I read these forums with great interest, and have 25+ years experience in RC flight (but only recently tried quads) and whilst I’m not using APM and Arducopter (I use Crius AIOP and MegaPirate which I believe to be a port of Arducopter) I see almost on a weekly basis that someone experiences a “flyaway”.
Some are lucky and are able to retrieve their machine and others aren’t so fortunate, and luckily so far no one has caused any damage to anything else or anyone else other than their copter. My take on it is that no one here is trying anything out of the ordinary with their machines and many are left without a clue what happened, and considering the potential of these things to fly at high speed and some weighing in excess of 3-4kgs.
I find this very worrying. I guess what I’m asking is, is the technology being used here consistently reliable enough to have all and sundry buying these things given the potential to kill somebody with one of these or because the new version of software and hardware has been released into the public domain and assumed “fit for purpose” are we to assume that the majority of problems are pilot error in either flight or config?
I know it’s not as Black and white as this and is very subjective but wondered what peoples thoughts are. I’m certainly not having a dig at any devs or suppliers of the software / hardware, I’m just trying to start a discussion about people perceptions of the some of the issues we see here.
I run a professional fireworks display company in the UK and health and safety issues are always a priority for me, and there’s no show that doesn’t have me thinking about what could go wrong, but we mitigate any issues by various means to the point that any malfunction (either with our firing system or pyrotechnic device) would not cause injury to any person, and I’m struggling to get this level of confidence with flying these as I can’t see anything you can do to mitigate a 3kg, four bladed object heading towards a crowd of people at 50mph.
So I guess this puts me in the “it’s pilot / config error camp”
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Another factor can also be budget, like buying a cheap radio, which can fail and endanger many.
It seems to me that there are relatively few flyaways compared with the ever increasing number of models. The concept of a flyaway model is not new. I fly helicopters and planes as well as Quads and to be brutally honest the plane guys are downright dangerous sometimes and have more flyaways than anyone else.
It annoys me intensely however in that 99% of all cases I've witnessed it could have been prevented. Sometimes its an inexperienced pilot but all to often its lazyness in setting safety measures or performing pre-flight checks. Some models I've seen recently are just not air worthy and sometimes its just a configuration oversight.
On the occasions where hardware failure is to blame I feel for the pilot, sometimes there's just nothing you can do but if we fly in a sensible manner in a sensible open space the risks are much reduced.
I am completely new to this community, but I've been a part of society for a few years now and my $0.02 is the operator is responsible for their actions. Whether it is flying a UAV, and RC aircraft, driving a car, a boat in public waters... the list is endless. I have read nothing here suggesting that these devices are idiot proof, ready to fly; I don't even hear them mentioned as toys. The newbies guide page covers that. We shouldn't expect these to be idiot proof either, that just makes us better idiots. The essence of open community of trial and error work depends on the care of the operator. People need to think about what they are doing and what could go wrong. I see some beautiful footage of videography of city skylines taken from multicopters but my first thought was, that's a lot of back yards and front windows, I hope they know what they're doing. And I hope they respect other peoples right to privacy as much as they enjoy the right to fly. Again, just my $0.02
I would turn the question around. R/C airplanes and helicopters have been recreationally operated since the late 1950's. As such operation and expected behavior of R/C pilots are well established with sanctioned flying fields etc..
What we are seeing a lot of lately, are people with little or no R/C experience jumping into what perhaps is the most advanced and complicated use of R/C technology available today, with the expectation that it is just a matter of pushing a couple of buttons and have the thing fly of doing it's thing. We're not there yet. Far, far from it..
And, more worrying is the same people operating the planes and copters in areas and situations that would be considered utter madness in the traditional R/C community.