That sickening, helpless feeling.....

Everyone who has spent anytime in the RC hobby knows the feeling you get when your model fails to respond to your controls... it happened to me yesterday.

It was a great day for flying and I decided to take my Quad out for a mid day spin.  Flew an entire 5000MAh without incident after upgrading to 2.8.  I few stable mode, Alt Hold with simple Mode, and Loiter....all was working really well.  I had never really flow in simple mode before but I thought I would give it a try.  It seemed like a stress free way to wing the quad around.

For the next battery I made no config changes and was generally flying around spending some time in loiter mode as it was a little breezy and it was a good test.  All was working fine.  I then went to Alt Hold with simple mode turned on and was doing a typical circuit.  On the return leg I felt disconnect from the model.  I was giving it left input and it was not responding.  The quad then banked a bit and I needed to give it forward and left input to correct... no response.  At this point it was moving at a very high rate.. I tried bumping the throttle to climb out of harms way.. again nothing.  Then it all ended with a ~25 mph smash into the back of my SUV.

Quad was in a few pieces nothing than cant be repaired... truck now has two dents in the back.

Obviously I am upset but I want to understand what happened.  I have not used with any degree of success the logs or telemetry that this thing stores and I want to ensure I get something that someone knowledgeable can help troubleshoot.

Assuming my APM turns on.. can someone give me the idiots guide to what is needed.  I have pulled logs off the dataflash before but never really understood how to use them in detail.

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  • This sort of thing is why I'm tempted to write an 'Remote Kill' extension to the Jdrones IO board that would use a spare radio channel, or a whole other radio altogether.

    Still 5 seconds - that's not a lot of time to press the red button.

  • Please attach your logs here, that's the first step.

    What radio equipment are you using, and how do you have the failsafes set up?

    Do you feel the quad was simply not responding to your commands, but was otherwise holding some sort of level?  Or was it completely locked up, not seeming to do anything and falling completely out of control?

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