Hey folks!
Yesterday I had my biggest, worst and most scary crash with my 3DR Quad.
Our local firefighters had an open day for public and presented their equipment, did some presentations, they had a jumping castle for the kids, BBQ and beer for the bigger ones.
A friend of mine who is always acting as a spotter for me when doing video flights planned to do some aerial footage of the place and in a second flight film the firefighter team during a car rescue.
So I picked up my quad with full loaded batteries, pre checked everything in my office and went to the starting locations. Here I powered the quad up und waited to get a GPS lock. I didn't need the GPS, but I just wanted to make it absolutely right, because I would be flying over a crowded place.
So after 2 minutes of patience I had a stable GPS lock, made sure I had the right flying mode dialed in, in this case I used stabilize with simple mode, so I could concentrate on the flying location while my spotter would give me advises how to align the camera.
A quick spin up test, everything was fine, so I took of, stabilised the copter in mid air 2 meters from the ground for a couple of seconds and pulled the throttle up to get some height.
First position was reached (no mission, no fpv, just plain odd manual control) so I headed to the second position and yawed the copter 90 degrees to the left. After the yaw I felt the copter beginning to drift a little so I pushed him backwards towards me and reverted yaw so the copter looked away from me.
I wanted to fly back to me whitch meant backwards for the copter but the quad started to lean more and more forward. I had fully deflected the stick backwards, but the copter would not come back, ist slowly increased pitch for some reason.
Because of the kids and the people under the copter the only way to recover safely from this situation was to apply throttle and let the copter drift away over the firehouse, keeping it in the line of sight until I could be sure it was over the building towards free space and then shut the motors down.
The result: most important: nobody injured, for gods sake!!!
2 Motors broken
2 arms damaged
GPS unit destroyed
IMU shield defective
maybe more to come, I didn't disassemble and tested everything right now
I have absolutely no clue what happened! So any help in order to understand what went totaly wrong would help!
Greets
Marc
P.S.: Board Version 1.4, Quad with 850 motors, all settings to stock, Firmware version 2.7.1
Replies
So sorry to hear about your crash, but good to know what no one was injured!
I was looking at the logs with Dan's log visualizer and your video at the same time to see if I could spot what went wrong.
I'm pretty new at looking at logs (after my own crash) but with the pitch I see in the logs, the quad should have returned to you but instead it kept going away from you.
I'm just wondering, is your camera on a stabalised gimbal or is it fixed to your quad. I ask because towards where it looks like you have trouble (1:55 in the video), the logs show the quad pitching upwards, but the video looks like the camera (and the quad?) continues to point downwards.
There wasn't a lot of space to put it down behind the building either
@R Lefebre How does the kill switch kill the copter? automatically over the crowd as soon as some thing goes wrong? or does the pilot operate the kill switch? I think I know what you mean it is just the way it was worded Have a Good Day!
I haven't looked at the logs yet, but I just wanted to say you did the exact correct thing as a pilot, IMO. Instead of shutting it down and having it crash into people, you throttled up, got it away from people, then killed it.
This is why I keep saying over and over that there should not be a "watchdog" or "killswitch" which simply kills it as soon as anything goes wrong.
An other reason I would say a form of "Jammed" you made it to the first marker Ok on manual
You still seem shaken! breathe in breath out .It is unfortunate you had to kill the copter you did the right thing under the situation I am not really a Quad guy but there should be something like a retractable dog's leash and weight say 20 feet long that could be clipped to the bottom of the copters on fire up when every thing is flying and working properly unhook it and go fly. I notice a pattern it is usually on start up or shortly after they click on the "amp"they wander off. Do you think a bunch of people in the crowd using cell phones might have had some thing to do with it ?On the telephone pole out side the fire station here there is a high frequency signal devise emitting a signal 24/7 if there is a call the fire fighters push a button and all the traffic lights go green . you might have got jammed from a signal from the fire department it self? Just throwing it out there?If you get any crap from this there is only one way to take it. Face it head on deal with it then move ahead.Try and have a nice day!
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