Sadly, my little quad has been lost in Davey Jones' Locker, I fear. I thought I'd try a longer programmed flight, and I didn't account for what would happen if the TX and/or the telemetry radio lost signal. At least that's my theory. I thought it would execute RTL, but it appears it didn't. A couple minutes into the flight (when I lost sight of it beyond some trees (but over the water), the telemetry radio stopped tracking. I went out to the beach and looked around, but the water gets really deep really fast out there, so I suspect it's at the bottom in 20-30 feet of water. I'm sad. Here's the last image from my computer...

[edit] I have a new theory...see my comment on page 2. Maybe it's not in the ocean, after all? According to the source code, the default RTL altitude is "1500cm (=15m). If zero the copter will return at it's altitude at the time RTL was invoked." I'm not sure I ever changed the default, and if that's true and RTL did engage on loss of signal, it's almost definitely going to be in the trees.

I was curious what kind of flight times I might expect from the little 3DR quad, so I tried an experiment today. I used a little LiPo alarm (super useful!), and flew it with a combination of a pre-programmed route (a couple minutes) and just a little random flying around. I had the GoPro Hero3 BE slung underneath with a simple velcro mount (super jello!). Here's a video (compressed in time) showing the whole flight. 12:40 is pretty impressive. I want to figure out how far out over the ocean that translates in to! :-)

Filmed an end-to-end flight using my Panasonic GH3 on a tripod showing my Mac ground station (running Parallels) and using a GoPro HD Hero3 BE on the copter. The GoPro was just velcro'd to the copter frame, which is obviously not ideal. But these are just initial flight tests, so I'm not concerned with video quality. I'm so excited about the prospects for this kind of semi-guided flight, and I'm looking forward to more like this!

I just got a 3DR quad with APM2.5+ with GPS, and I was itching to try out the mission planner and its ability to program a mission with GPS. Here's a video of my first successful flight!

I'm a pretty experienced multirotor guy with an xproheli xp2 and a Cinestar 8, but these are flown the old fashioned way. :-)