Owner knows why drone crashed into stands at bull run
Found the story intriguing. Batteries remane fickle things. Their total charge is still only estimated by stopwatches & coulomb counters, but there is no dip stick for a battery. Even a pilot experienced enough to keep 1 eye on the flight time while the other eye is on the 5000 other details still is often surprised when a battery comes up empty ahead of schedule.
Sometimes you forget to charge batteries. Battery chargers sometimes don't finish charging because they overheat or their own supply sags. Sometimes they don't start charging because of a balky button or a poorly designed user interface. Sometimes they report maximum voltage despite no longer holding a full charge.
A return to launch feature when the battery is low also remanes fickle. GPS comes & goes anywhere besides a wide open field. Is the return to launch feature supposed to count coulombs & maintain a database of every battery's capacity in order to determine when to end the flight? Should the pilot enter in the current battery ID or should the batteries have ID chips, raising the cost & complexity?
It's yet another one of the variables & details that keeping something in the air still involves keeping your mind on. There is still a lot of room in the current state of reliability to keep the price, complexity & training beyond the reach of hobbyists before the personal drone becomes as ubiquitious & hand off as the marketing campaigns depict.
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Sorry Oliver. I find your attitude above just as self-righteous as your earlier comment.
Fuel exhaustion is nowhere near equivalent to driving whilst drunk. No pilot sets out to run out of fuel mid-air, but still it happens and for many and varied reasons, some as a result of gross negligence, others much more subtle. A drunk driver sets out knowing they are already of impaired ability - but even here there are shades of grey.
The pilots who say "I'd never do that" or "it would never happen to me" are, in my opinion, the ones most at risk, because the have yet to identify their own human limitations. There, but for the grace of God, go I, as it were.
I'm not at all saying that flying to fuel exhaustion is a bright thing to do, nor suggesting that people should not be held liable for their actions, but the holier-than-thou attitude is a distinct impediment to learning and development in the field of UAV's.
@bill Hehehe you say people will hear the beeps and buzzing as the copter lands but you underestimate the dumfounded blindness and stupidity of some people.
I was flying in my town center a few months back (early morning very few people around) letting the biddies watch the video feed and the people that were walking past even though the copter was at eye level they were completely oblivious to it and on many occasions i had to take evasive action as they almost walked into it,
Sometimes you cannot imagine how stupid people can behave that even when something is hovering at eye level making a very loud noise, they completely miss this because they are in their own little world.
On a second occasion i was in town for a BBc interview on my multirotor and was giving a demonstration flight, poeple were crowded round a large area of about 10 square meters and there were a few gaps people would blindly barge though and cross the area not so much as looking up the the flying lawnmower they were intruding on, only to realize this when someone shouted "kind words" about their intelligence.
In this case it was the pilot and owners fault but even if their had been safety features and even if they made a landing away from the crowd, the likelyhood of some fool walking into the copter on its decent would be high.
Christopher, I've seen the comments about the compass orientation relative to the camera direction before. But at that time, it was concluded that for some reason the camera was panned to face "backwards" and the compass orientation was probably fine.
But your observation about the orange markers is very interesting.
If there is a charge it will be for reckless endangerment. The NTSB have opened a docket and the FAA are investigating.
I don't know if I can say that I never forgot to charge my batteries... though I don't think I have. Maybe I've mixed up some charged ones and full ones. But that's not really the point. *Flying* with discharged batteries should be impossible. You plug it in, and the telemetry tells you it's discharged. So you don't fly.
This is the same voltage telemetry system that would prevent you from having to crash land into a crowd by giving you ample warning of the battery dying.
Sorry, I don't buy that. If it were the case, I'd already be dead. I didn't suggest that manned aviators *never* run out of fuel. But it's several orders of magnitude less common.
Consider this: Even though running out of gas in a car is not normally life-or-death, I have NEVER run a car out of gas. However, I have had one really bad crash due to running a battery too low on a UAV, and several instances of emergency landings.
You think so eh? ;)
The most foolish thing to do is "lease" out your machine. And I had to laugh about the FAA investigating it. If it was under 400 feet and in line of site control it was a model aircraft. Anyhow bottom line is this "owner" will be liable for all damages and will not have a cent left after the attorneys are done with him. Also lets not forget the venue and the actual renter/pilot of the model. Of course the FAA will try to twist it and make it all about a "drone" issue and about a payment for service issue. It will fall silent eventually. But this is another example of how to DESTROY the hobby for everyone. Everyone must really think about what they are doing with these machines and the possible consequences of what might happen if something goes wrong.
There was nothing about this that was reasonable.
Simply, the place that rented / borrowed it is libel and given that it seems the Owner lent / rented it to them to use the way they did, he is completely libel too.
This has nothing to do with the FAA (except they will probably bring down their own hammer anyway).
This has everything to do with "reckless endangerment" civil and criminal.
It is a pure and simple case of completely inadequate judgement on the part of all concerned (except the hapless bystanders who had every reason to expect a "flying lawnmower" would not come crashing down on their heads.
Then the only thing that saved them from much worse injury was that the failure was low battery meaning that there wasn't enough rotational energy for those CF props to really slice them up.
As Madam LaFarge said: Guillotine!, Guillotine!
As I was alluding to Robert, it might be different, but only in degree.
Even when a pilot straps one's bum into an aircraft one sometimes becomes careless and careless enough to put ones own and others' lives in danger through fuel exhaustion. Check out some NTSB reports to see what I mean.
At the same time there are holy and self-righteous pilots who protest, like Oliver above, that they would never do that...
I don't see fuel exhaustion as being any less prevalent an issue in unmanned flying as manned. Despite regulations for fixed and variable reserves, alternate airfields etc, it still bites the less careful in the arse from time to time.
If I had someone tell me they have never forgotten to do something, they are by definition not human.
He flew a dangerous device over a crowd without rudimentary safety precautions. That is pretty much all that needs to be said.
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