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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Simple solution to PREVENT any disaster. Extremely loud battery checker (adjustable of course!), check voltage and prop conditions before launch, recalibrate compass everytime you fly somewhere different then the last, run a good 5 minutes of testing functions at low altitude (1-2m) and close proximity before going further away, tighten hardware after every third flight.
ALSO I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH! TURN YOUR ESCs TO NIMH! You would rather the copter descend with all motors and controls still there vs one esc hitting cutoff and the copter dart off in the direction of who knows what.
If anyone knows the importance of battery alarms it is me. We were doing a shoot down at Liberty Memorial and my friend was flying first person to get in close to the tower. I was spotting using binoculars (so we were being cautious and safe). However, even with me running a stopwatch alarm and viewing the copter with lenses (Naza has RED led when the battery is dying), it began dumping early and the copter quickly but smoothly descended to the ground with a hard smack about 30 ft from people taking pictures of the memorial.
Had he remembered to bring his lipo checker it would have warned him through his Vtx microphone that the battery was at the nominal 3.7 volts and it was time to come home.
@Arne: Yup, gave the crash a "LIKE" to make this here even more absurd.
It has already been said ad infinitum, but let's repeat one more time.
Why it crashed, technical or otherwise has no relevance. If it went down and there was no crowd under it, we would never have heard about it.
Don't fly over people..
Excuse me? Speak for yourself ... I have never forgotten nor will I ever "forget" to charge batteries. My chargers have never "overheated" or otherwise failed, and if they did it would be known to me immediately. Nor do they have "balky buttons" etc. etc. etc. I fly all-electric medium-size planks and helicopters up to 600 size and have NEVER "run out of gas" in the air. Nor have I spent a huge amount of money on either batteries or chargers. I don't buy the very cheapest, but certainly not the high end either. Just decent gear and the kind of care and caution involved in, say, flying a simple full-size airplane.
You are better than everyone else. And so is your equipment. So of course these things could never happen to you.
I don't advocate anything in this article or the contained comments, my comments are only the laws and clarifications that no law existed that prohibits flying over crowds.
Is it immoral and stupid yes.
Should the person who did it and hurt people be punished Yes
Should the person who rented the craft be sued Yes
But how many flights like this occur that we never hear about ? 100, 1000 ? 100,000 ?
I am betting over 10,000 flights of quads have occurred over large crowds but our media seeks out the worst of anything and puts it on display to create witch hunts and anger.
We as community need to come out together not tear each other apart that's the medias goal.
Like guns I dont care what tom did with his if he goes into a mall tomorrow and blows away 20 people I am still keeping my guns. The same will be said of my quads. The acts of ignorant people will not be justification for laws that bar me from my freedom.
Perhaps this is the perfect time to ramp up the flight standards group http://diydrones.com/group/flight-standards as I have quickly commented there perhaps the first should not fly over crowds.
With my manned pilot hat, I constantly read NTSB reports just to remind myself of what mistakes I make. Helicopters are very unforgiving learning from somebody elses misfortune is not polite but cheaper. When i was teaching more people to drive balloons I used to have a folder of NTSB style reports from around the world and a shocking video where somebody totalled himself showing off. The Flyaway Club is the first try at such a service for our emerging industry and should be commended for it. Every time when I am manned flying and I feel like I am king of the hill mother nature reaches out and reminds me I am not as clever as I thought I was.
I don't think these guys will be hung out to dry, unless the victims see it for the cash cow it might be. I think they will be warned not to do it again and the findings of the NTSB report will lead to a wider report on the state of the union. I expect Chris is having the same time as sUAS News, many government employees are currently reaching out to us to find out about UA.
Anything could go wrong. And when it goes wrong you should have been far enough from audience.
There is something which would have perhaps helped in this case as well one other similar case in this year: Auto deployed parachute
Camera copter should know in a fraction of a second when something goes wrong and then do rescue maneuver automatically or it can be done by operator. We have a project for this. There is only three of us now but everyone interested are wished to join. Most important is that Randy joined and is willing to help what it comes to Arducopter code.
http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/diy-parachute-deployment-mech...
These machines could kill.
You know, I belong to the AMA and they have a broad set of safety guidelines.
Both parties in this incident basically violated almost all of them and it probably will be presented to the membership as a perfect example of what not to do.
And worse at a time when UAVs are just getting started on a road to civilian commercial use, this happens pretty much serving as the perfect storm against civil UAVs.
It is very hard for me to see how either the owner or the Leasor could have considered that this was a reasonable thing to do.
On the other hand this was to record for posterity the stupidity of people running along an enclosed area with a bunch of 1000 pound bulls.
I guess there is a lesson there somewhere.
And the good news is injury was limited and there were no fatalities.
So perhaps it can serve as a reasonable model for the imposition of satisfactory safety requirements and perhaps for operators and owners to be required to have an IQ above that of a ground sloth.
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.
Rabbit: Regarding your specious and personally offensive argument:
Rabbit,"one" does not do this, rather criminally negligent d....bags do this. Crashing an aircraft by running out of fuel is exactly the same as crashing a car while drunk. If you want to include yourself in that group be my guest. But we as a society have decided that people who endanger, injure or kill others through gross carelessness are held responsible for the results and are to be kept from repeating such acts again, even if that involves tossing their sorry sociopathic asses in jail. If you think concurring with that long-established cornerstone of social order is "holy and self-rightgeous" and/or if you aren't sure that you yourself can't refrain from such criminal negligence, then I suggest that (a) you move somewhere where nobody will care if you kill someone and (b) that you not operate any devices that have sharp edges or pointy ends (starting with your tongue).
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