Fly-away, Fly-away

Here is probably a great place in this discussion to touch on a highly exasperating phenomenon called ‘fly-aways’. That’s not a typo. Fly-aways are moments in flight when the remote controlled aircraft simply flies away from you: completely on its own initiative and completely out of your control. Fly-aways happen for a variety of reasons and a variety of ‘no reasons’. In my 10 months of flying my Phantom 2, which I have named Tommy, I have never experienced a fly-away. However, I did have another branded quad leave my controlled airspace and crash into an office parking lot a half a mile away, about 60 feet away from a six lane intersection. Miraculously, no cars were hit but the quad was pancaked. Lesson learned. (As to Tommy, you’ll have to pull out that old Who album to understand the connection.)

Back to fly-aways. They seem to happen for two basic reasons. Technology failure* and human failure. Not much that can be done about technology failure except preventative maintenance and preflight testing. But, the human failure can almost always be pointed back to not reading the manual or not having practiced enough. (Ex: many newer quads have a ‘relative flight mode’ and I have found that newbies that invoke this flight mode are asking for real problems. Learn to fly the friggin quad, Grasshopper.

Before, we leave the subject of flight anomalies, let’s touch on the automatic ‘return to home feature’. This is a terrific feature made possible by the GPS systems in high end quads. In summary, when you lose control of your quad, invoke the ‘come home’ feature and your quad will return to its launch site. Kinda. For the Phantom, return to home involves some automatic maneuvers by the system including climbing up about 50 feet before flying back. Also, the auto-landing maneuver is a little rough on Tommy. I have only invoked the 'auto return to home feature' in test situations and it is still unclear as to what Tommy would do here flying 70 feet below my cliff if it went into auto return to home is invoked. Would it rise to 50 feet above the takeoff spot or 50 feet above the spot where auto home is invoked? Will it run into the side of the cliff. Right now I am betting on rising to above the takeoff elevation. That is a $2500 bet folks. The price of my combined aerial video technology. Not for the faint of heart.

 

* Note: A common problem with inexpensive quads is bad solder joints where critical wires come loose from connections. Many solder problems are called cold solder. If you are handy, you might want to open up these inexpensive quads and check solder joints. Particularly battery connection points.