You Gotta Be Shitting Me!

Those are some of the wickedest words you will utter or hear around radio control pilots with gear in the air. Unfortunately, those words are anything but foreign for me. Whether I am flying fixed wing, rotor or multirotor, YGBSM is never far from the tip of my tongue.

I started this RC escapade learning to fly a Real Flight PC simulator. After a month of crashing computer animated airplanes for hours upon hours, I decided to go out to the club field and smashup real planes. And, smashup real planes, I did, but that was after I learned to assemble $100 foamie aircraft from HobbyKing. It was while first attempting to assemble these models that were engineered by one group of peasants in Wyn Bin Qi and documented by another tribe somewhere in the heart of the good People’s Republic when I fully integrated YGBSM into my every other sentence. (Family was not pleased, nor neighbors when I was in the shop.) But, not to digress. We’ll get back to the wonderful world of HobbyKing some other day.

I found that flying DJI Phantoms was a real walk in the park. And, not a walk wandering around looking for my quad. But just because these babies fly in almost ‘cheating mode’ doesn’t mean that I was out of You Gotta Be Shitting Me World. My first YGBSM moment with Tommy was just after my observation that some of the RC Pilots at the club had these cute little lanyards attached to their transmitters and slung adorably around their necks. Very stylish. Others, the real men, grabbed their Tx by one hand and then at the last minute before liftoff placed both hands on the radio.  I flew (crashed) with the later style.

So, Tommy is out maybe 200 yards at 100 feet when I dropped my radio and six AA batteries went in six different directions. YGBSM!! At this moment I appreciated more than ever a quads ability to hands-off hover. I had done a lot of dumb ass things with fixed wing aircraft (none of which fly today by the way) but I had never dropped my Tx.

Of course, because DJI designed the Phantom to ‘return to home’ upon losing contact with the radio, Tommy was on the way back regardless of my state of panic.  As it turned out, I got the batteries back into the radio and regained control of Tommy as it started its final earth bound decent. (Remember, I don’t like the P2’s auto landing mode as tipping over seems to be a regular behavior and takes out a prop just for fun.)

Today, I never fly anything without one of those cute little neckless lanyard things. But mine is from Oracle Team USA. Friggin nailed it dude/ette.