Have any of you went out a long ways not paying attention and realized you aren't a gonna make it back with the battery u have remaining and landed it in a place you could find and out of the way and out of danger? I was flying a month ago and didn't realize I had such an incredible tailwind on my way out and ended up landing about 1/2 mile from my house in the rear of a public lot with no one around. Im continually keeping my eyes open for places to land if necessary and I recommend just dropping her down if your going to be cutting it close to allow yourself a nice smooth safe landing.
Low Battery
- Thread starter Sammynels
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Keep mind that if you attempt to just drop her down and you're not in line of sight, the remote controller connection will break and your Phantom will start returning home. If it's really not possible to make it, it'll eventually land in a random location when it hits the critical low battery level.
Never fly downwind on a long flight, it can take 25% more battery to get back than it did to get out there. Fly long, fly upwind always, 50% downwind = 60-75% back, leaving you looking for a landing spot elsewhere. How can you tell if your going downwind? easy, if your clipping along at 35 with 1/2 stick then guess what, your going downwind. My P3 does 34MPH in calm wind, so I know if I am doing 40+ I had better head back early if I want to make it. Someone else just posted he lost his P3 in the Ocean doing just that, flying long distance downwind and it ditched 100M from shore, that totally sucks.
I do all long distance stuff INTO the wind.
First I know that way that the wind isn't too strong for the quad to overcome. I live in fear of being full throttle home and still slowly blowing further away when I find the wind is stronger than the quad.
Secondly, the time to get back always seems to be an eternity, so having a tailwind home helps reduce to the minimum, that nerve-wracking wait for it to return.
But then I also suffer a little from battery-paranoia, I start getting nervous about battery power very very early. Unnecessarily so.
But given that the discharge curve on a LiPo is very steep at the tail end, it means that the last 25% of a battery won't last anything like as long as the first 25%, so I treat 50% as very low, because I plan on being back on the ground by 25-30%
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First I know that way that the wind isn't too strong for the quad to overcome. I live in fear of being full throttle home and still slowly blowing further away when I find the wind is stronger than the quad.
Secondly, the time to get back always seems to be an eternity, so having a tailwind home helps reduce to the minimum, that nerve-wracking wait for it to return.
But then I also suffer a little from battery-paranoia, I start getting nervous about battery power very very early. Unnecessarily so.
But given that the discharge curve on a LiPo is very steep at the tail end, it means that the last 25% of a battery won't last anything like as long as the first 25%, so I treat 50% as very low, because I plan on being back on the ground by 25-30%
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My one and only close call... I was out filming some of the local scenery when there was a pretty sudden rumble of thunder, I returned home pretty sharpish (being only about 1/2 a mile out) and i landed my P3 with about 60% battery to go before the rain hit. Fast forward 30 minutes and the sudden downpour has gone. I take out my P3 and wanting to get some shots of the sun breaking through the cloud rush my pre-flight forget to check the battery remaining... doh
Up i go, nice shots, dum de dum de dum... ooh look at that over there... that looks cool... *beep beep beep* whats this i see... return to home warning... oh great... 30% battery warning... suddenly realise i'm nearly 2km away with a fairly strong wind to battle... crap.
Long story short i landed in the field (just about) i took off from with the auto land kicking in and me pushing for all the distance i could get, i cleared the electric fence at the end of the field by about 1m looking back at the video. I was about 200m short of my take off spot and to top it off i slipped in cow **** walking over to collect it.
Never again... until the next time.
Up i go, nice shots, dum de dum de dum... ooh look at that over there... that looks cool... *beep beep beep* whats this i see... return to home warning... oh great... 30% battery warning... suddenly realise i'm nearly 2km away with a fairly strong wind to battle... crap.
Long story short i landed in the field (just about) i took off from with the auto land kicking in and me pushing for all the distance i could get, i cleared the electric fence at the end of the field by about 1m looking back at the video. I was about 200m short of my take off spot and to top it off i slipped in cow **** walking over to collect it.
Never again... until the next time.
unless you have FPVLR antenna mods or itelite DBS ones
I had to land about a mile away in a field the other day and was able to successfully land without LoS and no connection dropping.
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