Maximum wind speed for flying?

[Olek]

I had just my Phantom crash into Detroit River. I am not positive what really happened because I lost it.
I am wondering if wind could have made it drop straight down.
There was a gust of wind. GPS mode on. Fresh battery - ~30sek. into the flight. Leaned quite a bit into the wind.
Suddenly it leaned to almost 90 degrees and dropped in that position into the water from ~15-20 meters altitude.

The big question - can a strong wind in combination with GPS mode trying to maintain the location cause the Phantom's pitch so dramatic as to cause to fall down?

 

[martcerv]

If the phantom is working properly max pitch angle outside of manual mode is 45 degrees, so it wont go beyond this in any wind speeds unless it has something fail. If a prop comes of or goes loose or an ESC were to fail it can do this. I have seen it drop altitude but nothing drastic it was a very slow altitude drop flying into strong winds 35-50kmh and it was only dropping very slowly going by the OSD. Maybe a meter every few seconds but nothing drastic and overall the naza does very well maintaining altitude in ATTI and GPS modes which is the only reason I noticed this very slight drop.

By any chance when you went down did you fly multiple batteries that day and may put back one that was already used or not fully charged. Were there any red blinks before it went down that you noticed.

Here is a video from one of the flights in stronger winds, no OSD data as my headcam just didnt show anything the way it was setup. Here I flew all modes GPS ATTI and Manual, takeoff is in GPS with winds around 35kmh gusting to about 50kmh. Just after takeoff at 31 sec I switched to ATTI mode and let go of the sticks to see what speed it would get to with just the wind blowing it from a stationary hover. I did yaw 180 so I could avoid going to the freeway but didnt touch any other sticks until about 43 sec and this shows the wind speed and direction here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVbncGJAXjQ[/youtube]

Then I just flew around a bit in manual and ATTI modes, turning at 1:30 is when I was flying straight into the teeth of the wind, also about 800m away from where I started here and this is where it was losing altitude even though at first i was at 50% throttle in ATTI and then I even upped throttle but it was still going down. Its no sudden loss of altitude but control was quite sketchy on this flight which is why I stayed a little higher up.

Being so high its a bit hard to see the wind but you can see the trees being bent over quite a bit as I get closer to them and the pitch angle at the start and end in a GPS hover.

 

[The Phantom]

Trust me- a Phantom will not fly against a gale force wind !!

It's generally reckoned that it will not cope with gusts in excess of 20 mph

Edit; DJI claim a maximum velocity of 20m/s. That translates to 22 mph or 19.4 knots.

Old thread but anyway,
Am i missing something? The conversion tools i have been using says that 20 m/s (meters per second) is almost 38.9 knots, while you say 20 m/s translates to 19,4 knots?

Where i live we have for the last month had about 7-8 m/s every day all day long with gusts up to around 12-15 m/s, in my conversion tools that translates to about 13,6 - 15,5 knots with wind gusts up to around 23,3 - 29 knots.
So you would not recommend a person to fly in that kind of wind speeds? I don't think that sounds as particular heavy winds, or am i wrong?

 

[TJC]

Overall what is about the windiness conditions MPH is it safe to fly? Where I live is a top a hill and even on calm days there is quite a breeze and you often get sudden strong gusts. Currently I check the average wind speed and weather conditions from the data from Weatherunderground which uses local weather stations.

I just got the Phantom 3 Pro... flew first real flights in 15mph with higher gusts - max speed against wind was a little over 19 MPH, Max speed was 37 going with the wind... I think it slowed itself down. Rock solid platform - video and stills are awesome.

 

[Deleted member 29014]

I do the same as martcerv- if there is any doubt about whether it's too windy, I carefully fly the Phantom into the wind and make sure that if the wind is too strong and carries it back, I can grab it before it blows by me. This happened on the top of Whistler Mountain this summer.

I wanted to take a picture of the inuksuk on the top with the chairlift and peak in the background, and so flew it into the wind, and then tried to rotate it to catch the right sun angle and take the shot. It was pretty windy, so when I tried to rotate it, the wind pushed it back towards me and I could barely control it. Fortunately, I was able to bring it down and grabbed it as it came by- otherwise, it would have blown past me and into the bowls on the lee side.

nice pic!

 

[Aquarius4058]

Trust me- a Phantom will not fly against a gale force wind !!

It's generally reckoned that it will not cope with gusts in excess of 20 mph

Edit; DJI claim a maximum velocity of 20m/s. That translates to 22 mph or 19.4 knots.

I just flew my P3P on a wind gust of 22 - 25 mph yesterday and it handles really well.

 

[Osmosis]

P3 Advanced in 20-25 mph winds. Perfectly stable: