My 2nd Flight made me Sh** my pants!

Joined
Feb 24, 2015
Messages
629
Reaction score
140
Location
Treasure Island, FL
I'm flying a P2 V+ v3 with the gimbal/camera removed while I practice. I know I lose all the telemetry benefits I gain from using the Vision Assistant but I fear for the life of my $700 gimbal/camera! So I decided to practice without it...

Today I went out for my second session - I have been practicing with a Syma X5 and having a blast with it! That thing is practically indestructible, and flying it in manual mode is a fantastic experience and is very humbling. Today I was practicing flying squares with My Phantom and suddenly it ascended, rapidly (!), to about 400 feet and would not respond to any control stick efforts. It hovered there in the wind like a champ so I know GPS was working. It seemed like forever, but finally I realized it was slowly, very slowly, descending. I went from panicked and freaked to amazement - it was coming home on it's own! At the moment of it's ascension, I started worrying about the battery power ending and watching it fall from the sky as I positioned myself underneath to catch it!

On it's way down I noticed the lights were flashing red so I realized I had gone beyond RTH battery threshold, but what I don't understand is why did it ascend up to 400 feet when I have the RTH height set at 66 feet? I don't understand that part! I learned that I need to set my timer to 15 minutes rather than the 20 minutes I was using - probably the windy conditions used up more battery than I realized!

Lesson learned: 1) Added lost and found sticker with REWARD and phone number; 2) Serious research on a GSM or GPS tracker; 3) re-read my "Guide to the Phantom 2 Vision & Vision+"

Funny thing is, that was the first of my three batteries and I had been looking forward to about an hour of flying...after that incident with the first battery, I was so freaked I closed up shop and went home!....Weenie! But, I did figure out what happened so all in all, it was a good learning experience....

**** buy I love this stuff!
 
How do you know it ascended to 400 feet if you didn't have OSD telemetry?
 
Were the lights flashing red when it went up?
 
Having telemetry goes a long way to certainty and giving confidence.
You wouldn't take a long drive in the desert without a fuel gauge.
 
Did you change your RTH height by any chance?

Here's what I think happened. Your drone figured it was time to come home because the battery was getting a bit low. So it initiated an RTH.

Step 1: Go to RTH height. If that's 400' or more then it goes to 400'.
Step 2: go to home point.
Step 3: land
 
rbhamilton said:
Did you change your RTH height by any chance?

Here's what I think happened. Your drone figured it was time to come home because the battery was getting a bit low. So it initiated an RTH.

Step 1: Go to RTH height. If that's 400' or more then it goes to 400'.
Step 2: go to home point.
Step 3: land

I think he established it was a RTH already.

I realized I had gone beyond RTH battery threshold

And he already mentioned he changed the RTH height.

but what I don't understand is why did it ascend up to 400 feet when I have the RTH height set at 66 feet?

Reading is fundamental. :D
 
Well, the 400 feet was just an estimate - like most guys, I can estimate the length of a football feel pretty well. Point was it went way up and just stopped and hovered and seemed to take forever to RTH.

I had my maximum height set at 400 feet and RTH set to 66 feet, so still don't understand why it went so high...

It ascended so quickly I'm not sure, but I don't think the lights were blinking red at that point. I didn't mention this, but I realized that my practice field is one short block from an electrical substation, so maybe it was an interference thing and I lost the 5.8g signal, then while it went up and hovered the batteries reached critical and it went to RTH.

Yes, the telemetry would have told me what's going on so I think I'm putting my gimbal and camera back on - also, I'm doing pretty good at controlling the Phantom after spending so much time beating my Syma X5 up!
 
400 ft is pretty high. Maybe you miss judge the height. Could you have accidently switched it to meters ?
 
Mori55 said:
400 ft is pretty high. Maybe you miss judge the height. Could you have accidently switched it to meters ?
I agree.
 
Low battery? Not enough battery to make it home? Lost connection with the remote? In any of those cases you get an RTH. I can't explain zooming up to 400' height. But other than the weird height, it's all normal behavior. Check your RTH altitude.
 
Yeah, while it isn't that hard to estimate distance on the ground, it is very difficult to estimate altitude (lack of reference points etc).
I am often surprised that when the phantom seems way up in the air and my fpv only shows 120 ft.
 
i got a "Controller Signal Lost" yesterday when i was flying above an urban park.. in DOWNTOWN HOUSTON. you can imagine the fear that ran through my body when i saw that error message flash up on my phone.

any idea why this happened? there are some sub stations a few blocks away, and an underground parking garage i had to calibrate my compass on top of..

and if the error message were to stay on my phone instead of going away after a second, what would happen with the Phantom? theoretically it should still return to home.. correct? I'm nervous about urban flights now...
 
control signal lost will initiate RTH. It's the equivalent of shutting off your controller (or flipping s1 to the bottom in naza). It could have happened for any number of reasons, which is why flying in urban areas is not recommended (some might say illegal).
 
its a 12 acre park. what illegalities would i be running into? yeah i figured the interference must be part of it, I've just seen videos of other people flying their quads in said park and the videos are awesome. so should i risk going back in the future or no?
 
A valid reason about it ascended and then start RTH is because when HOME POINT altitude was set the aircraft was already flying... that is, if you didn't wait until 20 green flash (twice) before take of, phantom will set its Home Point at that altitude instead ground altitude.
 
edonovanl said:
Well, the 400 feet was just an estimate - like most guys, I can estimate the length of a football feel pretty well. Point was it went way up and just stopped and hovered and seemed to take forever to RTH.

I had my maximum height set at 400 feet and RTH set to 66 feet, so still don't understand why it went so high...

It ascended so quickly I'm not sure, but I don't think the lights were blinking red at that point. I didn't mention this, but I realized that my practice field is one short block from an electrical substation, so maybe it was an interference thing and I lost the 5.8g signal, then while it went up and hovered the batteries reached critical and it went to RTH.

Yes, the telemetry would have told me what's going on so I think I'm putting my gimbal and camera back on - also, I'm doing pretty good at controlling the Phantom after spending so much time beating my Syma X5 up!
Humans are pretty bad, no, really, really bad at estimating vertical distances. 66M is 216 ft, and that may be what you saw. At 400 ft a Phantom would be a tiny speck.
The electrical substation can't interfere with your control link.
 
CloudPhantom said:
its a 12 acre park. what illegalities would i be running into? yeah i figured the interference must be part of it, I've just seen videos of other people flying their quads in said park and the videos are awesome. so should i risk going back in the future or no?

I interpreted "i was flying above an urban park.. in DOWNTOWN HOUSTON" as flying in a playground in the middle of a major city. While probably not illegal, you should still follow up w/ the municipality. You probably aren't breaking any law, but might be breaking a rule set up by the municipality itself. The former, cops come, the latter, some park ranger asks you to stop.
 
That's a good thought, that maybe I accidently switched to meters. I have done that before but now I know to double check. Also, now I'm not so sure about my estimate of 400 feet - yesterday I watched a video from an elevation of ~200 ft and it looked pretty high up. I only thought 400 because that was what I had my maximum altitude set at...
 
Did you really **** your pants?


I dumped a phantom into a lake, and instead of shitting myself, I just ordered a new one.
 

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,358
Members
104,936
Latest member
hirehackers