Great story and good lesson.It's partly about # of flights. Keep in mind I may have a "problem" in that I fly almost every day and sometimes I fly for literally hours a day. "Stuff" happens and even though I have aircraft with over 300 hours of perfect service (Hope I didn't just jinx myself) if you fly them enough you will have some type of failure.
The one "pictured" was an airframe that had 190 hours at the time it crashed. I was flying about 2 miles away (over a lake taking some money shots of the dam) when I got "Battery Error" or something like that. I started the return flight home and watched as the battery amount was dropping at an insane rate. It was falling something like 2% every few seconds as if it has a massive "short" in the system (which would have caused a shut down I imagine). Anyway I found a clearing half way between where it was and where I was and initiated my landing there. Unfortunately this "clearing" put the aircraft on the FAR side of a stand of very OLD Oak Trees. As the aircraft was descending the battery was getting critically low and the beeping increasing greatly. All was great (no people under the aircraft etc) until the aircraft descended below the Tree Line and I lost connection between the Tx and Rx. After just a few seconds of me running around a corner to re-establish the connection (so I could force it to land) RTH initiated. The airscraft ascended to the preset RTH (it was based on my location and did NOT factor 100+ year old oak tree heights). Once it hit that height it made a bee-line for my location and WHAMO into the oak trees. Several "witnesses" heard it impact the trees but no one saw anything at all.
We used the last known location (immediately prior to RTH kicking in) and plotted it's intended course. Unfortunately due to very heavy foliage and the LAKE we never found the aircraft until 16 months later. The lake was lowered to facilitate dam repair and I walked over and saw it within mere seconds and it was exactly where the "plotted flight path" had indicated but it would have been about 6-8 feet under murky water.
I need to pull the SD Card and see if anything is on it. . . .