Phantom fell out of the sky!!!

[digitaldeviltees]

Ok first thing is first....im an idiot and forgot to press play on my go pro before the flight UGHHH. this is my first day and second flight with the phantom.

So basically the first flight went great, compass calibrated, waited until i got 6+ sat with green light, flew for about 8 minutes no problems.

My second flight I got a bit ballsy and took her up pretty high like 300 feet at least. I wasn't sure about my time in the air but I had a brand new fully charged battery. i was about 25 feet in the air, and because of the positioning it was a bit hard to see the LEDs...and because of the crash i was more worried about the unit than remembering what exactly was blinking. basically i was flying and descending with right stick full bottom left. I saw what i thought was green and some red lights once or twice so i stopped it and let it level, saw a blinking green consistently, flew a few feet high than did it again.

This time the chopper simply died! i was expecting a controlled landing because i knew it was getting close to battery time, and because this was flight number 2 i wanted to test it out. basically it fell 25 feet as if it was a $50 chopper where the battery just died. battery wasn't D/C because after the landing it still had LED's. cant tell you what they were as the Go Pro cracked the LCD screen i was more focused on that. and a bit surprised the underwater case didnt save it....from only a 25ft drop.

Any ideas what went wrong? I im kinda concerned!

 

[digitaldeviltees]

Ok so i just went back out to check it out again, phantom flies fine looks like she lived unscathed. BUT I mixed up batteries and flew her for about 1 minute with that same "dead" battery, after which i got the constantly blinking red. so now i know for sure it wasn't a battery issue.

I was thinking Vortex Ring at first but My first reaction what it was falling out of the sky was to go full throttle. and from my memory it didn't respond at all, just...died.

 

[digitaldeviltees]

I figured out what happened after some trouble shooting. Basically I shut the Phantom off mid air with stick commands. I'm not too happy about it, I really studied and read through the manual, i went through it again and saw that it mention that when the chopper is ON THE GROUND it can shut it off. never in a million years would i expect it to do this mid air. I mean it had full GPS, shouldn't a chopper that can return home be smart enough to figure out that it shouldnt shut off 30 feet in the air??? i was playing around with some BFM and attempting to do some kinda helix. guess that just shuts it off. Something that stupid should be a bigger warning than just a half ambiguous hidden sentence.

 

[martcerv]

I dont think the motor shutdown will work in flight only once landed I havent tried but Im sure I have put the sticks in the motor arm and disarm position many times in fligh. Descending at 0% throttle is pretty risky and a bit too fast with zero control and the only thing you will achieve is a very hard landing this way.

If you are already at the second level battery warning then it will start to descend with the hover level going up to 90% throttle as it begins to auto land. At this point if you put it to 0% throttle its going to drop like a stone so try and bring it down slower then that as it will also get lots of props wash making it unstable and nearly impossible for a good landing.

I suggest you use a timer so you know how long your flights are and learn to do more controlled descents then simply going 0% throttle straight down which is the worst thing you can do.

 

[Bats]

I don't think the motor shut off is what happened. You said you had the right stick at full bottom-left. Any time you are giving full power to the motors, they are pulling a lot more juice from the battery than when hovering or doing low speed maneuvers. My theory is that the red you saw was low voltage warning, then when you hovered and reduced the draw from the battery, you were ok. Then you took it up again, drawing more juice from the battery and killed it. When you took off with that battery again, I'm betting you were flying pretty gingerly after the crash, and therefore were able to get another minute out of it.

 

[digitaldeviltees]

Yea i agree the red I saw was the very first few blinks of stage 1. I am absolutely positive the Phantom shut down mid flight, 20-30 feet in the air. I put in a new battery and tried it safely over grass at about 10 feet. Got my new hero today, maybe have a friend catch it from higher maybe around 20 feet to show its possible. My friend better catch like Dez Bryant.

 

[edunwody]

Well today I did a real stupid thing.

Was shooting some stills and went through 3 batteries.

Someone walked up to me and started talking. My spent batteries were in the case upside down. I grabbed the 4th battery and took off.

I was airborne about 2 mins and looked down at my case and saw 2 batteries upside down and my final battery top up. ****! I grabbed the wrong battery.
I immediately started to do a hand landing and about 25' she gave out of juice.

No damage but was my face red.

I ordered a Volt tester 2 weeks ago but its on back order.

Moral of story, no matter how good you are you can be distracted.

Wew!


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[jumanoc]

A TIP:
After each flight I package the used batteries in one different place from the charged ones.

 

[edunwody]

A TIP:
After each flight I package the used batteries in one different place from the charged ones.

Yep, good tip.

E


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[PTCX]

If you set the motor cut off type to Immediately and pull the throttle all the way back/down (or less than 15%) the motors will stop,even in mid air.
I crashed once due to that and now set it to Intelligent for safety.

I numbered all my batteries and start a no.1 and count through as I use them.
In my Phantom hard case I put the charged batteries in their pockets with the wires pointing up and the flat ones with the wires pointing down.