These phantoms are tough

[Ptb]

Hi, this is my first post here. I took my Phantom 2 to a nearby town at the weekend to attempt to film some ferrari's at an event a friend had organised. Now I have had loads of uneventful flights in the past, so what happened was very scary. As soon as the Phantom took off, i had absolutely no control, i watched helplessly as it flew around and did it's own thing. I thought that was it, its going to fly away never to be seen again. But no, it decided to try and land, in doing so it hit a building and fell to the hard pavement with a crash. On inspection it seemed ok. I got it home and did a few low level test flights and all is well thankfully. Here is tha footage of what happened.

http://youtu.be/hBHGXYC4_qE

 

[Zinnware]

I agree that Phantom 2's are tough. You were very lucky for many reasons. Here is my assessment of what may have happened.
It looks like at 0:22 into the video, the Phantom disappears from your view behind the buildings and looses signal. At the same point it looks like the RTH (return to Home) kicked in. Maybe you manually triggered the RTH. In my experiences, I base it going into RTH at this exact moment from the visual queue of the twitch in the gimbal/video. At that point it looks like the Phantom then raises up to the 20 meter height and then flies back and begins to land. It is possible at 0:33 you could have regained control and landed the Phantom 2 yourself. If you started up the Phantom 2 between those buildings, then the Home Point recorded could be way off based on interference of GPS signal caused by the surrounding buildings.

Before taking off, did you wait for two sets of rapidly flashing green lights. One for the Course lock, and the second for Home point lock? If you waited for only one set, then your home position may not have been recorded correctly.

Did you have the GoPro WiFi turned off? If the GoPro's WiFi was on it could have caused interference between your controller and the Phantom 2 since the GoPro WiFi transmits on the same frequency.

 

[ianwood]

You took off from the roof of a car. Ferrous materials will cause the compass to freak out. That is the cause of your flyaway. Note the insane TBE. That is caused by massive disagreement between the compass heading and the GPS course.

 

[EMCSQUAR]

You took off from the roof of a car. Ferrous materials will cause the compass to freak out. That is the cause of your flyaway. Note the insane TBE. That is caused by massive disagreement between the compass heading and the GPS course.

I agree with Ian - taking off from the roof of a car is not a good idea. Another note be careful when filming cars & events where there's likely to be alot of Gopros. Anyone of those can have their wi fi on or the remote control nearby and that'll bring your Phantom down in a heartbeat.

 

[macheung]

Wifi from gopro or other normal consumer device isn't dangerous to the Phantom normally, or it would be a death trap to fly in any suburbia neighborhood. What makes a wifi enabled gopro dangerous is when it is mounted on the Phantom, the proximity of the wifi emitter to the controller antenna will overpower the actual rc signal. It is the proximity that is dangerous.