Turning off propellers mid-air

[WetDog]

Has anyone come up with a safety parachute?

I was originally going to belittle this idea. Generally won't work. But then I got to thinking, how about putting a low impulse Estes rocket engine on each of the legs with tiny little parachutes tucked in the tube, just like they use to recover the model rockets. Come up with a gyroscope board that can tell how the bird is tumbling then fire the correct engine to orient the craft and deploy the parachute, fire the other engines and hopefully one chute will survive the props....

That's right, won't work. Not at first anyway. Testing could be expensive.

If you think about what the drone is doing during a failure, noticing the fault, correcting the attitude (or deploying the chute when it is in a somewhat correct attitude) and deploying a big enough parachute to make it all worthwhile is a decidedly non trivial exercise. Be fun to try, I suppose.

 

[gegetrane]

For it to work in the simulator I had to be over 400 feet or so and most importantly MOVE THE STICKS after restarting the motors. Sort of like getting out of that vortex thing. Works fine though. In the simulator...

As for a good reason to use it...
1. A helicopter coming fast and low at the Phantom...
2. Last Chance maneuver to prevent the Phantom going into someone or something...
Both a bit far fetched, but then so is the maneuver.

 

[plasrobin]

Look at this youtube clip demonstrating, csc in mid flight, from phantom pilots

 

[Meta4]

As for a good reason to use it...
1. A helicopter coming fast and low at the Phantom...
2. Last Chance maneuver to prevent the Phantom going into someone or something...
Both a bit far fetched, but then so is the maneuver.

Yes .. those are the far-fetched reasons that come up in forums all the time because they are so exciting but neither is likely to occur in real life.
CSC is a very useful emergency stop mechanism when you have a crashed Phantom on the ground and need to pick it up or stop it before someone else or a pet touches it or when your Phantom is stuck in a tree.

 

[Raja777m]

I really don't understand why anyone would want to try this. What purpose would it serve? . It has never dawned on me to drive off a cliff just to see what would happen and if I would survive.

One silly reason is to save charge, may be, you know, once you reached a certain altitude and don't have enough charge(for some reason it showed wrong charge or suddenly dropped few points) on the way RTH, you can turn off the motors, thus saving some power, and the software should turn on the motors at a certain altitude, based on the speed, altitude, angle, and NOT hit the ground to become a blob of plastic and metal..!

Even if you're not flying, the video makes it looks like Iron Man jumping off the building and catching flight power few meters before he touches the ground.

For instance:
1.

(around 2:55)
2.

(around 2:55)

Just for fun, and I'm pretty sure most of the P-Pilots are blessed to have a house in a place where they don't have people/birds/planes around/over/near them and they are one of the few people who live in that few blocks radius..!

BTW, you driving off the cliff is different than, just pushing the car alone and see whether it survives or not, so, your comparison is, kind of wrong..!