pilot’s diary
Saturday, September 14th, 2013During the last week I flew many traffic patterns with the Cessna 172 in Flightgear preparing myself for a real flying lesson with a real Cessna 150 as soon as the weather gets nice enough.
2 days ago I crashed the Mini Protos by turning off the motor in flight. Although I have a video I still don’t know exactly what happened. I guess I was just too low to have enough time to spool up again. And the heli was in a 45° nose up orientation, so only 50% of the low thrust was helping to stop the descent. The Gear of the nick-servo stripped and the nick-linkage broke. The lower Jesus bolt broke into 3 pieces and the feathering shaft bent. Both blades look still o.k.
Today I wanted to try FPV with the Easystar again, but after one minute it lost his propeller. Luckily it was very high so I managed to glide back home and did not crash into the corn field. Because I had no parts with me, I moved the FPV cam+transmitter to the quadcopter. A few minutes later my quadcopter fell from the sky. All motors stopped. I don’t know why, the quad was only 160m away, but maybe it was an distortion by the power lines located between me and the copter. My girlfriend said she was also standing between me and the copter. It fell into a corn field and thanks to it’s beeper we found it easily. One arm was bent and one motor was filled with mud. All propellers and motor-shafts were fine. Maybe I move from Spektrum to FrSky RC for FPV adventures in the future.
Happy End:
We cleaned the motor and bent the arm back and had 2 more nice flights after that. I did fly through a barn which was located 220m away from me.
🙂