Alauda Airspeeder Crash

[Graham]

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

Goodwood Festival of Speed took a nasty turn in 2019, finds AAIB

www.theregister.com

 

[jannislh]

The cause of the “hard landing”, which severely damaged the drone, was found to be “a fault in a battery feeder cable connection.” Pictures published by the AAIB showed the quality of workmanship that went into the craft.

Wow that work is horrible. It looks like the 8th grader on his internship did it. I have rarely seen such a bad SMD soldering job. In terms of that cheap XT60 connector I cannot find any words. Mounting it the wrong way without noticing it is an achievement. I also cannot even believe what kind of components they are using. A proper XT60 connector costs about 1$ and they use some cheap Turnigy ones which are only a few cents less expensive compared to some proper ones made by Amass. I would not even consider using those in my 600g FPV drones. Furthermore that micro controller... If I intend to build a manned drone I would use genuine parts and not some cheap Chinese knock off which can be bought for less than 2$ on sale.

People like that should not be allowed to build any kind of flying device above 250g.

 

[DoomMeister]

This happened in 2019 and is just now making the news? This really doesn’t even qualify as a drone as it was supposed to be a manned aircraft and was being experimentally flown via remote. It was also way out of the weight class of an sUAS aircraft.