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Battery-optimal cruise speed?

Joined
Dec 5, 2016
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Hi,

I will be making waypoint flights in which the drone will be covering long straight lines and I need to get the most distance out of each battery. What speed is the most battery-efficient?
 
To many variables!
How high, wind, humidity, heat, what drone, video or not?
Go out and test it, let us know you're results.
 
Interesting question. A straight line flight in one direction or does it include the return flight?
I could only go by my "feel" for such, but is seems like the best run time is around 8-10 mph.
 
I would like to share an intresting story of mine.
Usually I do survey missions with crusing speed between 8-10 meters per second. If it's not windy at all, I set the speed to 10 m/s which is very fine for battery (about 20 minutes of flight time till 20-30% battery status). If its a little bit windy I fly perpendicular to the wind direction with 8 m/s crusing speed. Once upon a time it was a very windy day (about 10-15 m/s wind) and I was flying perpendicular to wind direction just fine, battery was discharging a little bit faster so I decided to RTL and it was not a very clever idea, since the RTL flight direction was exactly opposite to wind direction, which caused a drone flying with an absolute speed of 10 m/s (RTL speed) and opposite wind speed of about 10-15 m/s. That caused a sudden battery drop of about 1% per second. Fortunately, the drone managed to land safety BUT I could not manage to remove the battery from the drone. What happed? Well, the connectors of battery, just inside the drone, HAD MELTED. I had to send the drone to Yuneec service and they removed the battery, replaced the connectors inside the drone and gave me brand new battery :)
Best regards to Yuneec service and watch out for your discharge battery rate while flying high speeds or high winds.
Greetings
WP
 
@AH-1G let's assume no wind, 100m AGL, 25 deg. Celsius, video yes, the drone is H520 (we are in the H520 subforum :) ). Humidity - I don't think it is going to have any noticable effect :).

@Steve Carr Does it matter if it includes a return flight? (assume no wind). I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong. A straight line is stil going to be a straight line.

I know there may be a lot of factors at play here, and no wind on 100m is not very realistic.

@airwojtas thanks for sharing, that's scary... To me it also seems that 10 m/s in non-windy conditions seems to be optimal, but I never really made any tests to verify that.
 

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