Catastrophic GiFi Battery Failure and Loss of Aircraft

DoomMeister · Nov 6, 2020

7cyclops said:
Have you seen the recent yuneec skins posting on crash prevention. He shows 3 different pictures of battery contact issues,and how the spring,,tensioners go bad. May be related to your crash,as you already are aware of. The heat as in any electrical issue is caused by a contact arching occurance. We can all learn something from this and start checking our drone batteries and the terminals inside the drone. KC

Not heat related in this case. Look at the photos he posted. The casing for the terminals was broke on both the positive and negative terminals, with the positive terminal losing contact during flight. A definite manufacturing QC problem.

Tazmanic · Nov 7, 2020

Hi there,

As a engineer for almost 40yrs and have several Yuneec typhoon models I did the maths on the so called bigger batteries and there fine But the heat from the output does not match oem figures of original batteries, hense I will only use stock batteries and if you use V over I x R you will see the casing will not last long due to increased heat being delivered.

How ever that being said I have a few Q500 4K just sitting in storage and you are more then welcome to any, if you are willing to pay carriage as I too have moved to Typhoon H Pro's and feel for you ....

T

Thunder horse · Nov 7, 2020

SkyVidTek said:
Today I lost my #1 H480 copter due to a suspected battery contact failure. I was beginning a cell tower inspection, all pre-flight checks were performed without issue and the copter was ascending to an altitude of 63m. All of a sudden it lurched and then dropped like a rock, crashing heavily in a field only about 20m from the launch site. There was nothing I could do to save it. The CGO3+ was completely destroyed as it landed on the bottom with gear up. The battery was dislodged in the crash breaking the safety latch, which had been secured before launch. Upon inspection of the battery, as this was the suspected failure mode, I noticed the + contact was punched in. (see photo). This seemed to me to be the failure point, as the battery still measured good voltage in all cells, the flight was only 2min, 48sec into the mission when the failure occurred. Attached is the telemetry file and a few photos of the aftermath.....

Would you be willing to sell the remains of the camera

KEITH KUHN · Nov 7, 2020

Steve Carr said:
The telem confirms a loss of power. It also appears as the elevation increased, so did the wind. The voltage was dropping fairly quickly and was about 15.1v when it quit.

I'm just curious would you consider 15.1 volts too low ?

DoomMeister · Nov 7, 2020

KEITH KUHN said:
I'm just curious would you consider 15.1 volts too low ?

At 3 minutes into the flight the voltage would not normally be that low, but with the positive terminal barely making a connection this likely drained the battery faster than normal. Those that fly conservatively land at 14.7V to 14.6V. The first Low Battery alarm triggers at 14.3V and the second one at 14.1V. So no, 15.1V is not low. This has been covered in many other threads and after flying a TH for 2.5 years one should be cognizant of proper battery levels.