This is a bittersweet story of my terrifying out of control Typhoon H Pro flight and subsequent total destruction crash. This occurred about a month ago. This was my third Yuneec drone, I had 2 Q500 4K’s over the past few years and bought the “H” last November and in between the poor weather I had about 5 flights without incident. I wanted to try a test CCC flight so I went out to my favourite field location. I did a successful compass calibration, put the props on and had a fully charged battery. On turning on the ST16 and TH, I waited for 20 sats to get picked up on the H and 16 on the ST16, got the “ready” message and the full purple status light for angle mode. Something was wrong but I ignored 2 red flags. On the launch pad, the camera was on but pointing straight down and wouldn’t respond to the pitch control slider. Secondly, the H was beeping rapidly – about 5 beeps per second. Had I stopped at this point the ending probably would have been different. But I didn’t.The instant I pressed the red button, the H went full throttle up in a tight corkscrew spiral which put me into a panic. I pinned the left stick all the way down but it had no effect. In less than a minute the H had climbed to 262m (860 feet) with the left stick pinned down, so I switched to RTH mode but, still no effect. It was like controls on the ST16 were locked at full throttle, full yaw, full pitch and full roll, but no stick movement by me had any effect. Now I was really panicking. The H was directly above me still climbing in a tight corkscrew circle. At the 6 minute mark I switched from RTH to “smart” mode, again no effect and the H had hit max altitude of 307m (1007 feet).
At this point I switched back to RTH, but really had no ideas how to gain control and was resigned to the fact that it would deplete the battery and fall to the ground..... which is what it did. After 16 minutes of full throttle, spinning in a tight circle above me, it started to lose altitude and went into a total freefall at 120m (393 feet). There was a fair wind of about 25kph and that pushed it about 100m away from the launch point and I saw it go down to its final crash site. (This was the bitter part)
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After picking up the pieces in a state of disbelief, I kept wondering what caused the loss of control. Since it was still under warranty the next day I called Yuneec CS, I sent the telemetry logs in to Yuneec and after a few days they said it would be covered under warranty. I sent the broken H (without battery), camera, and ST16 off to the Staples (Canada) repair centre on May 5. After a few days, they determined that it was a total write-off. Three weeks later I received a brand new complete Typhoon H Pro kit with 2 batteries, wizard wand, and 2 types of video antennas etc. (This was the sweet part) I can’t say enough about the great CS I received from Yuneec.
There was no explanation from Yuneec of what the cause was but before I shipped off the wrecked H and ST16, I looked at the telemetry and ST16 hardware monitor panel. Without touching the sticks, the graphics showed J1 & J2 pinned to max and J3 & J4 pinned to min as well as all other controls were at extremes. This is photo is from another pilot’s ST16, but mine looked the same. A day or so before the fateful flight I had gone into the ST16 “secret menu” to check and calibrate the controls with the sliders set to “middle” and then exited, something may have happened then.
So a couple of my lessons from this are 1) Do not ignore a rapid beeping from the H on start-up, it was trying to tell me that the calibrations were off. 2) Add “check hardware monitor before flight” to my pre flight check list.
Could the H have been saved? In hind sight, in that situation where you have zero control, if I had turned the ST16 OFF, would the H go into RTH mode due to loss of signal and land at last known location? BTW I have full video of the flight up to the point where the H was dropping back to earth but at the end the battery had gone down to 8.5v and not enough power to keep the camera on when it hit the ground, I assume.
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