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Worst crash story

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I’m curious, who has the worst crash story? I’ve crashed my q500 once into a tree and once into my neighbors house (luckily no damage to their siding), and I’ve crashed my regular h once into a tree. Damage was minimal luckily. I’ve also had a very close call with my H running into something very expensive, so it got me thinking:

Who has the worst crash story? Just something crazy like crashing into someone’s car causing big $$ damages, or a building, house, people...anything. I’m genuinely curious what some others have experienced for crashes.. if you say you’ve never crashed I’m going to call bulls^%+*...think everyone has crashed at least once.

So, what’s your worst crash and what’s the biggest amount of damage your crash caused?

Don’t be shy or embarrassed folks, let it out for all of us to see, and it might even help someone in the future with a lesson in all of this. Like, don’t fly your drone around in your neighborhood like I did. That was within the 1st week of me getting into flying about 4 years ago and I’ve never flown around houses since.

Look forward to hearing some good ones.
 
Hmmm, is this limited to drones (multi-rotors) or do you want to hear from some of those who have also flown RC and/or other UAV's?

In all honestly, I’ll take any story, I’m a sucker for a great crash story. Video references even better. Lol

Crash stories are also great learning tools.
 
I've had 3 crashes since I started flying drones. The first was with a dji P2V on only its second fight back in Feb 2015...my fault. Minor damage since it landed in snow. The second was again with the P2V back in late March 2015 while doing a photo survey for a conservation group...again, my fault. Damage was fare more serious and almost terminal, but I id manage to repair it in the end. The last crash with a dji P2V+ wasn't my fault as far as I could see and that last one was on April 5th 2015.

I have never crashed my TH480 in the over 4 years 2 months I've had it. (Touch wood)

Here is the video clip of my last crash with the P2V+ (I know it isn't footage from a Yuneek drone...I simply don't have crash footage from a Yuneek)
 
I've had 3 crashes since I started flying drones. The first was with a dji P2V on only its second fight back in Feb 2015...my fault. Minor damage since it landed in snow. The second was again with the P2V back in late March 2015 while doing a photo survey for a conservation group...again, my fault. Damage was fare more serious and almost terminal, but I id manage to repair it in the end. The last crash with a dji P2V+ wasn't my fault as far as I could see and that last one was on April 5th 2015.

I have never crashed my TH480 in the over 4 years 2 months I've had it. (Touch wood)

Here is the video clip of my last crash with the P2V+ (I know it isn't footage from a Yuneek drone...I simply don't have crash footage from a Yuneek)

Yowzza, now that’s a crash.

I don’t miss the pit in your stomach feeling after a crash. Luckily my crashes were only witnessed by me. However, I was still depressed afterwards for a few days. Such a crappy feeling.
 
I’m curious, who has the worst crash story? I’ve crashed my q500 once into a tree and once into my neighbors house (luckily no damage to their siding), and I’ve crashed my regular h once into a tree. Damage was minimal luckily. I’ve also had a very close call with my H running into something very expensive, so it got me thinking:

Who has the worst crash story? Just something crazy like crashing into someone’s car causing big $$ damages, or a building, house, people...anything. I’m genuinely curious what some others have experienced for crashes.. if you say you’ve never crashed I’m going to call bulls^%+*...think everyone has crashed at least once.

So, what’s your worst crash and what’s the biggest amount of damage your crash caused?

Don’t be shy or embarrassed folks, let it out for all of us to see, and it might even help someone in the future with a lesson in all of this. Like, don’t fly your drone around in your neighborhood like I did. That was within the 1st week of me getting into flying about 4 years ago and I’ve never flown around houses since.

Look forward to hearing some good ones.

My worst crash story unfortunately wasn’t caught on video. I stupidly put the drone up as a Storm was coming in. The job was at a construction site and the winds started picking up. I decided it was time to land the drone! I got it down but the landing gear was at an angle to the ground. The drone was struggling and I get hear it applying more power. A really strong gust of wind came in and the drone did a somersault and landed on its head. All 6 propellers were broken as well as 5 of the arm clips and the top cover. It turned out the ESC board was cracked too. I replaced that but the drone still won’t bind to the controller.

Drone #3 gave me a really scare last month. I was shooting a video for an amphitheater and was shooting video where the drone was supposed to drop into the bowl and pull out just over the seats. I set it up as a CCC and ran the drone back and forth with the camera turned backwards. The climb rates are much better than the descent rates so I was going to reverse the video in the editing phase. Well everything was going pretty well. I’d made several runs back and forth when on a return run the drone dropped further than it had been programmed for. It was supposed to miss the seats by about 6 feet but ended up missing by about a foot. I had that terrible sinking feeling in my stomach but the drone came through okay. That footage ended up in the final video and the customer was amazed at how close I was able to come to the seats and not actually hit them. I didn’t tell them that it wasn’t on purpose!

Cable Curve Cam isn’t as positionally accurate as it should be for close passes. I thought I had enough buffer with 6 feet and it appears that it was just enough but man it was close!

I’ll have to find the original video and post it tonight. I actually tried to override but I was about a second too late. Now I wish I hadn’t tried that because the video would’ve been better if I’d let the drone continue its flight up to the stage!
 
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Cable Curve Cam isn’t as positionally accurate as it should be for close passes.
CCC rounds out all of the waypoints when you fly the mission. It doesn't fly straight lines. It creates a path the intercepts the waypoint. So the aircraft will dip low when descending to intercept a waypoint. The graphical example below isn't quite accurate but you can see what happens.
Curved Cable Cam.jpg
 
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CCC rounds out all of the waypoints when you fly the mission. It doesn't fly straight lines. It creates a path the intercepts the waypoint. So the aircraft will dip low when descending to intercept a waypoint. The graphical example below isn't quite accurate but you can see what happens.
View attachment 22970

I’m well aware that CCC doesn’t do straight lines. I actually programmed the way points factoring that in and had made several runs where it cleared the seats by the six foot margin.

For some reason on what ended up being the final run it dropped an extra five feet. I’ve created CCC’s in open spaces, saved them and called them up days later and seen visible deviations from the runs on the previous day. Which really isn’t all that surprising since the GPS satellites are in polar orbits rather than geosynchronous and it’s guaranteed that you’ll get a different number of satellites and different satellites for that matter. However, in this case I’d just run the drone out on the CCC with 6 feet of clearance and all I did was run it backwards on the CCC.

The moral of the story is give a really wide berth to objects when using Cable Curve Cam.
 
My worst crash story unfortunately wasn’t caught on video. I stupidly put the drone up as a Storm was coming in. The job was at a construction site and the winds started picking up. I decided it was time to land the drone! I got it down but the landing gear was at an angle to the ground. The drone was struggling and I get hear it applying more power. A really strong gust of wind came in and the drone did a somersault and landed on its head. All 6 propellers were broken as well as 5 of the arm clips and the top cover. It turned out the ESC board was cracked too. I replaced that but the drone still won’t bind to the controller.

Drone #3 gave me a really scare last month. I was shooting a video for an amphitheater and was shooting video where the drone was supposed to drop into the bowl and pull out just over the seats. I set it up as a CCC and ran the drone back and forth with the camera turned backwards. The climb rates are much better than the descent rates so I was going to reverse the video in the editing phase. Well everything was going pretty well. I’d made several runs back and forth when on a return run the drone dropped further than it had been programmed for. It was supposed to miss the seats by about 6 feet but ended up missing by about a foot. I had that terrible sinking feeling in my stomach but the drone came through okay. That footage ended up in the final video and the customer was amazed at how close I was able to come to the seats and not actually hit them. I didn’t tell them that it wasn’t on purpose!

Cable Curve Cam isn’t as positionally accurate as it should be for close passes. I thought I had enough buffer with 6 feet and it appears that it was just enough but man it was close!

I’ll have to find the original video and post it tonight. I actually tried to override but I was about a second too late. Now I wish I hadn’t tried that because the video would’ve been better if I’d let the drone continue its flight up to the stage!
CCC waypoints can vary even more over time.
I have flown repeated CCC missions at the same location for 20 months.
Altitude variance was maybe 2 meters. Lateral variance was about 10 meters.
Without occasional compass calibration, yaw can be off 20 degrees.
 
Does it have to be a true story? An uh..."Friend"...yeah...told me about this:

"I was out at the park, flying very aggressive figure 8's over a soccer field. I was in Sport Mode and I was doing the old "Yank & Bank" only getting 8 mins from a battery. I banked too wide and slid to a stop right next to a tree. I lost orientation which caused me to pull the stick the wrong way and fly right into the tree. It sounded like a weedeater with debris falling out of the tree. The 480 dropped out of the tree in 5 rotor mode, still flying but surrounded by bits and pieces of leaves and sticks. The only damage was a broken prop and my heart, which stopped for a second and visited my stomach."

Didn't happen to me though. I've never crashed any of my drones.
 
Does it have to be a true story? An uh..."Friend"...yeah...told me about this:

"I was out at the park, flying very aggressive figure 8's over a soccer field. I was in Sport Mode and I was doing the old "Yank & Bank" only getting 8 mins from a battery. I banked too wide and slid to a stop right next to a tree. I lost orientation which caused me to pull the stick the wrong way and fly right into the tree. It sounded like a weedeater with debris falling out of the tree. The 480 dropped out of the tree in 5 rotor mode, still flying but surrounded by bits and pieces of leaves and sticks. The only damage was a broken prop and my heart, which stopped for a second and visited my stomach."

Didn't happen to me though. I've never crashed any of my drones.

Lol, I see what you did there. I had “a friend” that ran into the top of a tree (totally his fault) and the h acted the same...sounded like a weed eater, then it somehow miraculously broke through the leaves about 30 feet up in 5 rotor mode..., my friend at first was thanking his lucky stars while it came stumbling and bumbling out of the brush.....then towards another tree. My “friend” watched in slow motion, while the drone was unresponsive, careen into a 2nd tree. Win some lose some I guess. A valuable lesson was learned that day though..pull your head out of your azz while flying, at least that’s what he said.
 
My worst crash story unfortunately wasn’t caught on video. I stupidly put the drone up as a Storm was coming in. The job was at a construction site and the winds started picking up. I decided it was time to land the drone! I got it down but the landing gear was at an angle to the ground. The drone was struggling and I get hear it applying more power. A really strong gust of wind came in and the drone did a somersault and landed on its head. All 6 propellers were broken as well as 5 of the arm clips and the top cover. It turned out the ESC board was cracked too. I replaced that but the drone still won’t bind to the controller.

Drone #3 gave me a really scare last month. I was shooting a video for an amphitheater and was shooting video where the drone was supposed to drop into the bowl and pull out just over the seats. I set it up as a CCC and ran the drone back and forth with the camera turned backwards. The climb rates are much better than the descent rates so I was going to reverse the video in the editing phase. Well everything was going pretty well. I’d made several runs back and forth when on a return run the drone dropped further than it had been programmed for. It was supposed to miss the seats by about 6 feet but ended up missing by about a foot. I had that terrible sinking feeling in my stomach but the drone came through okay. That footage ended up in the final video and the customer was amazed at how close I was able to come to the seats and not actually hit them. I didn’t tell them that it wasn’t on purpose!

Cable Curve Cam isn’t as positionally accurate as it should be for close passes. I thought I had enough buffer with 6 feet and it appears that it was just enough but man it was close!

I’ll have to find the original video and post it tonight. I actually tried to override but I was about a second too late. Now I wish I hadn’t tried that because the video would’ve been better if I’d let the drone continue its flight up to the stage!

Would love to see the video.
 

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