Saturday, August 23, 2014

Flight #3 - Another good flight

Third flight and third new flying site. Today we are at the park in a secluded field. Only non-ideal attribute is there is a power-wire hanging-down in about 2/3 of it (but easily avoided). Winds were 12-18mph. Flew my little v262 quad to warm-up and then let my brother fly the rest of v262 battery (he's a new RC pilot).

Flew some simple patterns and used Loiter-Mode. Loiter was holding good and re-positioning after wind-gusts. All good there. Noticed I can also Pitch, Roll and/or Yaw in Loiter and it then holds at final position ... nice.

Tested RTL Mode for the first time. Worked fine and landed better than me (without tipping over). This is even more amazing to me than Loiter. Tried it a couple of times with success. Noticed you can even switch directly from Loiter to RTL with no problems.

Only had one problem. Incidentally, this was really the first time I've seen the Nova do something un-expected. However, it was the very end of flight/battery and the LowVoltageAlarm was activated (for about a minute already) so I'm going to chalk-it-up to a low battery for now.

This is the event:

Loiter Mode - Good and Holding (fairly high)
Nova activates LVA - Light Flashing and Beeping
Switched on RTL - In hind-sight not smart of me
Gaining a little altitude and moving above RTL point
Reaches position and starts to descend (but slowly as usual in RTL)
Taking a while to descend and fighting wind
About a minute now in LVA - Beeping is getting faster (a bad sign)
About 20 ft off of ground
Suddenly, Nova rolls (banks) off fast in aft-port direction
Couldn't tell if it was flying-off or just trying to crash
I switched to Stabilize (manual) and made an emergency landing on edge of field
No damage. A little too exciting. Battery reads 10.4 volts.

Another good day. Lesson learned is ... when Nova's LVA engages (I think it's at 10.6volts) land immediately ... you are running on LiPo fumes. Also, probably not a good time to purposely engage RTL.

I have pics (so yes, it DID HAPPEN :-) but they are still on my brother's phone.

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