Hello all,
My first time here.  I did not find a thread for this so i'll ask.  Please excuse my ignorance for not using the correct terms.

I can take off and land fly forward and back and to the sides just fine.  As soon as I try to rotate, say clockwiize, I lose control and almost always crash.  It is like I can start the rotation and then it just vers off.  What should I do?  Additionally, real quick, I have the fc40.  I gopro 1 should work just fine right?

what are you flying in GPS

Yes.  Both switches are in the top position.

I'm not trying to insult your intelligence but I assume this is your first RC craft.

This sounds like a classic case of losing orientation and takes practice to overcome. We've all experienced this to some extent when starting off. Everything is fine if you are standing behind the quad, left is left, right is right, forward is... You get the idea.

The problems start when the orientation of the craft changes as eg. If you rotate 90 degrees to the left and push the right stick to go forward, assuming you are using a mode 2 transmitter, the craft will now appear to move to your left, pushing this same stick to the left will cause the craft to move toward you.

The Phantom has a feature labelled on the left switch as IOC. This stands for Intelligent Orientation Control. To use this feature you need to be in GPS mode and the craft needs to be a minimum of 20metres from the take off point. In this mode left will always be left and forward will always be forward irrespective of the crafts true orientation.

One great and relatively inexpensive training aid, and one which I used when starting out, was the Hubsan X4 mini quad. I still use it to annoy the cat and it keeps my thumbs in check flying indoors when the weather is less than ideal for flying the Phantom and my other larger multirotors. Even though it auto levels it doesn't have position hold and is great preparation for when you feel ready to turn off the training wheels of the Phantom's GPS and fly in ATTI mode.

As I said it's something we've all had to learn and from time to time it can still take the most experienced flyers by surprise when concentration momentarily goes on vacation. At my flying club a pilot of over thirty years experience had a "Dumb Thumb" moment and managed to plough his 1/4 scale P47 V-Twin into a neighbouring field. He could of used all sorts of excuses but owned up to having a momentary brain fart.

Regards

Nidge

Does it do this when you're just spinning and not touching any forward/back  (pitch) or side to side (roll) on the sticks?  I.e using left stick ONLY!  If so, it sounds like your calibration is off.  Search for IMU calibration and YAW in the threads...there's lots of great info in the forum.

Have you calibrated the compass?

Thank you for the responses.  Yes this is my first RC quad.

Yes  it does it when I only move the stick to rotate.  I am not moving any other stick.

I'll give it another calibration tonight.

Hi there also new to this my first rc is also the above model would calibration have anything to do with the reason behind mine pulling to one side? I crashed mine and this started to happen