endotherm
First Officer
Flight distance : 503241 ft
Australia
Offline
|
This shows a normal flight, but the pilot clearly did not notice the warnings on the screen until it was too late.
To clarify, you can get away with using a "just-flown" battery, where the remaining capacity estimations are still fairly accurate. That does not apply to a "yesterday-battery" or a "last-week" battery. So the advice of always trying to use a 100% charged battery is valid, but it did not have an effect on the outcome of this flight.
At 10% when the aircraft commenced a critical battery landing, we see the pilot maintain a full forward stick command for the remaider of the flight. As the aircraft descended, the pilot seems to have noticed the loss of altitude and pushed up on the stick to climb. This gained altitude, but the stick was again released, resuming the landing/descent. It is completely permissible (and recommended!) to override the height in circumstances such as these. Had the pilot maintained sufficient altitude by applying a constant climb command (say 50%), it is highly likely that the aircraft could have been flown manually to the beach and saved. It would only have required sufficient stick input to maintain the altitude, not climb at maximum rate and exhaust the battery quicker. It would still have had maybe a couple of minutes of flight before a critical battery shutdown. Eventually the battery will become so low that it becomes imperative to land, and the software will not respond to any further override commands to keep it in the air. There was literally only 600 feet to the beach in this instance. That's about 20 seconds at full speed, easily within the 10% remaining capacity. In this case the aircraft was lost because the aircraft was left to follow its auto-landing state, and only periodically instructed to gain altitude. The battery "gave out" at 7% because that is when the impact with water occurred.
One weird aspect of this flight record was that the column for GoHomeStatus showed it was in "Cruise" mode for the whole flight. I haven't seen that in a P3P record before.
I have seen other flight records where the time does not start from 0, but I haven't determined why this is. In this case it indicates that the flight timer had started and was running 661 seconds earlier. It is unknown how a battery change affects this. It may require a "break" in the app to reset the clock.
|
|