M Stuart K
First Officer
Flight distance : 1267717 ft
United States
Offline
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Note: The Flight Logs and Flight Video has Been Added to this Thread: Today, while flying in a location that I have flown for years I lost GPS signal on my M2P and it evidently went into atti mode. Unfortunately I was flying in some stiff winds when it happened; over water and near a shoreline with tall trees. The odd thing is that it displayed 17-18 satelites the whole time this was going on. The GPS signal never returned for the remainder of the entire flight. I was about 2 thousand feet out and about 200 feet up when it happened and then suddenly the craft bolted to nearly 500 feet and started drifting fast at the same time, because it was pointed in a headwind I suspect. Good thing I had practiced flying in atti mode a few years back on my P4, if not I would not have managed to bring it back. It was like flying a boat in a heavy ocean storm and the landing was crazy! I could not get it close to anything in the area because it was all over the place, but I managed to get it on the ground. Don't let anyone tell you differently but the controls do not respond the same in this situation and if this happens with not prior experience then you are out of luck.
A couple of notations that troubles me: I am disturbed by the fact that the signal never came back at all. I was using my smart controller and the screen never gave me any information concerning signal loss; only high wind warning. Also; I don't know about you, but my smart controller tends to disconnect from the app ramdomly, and since I was using the screen to guide me back to my location, what if the darn thing would have disconnected at that time? I know; we are supposed to fly line of sight all the time, but the thing is, in this situation, your line of sight just flew the heck away from you!
After landing I powered the craft up again just to see if I could get a GPS signal and I flew it around a bit to check it out and it flew fine, Can anyone point to why the signal failed to come back until after I landed? Yes, I did a compass calibration prior to takeoff, as it pretty much asks me.
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