fansd845e849
lvl.4
Flight distance : 1495906 ft
Philippines
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diver dave Posted at 8-15 12:35
I have a brace of inspires, a mk 1 and mk 2 pro. I use them for wildlife counting and monitoring. Though the mavic pro's, air and mini i have are superb, the inspire is my go to, its just so much fun to fly, and i fly for fun as much as for the monitoring jobs i planned for them. Other then wind bucking the mavic pro is just as good - i have 2 of them and they are superb. On paper they also buck the wind just as well but in reality, from my experience the inspires, being bigger and heavier are just better. I am flying in the Scotish mountains and so the wind throws all kinds of problems and can be calm in one valley and hellish in the next. Though the mavic pro has a longer flight time, practically the higher average speed of the inspire means we can do the usual flight routes faster with the inspire, it travels between the deer lawns and clearings faster so though flight times are shorter it does the job quicker. The mavic does them brilliantly, and has way better reception and video feedback, so should be the goto drone but there is just something about the inspire i enjoy. That said i had a spectacular inspire failure.
I was on the mountain, monitoring red deer herd movements. Conditions were ok, a little misty but more or less windless. Midges and flies were hellish! I had flown just over 6500 meters, in a series of legs, basically out and back checking various forest clearings, with me almost at the centre. I was just coming back from the last check point, my pal started chatting to me about what we had seen so i pressed return to home and it was doing fine. 13 minutes into the flight, 32% left in the battery and 320 meters out we saw it approaching at 118 meters (high so not to spook the deer) and it decided to lower its landing gear, which i thought was unusual. It stopped flight and hovered whilst it did this. A critical battery warning flashed, the screen went dead, and it fell like a rock, into a small valley behind some trees. Left thumb was now on the up lever, to no effect. It had clearly lost all power.
It took a while to find, as though the flight logs showed its last location, it was tough going to find, which we did, upside down in tall reeds, in one piece. The reed, heather and undergrowth were almost shoulder high in places and 2 of us took 2 hours with 2 dogs to search it. I flew 2 other drones over the area but they could see nothing. My pal almost stepped on it to find it. It was only 5 meters from where the line showed it to be, perhaps as a result of very light winds high up i guess. The battery, when turned back on still had 29 % in it, but it had been off since it fell for some reason. We recovered it back to the lodge by argocat, checked it over but it was unmarked, as were all the props. I changed battery, and it flew perfectly. I struggle to believe it fell 118/119 meters and is undamaged. I gave it another flight, with a full battery, but just short range, and then tried the dodgy battery in my inspire 1 pro, and it flew fine as well, though i did notice in both cases the battery did not click in, like all my other batteries do, so wonder if this is the issue. I struggle to believe this, as the battery pins are long, but clearly it suffered a power issue, and of course the telemetary shows nothing - it had literally no power for whatever reason. The 3 shorter pins may be the issue i guess and will do some research today. I would be interested to hear if anyone has any similar stories, or can add any insight to my issue. I note battery cell 3 was low all flight, i now see this, so think perhaps the effort of lowering the gear may have triggered something. I will flatten the battery, and do some testing and will update with my findings If the telemetry shows a bad cell deviation on cell 3 then that could very well be the cause. Your voltage would have went lower than 3.1vwhich is cutoff point for the battery. Auto return home can still stress the battery if the winds are high velocity. In scotland it isn't hot enough to make the battery fail at 160f or 71c onwards.
I've crashed before but my battery wasn't updated and had no autolimit, also I had a custom fw which removed vertical climb speed limit, laptop tele showed the battery overheated at 71c/160f in combo with high current, a cell failed and lost voltage to 0 and disconnected Rc. As the inspire was free falling really fast, it wanted to throttle up and restabilize but a cell's voltage was still starving at zero and the power was not enough to recover.
Since this huge crash on my first inspire 1, I no longer use the limitless vertical speed custom fw. And also I've updated the battery which auto limits its current whenever it gets low voltage or 2hot... |
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