As an engineer, I am always thinking about potential for improvements to the way(s) I do things. I bought into the Inspire 1 early on, and have no regrets now. Yes there have been some frustrating times in the past year, but I cannot look back without some precious moments captured that make me grin.

So, the point is to explore what can be considered in future renditions of the Inspire platform. I had always planned on an eventual purchase of either a S900 or S1000 for a true platform with redundancy to protect my camera investment put aloft. I have a Lumix GH4, G7 ready to go. But, it's time to rethink those plans relative to the evolutions. I have also upgraded to the X5 camera with Olympus 12,25,45 primes as well as a 14-45. These are all very valuable on the various camera plaforms, including the X5. The X5 package on the Inspre platform rivals any "pro" platform for useabailty except for catastrophic rotor failures!

Now we get to the one element which needs to be addressed, redundancy and inherant failure volatility of the quadcopter. I mght also add that I fly a 3DR X8 for survey work. The latter has the beloved redundancy of dual rotors on each arm and can recover from disasterous failure if one motor fails on an arm. So, the following is my suggestion for consideration by quadcopter engineers:
Consider smaller emergency motors/rotors under each primary motor/rotor. These would not rotate as a dependent lift component of regular flight, but would only turn on when a primary motor fails on the same axis. Primary parameter would be to size just enough to avoid the catastrophic failure of a single primary axis motor. I would think that a smaller motor of about 1/2 size in lift and propeller diameter would be able to provide enough lift to allow the CPU to use the failsafe motor in concert wit the other primaries to avoid a disastrous failure.

This is a discussion thread that hopefully makes an engineer react with a proposed solution. Calling all engineers from any company to blaze this trail fro the benefit of safety and redundancy that will make all flights inherently safer and prove that we are about protecting all in this wonderfully awesome platform.

I look forward to ingenuity being the primary discussion on thjis thread!
Jay

Well, that is a great suggestion, but if you are talking about  small motor on every arm,  then it has to have it's own esc,   i think it will raise the cost of the drone very high..

how often do motors or escs fail?