MP2 crashed during Drone Deploy mission

Carl_Schreiner · April 20, 2023, 3:59am

My MP2 crashed into a tree during a DD mission. I was able to extract the log from DD and use Airdata to locate its last position. I found the drone in some soft ferns and it seems to be fine. I’m trying to understand what happened, specifically how obstacle avoidance behaved. The flight altitude was set to 200ft but I thought I changed it to 320 because I knew there were some big trees on the outskirts of our property. Obviously I didn’t change it. From the logs, it looks like the drone slowed down at around 7m 59s. and probably dodged around a tree but someone on another forum thought it might have been struck and then taken down by a bird. There are eagles and hawks in the area. I haven’t measured the height of the trees in the area but they are huge. I’m wondering if anyone out there can extract more info from the log. The Flight Reader map sure looks like obstacle avoidance kicked in but the spreadsheets dont seem to show that they ever kicked in. Here is the link:

Thanks!

Fly_Dawg · April 20, 2023, 3:15pm

This is a little difficult to sort out from the data, however IMO I don’t think this was a bird strike.
First, the fact that from your takeoff point to the point where the aircraft went down is according to the GE profile ~ 100 Ft higher than your home point, not including the height of the trees. Had you changed the flight altitude to 300ft as you mentioned you would have cleared.

The next issue was your question on the aircraft slow down. This indeed “looks” like the OA activated although nothing in the data confirms that fact. Therefore I am guessing here. These pitch oscillations look like the OA was active, however with nothing else in the data to suggest that, I would say that the aircraft was clipping the very tops of the trees for a short period, until it got hung up and spun around. That may be stretching it but that’s the best I have for you.