Spark Fly Away

Hi guys!

Happy to be new here, but not so happy of what happened yesterday- I noticed some intelligent people are all around here at this website and since I had a bit of situation yesterday I hope you can help me out to prevent this from happening again.

To kick off; I just moved into a new apartment in London, and wanted to show friends how close it is to the centre, and that you can actually see the skyline. I launched the drone in the air from the balcony, went up in the air till I reached maximum altitude and all of a sudden the drone started flying away for some weird reason. I had no control of the drone what so ever, and I got tons of errors on my screen with updates, connection lost, and automatic landings which I couldn’t decline. Just to point out, I have flown the drone many many times, so definitely no beginner.

Seen the logs, it looks like it didn’t record the take-off, but started logging halfway. I did, however, manage to get the drone back by trying and trying to get control by walking around and eventually were able to spot the drone and guide it back home. The take-off was at Silwood St. as can be seen, but in the log, it starts above the roof where it tried to land every single time.

Can someone makes some butter out of these logs, and help me explain what on earth happened?

-I noticed that there were 0 satellite connections, how can that even happen…?

Thanks!

Cheers,

Lars

http://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/5S0I2L8403T81ASUM0GM/#

There appear to be numerous errors here. First, launching from a balcony is never a good idea. Metalic railings and such will cause compass issues as noted in the log. Second, You were above the roof before the home point was ever established. That is why it shows up there. Third, this was not a fly away. You flew it away from you. You were flying with the aircraft facing you, then turned the aircraft 360 degree’s and were giving full forward elevator commands until you lost signal. See chart below:

Here’s what I see in your log:

  • You took off before the Spark had usable GPS data. Since the GPS data was not being used, the home point was not marked before taking off.

  • 1m 1.3s: The home point marked and the Spark started holding its position since it had usable GPS data.

  • 1m 19s: The remote controller signal was lost for 3+ seconds and the Spark auto initiated RTH. It was too close to the home point (about 7 feet away), so it started auto landing immediately (as designed). The home point was marked on top of the roof, so that’s where it was attempting to land.

  • 1m 39s: The remote controller reconnected to the Spark. It was still auto landing at this point and was about 7 feet from the rooftop.

  • 1m 40s to 3m 46s: The Spark continued auto landing and you kept trying to counteract the landing by moving the throttle up. You should have cancelled RTH.

  • 3m 47s: RTH was cancelled and you started ascending straight up.

  • 4m 8s to 5m 11s: You flew the Spark over to Silwood St and landed it.

In summary, you made a lot of mistakes and did not seem to understand what your Spark was doing. The Spark seemed to have performed flawlessly and followed all of your commands.