Inverted Free Fall!!

[Kidroc]

It very could have been one heck of a Vortex ring state. so it was windy and you were descending straight down. maybe fell through a pocket of turbulence.

 

[michalszwed18]

It very could have been one heck of a Vortex ring state. so it was windy and you were descending straight down. maybe fell through a pocket of turbulence.

That's why I always get down with forward motion. I do spinning circles going in sport mode down.

 

[mlash]

Looks like a bird grabbed it by the landing skids and took it to the trees! Probably dropped it when it could not eat it. Else I think it would be spinning and tumbling. Also, those landing skids, along with the battery, should make it bottom heavy and it would fall with the skids facing downward (heaviest side down).

 

[Chips]

I've had the motors shut down while in LANDING mode and the battery still had plenty of juice. It had been on RTH and then when it arrived 100 metres over the home point, it began descending. At 80 metres, the motors shut off and it went into free fall. I saw it coming down and fortunately, it hit a soft awning, bounced back up and I saw the props spinning again so I tried the sticks and regained control. Brought it back to land near me and checked for damage, which it didn't seem to have. The incident bothered me a lot and I lost trust in the Spark, and went out and bought a Mavic Pro.

But last week, I tried flying the Spark again and it seems to fly okay so I still need to fly many more times before I can decide if I can trust it not to shut down again. The reason is unknown and one of the more knowledgeable guys here looked at my flight data and did not see anything unusual other than that the descent speed was double what it would usually be. There was no strong wind at the time, unless there was a jet stream at 80 metres although in my case, it didn't flip upside down.

Your case is incredible and my first thought was that it was a strong gust of wind. I read somewhere that if the Spark goes upside down, the motors automatically shut down - a sort of built-in safety feature. I learnt this because there was a time when I lost signal link after takeoff and the drone began to slowly rise and I could not bring it down. I had to grab it and pull it down and then shut off the battery to kill the power. Yes, people will say that the drone is supposed to RTH when link is lost but there was some technical problem, I think.

As I often say, a drone fall out of the sky is bad news and yes, you will probably have it destroyed although in your case and mine, we're lucky that there was no damage. What's scary is for it to fall onto someone or onto a busy highway and cause an accident. That's what makes me tense whenever I fly.

 

[Sparky007]

Hi All,

just had a pretty scary episode with my Spark.

With 69 flights, 68K ft distance and over 6hrs flying under my belt, I'm no veteran but not a novice either.

I had flown around 2,000ft out at around 200ft altitude and was almost back to the home point with around 30% battery left. Weather clear with a light blustery wind that had shown three cautions.

I was in full decent and had just passed the 100ft barrier when the Spark flipped upside and dropped like a stone.

The video footage cut out and find my drone was not working. Luckily, I saw roughly where the drone dropped and heard that it had hit trees on the way down. I was praying this had slowed the decent but not inflicted damage.

After checking the last shot from my phone footage to try and get a bearing, I managed to get the rough landing site and fortunately spotted the flashing lights in some rough grass.

The drone appears undamaged and flies, seemingly normally.

I am now fearful this will happen again when I am not close enough to see where it dropped and potentially cause damage to either itself or somebody's property.

If this makes any difference, there were helicopter style skids attached, which have had no affect on previous flights. These appear to be the only loss.

Any ideas, anyone?

I had the reverse happen in the winter first flight I set the spark on some hard packed snow and it took off like a rocket I was able to hit the pause button and bring it back down but the just like what happened to you it shut down and fell to the ground from about 30 feet. I figured that snow was stuck to the bottom sensors causing the drone not to know how far up it’s was going on takeoff. Then when I paused it and try to land it came down about 4 feet and thought it landed. Crazy but no damage as the snow was very fluffy.

 

[Sparky007]

The props were intact and in position. As I have lost the skids, I will dig out a library photo of the set up.
The very brief clip is attached. Up to the point of the video start, nothing unusual happened. I can see no evidence of any birds in the previous 10 minutes of video, although I’m sure they would be above and behind, if they have watched Avatar!

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That’s wild