Tell Me Your Stupidest Crashes

[Ophidia Snaketongue]

The other day, I crashed my Spark in a mind-bogglingly stupid way, and I thought it would be interesting to see if people dare confess their own dumb drone mistakes for us all to learn from.

So, here's my stupid mistake. I was flying my Spark at dusk, to show it to a friend who was curious about it. It was dark enough that the Spark was holding position purely by GPS, rather than visual positioning, and it drifted quite a bit as one would expect.

At one point, it drifted right up to me and nearly hit me, and without thinking, I made a 'shoo' gesture at the Spark...and whacked it out of the sky while cutting my hand on its props. I broke three propellers and covered my hand with cuts.

Thankfully, the poor Spark itself was fine and my hand has healed perfectly well, but this really was a total ID-ten-T error, I think!

So, what things have you done with your drone that made you think 'Well, that was really stupid of me.' Let's hear your stories!

 

[Davezilla]

hehe good story. I was trying to fly just above a tall coconut tree for effect, but miscalculated. It was sad seeing the Spark fall all that way, but it landed on some plants and had no damage!!

 

[His415]

Sport mode at night is the most common way I’ve crashed, but man it’s thrilling to fly at night.

I have a big Park next door to my house that’s well lit and I enjoy racing around the light poles. (When the park is empty of course).

I clipped a light pole one night at full speed, the spark attempted to recover and flew side ways at full speed missing a prop and then biffed on a tree branch and skidded into the street. I hit my fastest speed, 45mph and suffered only a jammed motor and several broken props.

 

[Tim Uiterwijk]

I nearly crashed mine in the water.
Luckily it landed on the other side of the tree.

I was making a big turn back to me and wanted to fly it towards me again. But kept the turn going too long and on my phone screen didn't see that until it was too late. It got into some branches with the props and as sort of a rescue attempt I throttled up to get the drone higher, but it got caught in there, flipped upside down and landed in the soggy mud.

Fortunatly I was able to clean it (was in 1 motor a bit and on the front sensor and camera) and no harm done except replacing 1 prop.

You can see the crash here

 

[mimixtz]

I haven't crashed my Spark yet.
But the most stupid thing I did was with non DJI drone.
I was flying it on our RC park. My son was wearing FPV googles, I was flying it via VLOS and FPV sreen on my RC.
While flying I haven't realized that because of keeping LOS I went app. 40 meters away from my take off point.
After 10 minutes I had my drone in my proximity (VLOS) and low as I know that soon 1st battery warning will appear. I was flying very slowly from one group of people to another and recording, then my son said to aproach to him as close as I dare. Sure, why not?
In that moment 1st battery warning appeared and drone was flying up to gain RTH altitude. I said to myself, wth, we are at take off point, I will fly a little bit more and then land. But the drone went up, of course it didn't respond to the sticks.
This drone has 2 hardware switches to initiate RTH or change flight modes (similar as Phantom 1). My intention was to switch it into Altitude hold mode and see if this will stop gaining altitude and give me back sticks control. But by accident I switched it to balance mode, which alows very high tilt angles, it doesn't hold altitude and it reacts very sharp to each control - much sharper than in Altitude mode. Yes, I had controls again but I tilted it too much and experienced motors shut off. It was on about 25 m altitude when this happened. I was running towards it to catch it but I was too slow (or drone was to far away ). After 10 minutes cursing and swering I calmed down and realized that it was 100% my stupidity.
Result was broken arm, broken LED cover and broken LEDs on 1 ESC. Because of ''Phantom'' shape I had to replaced complete chasis / housing and LEDs and it flies again.

 

[jimssi]

I tried landing to too small hard surface landing pad and of course pad was on snow (winter time)
Poor spark acted like snowblower when it dropped from landing pad because of my mistake
No damage taken. Only cleaned snow away and calibrated imu.

 

[Mjbok]

Not my Spark, but I have a dumb one. I had just gotten an Q500. It was the second time I ever flew it. I was showing off for my son flying it in for a landing and I had it hovering over the sidewalk right outside a football stadium I had just flown around.

I didn't realize that it was facing South, thinking it was facing North. When I went to fly it over to where the car was I flew it right into a chain link fence.

 

[Spark 317]

"D'oh !!" - H. Simpson.

 

[ed956]

Not my spark but my starter drone, parrot bebop 2. Forgot to take the lense cover off before take so when it took off instead of hovering it drifted towards me and just clipped my coat and carried on drifting, I landed it removed the cover and took off. After 10 minutes while flying at full speed and 50 meters up one of the rotors disintegrated. Luckily they are mostly made of foam and plastic so the new nose cone and four rotors were cheap.