I lost my RD2, not sure what to do.

[Burkeomatic]

As the title states, i lost my dragon.


I was flying it LOS doing the final shakedown before putting fpv gear on it.

It was flying awesome!

I had done a couple of laps around the football field and i throttle up a little. The motors spin up quicker than i thought.

Ok something is odd time to land it. I turned to bring it around which i did, then I went to do the 180 I always do to line up my approach.... nothing. No ailerons, rudder, nothing.

I have zero control and my plane is in flat, level flight about 50ft off the ground heqding toward a road and residential area.

I am starting to panic as I will lose LOS soon. I thought maybe going to rth but it was going the opposite way for that.

So in a panicked state of mind I think " I'll switch it to manual mode"

** sidenote, while i had the plane manually trimmed, i had to reset my model and forgot to dial the rates back. This plane is very acrobatic inspite of its looks**


So the switch frantically goes to manual. I pull back and left and the plane barrel rolls and plants right into the roof of the school. Dammit.

So i know there are things I could have done better, and I will discuss those, but short term, I don't know what to do.


There is currently a plane on the roof of a middle school with a 4000mah battery (about an hour of flight time) beeping to death.

I can see where that would cause concern if someone heard it and didn't know where it was coming from.

I don't have my FAA number on it.

I am not sure how much I care if I get it back. Does it suck that I lost over $200 worth of stuff. But it is electronics I no longer trust, a probable repairable airframe, the battery will be toast.So what would I salvage, maybe the motor escs and servos?

If there happens to be some incident, it will be easy to trace back to me due to the surveilance there. If the battery catches fire, or they think some terrorist tried to bomb their school, I will be easily found out.

On the other hand, if i say something, I could face some unknown legal BS just for trying to do the right thing, and let someone know.

So I am leaning toward say nothing and let it play out. I know what the right thing to do is, but I don't know what the legally least risky thing to do is.

What should I do? I am also open to some monday morning quarterbacking here.

[Burkeomatic]

On first glance, I shouldn't have panicked that much, the plane had quite a while before it hit any houses.

crash site by Burkeomatic, on Flickr

[Burkeomatic]

Other things I should/could have done:

Try to switch to ALT hold mode first disengaging RTH.

Waited a second, the plane wasn't even far out enough to hit RTH, maybe that would have brought it back.

Let the plane fly a little under manual and ease the controls over. I was in a panic, and so used to banging the sticks around on the drift, I had lost my head. It has actually been a while since I have been flying normal, I have been using my heavily stabilized drift a lot. The last real plane I flew was my mig 29. 

This plane had tons of power, really all I had to do is punch it and pull back and watch it bolt straight up. Once I had some altitude anything is recoverable, right?

One of my motors cycled off for a second when I was setting it up, I don't know why, and my night fury had done it once before too. This is the gyro out of my night fury, which had hours of flights and flew great with it. I checked it but didn't find anything weird, I should have known.

I had this full manual set up, but then I had accidentally changed a setting and missed it. So I ended up resetting the model. I put everything back accept for the rates, and I hadn't flown it in manual mode since the reset. So technically, my plane wasn't set up right. Yeah, it would fly straight, and all of the control surfaces went the right way, but had I launched in manual mode, I would have quickly put it down and dialed the rates back.

[ratcheeroo]

May 23, 2022 2:21:51 GMT Burkeomatic said:

As the title states, i lost my dragon.


I was flying it LOS doing the final shakedown before putting fpv gear on it.

It was flying awesome!

I had done a couple of laps around the football field and i throttle up a little. The motors spin up quicker than i thought.

Ok something is odd time to land it. I turned to bring it around which i did, then I went to do the 180 I always do to line up my approach.... nothing. No ailerons, rudder, nothing.

I have zero control and my plane is in flat, level flight about 50ft off the ground heqding toward a road and residential area.

I am starting to panic as I will lose LOS soon. I thought maybe going to rth but it was going the opposite way for that.

So in a panicked state of mind I think " I'll switch it to manual mode"

** sidenote, while i had the plane manually trimmed, i had to reset my model and forgot to dial the rates back. This plane is very acrobatic inspite of its looks**


So the switch frantically goes to manual. I pull back and left and the plane barrel rolls and plants right into the roof of the school. Dammit.

So i know there are things I could have done better, and I will discuss those, but short term, I don't know what to do.


There is currently a plane on the roof of a middle school with a 4000mah battery (about an hour of flight time) beeping to death.

I can see where that would cause concern if someone heard it and didn't know where it was coming from.

I don't have my FAA number on it.

I am not sure how much I care if I get it back. Does it suck that I lost over $200 worth of stuff. But it is electronics I no longer trust, a probable repairable airframe, the battery will be toast.So what would I salvage, maybe the motor escs and servos?

If there happens to be some incident, it will be easy to trace back to me due to the surveilance there. If the battery catches fire, or they think some terrorist tried to bomb their school, I will be easily found out.

On the other hand, if i say something, I could face some unknown legal BS just for trying to do the right thing, and let someone know.

So I am leaning toward say nothing and let it play out. I know what the right thing to do is, but I don't know what the legally least risky thing to do is.

What should I do? I am also open to some monday morning quarterbacking here.

That is a predicament. Personally my first instinct would be take the wait and see what happens approach but ....if you reached out to the school perhaps you  have the chance to retrieve it and everything will be cool, whereas if they come looking for you well who knows where that could go. My buddy did a similar thing, crashed his FT Alpha on the roof of a school, we called a buddy that worked for a roofing company, he came with some ladders and we went up and got it LMAO. Maybe thats an option? Be nice if you knew a custodian or maintenance worker at the school to get access to the roof. 

[Mr NCT]

Be quick to call the school but ask for the custodian.  Do not deal with the administration, "Karenism" is a required course to be a school administrator and the first two call they would make would be police and FAA.  Take the custodian a six pack of, ah, coke and life will be good.

[Burkeomatic]

Well, this is a school system that threatened my wife and me with truancy court for my daughter having missed 3 days unexcused for her great grandmothers funeral. I don't trust them not to be stupid.



I haven't heard anything yet, which may be a good thing, the school hadn't caught on fire, so I guess the battery is probably going to drain normally. You can kind of hear it from the ground, but with a hoard of kids going around, it probably won't be heard.



Since it doesn't appear any alarms have been raised and nothing has happened, I think I may play it cool, wait a little bit, and try to make contact with a custodian or someone that wouldn't mind getting it for me. I am also thinking that perhaps a strong wind may blow it off. The direction the wind usually blows in was the opposite direction of flight, so we shall see but at least that is optimal. We have the possibility of some thunderstorms coming through, so that could help it down, possibly. It is heavier but the wind does catch it a little bit, with a little luck it will blow off. If not, banggood has some PNP planes really cheap, and I ordered a ZOHD dart and a Eachine Airloader for the money that I have in the Dragon, which I probably overpaid for. I also have a few different flight controllers to try out.



On a side note, I have not had very good luck with that plane. It was one of those that just crashed a lot. It took me a while to get it right, and when I finally did, this happened, so I have a stigma about it. If I do buy another one, it will only be extremely discounted. I always say I am not superstitious, but I kind of am I guess. If something stupid happens with a design, I never want to fly it again.

[Burkeomatic]

We have a huge thunderstorm blowing through right now, 50-60mph gusts. Blew down a tree branch in my yard. I'll go by and check tomorrow and see if it made it down.

[Burkeomatic]

I got the best shots I could today. I know it is grainy, but a 50 inch wingspan plane I think would show up. Maybe you all might see something I didn't? I watched it in slow mo a couple of times.

My theory is the thunderstorm blew it off, and staff at the school found it, or some person found it and took it, or maybe it was blown far enough away and rain got it into the drainage ditch. Who knows, I'll search the ground for it more. I don't think it is up there anymore.

[ratcheeroo]

Yeah watched it several times , not seeing anything resembling a plane on that roof. Sucks to lose a nice plane like that my friend.

[Burkeomatic]

I just did a quick check on google maps, as I am approaching, those air units on the top appear to be about 5 feet wide, so I have further confirmed that the plane isn't up there. The wingspan would be nearly as wide as those units are, or wider than the smaller ones. Looks like I am getting better resolution than I think, and I am a little closer than I think. I feel like it would be pretty obvious. I am going to go check the drainage areas tomorrow, then officially call it a loss.

I guess I came out 50/50, I lost the plane, but I didn't get any legal BS.

This is a pretty obvious looking plane. Unless somehow it wound up under one of those air handlers....

[Burkeomatic]

ratcheeroo I figured this would interest you, especially given you have this flight controller, but I have thought about this, and the possibility of GPS signal loss, and I think I know the cause.

I do believe that the loss of GPS signal caused the plane to fly away, but not for the reason that I had thought, and it wasn't nearly as bad.

My original hypothesis, is that the plane, while it was in Fence/RTH mode lost gps position and though "home" was somewhere else. I don't think that is the case anymore.

I didn't come to this realization until I was setting up the "sparrow 2" which is the evolution of the sparrow controller. As you know, the wording on these instructions was written by a chinese person with rudimentary english skills. The sparrow 2 is a little clearer. If you lose GPS while flying in fence mode, or you go into RTH mode without GPS sync, the plane will go into ALT Hold mode.

If you follow the chart on the original sparrow, it states the same thing. So given it was a cloudy day, I lost GPS signal (I shouldn't have) and the plane went into ALT HOLD mode, which was causing it to fly in the direction it was going without my say so. Calmly switching to stabilized mode would have saved me. Manual mode would have been fine too, if it were set up correctly.

Anyways, had I known this FC better, I would have known what was going on, and been able to act accordingly and not panic. Had i not been flying my plane in fence mode, there is little chance this would have happened.

Now this little quirk makes sense if you think about it, say I have hit RTH and the plane is returning home, and it loses GPS signal, the plane would continue to automatically fly on the course it was set on, presumably toward home, where you could hopefully reacquire signal along the line then proceed to the stored GPS coordinates, or you would gain FPV signal or LOS and be able to bring it back home manually. However, it is an utterly useless function in fencing mode.

With that being said, and I can't confirm this, I don't think if the plane reacquires GPS signal mid flight that it would automatically assume that is the planes new home, that wouldn't make any sense. If you think about it, the plane won't arm until it has acquired GPS signal. I believe that the plane stores said GPS coordinates as home until it is power cycled. I wouldn't think that a system would be designed to where that if you lost GPS signal for a few seconds and regained signal a little later, it would say "this is my new home now" but maybe I am giving the engineers a little too much credit.

So my advice is if you fly in fencing mode, and your plane starts to fly away, this is what is happening. You can calmly enter whatever mode you have the most control over (I should have had the plane set up better in manual mode, but through stupid mistakes and laziness I didn't) and bring it back, or I would think once the plane reacquired signal it would bring itself back home. There is no distance limit on RTH mode as far as I know, It works 2 miles away.

My real advice is, you really don't need fencing mode 99% of the time, unless you just have a hard limit you don't want your plane to pass. Which would make sense to me with a small plane being flown LOS or if it is keeping you from a populated area, but even then, obviously it isn't fool proof as my plane was beelining toward a populous area which is what caused me to panic.

I say set up failsafe as "POS A" or whatever position your plane is in RTH and geofence mode, and if you lose signal or whatever, the plane will eventually take care of itself if worse comes to worse, but until then, fly in stabilized mode.

[ratcheeroo]

Jun 20, 2022 17:57:04 GMT Burkeomatic said:

ratcheeroo I figured this would interest you, especially given you have this flight controller, but I have thought about this, and the possibility of GPS signal loss, and I think I know the cause.

I do believe that the loss of GPS signal caused the plane to fly away, but not for the reason that I had thought, and it wasn't nearly as bad.

My original hypothesis, is that the plane, while it was in Fence/RTH mode lost gps position and though "home" was somewhere else. I don't think that is the case anymore.

I didn't come to this realization until I was setting up the "sparrow 2" which is the evolution of the sparrow controller. As you know, the wording on these instructions was written by a chinese person with rudimentary english skills. The sparrow 2 is a little clearer. If you lose GPS while flying in fence mode, or you go into RTH mode without GPS sync, the plane will go into ALT Hold mode.

If you follow the chart on the original sparrow, it states the same thing. So given it was a cloudy day, I lost GPS signal (I shouldn't have) and the plane went into ALT HOLD mode, which was causing it to fly in the direction it was going without my say so. Calmly switching to stabilized mode would have saved me. Manual mode would have been fine too, if it were set up correctly.

Anyways, had I known this FC better, I would have known what was going on, and been able to act accordingly and not panic. Had i not been flying my plane in fence mode, there is little chance this would have happened.

Now this little quirk makes sense if you think about it, say I have hit RTH and the plane is returning home, and it loses GPS signal, the plane would continue to automatically fly on the course it was set on, presumably toward home, where you could hopefully reacquire signal along the line then proceed to the stored GPS coordinates, or you would gain FPV signal or LOS and be able to bring it back home manually. However, it is an utterly useless function in fencing mode.

With that being said, and I can't confirm this, I don't think if the plane reacquires GPS signal mid flight that it would automatically assume that is the planes new home, that wouldn't make any sense. If you think about it, the plane won't arm until it has acquired GPS signal. I believe that the plane stores said GPS coordinates as home until it is power cycled. I wouldn't think that a system would be designed to where that if you lost GPS signal for a few seconds and regained signal a little later, it would say "this is my new home now" but maybe I am giving the engineers a little too much credit.

So my advice is if you fly in fencing mode, and your plane starts to fly away, this is what is happening. You can calmly enter whatever mode you have the most control over (I should have had the plane set up better in manual mode, but through stupid mistakes and laziness I didn't) and bring it back, or I would think once the plane reacquired signal it would bring itself back home. There is no distance limit on RTH mode as far as I know, It works 2 miles away.

My real advice is, you really don't need fencing mode 99% of the time, unless you just have a hard limit you don't want your plane to pass. Which would make sense to me with a small plane being flown LOS or if it is keeping you from a populated area, but even then, obviously it isn't fool proof as my plane was beelining toward a populous area which is what caused me to panic.

I say set up failsafe as "POS A" or whatever position your plane is in RTH and geofence mode, and if you lose signal or whatever, the plane will eventually take care of itself if worse comes to worse, but until then, fly in stabilized mode.

  Thanks for the insight, I actually installed that controller in the Super Bandit just to try it out, I'll review this stuff and make sure I am good to go.

[Burkeomatic]

Jun 21, 2022 16:15:35 GMT ratcheeroo said:

Jun 20, 2022 17:57:04 GMT Burkeomatic said:

ratcheeroo I figured this would interest you, especially given you have this flight controller, but I have thought about this, and the possibility of GPS signal loss, and I think I know the cause.

I do believe that the loss of GPS signal caused the plane to fly away, but not for the reason that I had thought, and it wasn't nearly as bad.

My original hypothesis, is that the plane, while it was in Fence/RTH mode lost gps position and though "home" was somewhere else. I don't think that is the case anymore.

I didn't come to this realization until I was setting up the "sparrow 2" which is the evolution of the sparrow controller. As you know, the wording on these instructions was written by a chinese person with rudimentary english skills. The sparrow 2 is a little clearer. If you lose GPS while flying in fence mode, or you go into RTH mode without GPS sync, the plane will go into ALT Hold mode.

If you follow the chart on the original sparrow, it states the same thing. So given it was a cloudy day, I lost GPS signal (I shouldn't have) and the plane went into ALT HOLD mode, which was causing it to fly in the direction it was going without my say so. Calmly switching to stabilized mode would have saved me. Manual mode would have been fine too, if it were set up correctly.

Anyways, had I known this FC better, I would have known what was going on, and been able to act accordingly and not panic. Had i not been flying my plane in fence mode, there is little chance this would have happened.

Now this little quirk makes sense if you think about it, say I have hit RTH and the plane is returning home, and it loses GPS signal, the plane would continue to automatically fly on the course it was set on, presumably toward home, where you could hopefully reacquire signal along the line then proceed to the stored GPS coordinates, or you would gain FPV signal or LOS and be able to bring it back home manually. However, it is an utterly useless function in fencing mode.

With that being said, and I can't confirm this, I don't think if the plane reacquires GPS signal mid flight that it would automatically assume that is the planes new home, that wouldn't make any sense. If you think about it, the plane won't arm until it has acquired GPS signal. I believe that the plane stores said GPS coordinates as home until it is power cycled. I wouldn't think that a system would be designed to where that if you lost GPS signal for a few seconds and regained signal a little later, it would say "this is my new home now" but maybe I am giving the engineers a little too much credit.

So my advice is if you fly in fencing mode, and your plane starts to fly away, this is what is happening. You can calmly enter whatever mode you have the most control over (I should have had the plane set up better in manual mode, but through stupid mistakes and laziness I didn't) and bring it back, or I would think once the plane reacquired signal it would bring itself back home. There is no distance limit on RTH mode as far as I know, It works 2 miles away.

My real advice is, you really don't need fencing mode 99% of the time, unless you just have a hard limit you don't want your plane to pass. Which would make sense to me with a small plane being flown LOS or if it is keeping you from a populated area, but even then, obviously it isn't fool proof as my plane was beelining toward a populous area which is what caused me to panic.

I say set up failsafe as "POS A" or whatever position your plane is in RTH and geofence mode, and if you lose signal or whatever, the plane will eventually take care of itself if worse comes to worse, but until then, fly in stabilized mode.

  Thanks for the insight, I actually installed that controller in the Super Bandit just to try it out, I'll review this stuff and make sure I am good to go.

Ok, I really, really, really figured it out this time. Seriously. 

I installed the original sparrow on my daughters trainer with the intent to use it for geofencing. I could turn her loose and not pay attention to her or worry about her flying away because if she hit the geofence, the plane would just return. I was flying just like I was flying the RDV2 above in geofence mode as stated above. She usually likes to keep it down around 50 feet or so height. So I was flying it just like she would, and geofence would work sometimes..... and sometimes, the plane would just fly away..... I would switch to manual mode and bring it back. But then I noticed, when I was low, that is when the plane would fly away.... or go into ALT mode. Thing is, you have no OSD telling you what mode it is in. 

So looking back over the shitty chinglish instructions, it says ''minimum height of aircraft limited to 35m, trigger fence limit, will return to home.''

Ok cool, so what I believe the english translation is, ''as long as the plane is over somewhere around or over 35m, fencemode works, if you are under 35m, your plane will enter ALTHOLD mode at a very low altitude and fly away if you don't do anything.'' So it is stupid, fence mode is worthless, and the time when you would arguably need fencemode the most, your plane will fly away. 

I also think the height is below 35m, probably more like 25m. 

Oh, and it does the exact same thing in RTH mode too. 

Anyway, it won't work as the failsafe I wanted for her, it would actually make things worse if it were to trigger fence mode and she were low. I tried. I know it was those people's first attempt at a flight controller, and it works, it just makes my head hurt, I learn something new about it every time I use it, and it only has one button and 3 pots. 

But it is freaking infuriating. I could have very well lost another plane due to that, and if it was something that handled like a hotrod and was going 60-80mph, I very well could have. Literally the one of the dumbest, if not the dumbest mode a plane could go into 30 feet off the ground would have to be ALTHOLD mode. ''We are going to take away all control from the pilot and ram this thing into the nearest obstacle.'' Like what world does that make sense. Maybe they should have had it freaking climb, then return home. Presumably if you have the fence set to 150m, there would be nothing between you and the plane. There is probably a greater likelyhood of obstacles outside of the fence..... hence why you would be using fence mode, to keep your plane from flying into shit you don't want it to, or leaving the fence area, but it does exactly that if you are below 35m. 

[Burkeomatic]

Wish I had this back then. 

Apparently there isn't the ridge around the whole thing that I thought there was, nor space under those air handlers. 

My best guess is it blew off in the storm, or it skipped off/missed the roof entirely, ended up on the other side, and I could have probably got it the whole time.. oh well. 

[droneflyer200]

OH I know how that feels The same kind of thing Happened with My FT Spear luckily  the kids of the guy whos property it landed on knew enough to take out the SD card from the action cam and check out the Video. They watch the first part and saw my Brother in-law on his lawn Tractor cutting grass and knew were the take off was from and took the plane back to his place. I'm planning on picking up some sonic locator buzzers you can get them real cheap and they give off a buzzing noise that helps you locate a downed A/C.M y brother in-law suggested getting apple air tags or some similar device like a G.P.S pet tag.