Burning ESC

[Speedster]

Flying my ME 163 and suddenly the ESC burned, and after a fast landing, where Thomas was very quick to find the screwdriver, we succeeded to get the burning ESC and batterys out of the plane before the whole plane caught fire.
Set up was:
Turnigy 42-50. 1000 motor
**LINK**
9x9 prop
110 Amp ESC (Birdie)
4 x 3cell 1800 Mha batteries 2 paralel and 2 in serie (6 cell)
Its a Wega sunshine modellbau 135 cm span. 81 cm long
One from the club bought it in Germany for many years ago, had it in his garage for 6 years, and sold it, and the new owner had it in his garage for 6 years, where both wings where dammaged.
Then the first one bourght the fuselage back and had it in his garage for 5 year, and then I got it for free :D
More about the building here (from post 17):
**LINK**

Cheers

Soren

[Frank Skilbeck]

Thats a lot of magic smoke , and they stink for ages afterwards.........................

Fortunately when this happened to me my ESC let go like this on landing just as I went to taxi back.

[Koen Smits]

Nice smoke, this could be used as smoker

Imo is this fire caused by lack of coolingair for the ESC .If you put in a new ESC, he will burn also within a short time. As I could see in the video the fuselage is coplete closed without any ventilation possible.Also you use a lot of foam to inside the fuselage to prevent moving from some electronic parts.

Koen

[Plummet]

Am allowed to suggest that that is taking "flying to scale" too far? Did the original not have a habit of producing bowel disturbing smoke as well?

Plummet

[John Privett]

I think the original was noted for either exploding on landing (and at other times), or tipping over on landing then leaking fuel on the trapped pilot. As one of the fuel components was a strong oxydising agent this tended to dissolve the pilot - despite the protective clothing they wore...

Didn't they reckon the ME-163 killed more German pilots than allied ones?

[Terry Mills]

Great action video!

But was this the best way to deal with the problem?

One person was left coughing with a lungful of (carcinogenic?) fumes from burning plastic, and another stuffed his hand into a confined space to retrieve a burning object. Luckily, it was not the battery, and he appears to have escaped without serious burns.

With these thoughts in mind, and now with the benefit of hindsight, would you do what they did, or would you let your pride and joy burn, assuming that you did not have a CO2 extinguisher available?

DA. You could use this for your next opinion poll.

[John Olsen 1]

One went at our club a couple of weeks back, same cause, the ESC was packed in with foam inside the fuselage. The result was a bit like Keystone cops, the owner running towards the shed yelling for the extinguisher while another guy ran past him towards the plane carrying it. One point about this is that the ESC is likely to keep on generating heat until the battery goes flat or until it melts a connection, so the extinguisher may not be enough.

I had one go, but that was mounted on the outside of the plane so cooling was not the issue...I suspect a vertical dive into the ground in the previous plane may have caused an issue which did not show for a few flights. It went while it was on the ground with the Wattmeter in circuit, so disconnecting in a hurry was not too hard.

John