Drone crashes are now investigated by the AAIB

[Former Member]

[This posting has been removed]

[Pete B]

Gents, apologies for something beyond my control. I edited the title as requested after looking at the thread which definitely contained a number of posts. I saved the one-letter change and all except Steve J's post had disappeared into the ether when the page re-loaded....

It wasn't finger trouble, honest!

Please feel free to post the thread opener again, leccy

Pete

[leccyflyer]

No probs Pete - it's better that my mistake in the thread title is corrected - the change that you made is what I meant it to be.

I was surprised to learn that drone crashes were being investigated by the AAIB since last year and posted a report of a recent incident in CrudenBay, where a drone crashed onto a historic church during an aerial survey of the church roof.

link

[Mike T]

When I first read this thread, I thought "wouldn't it be great if the AAIB could be got to investigate all our crashes?"

They'd lay out your wreckage in one of their hangars, interrogate you and your radio gear, examine your airframe minutely, then publish a report pinpointing, definitively the cause of your crash. Peace of mind and an end to fruitless speculation!

Then I read the link that Leccy posted:

“The cause of the control signal loss was not established.”

So - they have no more bleddy idea than we have!

[leccyflyer]

Mike - aren't all of your crashes investigated by the WCOLOG, same as mine?

WCOLOG = Watching Crowd Of Laughing Old Geezers

[Don Fry]

Out of all the models I have broken, i can say, 2 were not my fault. One a receiver fail. One a mid air.

Best I can say about the rest is some were retired too late, and broke up in mid hooligan.

So in rifle terms, nut behind the butt, is the problem.

I have seen an actual fight however. It went up, it went dead, it fell to earth. You shot me down, no I didn't. And the bloke with a dead before arrrival aircraft launched into an assault, without intent to touch, but it was very realistic.

[eflightray]

Until you have personally flown RC models, who would believe that tree branches can move and grab a model, hedged can physically jump up to stop a passing model clearing them, bushes can transplant themselves instantly into the path of a model.

I'm sure any accident investigation team would deny it happens, but we know it does happen.

.

[Don Fry]

Yea, but in fairness, I've hit the same moving tree twice, perhaps it has grown. Back to these drones, one I read, professional operator dumped a few kilos of quad into a dispersed croud, from hight. Cause failed motor. Cause of failure, water egress into a motor. Motor has a water egress tell tale, showing water in.

Thats a failure at A then. And the idiot was potentially permitted to file permissions to put me at risk, without seeking my permission.

[Simon Chaddock]

The interesting bit to me was in the January report there were also quite a list of commercial quad crashes (DJI Matrice) and almost all were caused by either motor or ESC failure which resulted in an uncontrolled descent by 5 kg quad directly into the ground.

The AAIB pointed out that to the unprotected (no hard hat) this could be a potentially lethal situation. They also commented that the same failure in a plane would be unlikely to have the same outcome.

They made no recommendation on this subject but the inference is clear.

[Toni Reynaud]

"Until you have personally flown RC models, who would believe that tree branches can move and grab a model, hedged can physically jump up to stop a passing model clearing them, bushes can transplant themselves instantly into the path of a model."

Plus 1 for that - there is one particular tree near our patch that caught me twice!

[Peter Miller]

It is NOT that trees and hedges move. They just create huge vacuums that suck model down into them