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Flyaways and NTSB reporting

zalo

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Joined
Dec 20, 2017
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Location
Southwest Missouri
I was taking the FAA's ALC-515: Part 107 Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (small UAS) Recurrent course and came across this quote:

Title 49 Part 830 requires immediate notification of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) of any aircraft Flight Control System Malfunction. A flyaway would qualify as a flight control malfunction reportable to the NTSB. A lost link event would not be reportable to the NTSB since the UAS is behaving in a predictable manner.

Has anyone had a flyaway (I have not) and made this report? What was the response?
 
A flyaway would qualify as a flight control malfunction reportable to the NTSB.
Almost everything that gets described as a flyaway is really operator disorientation or mistake with the aircraft continuing to fly in a predictable manner.
Actual cases of the flight controls malfunctioning are pretty rare.
 
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I have had the Inspire 2 lose GPS during autonomous flight and switch to Atti, I have had it lock up during mapping and go into a hover, (still had GPS), I have had it lock up during a pano due to interference from a high powered router and needed to use RTH to recover it. I have never had it just take off on it's own.

If I did, and I knew that I had done everything humanly possible to recover it including the RTH function, then I would report it.

Now a neighbor of mine lost is drone because he flew it out of sight and lost his video. I ask him if he had hit RTH, he didn't remember. The drone was found a few days later stuck in some trees. He swore the thing took off on it's own, it didn't. When I looked at his RTH altitude it was set at 0, we have hundred foot trees in our area. Most of the time it will be operator error in my opinion, not computer failure.
 
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Now a neighbor of mine lost is drone because he flew it out of sight and lost his video. I ask him if he had hit RTH, he didn't remember. The drone was found a few days later stuck in some trees. He swore the thing took off on it's own, it didn't. When I looked at his RTH altitude it was set at 0, we have hundred foot trees in our area.
If you are talking about a DJI drone, RTH altitude can't be set lower than 20 metres.
Since the RTH height is stored in the aircraft (not in the app or tablet).
You must have been seeing a zero RTH height because the aircraft was not connected.

The recorded flight data would show exactly what happened to his drone.
 
Well I just learned something, I didn't know that RTH altitude could be set that low. Yes it is a DJI Phantom 3, don't know what level of 3. Thanks for the response.
 

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