Teaching a friend to fly, not sure what really happened. This plane has a few features like hold mode and auto land. It was foggy with an ice covered runway surrounded by trees.
Holding pattern worked, auto land not so much with trees all around, it wanted to circle wide and decent which with trees around it could not and seemed pretty random for a base leg approach. Need an open field to try that feature out.
So he took off, flew around, started getting a little far so I said to push the button into a holding pattern, which due to a miscommunication I believe it went into auto land mode and it turned right... unresponsive to any control, so I said push the button again to abort. . . Nothing. Continued a right coordinated turn. It was disappearing into the fog so I took the transmitter and still unresponsive to anything. It flew by itself in a level coordinated 10-15 sec right hand turn before meeting the terrain. Read over the manual and turns out it does this when there is no connection for 35 sec before entering an auto land or when connection is restored. So a loss of connection.... interesting.
We hiked into the woods and wiggled the TX sticks until we heard something. Luckily that worked and eventually found it suspended by some devils club on a hill side. I was shocked it made it that close to the ground!! That was a win in my book. But needs a new elevator, and prop. Just happy it wasn’t at the top of a tree. Cool product, just need some more space for it to work as it was designed.
On a side note, I flew the laser in the misty sky, upped the idle up and seems much happier. Got too foggy so I stopped flying.
My 60” extra was acting a little funny, engine lacked throttle response from time to time, kinda like you left the choke on. From idle to blipping the throttle is would just mush. Hmmmm 36F our, so maybe the battery was just cold, dunno.
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