John of Drones

Fly-Away On First Flight - The Story I Did Not Want To Write

Hubsan H501SS like the one that flew away

The drone flew away. Let me just rip the bandage off a fresh wound. 

There really isn't much more about how and why that will help me at the moment. A search is underway. A search has essentially been underway from the moment the drone did not touch down where and when it should have. But the drone flew away and there was nothing I could have done about it. This much is certain.

Before you dive for the comment tab and say otherwise, let me assure you that short of electing not the fly the drone in the first place (a sentiment shared by more people than I care to admit) there is nothing I could have done differently in hindsight that would have prevented a fly away under what turns out to be unusual conditions.

The event in question: Within hours of receiving my Hubsan H501SS and controller, after charging the batteries, doing the preliminary binding and setting checks, attaching all the antennas and making sure all the signals and telemetry checks out, I took my drone to an unused baseball field within a fenced-in lot behind a neighborhood school in the hour before sunset, hoping to shoot some HD video and take some photos during my first flight.

Everything went well for the first five or six minutes while I was hovering and maneuvering the quadcopter at eye level. The H50SS operated rock steady vertically in GPS lock and settled nicely in altitude hold a few feet off the turf. Hoping to get video and photos of my neighborhood from above the roofline, I eased the left paddle up to get a steady video angle to the west as the drone gained altitude. At about 80 ft overhead the drone suddenly pitched wildly and began an uncontrolled orbit that arched out and brought the quadcopter up another 60 feet and 100's of feet out to the northeast of the ballpark where I was now standing and gaping at the drone as if it were a kite that had busted it's string.

That was the last I saw of my Hubsan H501SS

Hubsan H501SS in white with advanced controller 

Hubsan H501SS is a GREAT DRONE. The advanced controller with it's omni 2.4 Ghz and 5.8 GHz FPV line-of-sight paddle antennas provided precise handling capabilities while the drone was in controlled flight. Signal loss was most likely due to unusual RF interference in the general area as we will see.

After days of climbing on more than a few apartment building roofs (with permission, of course) and conducting a systematic ground search of the area a fellow drone pilot got in touch with me on Facebook and graciously volunteered to fly his DJI Phantom 3  over the roofline and video the neighborhood trees, etc. Shockingly my new friend Denny nearly lost his DJI P3 to the same RF interference. In exactly the same manner in which I watched my H501SS fly away, the DJI P3 pitches wildly as it breaks GPS lock and careens off to the northeast, then gains altitude.

My YouTube video of Denny flying his DJI Phantom 3 in an effort to locate my Hubsan. Shock and horror as the same radio interference that caused my drone to fly away threatened to take Denny's DJI P3 away with it also.

Lucky for my friend Denny he was able to retrieve his DJI P3 in return-to-home mode. I'm still searching for my Hubsan. The weather has not been great over the weekends and my neighbors have not been out in their yards much this year so far. Eventually folks will get around to clearing fallen branches and debris from earlier snows. I have flyers with my cellphone number offering a reward taped to lamp posts around the area and the local police have a missing properties report on file should anyone turn it in. Wish me luck.

(Note: Oak Park is a suburb directly west of Chicago. It is a village with the second largest municipal population in the state. The Oak Park Village Hall is 3/4 of a mile from what was my take-off site. In the parking lot of village hall is the police radio tower serving four adjacent communities fire/police/municipal agencies. This was overlooked in my planning but is an obvious error when looked at in the aforementioned hindsight)