Hey guys! Last Saturday we shot a few car scenes in the Swiss Alps. Everything went fine until the very last scene. Immediately after take-off our Alta 6 banked hard to the right and crashed into a bush. Luckily it was close to the ground (which ultimately is applicable for most crashes ) and other than a broken landing gear and 2 damaged propellers nothing happened. Our pilot is convinced that it wasn't a wind gust that blew the Alta into the bush. He also claims that his right stick inputs (Pitch/Roll) had no effect on the copter's behavior. He was only able to control the thrust with the left stick. Take-off was in manual mode. A cell phone and an additional radio were used to communicate with the driver. Could these devices have created some sort of interference between the Futaba remote controller and the Alta? I'm a Mac user and have no access to a PC that fulfills the system requirements for the data viewer. I tried to analyze the flight logs in Excel but unfortunately I just can't make any sense of it. Can any of you flight log wizards please help me analyze the data? We have an important job coming up and I would like to have the assurance that it's safe to fly. Here's the link to the log file. I uploaded the last two files just to make sure. The one that recorded the crash should be SYNLog-13-11-22 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8fcoxn70nha0v6j/AADms5p4pkfPi8A10AT3c7VLa?dl=0 Many thanks!
When is the last time you did a firmware update on the ALTA? What version are you using for the ALTA App?
See App and FW release notes for Synapse 3.8.2 and ALTA APP 1.5. 1.Update firmware. 2.During boot-up keep airframe absolutely still. 3. Once motors are armed, take off ASAP. If lift off is delayed, disarm and re-arm and take off ASAP.
Sad to hear this. But also keen to hear what will come out of this. We had the same kind of crash. Directly after start the Alta banked hard to the left in our case and crashed in a tree. Same thing. No control with the right stick only the left. Freefly blamed it to the pilot, saying it was in GPS mode and interferences might have been the case. They ignored that the pilot switched to manual and insisted on not having this switch on the flight log. Nevertheless a bunch of people witnessed the switch to manual. I am pretty sure they will come to the same conclusion in your case and you will be left behind with a very uncomfortable feeling for your next take offs. It is not about blaming freefly or blaming anybody, but instead aiming on finding out the real reasons for those often occurring crashes which all sound quite similar. Please post your results and findings. thx. Harry
Harry, Do you have an ALTA 6 or 8? The logs from the ALTA 8 have a column that indicates if it was in Manual, Height or Position. It's under the RC OUTPUT CONTROL - RC MODE column.
Hi Jonny! Thanks for your help. I'm aware of the issue that may be caused by spinning and I'm always very cautious during boot. Therefore I can rule out any movements of the Alta during initialization. Also, we were definitely flying in manual mode. We had to abort the first take-off due to traffic. In such a situation the pilot would normally disarm the Alta. But we don't know if he did and therefore it's possible that the Alta was armed for just over two minutes before we took off the second time. Harry, it really sounds like you had a very similar incident. And it definitely leaves you with a bad feeling for the the next flights. Still hope, anybody can read something out of the flight log.