Andy, I echo your concern. The OP's question sounded like a cross-examination. Scott was generous to come on to this forum and educate us as to the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate event. This is not the place to measure guilt or innocence. I, for one, just want to learn from the mistakes of others...
Steve, You will have to explain to me how my question in any way implied guilt or innocence. I mearly asked if there have been any direct actions taken by the FAA. Others could find themselves in a similar situation at some point so I felt such a question was very relevant.
Scott You are correct those batteries are toast. Do you have the ability to monitor your battery in real time? If the answer is no, you need to. There are several options. One is to use an on screen display that overlays the aircraft system information from the autopilot to a video display for the pilot to monitor. Typically a technique with people that have 3 axis gimbal systems is to have a pilot only fpv camera a small board camera and monitor for the pilot that always is looking at the front of the nose. DJI has a plug n play system that links directly to the WKM flight controller. It will give you real time voltage of the battery. In addition it gives you other system information like speed, altitude, what flight modes you are in as well as other was essential information so that quantitatively figure out what a/c is doing as well as what the battery state actually to make a better pilot decision as to when it is a good time to bring the copter back and land. There are other products such as min osd that are system agnostic. This system has its voltage monitoring circuit directly off of the battery distribution bus, it gets no data from the autopilot and only overlays just the battery info to a video feed. This system does not give the other useful information as mentioned above. If an OSD is not used a lot of rc controllers have proprietary battery telemetry monitoring that feeds off ghe battery bus as well but, down links that info to your rc controller. Typically the rc controller has some sort of alarm like a tone, or like cell phone type vibrator that alerts if the battery state is detetscted to be getting below a desired state. I use both types of systems. I like to see the battery info on my osd so I don't have look down at my controller. At a minimum there at least needs to be some system to quantify the battery state. This is a MUST. Especially when you are carrying a 15k camera. You never assume how your battery is. I had a battery drop bellow safe load voltage once imidiatly after takeoff. I got an aggressive alarm spektrum controller followed by the aircrafts on board visual warning system. Luckily I was only abut 10 to 15 feet off the ground to give me enough time to do an emergency landing. To this day I am sure what the hell happened to that battery. It flew fine the on the previous day same camera and glass. I charged it like I normally charge batteries. It indicated a solid full charge and good resting voltage. No visual indications of a bad LIpo such as the bloating that they do when starting to go bad. It could have been jostled a little during transport or it said "I've had enough of this abuse." Whatever the reason was, its hard to tell. The point is these batteries do degrade their advertised discharge capabilities under the loads we sometimes put them through. I know a lot rc hobbiest typically use the technique of timing their battery as to when it is time to land. Very experienced pilots with traditional copters claim that they can tell the battery by the different audible pitch of the single motor. We don't have that luxury to really tell, especially since we sometimes fly beyond audible range of the aircraft. It is not a good indicator for us. Also the traditional guys have the ability to dead stick or autorotate when power is getting to low. Our only option when the power gets too low is too watch carbonfiber snap into a bunch of pieces when hits the ground at 9.8m/s^2 Here us a link for the DJI OSD manual. You can buy all DJI stuff dji camera and dji video transmitter for straight plug and play. Important thing to is dji uses a propeary 5.8 ghz video tx. This may interfere with your main camera if you are using a 5.8 system on that. http://quadcopters.co.uk/ekmps/shop.../Other/osd-user-manual-v1.0-en-2012.09.19.pdf