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Newby - crashed heli
Hi
Firstly hello all. New (ex) heli owner.
I had a catastrophic heli failure / crash at the weekend which I'd like to understand better if anyone can comment.
Heli was a new Raptor 50 but bought and build about 18 months ago by my father in law who is an experienced model flyer / builder. Since being build it hadn't been flown due to ill health and a couple of months ago I bought it off him.
Fast forward to this Friday. Gave the heli a good going over with an experienced heli flyer friend to check the set-up etc and he gave it a test flight for me - all okay very stable but he thought the head speed was a little slow. All good and getting very excited for Saturday morning when we were going to the local flying club so that I could start flying.
Got to the club and got everything ready to go. The heli guy at the club spend some time going over the heli and did an initial test flight. (edit. range test was completed before initial flight. Batteries were charged that morning also) All okay. Tweaked a few settings on the radio gear (pitch curve and throttle curve) and started the second test flight. This is where is all goes wrong.
The heli was idling on the deck for about a minute when it suddenly start to pirouette on the ground, continued to do this for a few seconds and then went airborne. Essentially there was no control and it didn't respond to any control input. The heli effectively went for a 10 minute solo flight until it ran out of fuel and we later found it just over a mile away by pot luck as we'd lost sight of it into cloud cover after about 5 minutes. Complete write off as you'd imagine.
The general thinking is that it had a power failure / unbound radio?!.. I'd be interested to know peoples thoughts to help me understand better what happened.
Not the first post I'd imagined making but that's life I suppose..
Firstly hello all. New (ex) heli owner.
I had a catastrophic heli failure / crash at the weekend which I'd like to understand better if anyone can comment.
Heli was a new Raptor 50 but bought and build about 18 months ago by my father in law who is an experienced model flyer / builder. Since being build it hadn't been flown due to ill health and a couple of months ago I bought it off him.
Fast forward to this Friday. Gave the heli a good going over with an experienced heli flyer friend to check the set-up etc and he gave it a test flight for me - all okay very stable but he thought the head speed was a little slow. All good and getting very excited for Saturday morning when we were going to the local flying club so that I could start flying.
Got to the club and got everything ready to go. The heli guy at the club spend some time going over the heli and did an initial test flight. (edit. range test was completed before initial flight. Batteries were charged that morning also) All okay. Tweaked a few settings on the radio gear (pitch curve and throttle curve) and started the second test flight. This is where is all goes wrong.
The heli was idling on the deck for about a minute when it suddenly start to pirouette on the ground, continued to do this for a few seconds and then went airborne. Essentially there was no control and it didn't respond to any control input. The heli effectively went for a 10 minute solo flight until it ran out of fuel and we later found it just over a mile away by pot luck as we'd lost sight of it into cloud cover after about 5 minutes. Complete write off as you'd imagine.
The general thinking is that it had a power failure / unbound radio?!.. I'd be interested to know peoples thoughts to help me understand better what happened.
Not the first post I'd imagined making but that's life I suppose..
Sorry your first post is a sad one 
's Rachel
x 3
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