Statehouse

My Last Drone Flight over Rhode Island State House

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• published: 19 Aug 2016
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I was flying my Phantom 3 Standard last week in Providence, Rhode Island in really beautiful conditions. I had a few issues with image transmission flickering, but suddenly I loose it and it doesn't come back. This may have been because I lost line of sight behind the dome of the state house. Turned out that I was flying closer over the building, which I didn't really intend to do. At this point I try to gain altitude, but it seems like I've completely lost connection, so I run over to try to get closer, and hopefully get reconnected with the drone. I can't get connection with it, and can't find it anywhere. Finally we figure that it must have landed on the roof of the state house, and we think we are able to see it (though it's pretty hard to tell.) It was a state holiday in Rhode Island so the building was shut down. But we call the next morning, and the capitol police go up on the roof and find it! When we stopped by the pick it up the next day, it turned out that it had a pretty hard landing. It was found in several pieces scattered over a large area - the battery had come out, two propellers were broken and on a third the threads were completely stripped. Both the gimbal and camera had broken off, and unfortunately they didn't find the camera, so I have no footage of the actual crash. Worst of all, when it fell it broke a pane out of the skylight, which I'm going to get a bill for. However, the police lieutenant was very nice about it. He didn't give me any trouble at all for flying the drone, and just said that accidents sometimes happen. This certainly was a learning experience for me. Once I'm flying again, I'll be more careful to make sure I don't loose line of sight, to set my RTH altitude for every flight, and not fly over anything I don't want to pay to fix.