Wind Limits Flight Testing
This is 8 Mar 2017, Sarnia ON Canada. At an unfinished Centennial Park make in Sarnia ON. My DJI Mavic Pro . . fighting hard to stay on place with 40+mph winds gusting 55. Mavic Pro came through and managed to not get blown away in the gusts by dropping down under 50ft. This was only possible in SPORT mode.
This is raw 1920x1080 video unedited. You can see me fighting to keep it over the parking lot. The gimble is doing it's job for the most part but most of the flight was with full stick deflection in sport mode just to keep it in place. Max altitude as 104ft. Area weather reported mostly 40 mph wind with gust to 55mph during that time.
This was a well planned and thought out exercise and I was prepared for the worst -ie. to damage the drone but not lose it. That might require issuing a CSC Command (Combined Stick Command) that stops rotors and lets the machine take ballistic trajectory to the ground. Needless to say that would have been awful but . . . for fight safety reasons, I had to acknowledge that it could not be allowed to just get carried away in the wind and strike something.
I planned a take-off point from the side of the target area, away from the blowing sand and dust, and takeoff was behind the wind shadow of a building up-wind of me to the right. You can see that once I got above the height of the building, at about 100ft, the gusts began to carry the drone away but I was able to reduce altitude and fight my way back over the parking lot to land. Sadly, although the landing was smooth enough it kicked up some sand into the motors and the Mavic had to be sent back to California for some servicing. It was worth it to test the limits and that's about a windy as the Mavic can handle. It's good to know your own limits as well as those of your equipment. I've gathered other equipment and video experiments in a Vimeo Album CLICK HERE
This is raw 1920x1080 video unedited. You can see me fighting to keep it over the parking lot. The gimble is doing it's job for the most part but most of the flight was with full stick deflection in sport mode just to keep it in place. Max altitude as 104ft. Area weather reported mostly 40 mph wind with gust to 55mph during that time.
This was a well planned and thought out exercise and I was prepared for the worst -ie. to damage the drone but not lose it. That might require issuing a CSC Command (Combined Stick Command) that stops rotors and lets the machine take ballistic trajectory to the ground. Needless to say that would have been awful but . . . for fight safety reasons, I had to acknowledge that it could not be allowed to just get carried away in the wind and strike something.
I planned a take-off point from the side of the target area, away from the blowing sand and dust, and takeoff was behind the wind shadow of a building up-wind of me to the right. You can see that once I got above the height of the building, at about 100ft, the gusts began to carry the drone away but I was able to reduce altitude and fight my way back over the parking lot to land. Sadly, although the landing was smooth enough it kicked up some sand into the motors and the Mavic had to be sent back to California for some servicing. It was worth it to test the limits and that's about a windy as the Mavic can handle. It's good to know your own limits as well as those of your equipment. I've gathered other equipment and video experiments in a Vimeo Album CLICK HERE