Marc's Public Blog - Remote Control Aircrafts

Ok, I'll save you the details, there was wind (no big deal), I was too close to the street at end of the park and when I made my turn to land back close to where I was, the plane flew right into the sun. I got blinded and by the time I could have seen it, I tried to dodge a power/phone line and lost. The plane hit the line motor first, and the plane fell right onto the street outside the park.

I have to say I actually had a string of good luck there:

Plane damage isn't too bad

I had a look at the lipo and it looked like only the connector piece of it got compressed but the 3 sheets of lipo were otherwise unbent/unarmed. The lipo looked ok so I put it back in my car with the rest of the pieces and drove home.

A good 25mn after the crash, it self ignited on the desk I was working on. I was able to throw it on the ground and then away from close to my car where it landed while the 3 layers of lipo ignited one after another. Nothing actually got burnt despite an otherwise intense fire as the 3 mostly fully charged layers caught fire one after another (it shot pretty vivid flames 2 feet sideways). Sorry, I was too busy watching the fire to take a video :)

this is what's left of the lipo

Needless to say that on top of very limited damage to my plane, I'm very lucky that the lipo didn't self-ignite in my car's trunk, or later on when I wasn't watching it.

Moral of the story, a charged lipo that got any kind of reasonable shock is a ticking timebomb! Check Lipo Fire on youtube for more examples.

My first flight went mostly ok: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider)

Unfortunately, on the second flight, the motor crapped out. First it started vibrating a lot, hence the shaky video, and when I removed the throtlle in flight when preparing for landing, I wasn't able to re-engage it. The video after the fact gives the 4 beep code from the ESC which means motor failure, shutting down. At that point, the minimag with all that weight feels like a 2 for 1 glider at best. I don't remember if I tried to flare, but it looks like I barely had enough lift glide energy left to make it to the edge of the hill (beyond that, it would have gone below my field of view)
Turns out I was able to restart the motor on the ground after a full shutdown, but it didn't restart in flight and you can hear the unhappy motor sounds :)

Just like motor, the video had a problem: after downloading it on my laptop, I screwed up while recompressing the first video and wiped the second video in the process. The second video was still on the sd card, but its cluster table had been freed since I had reused the card already.
In this case, photo recovery software usually only has to find the signature of the file by scanning blocks, read the file header and deduce how long the file is from that info since it's already lost in the cluster table, and then rely on the fact that all blocks are super likely to be contiguous, so you can just keep reading linearly until you have the whole file. This usually worked well, but Christophe GRENIER's very handy photorec wasn't succeeding there, and neither were other pieces of commercial software I tried: the restored file would not play (I restored the file by hand myself too by just copying the blocks and got the same result).
In the end, I got really good help on the mencoder-users list from Reimar Döffinger, whom I owe a debt of gratitude to: he looked at my sd card image and figured out that my GoPro HD Camera wrote the index-related part of the file header, after the data blocks. With Reimar's help on what offsets I should be looking at, I was able to get the first part of the header at the beginning, concatenate the end of the header that was written after the data blocks, and then add the actual data blocks. After almost 2 weeks of trying, his answer worked and I got my file back. If you are interested in more details, see this message from the mencoder-users list.

Here it is: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider). Jump to 04:20 for the motor failure.

A 4mn clip comes to 360MB in H264 video from the camera, and I can recompress it with virtually no visible loss of quality to 100MB with mencoder set at 3200kbps for H264 (or almost 100MB/mn down to 25MB/mn).

Changes with the GoPro HD so far are:

Here are some pictures comparing GoPro HD colors vs GoPro Wide (that's the 2 pictures per second mode where both GoPro Wide and GoPro HD take 5Mpix pictures). Just in case you ask, pictures were taken just a few minutes apart with the same amount of sun.

GoPro HD: Nice crip picture, somewhat dull colors

GoPro HD: Still nice crip picture, somewhat dull colors

GoPro Wide: Picture slightly less crisp, more vivid colors, more blurry around corners

GoPro Wide: Just prettier picture except for blurriness around corners

So far, I'm a bit torn, the every 2 second pictures are just nicer on the older GoPro Wide for me, and the early bugs on the GoPro HD had better get fixed (SDHC support and taking pictures upside down at least). No idea if the washed out colors problem is solvable or not. If not, that would be a shame.

But yes, the full 1080p HD video does beat the old 512x384 videos hands down though :)

Here is a link to the full 1080p video recompressed to 3200kbps and a link to the youtube page with the video (which allows 720p and 1080p viewing).

Laguna was also harder to get because of how much bigger it is compared to Thunderhill where I can mostly overfly the whole track while being in a couple of spots. Laguna has much more track that just isn't visible from the paddocks. So, I ended up driving around the track (not on) and finding other vantage points that had better visibility. This mostly worked, except my 200+ shots taken around the corkscrew: I had a great vantage point, but my camera got knocked out of angle during a tough takeoff and all my shots were unusable :(

Anyway, here are a few of the good shots, and you'll find more in the link below

short video with takeoff from turn 11 (click for video)

turns 10, 11, 12-13

another vantage point

both straights

5, 6, 7

better view of 14-15

5 looks kind of flat from the sky :)

closeup on 14

another vantage point of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15

Shot of one of the instructors who went out for fun during lunch

I did a test run of the new camera pointing forward, forward+down, and backward

a forward facing 180 degree view without seeing the prop or the wheels is hard

obviously the prop doesn't look good when spinning

I pointed the camera down some more, it helped a bit

you definitely get a bigger field of view, but it's distorded

but the big field of view is nice

and the curvature on the horizon simulates being at 100,000ft like a U2 :)

pointing back looks nice but it's near impossible not to get the tail in the shot

After the first quick 1mn flight to check the weight, I added my camera to enjoy a longer flight with the bigger battery (I figured over 25mn since I get around 15mn with batteries half that size).
And then... well, I went downwind a bit too much before I realized that to fly back I had to have the plane point straight at me, at which point it would become absolutely invisible due to how far it was and its cross section becoming almost nil. I was however getting back slowly by making turns so I could see the plane when maybe 7mn into the flight, the battery crapped out and the plane went down so far out of view that I could not really tell where it went down.
The next 2.5 hours were spent with me walking all around the search area, which was quite big. I got to hike around Rancho San Antonio trails, go through the cemetary, jump 4 fairly tall fences that were stopping me from proceeding further ahead, and I brought my controller with me in the hopes that I could maybe hear the plane around me by moving the controls, but no such luck.
Instead, I got to see some hiking/biking trails, scale a few fences à la Jackie Chan, see several deer, more than 10 bunnies, an abandonned railroad track, a horse farm and more.
For now, I searched the Cemetery, Canyon Oak Way, Serra St, Madrone Ct, Manzanta Ct, the traintracks there, and the nearby power plant on California Oak Way.

But no plane :(

Map of the area I searched
and a couple of pictures of the area to give an idea:

Kind of sucks since I had my camera on it, a brand new battery, and $250-ish of electronics in addition to the plane itself :(
If I'm very lucky, someone will find the plane, notice my name and phone number on it, and call me, but I'm not holding my breath...

If someone somehow happens to have found a crashed remote controlled plane and found this post through google, please call me :) 408 7(zero)2 22(seven)1

(update) I went back this morning (the next day) to scope other pieces of the area, but it's basically not in anywhere easily visible. I however dropped 80 "have you found my plane" flyers in nearby resident's mailboxes, just in case it's in their yard, but at this point I'd say my chances of getting the plane back are below 30%.

(update #2) Got no answer from my flyer, or anyone who found the plane, so at this point, my chances of ever getting it back are below 5% :(

(update #3) I ordered a couple of SkyKing RC Lost Model. It would not have guanranteed that I get the plane back, but it would clearly have improved my odds.