If it were a cheap drone I'd say he was lying, but these model planes are not cheap and are given lots of love and attention by their owners, so in this case, I'm inclined to believe him. Also, dodgy goings on in lorry parks is not exactly unknown.

"Also, dodgy goings on in lorry parks is not exactly unknown."

Did you mean dogging goings on.... ?

drone

you keep saying that word but it wasn't a drone, it was a remote-controlled plane, drones act autonomously whereas planes need to be controlled which needs the signal to not be jammed.

2. In the event of a loss of control link, you cut all engines / motors whatever

seems risky if the signal just cuts out for a few seconds at which point it's in a nose-dive, if it carries on it can be guided back when the signal re-establishes

I dunno anything about these planes but the first option sounds like a full-spec autopilot, bearing in mind these things don't hover or do VTOL

>seems risky if the signal just cuts out for a few seconds at which point it's in a nose-dive, if it carries on it can be guided back when the signal re-establishes

If it's heading away from you when you lose control link for an extended period (Say 10 seconds) then it almost certainly is not coming back.

If it's heading towards you, then if you regain control link after it loses it, you can pull it out of the dive.

Besides, unless you were close to stall speed anyway, it probably won't be going into an instant nose-dive.

> I dunno anything about these planes but the first option sounds like a full-spec autopilot, bearing in mind these things don't hover or do VTOL

You don't need hover or VTOL for this feature. All you need is gyros (So it knows what attitude it is at) and GPS (So it knows position / heading / airspeed).

It's not exactly expensive - a flight controller and GPS that can do this will cost you from about £50 - £100, and considering this is a 1.7m model, an insignificant fraction of the cost of the model. My mate's plane which weighs <250g has this, so it's not going to be a weight issue either.

While the public tend to think of a drone as as a multi- rotor device, typical the four armed quadcopter ie what a DJI model looks like, the CAA don't make a distinction. To the CAA a Drone is any remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (RPAS or UAV).

The fact its remotely controlled in real time (as this was) or autonomously following a preset flight plan makes no odds to the CAA definition.

Re: "I don't fucking care if your drone crashes and gets wrecked, that's a part of the hobby that we all have to deal with - you put the safety of other people first - drones can be replaced, people cannot."

And what do you propose as failsafe for a plane with no autonomous navigation? Shut the engine down if signal is lost? Because of course that way it'll stay put and absolutely not crash...

Personally, I'd suggest that it should adopt as tight a circular route as it can - eg bank right and pull up.

That way its position won't drift too much and the operator stands a chance of getting in range / replacing controller batteries / whatever. It also means that once the fuel runs out it will make the undignified landing around where it was flying, so reducing the risk to others.

This is an autonomous feature - without autonomy there's basically no point - it probably has no gyros anyway, so it has no idea whether it's currently level or what, so has no concept of what "banked right" is. You can't just input right roll constantly, as that would send the aircraft into a constant corkscrew roll.

The normal setup for planes' failsafe is some rudder, and throttle cut. If all goes well, the plane glides in a circle. If not, it hits the ground in the reserved flying area.

Failsafe mandatory for models over 3.5kg (likely to be the case here unless this was a very light build).

>And what do you propose as failsafe for a plane with no autonomous navigation? Shut the engine down if signal is lost? Because of course that way it'll stay put and absolutely not crash...

This is EXACTLY what ALL of my drones have.

If you have lost control link and you have no autonomy, it's going to come down SOMEWHERE anyway, and not in a controlled manner, so you might as well cut the engine to try and reduce the potential danger to other people.

If you don't do this, things like what happened in this article are the most likely outcome.

If you do enable a failsafe, it's likely to come down a lot closer to you (And quite possibly not have reached a road etc by then), and the motors and props will not be spinning, so all you have to worry about is the initial impact, and the impact speed is likely to be reduced.

Obviously in the case of a fixed wing which is relatively stable without control input anyway, you don't failsafe immediately, you give it a good 5-10 seconds timeout, but on all my multirotors, the failsafe timeout is very very short

WTF? What kind of arsehole does not enable a failsafe on their drone?

IMHO it's grossly irresponsible to not disable the engine if you lose control link for an extended period.

Then you get the situation where a friend of mine was almost hit on the head by a falling drone. The pilot came racing over and apologised after this thing had dropped like a stone out of the sky. Apparently he'd managed to go out of range and as a 'safety feature' the engine therefore had cut out. It was within about half a meter of her when it hit, whilst she was standing in her field playing catch with her dog. She said a parachute wouldn't have been a bad idea if the engine shut down for any reason.

It's a legal equirement to enable failsafe if the RC equipment supports it.

A parachute isn't exactly feasible - you would need to store it inside something (So that the wind does not catch it and deploy it during normal operation), then some way to open that compartment and eject the parachute. Plus of course a parachute is probably going to have zero effect if flying quite low as it will not have time to slow down the drone.

It's entirely likely that the guy broke one of the other rules (Flying beyond line of sight, not having a spotter, not flying within a certain radius of uninvolved people etc)

She has a point, [1]light planes have parachutes. Just store the parachute at the top of the thing with a spring loaded cover and a spring platform to push it out.

I don't know all the details but he was flying it on a large private estate which she lives close to. There was also a sudden very strong wind for a small period preceeding the crash. I do know for a fact that his equipment suffered from both the crash and her black Labrador chewing it.

[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/those-parachutes-small-airplanes-really-do-work-180969057/

I get all the downvotes but as a one-time radio modeller myself I do wonder if something cheap could be made available that provides for some kind of failsafe for signal loss.

Having said that, loss of contact with a radio controlled plane is not all that common. The radio equipment typically employed on these scale models is rather better quality and more powerful than what might be found in a lot of cheaper drones. I'm inclined to agree that some kind of radio jamming is likely.

> Instead of staying in the circuit at the model flying club's airfield

The guy's excuse would be a whole lot more convincing if other club members had (in the past) reported jamming activity.

From the article:

> Even the Hatton Garden jewellery thieves used a GPS jammer

However the linked Scotman article says: "used a 2G mobile phone jammer to block the alarm signal" which makes more sense than a GPS jammer, after all they were not stealing (i.e. moving) the vault itself lol

>"the authority was told that "no such [jamming] devices were in operation"

"Told" by who? The supposed perpetuators?

"We asked the people doing illegal things if they were doing illegal things. They said no."

Why doesn't it say that they went out and measured it? Why does it say they were told? Obviously they can't measure it now, they've essentially tipped them off.

I am sick of people who are ignorant of R/C down-voting me, so have withdrawn my original post.

It's a LEGAL REQUIREMENT under CAA law CAP658 that you must enable failsafe (Turn motors off) in the event of a loss of control link if your equiment supports it (Which nearly everything does)

So if this dickhead let his 1.7m behemoth happily fly off into the sunset and come down some distance away with the engine still running, he is entirely at fault, whether jammers were involved or not.

https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/modalapplication.aspx?appid=11&mode=detail&id=5631

https://bmfa.org/info/articles/failsafes

The BMFA (Which this guy was almost certainly a member of) guidelines clearly lay out the rationale behind this:

"The fitment of a failsafe performs three vital functions in the event of a loss or corruption of the R/C signal.

The primary purpose is to reduce the potential energy of an aircraft that is no longer responding to commands from the transmitter and is therefore likely to crash.

Taking away the propulsion source can significantly reduce the energy of any impact thereby reducing the potential for injury or damage.

Secondly, the closing of the throttle on loss of signal serves to significantly reduce the potential radius of the impact area, with the primary aim that any impact will be on the “live” side of the flying activity; this is particularly important at displays and public events but also relevant at the club field.

The third aspect of the closing of the throttle is that it prevents an out of control model aircraft from climbing once the signal has been lost and presenting a hazard to full size aircraft or entering controlled airspace."

This has NOTHING to do with autonomy - your model does not need autonomy to do this, it's a feature of the R/C control link

TLDR you put the safety of other people first - if this means that your model gets wrecked, so be it - that's a part of the hobby that us UAV pilots must deal with.

TLDR you put the safety of other people first - if this means that your model gets wrecked, so be it - that's a part of the hobby that us UAV pilots must deal with.

THIS..

The folks flying models like this are almost certainly following all the guidelines and flying responsibly. They know the rules, and should have failsafe's installed and set up.

If you look at the AAB report its a 2.3M wingspan model, that will be a few hundred pounds of model (maybe getting for for a thousand) to get up in the air, Its not the sort of thing a new flier would have. The pilot had a B certificate, which is what is normally what you would need to show you are of a level that your considered safe to fly public displays.

There seems to be some people who think a failsafe is the answer to everything, and Clive is completely right in saying what we should already have set up to try and minimise risks. HOWEVER failsafe's are not foolproof, they work on the basis that is a signal is lost they move to either to preset settings, OR keep the throttle and control services at the same state to try and fly though the interference.

Failsafe's also will not work if the batteries fail, but the batteries were checked before flight and remember they are relatively cheap and mass produced electronics and so some will have issue from time to time.

Full on autopilots are also not really common in model planes, the skill in the hobby is flying the model, not pre-programming a PC.

Its very easy to say the flyer was negligent, but it sounds like they were reasonable competent, and did preflight checks.

Interference happens, sometimes you fly through it, sometimes it causes a crash, As Clive said as responsible fliers we have to try and take precautions to minimise the kinetic energy to try and reduce the risk of dameage to the model, the surrounding and above all to any person in the area.

2.4GHz is the ISM frequency band set aside for unregulated uses such as WiFi and car keys - and microwave ovens (well, strictly its centre frequency is 2.45 GHz but, due to sidebands and shit, it spreads itself around a bit). Sufficiently low noise for signal reception at any given moment in time is not guaranteed; you just have to try again later, and if there's a lot of noise around that might be significantly later.

Mobile phones and GPS use other frequency bands; GSM runs up to around 1.9 GHz, UMTS (3G) up to 3.5 GHz but in fits and starts, carefully avoiding 2.4 GHz.

So what was actually going on in that lorry park, when nether the characters involved nor the reporters had a clue about all this, is anybody's guess.

From what has actually been said, some trucker dinging up their Pukka Pie in a grubby microwave in the back of their cab is the most likely scenario.

2.4GHz ISM is used for lots of things and is pretty much "unregulated" ... which means that it's quite unreliable. So it's cheap to use but that does have a cost as this crash demonstrates.

"The big difference between RF communication for money and RF communication for free is that RF communication for money usually costs a lot less." - Brendan Behan (updated for today's world).

Most modern transmitters and receivers have a range (and x,y,z telemetry) check. But yea, sucks if some dude turned on a jammer mid-flight. Hope the fella had logging enabled to prove it.

mobile phones operate on licensed spectrum - totally different frequencies from the 2.4GHz unlicensed spectrum used for wi-fi, RC, bluetooth etc.

When used for RC the transmitter makes a lot of retries to address the problem of interference.

Most likely the issue was a receiver lockup, which I have seen happen a couple of time with a particular make of RC gear.

As for me, I just suffer from brain lockup.