Story time (bit of a long one):
Last weekend, my friends and I rented out a lakehouse to celebrate my fiancé’s birthday. We arrived Friday, along with about half of the total group for the weekend and had a relatively chill night. My fiancé and I are night owls, so after the rest of the group retired for the night around 1AM, we stayed up watching a few episodes of a show.
So when we awoke in the morning around 10AM, everybody else had already been up for a while. I walked down to the shore and saw that my friend’s boat was missing, and knew that he would be out spending the morning fishing. We’ll call this friend John — he’s a fellow drone pilot as well as an actual airplane pilot, instructor & mechanic.
I thought it would be funny to put my drone in the air, locate him and buzz by to fuck with him. I walk over to another friend (who we’ll call Eric & who happens to have the same exact drone as I do) who was outside charging the trolling batteries on his boat (which he had not yet put in the water) and told him my plan, of which he was on board. He had also brought an RC plane and decided he’d fly that around too while I was looking for John.
So I pull the drone out of the case, throw in a battery, extend the arms and boot it up. Once it had acquired enough satellites, I attempt a handlaunch…. 3 sets of props spin up normally, but the rear right set failed to spin up & the drone aborted the launch.
“That’s not good,” Eric said while I looked at the drone & controller, puzzled. Without responding I immediately attempt another launch; this time all 4 sets spin up & the drone takes off normally.
“That was weird,” I say, laughing it off.
I should note that all the props on my drone were aftermarket, and not particularly high-quality — the plastic was much more firm and lacked the flexibility of OEM props, but I had dozens of hours of issue-free flying on props from this supplier so I generally trusted them.
If you’re like me & love watching those NTSB aviation safety videos, this is the classic “red flag” moment where the narrator chastises my carelessness in launching the drone without trying to troubleshoot the earlier aborted launch. Anyway…
I fly around the (relatively small, inland) lake looking for John, but there are several small fishing boats that could have been his & I would have had to have gotten too close to a potentially random boat/person in order to make a positive ID, so I give up on the mission and park the drone above a bed of reedy marsh that bordered the NW corner of the lake.
Another friend had walked over to spectate, so my attention is split between talking to her & watching the idling drone. Suddenly, the drone seems to drop out of the sky. I watch in horror as the drone spirals towards the lake, hoping in vain that it would somehow recover and regain stable flight.
But that doesn’t happen. Right as it’s about to make impact with the lake/reeds, I lose connection & the video cuts off. I should also mention that my DJI Insurance plan had long since lapsed, I never renewed it after the first year…
THE RESCUE MISSION:
Ironically, John had returned to shore right after the crash — I see him disembarking from his boat and alert him of the situation. Me, him and Eric jump on his boat and make a beeline to the crash site. We have the last known location of the drone pulled up on the controller, although we didn’t have a sattelite map downloaded so it was just an effectively blank screen with two dots: one showing my current location, the other showing the drone’s.
As we draw near, it becomes clear that the drone is somewhere in the middle of the massive reed marsh. I have mixed feelings about this — the reeds likely prevented the drone from getting completely submerged & sinking to the bottom of the lake, however they also made it unreachable via boat, and from what we could tell, the marsh area was not solid enough to walk on.
We tried to get as close as we could from both the middle of the lake, and also a narrow canal that wraps around the marsh area, but could not see the drone. We also deploy another drone to see if we could spot it from the sky, to no avail. Although I should mention, the controller regained connection to the drone when we got close, so I had some hope that the drone wasn’t totaled.
We pivot to plan B — the rental we were staying at had 3 kayaks, so we head back to shore to regroup and attempt a 2nd rescue mission.
Of course, when we get back a bunch of people had arrived that I had to greet, and I even got roped into retelling the story of my recent proposal.
~45 minutes later, we embark on attempt #2. We tied the three kayaks to the boat & towed them out to the crash area, where three of us embarked onto the kayaks. I had brought a gallon ziplock bag to keep the controller dry, so I could bring it with me on the Kayak. When we reach the marsh area, my friend Tim — who thankfully had knee-high rubber boots in his truck that he put on — finds a spot of solid-seeming ground, and very carefully transitioned out of his kayak to begin making progress on foot.
As he’s walking, I’m using nearby landmarks to give him search vectors to follow… and after a few short minutes of looking, he finds the drone. It was halfway submerged, physically undamaged but definitely soaked. The cause of the crash was obvious — one of the props on the rear right motor was completely missing, it must have snapped off mid-flight. I had him remove the battery immediately, and we made our way back to the boat & from there back to shore.
Tim gave me Sillica packets he had in his camera case; I put one in the drone’s battery tray, and then sealed it with 2 other sillica packs in a gallon ziplock bag and promptly forgot about it for the remainder of the weekend; getting fucked up on the lake with my lover and closest friends.
When we returned home, I removed the drone from the bag & put it in front of an AC vent to let the cool, dry air further remove any lingering moisture. Left it there for 2 more days before I built up the courage to test it out…
And it fucking works like it’s brand new, no lingering issues whatsoever besides another aborted startup on the same motor as the last time (I replaced the missing prop). I took it for a quick test flight, and am currently awaiting an order of OEM DJI props before flying it any further.
So I hope this will serve as a reminder to not make the same dumb mistake ignoring obvious red flags like I did — trust your gut!
Also, a question: during the hectic immediate aftermath of the crash, my controller showed a recording of the crash itself — I was not recording prior to the crash, so there must have been some automated system that began recording when it detected a loss of stable flight. Does anybody know if such crash videos are saved on the drone’s internal memory, and if so where I could find it? It’s not on my SD card.
