[Canberrauav] Bushmaster Crash
Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com 
Sun May 25 15:33:22 EST 2014 

Hi everyone,

Earlier today, we lost control of the Bushmaster during flight and it
crashed at CMAC. Fortunately nobody was injured, but the Bushmaster was
destroyed. There will be very little (if anything) we can salvage from it.

Here's some photos of the carnage:

https://flic.kr/p/nJp34D

https://flic.kr/p/nrUN2q

https://flic.kr/p/nJmTbw

In our post-flight analysis, we discovered that power to the servos was
lost. The batteries (both packs of them) suppling power to the servo rail
experienced a very rapid discharge and went flat. Thus all the servos lost
power and around 15 seconds later the Bushmaster  crashed into the ground.

It is likely that there was a short circuit on the servo rail (possibly due
to a defective servo) that caused the rapid discharge of the batteries.

The Pixhawk was operating fine (up until ground impact) and we have full
logs of the event. It should be noted that Jack was in control of the
Bushmaster (ie. not in AUTO mode) at the time and there is no reason to
suspect the Pixhawk or APM software contributed to the crash. We have
confirmed that the APM was sending the correct PWM values to the servos for
the entire flight.

We will discuss the way forward from this at the Mumble meeting tomorrow
evening. For now the rough plan is:

-Get the Porter up and running and continue testing

-Buy replacement parts

-Build up another Bushmaster

Thanks

Stephen

[Canberrauav] Bushmaster Crash
Hugh Blemings hugh at blemings.org 
Mon May 26 12:06:13 EST 2014 

Hiya,

Sorry to read of the crash, photos are sobering indeed :(

Is a whip around of use to help fund the rebuild or are the finances ok 
at present ?

Cheers,
Hugh

[Canberrauav] Bushmaster Crash
Andrew Tridgell andrew at tridgell.net 
Mon May 26 13:51:54 EST 2014 

Hi Hugh,

> Is a whip around of use to help fund the rebuild or are the finances ok 
> at present ?

finances are all good - we have enough in the bank to cover the
replacement plane comfortably. Thanks for the thought though!

Cheers, Tridge

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