Flight Safety
Safety is always the primary concern when performing experiments and tests. All it takes is 1 mistake.
Last updated
Safety is always the primary concern when performing experiments and tests. All it takes is 1 mistake.
Last updated
Anyone flying a drone is responsible for flying within FAA guidelines and regulations. That means it is up to you as a drone pilot to know the Rules of the Sky, and where it is and is not safe to fly.
Never fly above 400ft in altitude, it is illegal without the proper FAA license.
Download B4UFLY from the app store, check your local airspace prior to flight for restrictions.
Always maintain line of sight with the drone during flight
Do not lose wireless connection to the ground control station (GCS) to the hotspot, this is the limiting factor during testing. The range on the transmitter is greater than the wifi connection between the TX2 and the GCS.
Make sure that all batteries are fully charged for
The drone
The joystick
The GCS laptop
The Transmitter
Check prior to flight that all manual flight modes work as intended
Perform sensor calibration prior to every flight
For more information about becoming a drone pilot see the link below
Prior to flight, all drones must be registered even if flying under a recreational licence. Follow the link below to find out how to register your drone.
Open up QGroundControl and switch over to the safety tab, you should see something like what is shown below.
Set the geofence failsafe trigger to 120 meters in altitude to avoid exceeding the class G limit stipulated by the FAA regulations for recreational drones. The action on breach of the geofence should be return to home to avoid exceeding the altitude, you may consider setting a lower ceiling so that in case of a run away situation the drone will execute return to land at a lower altitude.
Follow this guide for configuring your safety parameters prior to flight. Test that they work as intended prior to performing autonomous flight testing.
It is important to read and understand what each flight mode does to the control of the drone. If you need to take over offboard control and switch into manual RC control then you will have to switch out into one of these modes. We suggest switching out into position hold mode if GPS is available, otherwise switching into altitude hold mode is also a safe transition. In both cases you must make sure that you have the throttle at 50% in order to maintain your current altitude, otherwise it will drop like a rock!
See how to configure your transmitter in the software setup section. You will need to configure your switches in order to perform this transition between offboard and position/altitude/land ect.
