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At least 5 shows canceled after drones fell from the sky at Orlando holiday event
(www.accuweather.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Drones are controlled by varying the speed of the motors while helicopters are controlled by varying the pitch of the blades at various points in the rotation. If a motor fails on a drone then it's lost, there is no way of controlling it. The helicopter rotor will spin while falling and the pilot can then mechanically control the pitch of the blades purely mechanically which gives some control.
The change of pitch in the helicopter rotor throughout the rotation can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0shLv2_Rtnc
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.
The bit that confuses me is how anyone got hit. Drones have this neat ability that if you just stop the propellers they drop like rocks. It's pretty standard practice to not fly drones directly over people. In a drone show they shouldn't have really been moving fast enough where horizontal momentum would account for much and in the event of a collision they should have just cut power to the drones. The only way I can figure for this to happen is either a) they didn't follow basic safety precautions and were flying over the crowd, b) rather than cut power they tried to save the damaged and uncontrollable drones, or c) there was major radio interference and the drones aren't setup to cut power when they lose signal and/or crash.
From the video I saw of the incident, it looks like they were flying them from a safe distance to the crowd. But possibly some kind of interference or routine code bug caused some to drop and others to shoot out in random directions at full speed. As an FPV pilot, it’s crazy how fast they can pick up speed. I wonder if they lost all TX/RX abilities in order to turn them off. It happened to me once, luckily in a field alone and was only able to find it because of the stupid loud beeper I put on it.
I think drone shows are super neat, but there maybe needs to be a minimum distance regulation and required netting in front of crowds before we keep bringing the tech to events.
That's a great idea, although I still think the drones should be programmed that in the event they lose RX for more than a second or so or if they detect a collision to immediately cut all power to the motors.
And as with anything, there are exceptions:
https://youtu.be/TnGhEInTXYc
One of the rare ones that CAN control the pitch of the blades. You don't see this often because it greatly increases cost, weight, and complexity for not that much benefit.
If you're going to go full collective on a quad, the only real reason to do that is because you want to spin up your rotors to higher head speed. (aka, you're trying to set speed records.)
The reason for this is because if your rotor speed starts going transonic, when the rotor is retreating, it's slower and that causes massive amounts of flutter. (and excessive flutter causes shattered rotor blades. Or worse... sheared masts.)
but if your goal is to just go freaky fast... getting rid of the tail rotor and flopping so the rotors are more like "propellers" remove this problem.