It's time for a club that gives a little recognition to those that accomplish the 3 mile task. Yes there are Mav Pilots that have flown much further, but 3 miles is a distance that can be flown with the stock battery in place.
Earlier this week I finally had weather that made for good flying. Prior to this I had issues with the app & firmware combo. I installed a combo I felt good about but my attempt at setting a new personal distance record was going to take place with no pre testing.
I flew the flight and up to the turn around point, it was awesome! Just as soon as it finished rotating, it took a turn for the worse. 1st thing it began dropping both signals which lead into total loss of video completely. I wasn't worried as it was coming by RTH. I noticed the gps satellite reception was in super great shape at 20. Something that surprised me a lot was the headwind at turn around. At ground level there was no wind, at 800ft it must have been 10-15mph as the aircraft was into a -24 flight pitch and some 15mph slower. The norm for the RTH speed is around 22mph where because of headwind it was then at 15mph. Right away I went into lowering the altitude at a steady rate. The goal was to reduce altitude in hopes of less headwind. I managed to reach the halfway back home point and the video restored. Shortly after this however, 400ft from reaching home point I got jacked by the Critical Battery...and the decent downward was under way. This was totally new to me as I had never experienced a critical battery decent. As soon as I saw there was no chance of increasing altitude, my fingers started going everywhere on the controller sticks. And then....about 5 seconds later it began to rain. No doubt an event I wont be forgetting anytime soon.