I would've almost lost my MA2 yesterday to a bird! It is definitely not the first time I encountered a bird, but definitely the most scariest!
I usually fly up to 100m right after takeoff to avoid any birds flying the Dallas area. My protocol when I encounter a bird is to switch the aircraft to sport mode and push the throttle to max. That usually helps me gain altitude after which I fly away from the bird. Mostly, curious birds just fly close to the drone and don't really bother it.
Yesterday, however, this bird viciously circled my drone. When I say circled, it was like a meter away from the drone. This started when I was 75m up in the air and no attempt to fly away would have worked since I was afraid of crashing it into buildings/cars/people. My only option was to lower the altitude (since the then-current position of the drone was over a grass land), which I did and this bird circled my drone down until 5 m away from the ground! I think it was a predatory bird since it rarely flapped its wings after it flew away (it wasn't large either).
This incident has me thinking about the worst- what would happen if the mavic indeed gets attacked by it? I am assuming that the bird will suffer injuries from the props, but that impact should also lower the rpm of the bird-impacted motor, causing the Mavic to tilt on one side. Would the Mavic come crashing to the ground because of the tilt (usually tilting the mavic shuts it off, right?) or would the motor regain its rpm and cause the aircraft to stabilize some point below the original altitude? If anything, I think the folding props help the drone in this case because the pro would simply fold at the time of impact, killing the flow of stress at the pivot point rather than transmitting it all the way to the center of the prop, as it would in the case of a non-folding prop.
Can anybody who has encountered a similar situation share how they dealt with it? And would anybody have any comment on the protocol I followed (lowering it) when this bird started circling my drone?
I usually fly up to 100m right after takeoff to avoid any birds flying the Dallas area. My protocol when I encounter a bird is to switch the aircraft to sport mode and push the throttle to max. That usually helps me gain altitude after which I fly away from the bird. Mostly, curious birds just fly close to the drone and don't really bother it.
Yesterday, however, this bird viciously circled my drone. When I say circled, it was like a meter away from the drone. This started when I was 75m up in the air and no attempt to fly away would have worked since I was afraid of crashing it into buildings/cars/people. My only option was to lower the altitude (since the then-current position of the drone was over a grass land), which I did and this bird circled my drone down until 5 m away from the ground! I think it was a predatory bird since it rarely flapped its wings after it flew away (it wasn't large either).
This incident has me thinking about the worst- what would happen if the mavic indeed gets attacked by it? I am assuming that the bird will suffer injuries from the props, but that impact should also lower the rpm of the bird-impacted motor, causing the Mavic to tilt on one side. Would the Mavic come crashing to the ground because of the tilt (usually tilting the mavic shuts it off, right?) or would the motor regain its rpm and cause the aircraft to stabilize some point below the original altitude? If anything, I think the folding props help the drone in this case because the pro would simply fold at the time of impact, killing the flow of stress at the pivot point rather than transmitting it all the way to the center of the prop, as it would in the case of a non-folding prop.
Can anybody who has encountered a similar situation share how they dealt with it? And would anybody have any comment on the protocol I followed (lowering it) when this bird started circling my drone?
