Glad you got it home, those few minutes can produce a little “pucker fear”. As suggested, if you do a few RTH operations, gain confidence, the anxiety & fear will minimize.
Revisit Yester-Year manual methods...
@Dronage and a few touched on craft orientation at distance. The RTH procedure is good if goal is home point. If wanting to stay down range, don’t waste batteries bringing craft closer than needed. This practice was used long before video transmission provided a FPV orientation view; which could easily orientate with the Sun or brightest sky in video to provide orientation.
If craft visible... and spotted in Sky; moving craft towards or away from You is impossible to see at distance and depletes battery experimenting.
The standard method to gain an understanding of craft orientation is to perform a few maneuvers to first obtain knowledge of current orientation & reposition orientation.
This and stick “timing” are rudimentary exercises to aircraft training movement. These used to be practiced with sUAV to gain fundamental flight experience before modern electronics simplified flight operations.
Obtain Distant flight orientation:
1) Remain calm and methodical in actions. 2) Perform a stick 90 or 270 (left or right) movement for a few seconds, did craft visually move sideways? 3) If not, stick rotate (yaw) craft 35-45 degrees (learn apx time & stick hold to turn for reference), 4) Perform a stick left or right again, most likely you should now see sideways movement, if not repeat steps 3 & 4. 5) If stick movement matches craft direction, perform smaller stick rotate (yaw) and repeat left or right. Once left or right movement appears to match stick movement you’ve oriented the craft. 6) If opposite direction, simply yaw 180. An alternate method for those finding stick timing for yaw difficult was perform a 90, if no sideways movement, move stick yaw 10-15 degrees 100-105 and check sideways movement, repeat with additional using 120-130 and check for sideways movement. Once sideways movement verified, now counter yaw the same degrees over 90 to correct orientation and reverify & fine tune if needed to obtain accurate orientation.
Practicing fundamental sUAV exercises near home base: stick timing, figure 8, square, cube, and orientation maneuvers helps in unexpected, compass, GPS failures and understanding rudimentary craft characteristics assists in confidence to maintain control. With increasing FAA requirements and possible certification tests, these fundamental skills may once again become required to exhibit.
