Imagine you have hiked 2 miles uphill with your M4P, on a country trail to reach a hilltop field, where several (mainly) successful flights have gone on before (albeit with much bigger, heavier drones)...
Sometimes there are military aircraft (previously limited to Chinooks, which we can hear about 5 mins before they appear !), but not usually at weekends, and this was a Sunday night. There is usually some sort of hawk activity in the general area, but their patrols and territory seem to be vastly larger than the relatively small VLOS area I try and fly in. However, that evening there were 2 huge red kites that kept circling overhead as I considered whether to fly. I also counted at least 5 sparrow hawks or similarly sized raptors, and they too were 'in my area', or rather, I was in theirs ! Sometimes these things disperse when you launch, but I am also aware that sometimes they don't ! I am also aware that the tiny M4P doesn't quite have the 'presence' that a large hex has, so may be too small to intimidate hawks. Probably not too small that they don't feel a need to get it out of their aerial territory though !
Then I heard an unusual building roar in the distance, and just 3 seconds later 2 full-on fighter jets appeared over the treeline at what I estimated to be no more than 150 ft from the canopy, only about 300 ft from my position, and sped off at what I can best describe as 'hyper-speed' off into the distance ! This gave me 'the willies' about my flight session.
And the wind had also picked up by now. In UAV forecast winds were slated to be no more than 20 mph gusting at 400 ft, but up here on the hill brow there were sporadic updrafts and a fairly strong prevailing wind, which was blowing away from the hill - ie I would be flying with it on the way out and against it on the way back. I might have felt comfortable with that on my old Typhoon H, (a powerfully wind-resistant hex jobby) but my little M4P is untested here, and if it goes down in the acres of woods around, recovery will be somewhere between hard and impossible and almost certainly in a high tree, AND it was 8 pm at night, so I had another hour or so of daylight left, and I didn't want to be doing any sort of recovery in the dark !
I stayed up there for a good 20 mins, humming and haa-ing about whether to fly or not. The birds didn't really go away, and the jets were a one-off it seemed, but wind was still high and the wrong direction, there were some slow predictable civilian helicopters at a lower altitude than I was, but it all conspired, and in the end I called it as 'unsafe', and completed the tedious 2km walk of shame home with no footage but a working drone !
By the time I got back I was knackered, hadn't eaten enough and was feeling tired and light-headed, so didn't even feel up to finding another fly site, and drove home feeling a bit cowardly, un-daring and risk-averse. Perhaps it's because I don't have DJI refresh !
Just wondered, would you M4P guys have flown in such circumstances ? The view would have been worth 'some modest risk'.
Sometimes there are military aircraft (previously limited to Chinooks, which we can hear about 5 mins before they appear !), but not usually at weekends, and this was a Sunday night. There is usually some sort of hawk activity in the general area, but their patrols and territory seem to be vastly larger than the relatively small VLOS area I try and fly in. However, that evening there were 2 huge red kites that kept circling overhead as I considered whether to fly. I also counted at least 5 sparrow hawks or similarly sized raptors, and they too were 'in my area', or rather, I was in theirs ! Sometimes these things disperse when you launch, but I am also aware that sometimes they don't ! I am also aware that the tiny M4P doesn't quite have the 'presence' that a large hex has, so may be too small to intimidate hawks. Probably not too small that they don't feel a need to get it out of their aerial territory though !
Then I heard an unusual building roar in the distance, and just 3 seconds later 2 full-on fighter jets appeared over the treeline at what I estimated to be no more than 150 ft from the canopy, only about 300 ft from my position, and sped off at what I can best describe as 'hyper-speed' off into the distance ! This gave me 'the willies' about my flight session.
And the wind had also picked up by now. In UAV forecast winds were slated to be no more than 20 mph gusting at 400 ft, but up here on the hill brow there were sporadic updrafts and a fairly strong prevailing wind, which was blowing away from the hill - ie I would be flying with it on the way out and against it on the way back. I might have felt comfortable with that on my old Typhoon H, (a powerfully wind-resistant hex jobby) but my little M4P is untested here, and if it goes down in the acres of woods around, recovery will be somewhere between hard and impossible and almost certainly in a high tree, AND it was 8 pm at night, so I had another hour or so of daylight left, and I didn't want to be doing any sort of recovery in the dark !
I stayed up there for a good 20 mins, humming and haa-ing about whether to fly or not. The birds didn't really go away, and the jets were a one-off it seemed, but wind was still high and the wrong direction, there were some slow predictable civilian helicopters at a lower altitude than I was, but it all conspired, and in the end I called it as 'unsafe', and completed the tedious 2km walk of shame home with no footage but a working drone !
By the time I got back I was knackered, hadn't eaten enough and was feeling tired and light-headed, so didn't even feel up to finding another fly site, and drove home feeling a bit cowardly, un-daring and risk-averse. Perhaps it's because I don't have DJI refresh !
Just wondered, would you M4P guys have flown in such circumstances ? The view would have been worth 'some modest risk'.
There was a brief moment of extreme compass weirdness where the RC2 started clicking a lot (not a sound I have heard it do before !) and the radar display on the craft went temporarily nuts with home point indicators and craft orientation zipping around and going properly mental while I was up at 400 ft, and it seemed like it stopped following orders briefly, which was a bit worrying. Kept checking RC signal and satellites which remained at 4 bars, and 28 all the while ! Anyway, I dropped altitude a bit, and normality was soon restored and remained for the rest of the flight, but I do wanna know what that was about, so will check the log and screen record later.
