Welp, I crashed the heck out of my Littlebird. The main thing that happened was I took it over a tree, lost line of sight with it, and didn’t counteract my initial response, so it nosedived into the ground.
So I’ll draw you a story. I’m walking out of my front door, and I already have Littlebird in hand, spinning its blades. I’m going to hand launch this into the air, and fly it out towards the street. Good idea huh?
I let it fly high enough to go over trees, and when I lost sight of it, I decided to push the throttle high, and pitch the nose forward. By the time I realize where the Littlebird went, and it was now nose diving towards the ground. I should have pulled back on the pitch, could have brought it back up. Instead it hit the ground.
The assessment.
By design, the plastics of the head cover cracked all to hell. But with tape (electrical tape), it can be patched together. However there is a bit of concern as to how fragile the head cover plastics are for the inside motor mounts.
The motors, and electronics you can rest assured, will survive a good crash. So besides the body damage, you can rely that most of this thing will remain intact. I’ve read from other forums (rcgroups.com) other people have had faulty electronics out of the box. So I point this out. Every R/C helicopter is an experiment.
Even though the crash was the 5th flight, I got out of this thing, I certainly don’t blame the crash on faulty electronics. I literally, over shot, and without remaining in constant eye contact with it, I allowed it to get carried by the wind, and didn’t counteract the situation in time.
I slimmed it down, took off the missile pods.
Okay, its fixed again, but I notice some issues with the servos. (I didn’t realize this at the time, but nothing was really wrong with the servos, I changed the TX settings, and didn’t realize the mode I was in) The tail motor is intermittent, as in, it cuts out randomly. This was solved by realizing the glue used to hold the power connector for the tail motor came loose and thus when the tail motor wire pulled just right, it disconnected, and no tail. Fixed once I realized the loose connection.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMTztOj2piI]
Here is a post flight video. 6th flight. I’m making the biggest mistake of all, by trying to keep flying this thing when the landing skids pop out from the back. Because of the shipping damage, the landing skids are THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to a helicopter, good pilot or not, without landing skids, you are going to crash every time.
I tried with skill on my first few flights (3rd and 4th flight) to always land really slowly “soft landing”, to
Front of the impact. This is the aftermath of one of my flights. I full throttled and nose dived.
show that ability I wish I had a camera person to do the filming. (I bought a head mount/harness for my camera, so soon I’ll try flying and filming together)
Considering the point of impact the Canopy was the direct point, along with the head accessory (sensor pod), those two things didn’t shatter.
Reassembly was a bit more difficult because many of the screw points on the head cover were stripped out. Electrical tape became a good friend in mending this Helicopter back to life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44PdTknAUBM]
This is where I noticed a servo problem, but at the time I didn’t realize I had changed the TX controller modes, and settings. I was in mode 2, and had the EXT option on, which screwed up how I anticipated a heli’s responses.
