Mid summer 2014 I left for a job on the salt flats in Utah filming for Venturi. This was to be a two day event and I was with my camera operator Matt Schramer. We arrived the night before the event and decided we needed to go out and do a test flight. Upon take off the Heli was unresponsive and my heart stopped beating as I had no control.
Luckily I was able to maintain throttle control and bring it down before it got too far away. But this presented a new issue that had to be resolved before 6am, and I thought I knew what the issue was but upon further investigation it was an entirely new dilemma from previous technical issues.
At this time it was about 10:00pm and time was running short to get enough sleep and fix the chopper. But it had to be fixed immediately so that we would be ready to fly in the morning.
As I trouble shooted my DJI S1000 and A2 flight controller it seemed strange that all motors would start up while inside our hotel, but the second I went outside the S1000 was unresponsive. I tried everything, Calibrating the compass time after time, unplugging the Lipo batteries, and even rebinding all my transmitters and receivers but still my motors simply wouldn’t start up even though DJI software was telling me it was receiving the inputs from my Spektrum DX9 transmitter.
I was online for hours trying different things, going in and out of the hotel for testing, but without success. Finally I decided as a last resort I would hard reset the DJI A2 Flight controller.
After I reset the flight controller, I went outside one last time with a prayer in my heart that it would start up.
As I powered on the helicopter and my transmitter all seemed normal, so I went to throttle up the help and to me relief she turned on!
The rest of the week Lulu (my DJI S1000) performed flawlessly getting amazing shots of the worlds fastest electric car by Venturi race team.
And to my benefit I learned something new that would again later down the road help me fix my helicopter much quicker.
Having technical issues is never fun, but it does teach you how to fix issues quickly when they do arrive (because they will happen).
Thanks to the issues I had while I spent hours training, I have never had to forfeit a job because of technical issues.
Check out: Be Wise And Don’t Get Stuck.
