What happens to the Drone when one motor stops working in mid air?

[Kit Walker]

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me what happens to a quad drone (Phantom3 Advanced) when one motor stops working whilst flying?

I haven't had this happen but I did wonder whether it kept flying, it fell out of the sky, it tumbled head over tail to earth or it started spinning and spiralling downwards?

I understand that the chance of this happening is remote, but I thought it was an obvious question regardless.

Has anybody seen this happen.

Thank you,

Pete.

 

[Cobs]

I had one sticking which threw my drone out of control some ... Motor Out - What To Do?
All i could use was throttle and yaw, the other stick was useless, my fault seemed intermittent, no idea if you could have any directional control with a fully stopped motor, i gave it power to try and clear the trees and worked out yaw was all i had for some kinda directional assistance.

My editing has kinda hidden how serious it was.

 

[robinb]

It will spin out of control and meet a fairly horrible death.

 

[Cobs]

Yup, even mine had to hit the ground very hard in the end, if your in a built up area or there are lots of people around ... start saving up for those compensation claims.

 

[Mark The Droner]

One of the nice things about a hexacopter is it can continue to fly and do an emergency landing after losing a motor...

... OTOH quads just crash

 

[aniwack]

Quads typically hit the ground, unless you hit a tree first.

 

[GMack]

Didn't someone on here post a video of a Litchi mission where it crashed into some trees, and yet somehow it still made it home with a broken prop or half a prop?

I know there was the guy cutting his prop down with cutters to see how and if it flew too, and tying water bottles on it as well.

 

[Mark The Droner]

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[dg8882]

My standard suffered an ESC failure in flight a few months back. It's not going to end well. I found the poor thing struggling to fly in a tree 20 minutes later. 2 trips to DJI later, my bird is flying again
If you just picked up your phantom, there is a chance the ESC can fail within the first few flights, like mine did. But it's just my luck that happened, it's extremely rare for the ESC to fail randomly.
Unless you ignore extremely obvious signs that a motor bearing is going bad, or trying to see how many stress cracks you can get on the shell, there isn't really a concern for a motor stopping in flight.


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots

 

[Gearbox]

I lost a Prop & it tumbled to the Ground on to a over grown Grassy field & it hit hard enough to rip the Camera off & break the Gimbal . Was about twenty feet high when it happened , after 3.5 Minutes of flight time & I was running around 30 mph & slowed down , I watched it happen .
DJI said it was compass error because of Power lines & I crashed into something . the compass error happened because of the Drone flipping end over end trying to right its self . Yes ,I do a preflight every time & I had no compass error's & as I said ,watched it happen .