Virgin Flight

I recently met the president of the Alpine Club of Canada's Yukon Chapter while in Whitehorse, YT. We spoke of his efforts to promote climbing in Nahanni Park's Cirque of the Unclimbables. Apparently, the national government has sponsored a few flights into the park. He's going. I'm jealous. Over the next week, I get to thinking that I'll try to get on one of these trips by posing as some sort of climber/photographer playing up my big wall experience and the Y6 ArduPilot photography drone which I just happened to have hauled along on this 5,000 km road trip. 

The plan has just one flaw. I've never flown the drone and the only Nihanni trip I know of is leaving next weekend! Surely the bush flight is full, but might as well get things lined up just in case another job comes along.

So I spent Wednesday flashing the firmware, calibrating the compass, calibrating the accelerometers, calibrating the motors, etc.. When I was indoors, the drone was passing the PreArm check and I had finally gotten all six engines to spin together. I completed the pre-flight check-list. I'm ready! 

Except this one time when I was testing without propellers and the motors just stayed on at full power even when throttle was off inexplicably. And another time, when the battery died on the remote control and the navigation system "failed over" to a mode where it tried to fly home and land itself in Vancouver 2,000 km away. In both these cases, the drone would have simply flown off into the sunset. So I'm ready ... enough!

Conditions aren't perfect here in the Walmart parking lot. To be honest, I'm nervous. Nervous I'm going to fly out of control and hit a car. Nervous I'm going to maim a small child. Nervous that I'm inside of the airspace of the Whitehorse International Airport. It just isn't the right place for a virgin flight. But before I move elsewhere, we decide that Mikey is going to hold the drone over his head (so it can't get away) - while I conduct simple incremental tests. Not surprisingly, the drone fails to PreArm and can't take off. 

I spend a few hours tinkering and re-calibrating. I try a few things and consistently I can arm it inside but not outside. Eventually, I re-zero the "ground level" altitude mark while it is outside. It's the fifth or sixth attempt at a launch. I'm expecting another failure. I'm careless. I'm just a few feet away when the red LED changes from the regular flashing pattern to one solid tone. Armed! Or is it? I give it just a little throttle - surely it's not enough to get off the ground!

Next thing I know, I I'm curled up in a fetal ball screaming; pinned between my car and a twelve bladed electric weed whacker. I push it away with my hands, but it just comes back again; flying right into my face. Mikey  gets the thing off me and holds it while it gyroscopes madly. I eventually find the kill switch on the remote.

Put blood on helicopter blades and you get mad splatter effects.

Mikey cruises us over to the emergency room where I get sixteen stitches over my left thumb. I think of CSI as Horatio mentions the "defensive wounds" on the hands of a corpse killed in a stabbing. This awesome doctor cleans and glues the cut through the cartilage of my ear after I recover from the vesa vegal reaction which left me unconscious - sirens in the emergency room blaring the code blue. Mikey just laughs and repeats "better than TV."

On the way home from the hospital I happen on some members of the Alpine Club. One of them just happens to be a RC helicopter enthusiast. He mentions "up here, the magnetic compass has terrible precision and a lot of the auto-stabilizing drones can have very erratic accelerations." Lesson learned, I guess.

Exhibit A: deep cuts on my thumb

Exhibit B: gash through ear cartilage

I propose that the events leading to these two injuries could have easily unfolded in a more displeasing manner. They could have slit my throat - leaving me horribly embarrassed as I bleed out in a Walmart parking lot. For these mercies, drone flight #1 is a marginal success.