Stupidest Drone Crash Ever (w/pumpkin) - I'm a moron Drone Crash - I could have titled it 'How not to avoid a flying pumpkin'
So I brought my phantom 2 to the pumpkin farm and they had a pumpkin cannon that shoots pumpkins into the woods (a couple hundred feet away at over 200 mph). My daughter says "it would be cool to get video from the woods", (not blaming her or anything) so I set it out in the woods just in front of the trees and maybe a few feet above the tree line. I ask the guy operating the cannon thing where the pumpkins go and he pointed to a clearer spot in the trees with less leaves, so I camped the drone a good 15 feet to the left of that. He pulls the rod and the pumpkin flies out, veers to the right a bit and I had no time whatsoever to react. The pumpkin slams into the drone and there goes $500. I thought the gopro would be shot too but it was fine after I eventually found it 4 hours later! The gimbal wasn't even banged up a whole lot but a rod that goes through one of the axis rotating things was sheared off. After yelling 'no' at the top of my lungs (because I have a job to do with that quadcopter later on this week) I calmly asked the guy operating it what happened, why it veered off course and why it came in lower than he said. He told me it looked like someone dropped a small pumpkin into the chute after he put his big pumpkin in earlier and that that affected the flight of the pumpkin. Unbelievably bad luck, but I was stupid for having it anywhere near close enough to get hit.
Total damage only $500. The guts of the drone were still okay. 3 prop motors worked fine. The other had to be resoldered and I needed a new shell. The gimbal, like I said, was shot. Needed new landing gear too, forgot to mention that. And a new transmitter as that was never found. Gopro looked and worked as though it never was in an accident (except that there was a piece of pumpkin stuck hard to it. Once I cleaned it up it looked fine).
Pumpkins and drones do not mix.
Near Hit - Trespasser<br/>Vision taken from the driver’s cab of a V/Line train show a rail trespasser jumping for his life, as a high-speed train approaches on the Ballarat line near Melbourne.
