During a demo of my Ground Station-enabled Phantom 2, I did something stupid. I was at the base of the beautiful, rolling hills of eastern Fremont and wanted to send the Phantom 2 up over the hills on a waypoint-driven mission. It looked like the hills went up at least 400’ above us, so I programmed the first two waypoints to be at around 700’, which would have been, in my estimation, 200-300’ AGL at the waypoint locations. Everything worked as planned. The Phantom 2 flew up out of the backyard and over the hills. Unfortunately, I made a fatal flaw. I wanted the bird to descend to around 175’ when it came back to the house, so I put 175’ as the last waypoint elevation. What I didn’t take into account was that the Phantom 2 would descend during the final stretch between waypoints and wold not stay at elevation as it came back toward us. When I heard the distant prop buzzing stop, I knew it had hit the mountain.
And so, we went for a hike up that mountain, which turned out to be much higher than we thought it was. When we reached a saddle that had good line of sight around us, I turned the ground end of Ground Station back on and ran the iPad Ground Station app. A solid green light on the hardware indicated that we had wireless link, which meant that I was within line of sight, and in range! The app showed the location of the downed bird as the standard red arrow on the screen at around 390’ in elevation (even though it also said it didn’t have the aircraft location—probably a bug), and Jonathan’s sharp eyes spotted a bit of white in the grass by a fence, which is where we found the Phantom 2 and gimbal (which had popped off), undamaged. I was lucky! It could have been much worse…