Lets Talk about wind!

[Commando]

Please lets clear the wind thing,
what is the limit to fly?
what a strong wind means?

for example, i try to do a mission, the wind was 18-20 km/h that means full 3 Beaufort starting to 4 Beaufort.
The hexacopter tried to make the mission, was stable enough for couple seconds. never made to reach first way point, (20 meters towards wind) but!
without mission mode the copter was drifting waaaay out.

FC: crius AIO V2
FW: Multiwii 2.4
GPS: Crius U-blox Neo-6 V3.1
Frame: Hexacopter F550



Thanks guys for the good work, i was fly since version 2.0. God bless you! Keep that wonderful work

[Cereal_Killer]

Hi Commando,

My personal cutoff (for when I'm working) is 25mph. Above that I wont fly, not cause the copter wont make it back upwind but because at that speed GPS's control loops arn't strong enough / fast enough to maintain an acceptable position hold / waypoint radius (as you found out, it never hits the WP and just keeps searching). This is with all my copters, from my 360 quad (a second backup that I almost never fly) a 480 quad (backup) and my main working rig my 600 tri. I see you have an F550, those style frames are absolutely horrible in terms of wind resistance in general. I use either all flat carbon fiber arms (the blackout 360) or CF boom type arms and DIY builds (480 and 600 tri which is RCExplorer style). I'm guessing that's where some of my stability is coming from vs a dji style hex(plus the two / three extra rotor disks)

Now when it comes to leasure flying, either my 600 tri (without the extra camera payload) or my 250 race quad or my newest 200 tri when I'm just cruising around or doing acro (NOT with the 600 lol) I wont even fly in that much wind just cause it's not as fun / relaxing as when it's calmer. For just playing around I dont usually fly if it's above 15mph or so (unless someone's over that really wants to see something fly), I do enough flying for work, when I go out to play I want to relax and have fun (hey acro can be relaxing, mostly it's just not worrying about screwing up in front of a customer). The fastest wind I've ever flew in was 35mph gusts (maybe 15-20 sustained), this was my 4S powered 250 H quad (2204 motors / 18A ESC's and 6" props) and it had no problem fighting the gusts back upwind but when they would hit from the side, or from any direction that you wern;t currently flying into it was just so fast that it pushed it 100m away by the time I could react and get it headed back. It came back up just fine but that was scary still, one sec it was here, two seconds later it was a football field to the right...


I advise you just pick a speed you're comfy with (probably lower than 20km/h) and stick to flying below that. If you do try to pusk your luck I'd set my failsafe to just drop it out of the sky. Failsafe could get you in even more trouble if the wind is strong and FS is set to slowly descend who knows where it will end up with the blades spinning once it's out of range, usually even in strong wind if you cut the props off it'll fall pretty straight from there.


I would say if you want to know as exact number clock your copter (doppler audio based phone apps work pretty good) and divide that by half, I dont actually care what the fastest wind I could fly in is cause like I explained, 25 is all I'm comfy with.