A cool(ish) night and a struggle up to 20°C today, but clear blue skies and sunshine with little wind.
Last night we went to a “concert” at the resort, it was billed as a John Denver concert and was performed by a guy from Colorado who spends the winter months travelling around entertaining, and the summer as a park ranger in the Colorado Mountain State Parks. The concert was actually pretty good, not only did he do John Denver songs he also sang a few that he had written himself. A good evenings entertainment and the price was right.
As the wind had finally calmed down I took the quadcopter with its new software for a test flight. Part of the software upgrade requires changing some of the switch positions on the transmitter, shame I forgot about that. The first 10 minutes of flying were great, but then the inevitable happened, I flicked the wrong switch which put me into the super agility (aerobatic) mode. I wasn’t expecting this, and by the time I worked out what had happened I was 2ft above the ground going both forwards and downwards a little too fast! As it hit the ground stones, sand and bits of helicopter went everywhere, but once the dust had settled the only obvious damage was that the battery cover had come off and the battery had come out. The machine was smart enough to know that it had crashed and switched off power to the blades so there was no damage there. I got the switches into the right position, tried a quick flight and all was good. A close inspection back at the trailer showed a couple of cracks in the body, and some stress marks as well. Maybe time for a new body.
After lunch we headed south towards Tucson to visit Pinal Air Park. This is home to one of the many boneyards in the Arizona and California deserts where aircraft come to die, or be stored in the dry desert air.
General Views
These ones came here to die
National Guard Helicopter Training in the Circuit
On the way back we planned to do some geo-caching in the mountains south of Casa Grande, unfortunately the road we were following to get to the start point stopped at the local funeral directors. We figured that was enough of boneyards for the day.