If anyone's contemplating a BNUC-S then its worth noting the lack of any clear facilitated path from buying your first WL Toys V929, equipping it with a suitable broadcast level payload, photographing the Chinese manual, running that thru OCR and Google Translate and then handing it in to the CAA for approval as an Ops Manual. I was close but not quite. (I assumed it was Mandarin so had to tweak Google translate).
LiPo shorts, prop hits, solder burns, 12v fires, downward transverse trajectories, I've seen and done the lot and feel as though I could have done with more help from a friendly Wiki.
Surprisingly there's still no one out there really, they are either flying or busy with a 2.5mm hex rebuilding the flagship ... There was a guy at my BNUC-S theory course who supposedly offers training but there were no multirotors on his web pages and he kept gazing wistfully at the ground.
One thing did concern me, namely the willingness of the CAA to certify pretty much any multirotor... no requirements for e.g. ESC to motor matching, ESC to controller matching, eCalc profile, MTOW to motor thrust, telemetry, telemetry logs, black box (GPS, stick input and power train logs) or recorded flight hours on type. etc etc. I think this is a potential weak point. I've flown one Quad for 4 hours on WKM V5.14 - incident free until 4hrs 6 mins, then wham in it goes. If we end up reporting an incident to the CAA such as this then how are they going to isolate the cause and apportion blame if they are not interested in the technical specs of the aircraft? What wrong assumptions might a Judge make in a County Court? I came away feeling I was in no doubt as to who would be held responsible. This was what the course emphasis was skewed towards - it would have been nice if EuroUSC had someone available to provide sound hands-on technical advice. UNtil such time as we can achieve a high level of assurance about a craft's reliability, earning some kind of a living just won't happen.
LiPo shorts, prop hits, solder burns, 12v fires, downward transverse trajectories, I've seen and done the lot and feel as though I could have done with more help from a friendly Wiki.
Surprisingly there's still no one out there really, they are either flying or busy with a 2.5mm hex rebuilding the flagship ... There was a guy at my BNUC-S theory course who supposedly offers training but there were no multirotors on his web pages and he kept gazing wistfully at the ground.
One thing did concern me, namely the willingness of the CAA to certify pretty much any multirotor... no requirements for e.g. ESC to motor matching, ESC to controller matching, eCalc profile, MTOW to motor thrust, telemetry, telemetry logs, black box (GPS, stick input and power train logs) or recorded flight hours on type. etc etc. I think this is a potential weak point. I've flown one Quad for 4 hours on WKM V5.14 - incident free until 4hrs 6 mins, then wham in it goes. If we end up reporting an incident to the CAA such as this then how are they going to isolate the cause and apportion blame if they are not interested in the technical specs of the aircraft? What wrong assumptions might a Judge make in a County Court? I came away feeling I was in no doubt as to who would be held responsible. This was what the course emphasis was skewed towards - it would have been nice if EuroUSC had someone available to provide sound hands-on technical advice. UNtil such time as we can achieve a high level of assurance about a craft's reliability, earning some kind of a living just won't happen.
