The Carnage!

After several months of relative inactivity on the UAV/flying front I decided ANZAC day was the perfect day to get back into it. The weather was perfect for flying - hardly any wind, and lovely and Sunny - but not overly glary.
The original plan was to first take out the UAV and (under complete manual control) put it through its paces. I was really looking forward to this, as when we were flying with all the extra hardware onboard it was a little laid down and was really sluggish - I was really looking forward to doing a bit of aerobatics and really opening up the throttle. But those plans went amiss - it seems I completely destroyed the motor speed controller/BEC circuit in the latter stages of our project - now the BEC doesn't work at all and the motor speed controller is stuck at full throttle - a replacement module is on order from hstore.
In the mean time I managed to switch over my controller from mode 1 to mode 4 setup (the cause of at least 4 crashes).

Failing the UAV - I still had the heli which I'm trying to learn how to fly. The first flight was uneventful - hovering a foot or so off the ground - gently hovering up and down. Spurred on by this success I charged up the battery and promptly did the chopper a whole lot of damage - 5 seconds into flight. A foot of the ground the chopper banked left - the rotor clipped the ground - flowed by the tail. Total damage: tail boom snapped in half, damaged rotors, missing tail gear. I have now order the spare parts and a new (different) chopper. Hopefully this will be easier to learn to fly in.