NASA · Aviation Safety Reporting System
Government UAS pilot reported a loss of control of the UAS in-flight resulting in the UAS descending into a tree and crashing into the ground.
What is ASRS?
The Aviation Safety Reporting System is NASA's voluntary, confidential, non- punitive incident-reporting system, established 1976. Pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and maintenance technicians file reports describing safety- relevant events. NASA de-identifies every report before adding it to the public database. Reports are not investigated by NASA, the FAA, or the NTSB — they represent the reporter's perspective.
Pilot narrative
Verbatim from the de-identified NASA record. First-person account by the
reporter. NASA strips identifying details (names, company, specific time);
anonymization placeholders are ZZZ,
X, Y.
Deployed drone to assist patrol with searching for missing / runaway juvenile that had been gone about 3 hours, however was not able to locate the juvenile. Near the end of this flight record, I had maneuvered the drone into a position to evaluate a spot under a tree (in thermal) and shortly after doing this the drone started to lose altitude (uncontrolled descent), which I tried to correct with giving stick controls to elevate in altitude and / or move side to side, however none of the inputs corrected the issue. The drone eventually fell (with motors still going) from about 130 feet to the ground, striking a tree on the way down and causing damage to the aircraft (broken antenna and cracked body), resulting in the drone being inoperable and going to need repairs.
Analyst callback
ASRS analysts occasionally follow up with reporters by phone. These are the paraphrased additional notes from those conversations.
Reporter stated the UAS exhibited delayed responses to inputs once before, but this was the first time all control was lost. The reporter was unsure of what could have caused the event.
NASA classification — Anomalies
- Aircraft Equipment Problem
- Inflight Event / Encounter
NASA classification — Assessments
- Contributing Factors / Situations
- Aircraft · Software and Automation
- Primary Problem
- Ambiguous
ASRS reports are voluntarily submitted, de-identified by NASA, and represent the reporter's perspective. The presence of reports on a topic cannot be used to infer prevalence in the National Airspace System. The authoritative source is the NASA ASRS Database Online at asrs.arc.nasa.gov ↗.