Today I finally made it out to the field for the first time in a month, bringing a brand new heli to maiden and another one to tune, a trex 550x and a trex 700L.

I had both helis on a table at the field and went into the integration menu to change some governor gains on the 550. Completely on accident, under the general tab I hit throttle reverse instead of getting into the gain settings. In just a few seconds before I realized what I had done the heli spooled up to 100% throttle on the table, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. With the throttle reversed throttle hold caused it to see 100%, turning off my TX into failsafe would have locked it at 100%. In addition, the integration menu stopped responding (I'm assuming because it saw a high throttle percentage all of a sudden).

The 550 chopped itself up, the table it was on, and also my 700L that was sitting next to it on the table got directly hit by the blades and cracked the frames.


A lot of damage was done but thankfully there were no personal injuries. It could have been much worse had somebody gotten hurt.

I am in no way blaming spirit or the unit or anything for this freak accident. It was my own fault for accidentally changing the wrong setting in the integration menu.

However this leads me to suggest that throttle be completely disabled while in the integration screen, or, instead of having a 'save settings' tab to save any changes, make it 'apply settings' so that no changes are actually applied until you select to apply them, because as it is right now, any changes you make happy in real time, and as you see with my accidental throttle reversal, I could not stop the heli. Even had the heli been out in the field there would not have been much I could have done to shut it off other than intentionally plowing it into the ground.

I would not wish this to happen to anyone else. Be safe guys, this accident is putting me out of the hobby for a while because I can't afford all the repairs right now.

OMG!

Sorry for your loss. Thanks for posting this unforeseen set of circumstances.

May we all be extra careful in light of this mis-step. Hopefully you're able to get the helis repaired before the season starts.

That is very, very sad
We will try to implement some safety lock to prevent this situation so it can't never happen again.

I hope you will be flying shortly again.

_________________
Spirit System developer

Thanks. It would be a good idea to also disable swash movement when navigating integration menus like the brain 2 does. Ultimately my heli tipped over because I frantically tried to change the throttle reversal back while it started spooling up, and since the swash moves in the integration menu.