Fail Safe Settings

While this may be old hat to most of you, I think it's worth mentioning. Today one of my customers called and told me that He had crashed a friend's Freya because it went into hold. It ran full bore into the ground tail first. Not good.

The fail safe wasn't set to go to idle, so it was under power when it went in, which caused quite a bit of the damage in addition to the initial impact. I preach about this quite a bit. If you run PCM, it is my firm belief that it is best to have everything set to hold it's position except the throttle...it should be set to go to idle.

This does several good things.

1. If the lockout is due to vibration, the vibration will be less with the engine idling and there's a good chance control will be restored. Auto to a full stop landing and find out what happened.
2. Even if you don't get control back and it crashes, at least you won't have collateral damage...dead chicken.
3. If it goes into a person or property, the damage will be less, and with the other servos holding, you at least have a chance of predicting where it will hit.
4. Even if it doesn't lockout, you still know you've been hit because the engine will sound like it missed. This will clue you in that there's something wrong.

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