Naturally I've been suspended from the proj and all related driving duties whilst the AAIB investigate the recent incident. Meantimes I content myself with the fact that (a) I'm still a member of the pilot's union and (b) I carried out the POWER PLANT: FIRE, SEVERE DAMAGE OR SEPARATION checklist to the letter, with an emergency landing on Blaguegate Lane as soon as it was apparent the motor was attached by one remaining bolt... and barely millimetres of that.
These props are not cheap, but they do come by the (CW and CCW) pair in view of the fact you're expected to fit them to quadcopters as a bare minimum. This suits a catamaran too, it using even in the most rudimentary form two cruise motors.
But in fact among the reasons I steered myself from airborne toward a waterborne drone was precisely because a fall from say two feet is altogether more acceptable to hearts and minds than one from two hundred. It is also because whilst the people who fly radio-controlled aircraft were once seen as sad middle-age men in anoraks, they are now viewed as fundamentalists intent on destroying our way of life.
In previous consultations with people co-opted to produce the prototypical drones I made in the past, the merest nick in a carbon-fibre propeller was viewed as reason to discard it all together.
My opinion on this changed somewhat watching YouTube vids of people messing around with drone-builds, almost invariably sourced in the US where they are a good deal more adventurous than us here, whilst having more space to experiment. In brief, however, with one drone stuck up a tree another was sent up to release it by using its carbon-fibre propeller blades as an expensive form of strimmer.
Accordingly the timber boom here will be rounded down with sandpaper in the time-worn method that has served alloy and wooden aircraft since the dawn of time, and the propeller will be pampered with sellotape either side and told to shape up and get back to front-line duties.
Looking at the woodwork though, which looks like its been on the end of some of my work with a mallet and chisel, you get a notion of just how fast these things are windmilling even in a breeze of twenty knots or less. In fact it occurred to me that we could harness the electricity produced to recharge the car's battery, something for which our Minister for Environment would provide a grant of millions.
Ed. As the AAIB conclude, the propeller was running backwards with the air flowing in the wrong direction ~ leading to its trailing edge and not leading doing the chiseling.
