Safe drone flying depends on more than keeping the aircraft away from obstacles. Operators also have to consider people, airspace, weather, equipment condition, batteries, communications, human error, and what happens when a plan stops working. This section covers practical risk assessment, operating procedures, emergency actions, maintenance, reporting, and lessons from incidents.
Topic
Drone Safety: Risk Management, Procedures and Incident Prevention
Latest topic news
ArduPilot reviews bidirectional DShot decode bounds on F1 IOMCUs
ArduPilot PR 35036 proposes fixing an out-of-bounds read in the F1 IOMCU bidirectional DShot telemetry decoder when the sampled buffer ends before a complete 21-bit packet.
Read newsPX4 protects 1.18 auxiliary global-position settings during upgrade
PX4 PR 29541 proposes migrating older EKF2 AGP auxiliary global-position parameters to the 1.18 per-source EKF2 AGPn layout. The author says release/1.18 has the new setting structure without corresponding migration.
Read newsPX4 proposes GNSS velocity-versus-position consistency checks
PX4 PR 29660 proposes a kinematic consistency check between GNSS position and velocity estimates. The author notes that code-pseudorange-derived position and Doppler-derived velocity can deteriorate differently under multipath or other faults.
Read newsArduPilot OSD proposal closes a backend-index gap that can crash startup
ArduPilot PR 34497 reports a crash if one OSD backend is disabled or fails to start while a second backend initializes. The proposal removes the hole left in the backend list.
Read newsPX4 precision-landing proposal updates coordinates when EKF origin changes
PX4 PR 29711 describes a precision-landing target mapped from local NED coordinates to latitude and longitude that can become stale when EKF2 resets its navigation origin during GNSS-denied operations. The patch proposes refreshing that mapping.
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An odometry quaternion can look valid while giving a drone the wrong yaw
A position estimate can pass a basic sanity check while its attitude points into the wrong coordinate system. That is the failure behind a PX4 change merged on 31 October 2026: the MAVLink receiver converted position and velocity from ENU/FLU conventions into the frames expected by the flight stack, but copied the orientation quaternion without the corresponding rotation. The result could remain hidden until the estimator used external-vision yaw.
Read articleDJI Return to Home: RTH altitude, Optimal or Preset, signal loss and the Home Point
It's easy to leave Return to Home on its defaults and never look at it again. It usually works. When it doesn't, the cause is often a setting chosen months ago or never checked: an RTH altitude below the tree line, a Home Point recorded in the wrong place, or a signal-lost action nobody remembers choosing.
Read articleA GNSS spoofing warning cannot decide whether an FPV rescue is safe
A receiver can keep reporting a plausible satellite count, position and navigation fix while its coordinates are wrong. That is the failure an FPV pilot fears when GPS Rescue takes over after a radio or video link problem. A receiver's spoofing flag can provide another warning, but its absence cannot certify the coordinates, and its presence does not by itself specify a safe flight-control response.
Read articleA mission can have more MAVLink commands than QGroundControl shows as waypoints
A survey mission may show six points on a map while the flight controller holds many more commands. Camera triggers, speed changes and landing-pattern instructions can sit between the navigation points. For operators this is usually a convenience: the ground station combines related actions into one editable visual item. For software deciding whether a mission can be continued, however, the distinction can become a correctness problem.
Read articleConformal coating an FPV drone: what to coat, what to leave bare and what it won't protect against
Most water damage on FPV drones doesn't come from flying in the rain. It comes from landing in wet grass at dawn, a tumble into snow, or carrying a cold quad into a warm room. One drop across two pads on the flight controller is enough for a short. Conformal coating is the usual fix: a thin film brushed over the boards that keeps water off exposed solder joints and pins. It costs little and takes an evening, but only if you coat the right parts and leave the rest alone.
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