Not Coming To A Dealer Near You - AVweb

I’m probably a little late to the party and I though I’m not intending to be a bandwagon naysayer, I will be a naysayer. My logbook pales in comparison to many around here but I do have, by my estimation and thanks to the sheer cheapness of it, hundreds of hours behind the sticks of FPV and line of sight multirotors. Not DJI or toy grade ones, the home built, racing and freestyle kind. I’d never accept the risk involved in flying a manned multirotor, let alone a quadcopter. An airplane is highly unlikely to just drop out of the sky unless you make it, a helicopter can autorotate, a fixed pitch quadcopter? Its mode of failure is to drop or, more accurately; tumble, to the ground. A hexacopter will probably allow you to make a safe forced landing, an octocopter may allow you to find an airport, a quadcopter you’d better hope you can bail out as it spins end over end from asymmetric thrust. None of them stay in the air if there’s a complete power failure. There are collective pitch equipped multirotors, I have only flown one since they’re pretty rare and fairly expensive, they may be able to autorotate if there’s a power loss, but any asymmetric condition is still instant and irrecoverable LOC.