Sunset Flight
This is Skywalker Flight #74, flown on Sept. 7, 2017. It ended up being a 38.5 minute flight–scheduled to land right at sunset. The purpose of the flight was to carry insect traps at 300′ AGL and collect samples of what might be flying up at that altitude.
What I like about this flight is that the stable sunset air leads to very consistent autopilot performance. The circle hold is near perfect. The altitude hold is +/- 2 meters (usually much better), despite continually varying bank angles which are required to hold a perfect circle shape in 10 kt winds.
The landing at the end is 100% autonomous and I trusted it all the way down, even as it dropped in between a tree-line and a row of turkey barns. The whole flight is presented here for completeness, but feel free to skip to part 3 if you are interested in seeing the autonomous landing.
As an added bonus, stick around after I pick up the aircraft as I walk it back. I pan the aircraft around the sky and you can clearly see the perfect circle hold as well as the landing approach. I use augmented reality techniques to overlay the flight track history right into the video–I think it’s kind of a “cool tool” for analyzing your autopilot and ekf performance.