Can I fly my drone in the rain?

So here I am out before dawn, waiting for the sun to come up for a flight. .problem is it’s raining.

Not a a drizzle but not pounding it down, somewhere in between.

What do you all think about flying in rain?? Possible or no go?

Don’t do it. When you fly ANYTHING always think safety. Your drone is basically a highly computerised flying machine, if small droplets of moisture get onto the circuit board, sucked in by the cooling fan, the result could be a loss of control and fly away to heaven knows where. At the very least if you get away with it after flying in the rain, any moisture that dries off the circuit boards will start a corrosion which may not manifest itself until many flights in the future. There will be people who no doubt say they have happily flown in the rain with no problems (so far), or have water proofed their drone with some mystical spray or covering. Flying is all about safety and common sense. A bit like covid. Some say don’t wear a mask because they don’t always work. Well parachutes don’t always work, but if I jump out of a plane I sure as heck want to be wearing one.

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The answer is NO. Please read your machines manual carefully. Its the number one rule of operating.

Should also be familiar with CAP722

https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP722%20Edition8(p).pdf

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UNLESS… you have one of these???

splashdrone 2

:wink: :wink: :thinking:

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Nope, not got one of those…so the rain stopped but it wasn’t great anyway so I had a short flight and then called it. Fog came in pretty bad and with it lots of moisture anyway. Disappointed as I wanted to give the drone a good flight today and didn’t even manage to drain one battery…got a few shots, I’ll post them in a bit.

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It will depend what IP (Ingress Protection) values the components of the drone have. Most are not suitable for flying in any moisture let alone driving rain. Very sophisticated and expensive drones have fallen out of the sky due to short circuits and short sighted pilots.

I’ve got the Spry+, nice little machine. It’s fun to fly, the waterproof casing makes it quite robust. However it’s not as wind-resistant as my M2E so it’s for urgent close-proximity phots in wet/damp/foggy but calmish weather.

The drone is IP67 rated and the controller is IP66 rated- but you still need a dry spot to change the batteries (gets about 10 min flight on 1 battery). So you need to get your van as close as possible to the TOLS… :wink:

The camera is in a sealed binnacle affair, works surprosingly well in most sorts of damp, so long as you’re looking down somewhat it doesn’t seem to be too badly effected by rain on the cover.

GC

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Absolutely. You can also watch your TV out in the rain.

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You most certaiy can. :grin:

One good gust of wind though and it’ll be off like Mary Poppins.

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Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

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I’m not aware of any regulation that restricts flying in the rain, I did a word search on CAP722 with zero hits for rain, but I may have missed something.

I have a PowerEggX Wizard which is happy flying in the rain, and apparently report my every movement (excluding bowel) to the Chinese CAAC :scream:.

As previously mentioned any water ingress into the internal electronics could result in a death sentence for most drones, it’s not the water itself (pure water is an insulator) but rather the impurities (salts and such) that result in conduction. Brushless motors will happily work in water.

Nidge.