Does Arduplane use airspeed when a VTOL aircraft is operating as a plane but change to ground speed when operating in copter mode?

Title says it all really- for planning and better understanding I am just trying to get my head around how things work to help with planning approaches, especially down wind approaches. I know that the native Copter firmware used groundspeed and that Plane uses airspeed but where do we stand in VTOLs? Thanks everyone.

Hi Angus,

That’s a good question!

The Q Flight Modes in a VTOL are derived from copter code and I believe it has no knowledge of an external AS sensor.

Perhaps we can get some dev help to answer this question properly. @hwurzburg @iampete

Q modes use ground speed and forward flight modes use airspeed.

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Awesome, thank you for that.

Sorry to be a pain but one other related question, does this remain the same for WPNAV in both modes ie WPNAV is windspeed based in plane?

Angus,

WPNAV is a copter parameter. In Plane (or VTOLs), it’s Q_WP_ACCEL. I would assume that Q_WP_ACCEL uses ground speed when you are in a copter flight mode of the VTOL…but the description doesn’t really say.

For VTOL and Plane forward flying, TECS is used along with an AS sensor.

Cheers!