I had the good fortune and privilege to meet @leonardthall at the Avalon Airshow where I asked about fast decent using a spiral or zigzag to avoid prop wash or vortex problems. Leonard explained a couple of other more radical fast decent methods, although AGL would have to be accurately known.
He indicated that he already thought about this extensively and so far the decision was to avoid implementing this feature.
My reason for asking about fast decent was for occasions like battery running critically low and yet the copter is decending very slowly to maintain stability, but burning up more battery than in forward flight. No doubt many of us have been sweating profusely watching our copter doing a painfully slow decent with low battery.
Leonard suggested the feature would only be needed in a very small number of edge cases and so didn’t warrant the development time at the moment. We all agreed that proper battery management should be in place, and you should be fully aware of flight time. Also it’s possible to override a RTL or battery failsafe and land the copter faster yourself.
Honestly I haven’t had a near-battery-death experience requiring a fast decent for quite some time, since we got the hang of battery management and monitoring flight times, voltages and current. Even at the end of an auto mission you could program in a fixed-wing style approach, and provided you can put a waypoint within the RTL cone-slope then the copter shouldn’t rise when it hits the RTL command at the end of the mission. This would minimise the amount of time doing a slow decent, although could be tricky to set up.
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