Rumor I heard is that the flyer worked for the gov as some sort of intelligence analyst. Seriously? How intelligent was it to be flying that thing anywhere near the white house?
But of course, this might not have been an accident at all. The FAA is getting some substantial resistance to their efforts to try to claim authority over ALL airspace, so maybe they needed a helping hand.
And yes, I believe that likely the majority of the fly aways, not just in the phantoms, but other products as well, have likely been caused by too much reliance on GPS. From what I have read about GPS, it is really a military purposed system, and it likely has errors purposely injected into the data stream to keep unfriendlies from being able to use the system against us. Heck, I've had GPS dropouts on my laptop on occasion while using the mapping function while on trips.
That and the coding of the devices not being robust enough to be able to adequately recover from GPS glitches. If the code detects a nonsensical command based on unrealistic GPS coordinates, it SHOULD just block the command, drop into manual and try to hover in place (or at least maintain altitude while doing the best it can to not move laterally) until the operator can take over control manually. But yeah, the technology isn't at all mature yet and the programmers have more work that needs to be done before I'm ready to plunk down my money on one of the more expensive units. No way I want to watch a $2,000 quadcopter carrying a $500 camcorder go into RTC (Return To China) mode suddenly and irrevocably.
Linear Mode
