General Airplane went crazy

[sneezy007]

Hi everyone,

This week I installed a new ESC into my airplane. I went flying on Wednesday. A couple of circuits into the flight, the wings started rocking back and forth like crazy.
The plane even went inverted, I managed to save it once, but when it did again, it crashed. Any idea what would have caused this? The ESC is an Eflite 1040U. The receiver is the Spektrum AR410, my transmitter is a DX8. It flew great before this crash. I calibrated the ESC to my radio using the following technique. Throttle to full, plug in the battery, waiting for the ESC to beep, then bring throttle all the way down. Any ideas as to what would have caused this?

Thanks,
Dino

 

[RandyDSok]

It's unlikely that the ESC is the cause since it is just there to supply power to the system and motor. The likely cause would be more like some cables got loose and were making intermittent contact... if I were to guess it'd be the ones going to the ailerons since you mentioned it was rocking back and forth. Since what you described were changes in the roll axis ... other possible causes could be bad servos or slipping pushrod connections to the ailerons. I picked the cables as the more likely area of failure since they are easily knocked.

 

[D.O.G.]

I agree with Randy on the bad connection. I even had a factory solder/connection come loose while flying my heli. It wasn't a good day for my bird .

 

[RandyDSok]

With a heli, vibrations are out of the roof compared to an airplane ... so connection issues would be even more of an issue. Either way, I always look at a connection or cable first in just about anything I'm diagnosing.