Last night, I decided to reconnoiter the area where I thought my FIK 100 landed. I was on my bike, slowly looking at the trees and yards on a street over 600 feet away from the park when I saw the FiK 100 sitting in the front of a garage. I went home and walked back to the house to retrieve the FIK, and when I asked the owner about where he found it, he said he saw it sitting in his front yard on the lawn. He asked his son if it was his, but his son said it wasn’t. He said he left it by the front door last night, but I must not have seen it when I went by the street Sunday night.
I was amazed the plane was totally undamaged, but I remember I was trying to pull the plane up when I lost sight of it, so it must have just drifted down after I lost contact with it. The only thing that was a little adverse was the battery since it hadn’t been unplugged from the ESC. The BC-6 wouldn’t recharge the battery since it said the voltage was too low, but after reading about how to bring back a drained lipo battery, I hooked it up only by its JST power lead and charged the battery as a NIMH at .1 amps until the voltage hit 9 volts (it was a 3s battery, so 3×3 volts). After I did this, the battery accepted charging as a LIPO. I’ll have to see how the battery performs tomorrow morning. After this incident, I’ve learned my lesson on not taking a plane up on a thermal when it’s a windy day!