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From: sheridan,
IN, USA
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Bosch232
Well this was scary.. 
I have almost no heli experience, but about 15 yrs on airplanes and a brief stint with ground vehicles. A friend of mine gave me his E Flite 400 and Spektrum Tx, which he hasn't flown for years. I've been fooling with it for about a week, going over the exercises on rchelicopterfun.com. Today I had 3 hovering flights in the driveway with no issue, and put it away. Later in the day I took it out for another practice run and here's what it did:
Tx switched on, showing 6.0 v. Fresh charge on the heli batt. Plugged the heli battery in, and the esc did a series of double beeps and didn't stop beeping, so something was wrong. But I don't know heli's and didn't know what it was telling me. The swash plate would move, but it seemed slower than I remember. It would not spool up. So I put it away for a bit and then decided to trouble shoot it in my basement a little later. Same beeping from of the esc, only this time the heli spooled up on its own! With the Tx on and throttle at zero. It actually lifted off, and I quite literally ran out of the room until it hit the wall and broke the rotors.
If it was naive of me to plug in the battery when I knew there were Rx issues, then so be it. Chastise me. But I read in the Spektrum manual this week about fail safe programming in trouble conditions, so I didn't know the risk. I sure as hell do now.
Can anyone tell me what I should do next? New rotors are in order, obviously, but what does constant double-beeping mean? Why would it spool up like that? I found no troubleshooting guide in the manual. Any help appreciated, because I was actually gaining confidence in hovering, but this was scary as hell and right now I don't trust the thing. Thoughts?
If the heli hadn't been flown for years, and the transmitter voltage was 6.0 volts, it sounds like a DX 7.
DX 7 uses a 9.6v battery, I think, and 6v is obviously too low.
If it is a newer Spek. radio, like DX6i, DX8, etc, they use 4.8 4-cells, and don't charge past about 5.6 or so on a fresh charge.
So, if it is a DX7 at 6v, then that could trigger a failsafe. For what you describe, the heli would have to be bound (binded?) at a throttle/pitch setting at above 1/2 stick, assuming
the heli is set up like most. At zero throttle, there should be no positive pitch in the blades, in fact there should be a few degrees negative, and the heli should not be able to lift off at all.
The only scenario I can think of is that while flying earlier, you were extremely lucky, and the tx. batt. had just enough juice to transmit.
When you went to test it later, you had just enough voltage to arm the esc, then the voltage dropped off and caused the failsafe, which is set improperly.
Set the failsafe, (rebind the helicopter), with throttle at zero.
Edited to add:
Check the tx battery. I've had some last for several years, and some last only a few months.
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E Flite 400 3D goes haywire! - 
