Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Summary: The Typhoon has a defect that causes it to not behave as claimed | advertised in Smartmode. Since the Typhoon did not behave as expected and I thought the Typhoon was in Angle mode, the flight resulted in a crash. Yuneec support is extremely disjoint and at times combative on getting to the bottom of this case based on evidence in the flight log. They do not consider all the facts found in the Typhoon flight logs. They only go by what they see in their proprietary simulator which does not present key information gleaned from their logs. Typhoon H 4k Collision Avoidance Hexacopter w/ Battery, Charger, ST16 Controller and Free Wizard Wand Controller Details: 2016 Jun 12 I take the Typhoon H on my 3rd flight with it. I believe that the Typhoon H is in Angle Mode and I fly it accordingly. My planned flight route was to fly it between two houses while taking a look at the roof of one of them. I stand facing the house. I have the Typhoon take off in front of the house and then strafe to the left side of the house. I walk to the side of the house that I plan on having the Typhoon fly next to. I next had the Typhoon turn 90 degrees to face the side of the house. Around this point in time, I lost control of the craft. It did not respond to commands. It flew towards a tree that was now behind it. None of my attempts to fly the Typhoon away from the tree worked. It clipped some leaves and fell to the ground. The flight log showed the drop to be about 12 feet. Several props broke. Two arms broke. The case cracked. The gimbal sheared from the mounts and wires were ripped out. The battery dislodged. The glass on the camera broke. 2016 Jun 15 1:30 PM I call Yuneec and get Mike from Tech support on the phone. He tells me how to retrieve the flight logs from the Ground Station. I send the flight logs to him for analysis. 2016 Jun 15 4:15 PM Mike call me and tells me that the Typhoon was in Smart Mode rather than in Angle mode as I thought. He says that it was operating as it should and followed me into the tree. That was why it did not respond to my commands. With the realization that I was in Smart Mode rather than Angle mode I asked Mike why the Typhoon was not behaving according to Smart Mode parameters earlier in the flight. If it behaved as it should have, I would have realized that I must of inadvertently switched the mode and either landed the Typhoon or switched the mode back. I told Mike that the issue was that I was close to the Typhoon during the entire flight. Smart Mode is supposed to keep the Typhoon 26 feet away from me. Mike suggested that I send in the Typhoon so they can analyze it. 2016 July 1 6:30 PM I sent in the Typhoon. It is expensive to ship. It arrived at their facilities on June 24. The first message I get from Yuneec is an e-mail with a price quote for repair. The e-mail asks me to contact them to approve and process the repair. I call in and get Christine on the phone. She is very nice but knows nothing about my case. I explain it to her. She talks to a manager and tells me she'll call me the next day to update me on my contention that the Typhoon has a defect and the repair should be under warranty. 2016 July 6 10:15 AM I don't hear anything from Yuneec. I call in and get Sergio. He knows nothing about my case. I explain it to him. He then looks and sees that Mike has the case and told me he will ask Mike to call me after he gets in. Between the phone calls, I also use e-mail to contact Yuneec about my case. The employees who answer my e-mails seem to know nothing about my case. I get the feeling they do not have a good customer service system. Internal Yuneec communication seems poor. I have not encountered other companies I deal with whose customer support is this disjoint. 2016 July 13 12:30 PM I call and speak to Brandon. He tells me I owe $185 to get it fixed. He tells me to either pay or threatens that Yuneec will send me back my drone as is. He is very combative and made me feel like s***. At this point, I'm mad. I've always been polite and my customer service experience with Yuneec has been terrible. I can't say much for my limited experience with their drones but customer service certainly stinks and Brandon tops the list here. In short, I had to insist hard and several times to get him to allow me to speak to a tech about my case. 2016 July 13 ~1:00 PM Mike calls me and discussed the situation. He focused on the crash event. He tried to convince me that other parts of the flight are not relevant. I asked him to consider the fact that the Typhoon did not behave as it should in Smart Mode. If it did, I would have either landed it or changed the mode. The flight would not get to the point where it crashed. Mike resisted this point. I said if I was driving a car that was on fire, I would not continue driving it until it crashed. The fire would tell me something is wrong. If the Typhoon behaved like it should in Smart Mode, I would have known something was wrong and would not continue flying it and it would not have had an opportunity to crash. I told him that I will examine flight and he will agreed to examine the earlier part of the flight logs. If the early log shows that I was indeed less than 26 feet from craft, then there is a defect. 2016 July 13 ~3:00 PM Mike sent me an e-mail and called me to discuss his findings. He told me that he looked at the logs with a colleague and said that the Typhoon darted off to get away from me and was operating like it should in Smart Mode. I thanked him for looking at the logs and asked him to give me time to analyze them myself. His description was not in sync with my memory of the flight or that of my friend who was watching the flight with me. My friend said that I was in control of the flight until the end when the Typhoon crashed. I felt the same way. I don't recall the darting away that Mike described. 2016 July 15 3:15 PM I called Mike after analyzing the flight logs myself. Before I write about my conversation with Mike, here's what I did. The Typhoon H produces 3 logs. The Telemetry log and the RemoteGPS log contains information regarding the location of the Typhoon and the Ground Station. I matched up the records in the two logs and calculated the horizontal distance the Typhoon was from the Ground Station, and thus me. I then used the calculated horizontal distance and the altitude of the drone to calculate the line of sight distance between the Typhoon and me. The resulting figures show that the Typhoon was 25.7 feet from me at most. It was at that distance for one data point out of 91. The Typhoon did not try to maintain the safety envelop of 26 feet as Mike and Yuneec claims. I sent my calculations to Mike and called him. Mike told me that his warranty denial stands. He said he only looks at the logs as processed through their system (which no customer can use or analyze). I asked and he told me that the Yuneec system does not show distance between Typhoon and Ground Station. I asked how he can ignore the fact from the logs that the Typhoon did not operate as claimed. He did not relent. There is a defect and Yuneec and Mike will not acknowledge or address it. I gave up talking to them. I have a very bitter taste in my mouth from this experience. I will be looking at other drones in the future and perhaps you should too. On another note, my friend who was with me is a chemical engineer with a specialty in adhesives. He examine the drone after the crash and commented that Yuneec saved about $4 by not using a more durable plastic that would have helped the drone survive the crash. 2016 July 27 Yuneec refused to acknowledge a defect that their own flight logs indicate. I was forced to pay to fix the drone or end up with a $1300 brick. I paid to fix it. They ship it back without props. Perhaps it is the only way they can guarantee this thing won't crash. Buy a drone from someone else. 2016 Aug 8 On July 28, they decided to ship me props. I find out today, after I ask them, why I have no props yet. They tell me that the props are back ordered. Let's see. I paid $1300 back in the beginning of June. I flew it 3 times over 2 days before defect causes crash. Yuneec has no answer to why their drone does not operate according to parameters they lay out as indicated in their logs. I have to pay another $230 in shipping (to & from) and repair costs and I still don't have a working drone. As of today, Amazon lists the price of this POS at $1,097.40. I also filed a BBB complaint against Yuneec after I first posted this log. They never replied to it. Best of luck to future purchasers of this drone. 2016 Aug 10 I filed a BBB complaint on 07/18/2016. Yuneec responds today. They reiterate what they told me over the phone. Essentially, what they are doing is what people do to prove what they want. They play with the sample size. If you define the sample size to what you want, you can make your point. They selectively look at a subset of the logs and ignore the log entries that are not convenient to them. What a genius way to screw customers. 2016 Sept 1 Final note from BBB says that Yuneec stands by its position and will not take back their defective drone.