A pre-flight checklist is the single highest-leverage habit in drone operations. The two minutes it takes to run through this list prevents the vast majority of “why did it just crash” incidents — and the ones it doesn’t prevent, it usually gives you enough warning to abort the flight before they happen.
Current status: this page is a placeholder for the operational checklist tied to the physical drone, which is in design. When the H2 2026 hardware bring-up lands, this page will become a real checklist with specific values, photos of what good vs bad looks like, and the exact MAVProxy commands to verify each item.
Planned checklist (in order)
- Battery voltage. Read pack voltage with a meter; should be ≥4.10 V/cell at rest for a “full” pack. Below 3.7 V/cell, recharge before flight. Below 3.3 V/cell, the pack is damaged — retire it.
- Battery temperature. Hot battery + cold airflow is a recipe for sag. Don’t fly a pack hotter than ~40 °C.
- Prop check. All four props seated, correct rotation directions visually verified, no chips or cracks. A cracked prop will destroy itself at full throttle and turn into shrapnel.
- Frame check. Tug each motor mount and arm. Looseness means vibration, vibration means EKF drift.
- IMU calibration drift. ArduPilot will refuse to arm if IMU is too far from level — that’s the right behavior. If it consistently refuses to arm on a level surface, recalibrate.
- Mode check. STABILIZE or LOITER for manual; GUIDED for autonomous. Don’t switch to GUIDED until autonomous control is what you actually want.
- Telemetry link. Verify MAVLink heartbeat is arriving in MAVProxy / your GCS. Telemetry-out before motors-on, not the other way around.
- Fail-safe configuration. RC fail-safe, battery fail-safe, GCS fail-safe all set. For indoor flight, “fail-safe = LAND” is almost always the right answer.
- Surroundings. Anyone within ~3 m of the drone needs to know you’re about to spin motors. No exceptions.
Differences vs simulation
The pre-flight checklist is one of the few places where simulation and reality diverge sharply. In sim, every item on this list is automatically satisfied (no battery, no props to crack, no humans nearby). In reality, every item has bitten someone — usually not us, but the lessons in GSoC 2023 ArduPilot ROS 2 and the broader ArduPilot community include enough crash post-mortems that the patterns are well-established.
Where to go next
- Operations hub — sibling pages
- Drone assembly — the build that produces what you’re checking
- SITL “Waiting for heartbeat” — for the simulation analog of telemetry trouble