Independent report

AAIB Record-only UAS investigations reviewed: August - September 2025

Published 13 November 2025

This section provides details of accidents and incidents which were not subject to a Field or full Correspondence Investigation. They are wholly, or largely, based on information provided by the aircraft commander at the time of reporting and in some cases additional information from other sources. The accuracy of the information provided cannot be assured.

Event date	Aircraft Type	Location Name	Record Only Occurrence Text
4 Aug 2025	ARC Aerosystems S5M-001	Finmere Airfield, Buckinghamshire	About 23 seconds into the test flight, during the transition from hover to cruise flight, the unmanned aircraft pitched up and rolled right, before flying into the ground in an inverted nose-down attitude. From flight logs it was determined that onboard pitch attitude tracking was insufficient to react to the deviation in pitch without sending an ‘out-of-range’ command to one of the pitch motors, which powered down. This then triggered a similar effect on another motor.
6 Aug 2025	MA glider	Dundonald, Ayrshire	The model aircraft was unable to turn to the right and rudder control was intermittent. The pilot lost sight of the model behind trees and it was not recovered.
13 Aug 2025	DJI M300	Wokingham, Berkshire	The UA had flown normally on an initial flight and returned to the remote operator uneventfully. When it was launched for the second time, it flew to the location at which it had previously operated but, after approximately two minutes, an overheat error developed and the UA descended vertically into trees.
15 Aug 2025	Skymagic	Royal Chelsea Hospital, London	During the seventh test flight involving a swarm of 700 UA’s, the ‘start show’ command was sent. 17 vehicles had not received the command and so a second command was sent. This introduced a delay in the start time for those 17 UA’s. During the show 16 vehicles collided and fell into the safety zone and 10 returned to the start point. Although the radio frequency (RF) environment had previously been assessed as good and previous test flights had been successful, data logs from the 17 UA’s indicated that a degraded RF environment prevented them from receiving the original start command. The operator planned to use an auto start timer for future rehearsals and shows and to use a larger antenna for command transmissions.
23 Aug 2025	DJI M30T	Aldershot, Hampshire	The UA was being operated within a cordon to record a road traffic collision. The UA made contact with the cordon tape, causing the UA to become tangled and fall to the ground leading to damage to the rotors and rotor arm.
24 Aug 2025	MA E-flight apprentice	Bromley, Kent	The small model aircraft was being flown in a public park. Connection was lost between the controller and the aircraft, causing the aircraft to continue to fly beyond a tree line and was not recovered.
28 Aug 2025	DJI Matrice 300	Brandon, Durham	Without warning, the UA fell from the sky and struck the ground in a controlled area. It was reported that the UA had not collided with anything whilst airborne, and the remote pilot did not observe any warnings on the controller.