Yesterday I was invited to fly with (what I call) the "old guys". They are pretty much old school fixed wing RC.   I got up, started to charge batteries and packed pretty much all of quads...even my old Wizard 220..  Reason being It has been a while since I got out and the last time I flew I had some pretty bad "crashes"... 
  Figured I would sort things out in the field, ..not a great idea...first up my 1w hdzero that I disarmed 60 feet up.  NO VIDEO signal.  I thought it survived, guess not.  Next up my 5" basher... flying fine, but the OSD (analog) is partially cut off and I cant see the battery voltage or vtx channel, so Im not pushing it.  Later found out I had to change from NTSC to PAL on the goggles.  I had thought I had it setup, maybe they "re-set" themselves? 
  Anyway, a slight "crash" no big, I fly more aggressive.. Death Spiral...  I either lost a motor (warm) or a esc...funny though this motor was from my wizard 220...
  Added a battery to my Betafpv Twig XL, looked at my controller.. waited for the telemetry to show before arming... No luck, then I remembered, it has a XM+...(No telemetry).
  I know any day of flying is better than not... and even better preparation can allow "issues"...and yesterday  caused me to think.. Is there a better way to set myself up for successful time out? having fewer quads to 'repair'? When do you 'retire' components?(total failure?) I know that Panda RC vtx has been through HELL and back, along with the antenna...I know the performance has been compromised....
  Oh, totally forgot.. I had grabbed my fav 4" got the tones.... would NOT ARM.. 
Still had a great time with the guys...discussed RID... all had the same train of thought.., non-compliance, ' they gotta find me first'.

I think component failure is pretty hard to predict. Despite service life logic, some new parts just randomly quit, whereas some old, abused, poorly installed parts seem to live on forever...
However being organized after you fly your drones does help, especially if you have a larger fleet. Often times I spot issues and tell myself, ok I need to fix this... later, then grab another drone to fly. I end up putting off the repair, eventually forgetting, and then only remember next time I plug it in, "Oh yeah I was supposed to fix that...". I never got to doing it, but imagine if I had a some simple tags to write down the issue and attach it to the drone would help.

THAT is a good idea..

Haha, the black tag. I use them, but mostly I don't have to because if it's broken, it is generally not assembled. But I also only ever have a couple of working quads built at any time. Still in the past I would often throw my Meteor85 in the flight box as well as Flea and since I always carried 2S and 3S Lipos, I could always fall back on the whoop if Flea had some issue. But flying for me has never been a day thing. Most of the time it's a couple of hours. Going out for an entire day would need me to charge about 100 Lipos.

… update- the HDzero rig, dislodged mipi cable and discovered an antenna issue (pretty sure it was from the 60 foot disarm).. but it’s all good, great signal!
The 5” basher motor issue may have been “enhanced” because I had it set up to fly 6s on 4s motors.. the motors were “mis-matched”, beat up and on but-directional ..
The non-arm was pilot error.. I had totally forgot I had this on a weird arm procedure. If I had my goggles on I would have seen it in the OSD..
If I was better prepared (having my rigs in proper working order), this flight day would have been 1000 times better! Flying wise..
I always have a great time with the “old guys”.. They perked up a bit when I said I wanted to try fixed wing ..(you know it’s gonna be fpv)..