Zviratko
lvl.1
Flight distance : 1401 ft
Czechia
Offline
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It's good to be afraid when operating a drone, keeps you concentrated and thinking.
But yes, I am quite afraid that one day I'll turn the Spark on, let it lift off and it will just fly somewhere on its own. It's happened to me before with my DIY drone with GPS - the GPS module had a loose wire which caused it to reset, and when that happened during flight it also triggered some bug in the control software.
This meant that I took off with home position "unset", effectively 0°00'00.0"N 0°00'00.0"E. This also meant that when it happened during flight, drone switched to RTH mode and went full speed away to that location - luckily straight into a bush. Were it not for the bush it could have gotten 20km away somewhere then dropped like a rock. (true that Spark would have avoided the bush and screwed me much more )
Drones have come a long way, DJI Spark is another beast completely, but it still runs software, and it will always have bugs.
But cars also have software (with bugs). Airplaines also have software (with bugs), your electricity company uses software for management - and (surprise) it will have bugs, yet you don't see crashed cars/aircraft everyday, and your electricity works.
The better question is how likely you are to trigger this bug - even if we had, say, 200 people on this forum whose drone flew away or dropped from the sky, it's still but a fraction of the number of drones that fly every day.
And people coming here either
1) were registered and coming here already, thus we can infer they probably fly more than your average guy
2) had this issue happen and came here to share/complain/find solutions
neither I think represents the average user who bought it to take snaps on a holiday and has a drone more as a novelty....
However! People do stupid things with drones, like flying over people, near highways, close to electricity lines and so on. If this issue exists and has a more than negligible probability of occuring, then DJI should tell us - so far I've seen no explanation, no disclosure, no alert from them. I'm wondering what would happen if we reported those issues to the NTSB... |
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