All -

During my maiden flight w/ DJI Spark, the drone shut down in the middle of the flight and dropped ~2m's creating some cosmetic blemishes on the camera and gimbal. I have checked the flight details and noticed no abnormalities. It does not seem to be related to a battery as it was still charged at approximately 58%. Can anyone help me look into this issue? What type of information needs to be shared? I am quite fearful of flying it any further until the problem is pinpointed and resolved.

Do you started your flight with a fully charged battery?

I'm still new to this, but could it be that you implemented the CSC command by accident? (emergency shutdown command)

Hi, please connect to DJI Assistant 2 on PC, extract the flight record and black box data, send to DJI support. I believe they can help you to analyze the problem.

if your battery is not fully charged (or very close to it) whenever you go to start a new flight, then you will have issues with it when you go to fly. Always charge your batteries to the 4th green light before you go flying.

Mr Smith Posted at 2017-6-22 04:50
if your battery is not fully charged (or very close to it) whenever you go to start a new flight, then you will have issues with it when you go to fly. Always charge your batteries to the 4th green light before you go flying.

What if you fully charged your battery, do one of the quickshots, say a drownie, shut down the craft.... move to another location and take another quick drownie or something else.... this should be possible (my thinking)

Do you use android or ios because I have heard of a lot of problems with people who use android?

MaikR Posted at 2017-6-22 05:08
What if you fully charged your battery, do one of the quickshots, say a drownie, shut down the craft.... move to another location and take another quick drownie or something else.... this should be possible (my thinking)

It is, you just have to keep an eye on the battery performance, LiON batteries 'recover' after discharge, so you might see 90% when you power up but you may see an initial rapid discharge as it all balances out. This is why the manual 'recommends' flying on a fully charged battery.

There is no harm in topping up LiON batteries, as long as you don't top off regularly when they are around 85% as they really don't like it. Once in a while won't hurt though.

I had the exact same thing happen to me!  Dropped from about 2-3 meters.  It was my second flight on my first day owning it.  It was at night and I was hovering over my driveway. The lights and power cut completely off and it fell to the ground!  The controller still showed it flying and still gave me the option of landing even though the spark was completely off.   The battery was still over half way charged and it was a fully charged battery and the first flight for that battery.  It was very hot outside and the batttery was very hot.  Not sure what happened but my confidence to fly this very high and far is shot. Thankfully everything seems to work fine now. There is some superficial scratches but seems to work ok now

It sounds like you did an accidental CSC shutdown, your flight data will tell the tale of what happened

Jaylarsondpm Posted at 2017-6-22 09:34
I had the exact same thing happen to me!  Dropped from about 2-3 meters.  It was my second flight on my first day owning it.  It was at night and I was hovering over my driveway. The lights and power cut completely off and it fell to the ground!  The controller still showed it flying and still gave me the option of landing even though the spark was completely off.   The battery was still over half way charged and it was a fully charged battery and the first flight for that battery.  It was very hot outside and the batttery was very hot.  Not sure what happened but my confidence to fly this very high and far is shot. Thankfully everything seems to work fine now. There is some superficial scratches but seems to work ok now

please let us know when you check your flight data, this is making me nervous to fly over water!

R&L Aerial  Posted at 2017-6-22 10:14
It sounds like you did an accidental CSC shutdown, your flight data will tell the tale of what happened

How do I check my flight data to check if there was an accidental shutdown?

R&L Aerial  Posted at 2017-6-22 10:14
It sounds like you did an accidental CSC shutdown, your flight data will tell the tale of what happened

How do I check the flight data?

Jaylarsondpm Posted at 2017-6-22 12:08
How do I check my flight data to check if there was an accidental shutdown?

You could playback your flight in the app, not sure if you know how to do this so will explain.

Opening page of app, one with picture of spark , top right hand corner 3 lines click on , drop down menu click on I think it's flight logs or something like that. This will bring you to where all your flights are stored. Just click on the flight you need and you can play it back. You will also see at bottom of page your actual stick movements watch these and it will tell what you did with sticks during the flight. If you need to post them here just contact me and I will be able to show you how to do it. But check them yourself.

hallmark007 Posted at 2017-6-22 12:44
You could playback your flight in the app, not sure if you know how to do this so will explain.

Opening page of app, one with picture of spark , top right hand corner 3 lines click on , drop down menu click on I think it's flight logs or something like that. This will bring you to where all your flights are stored. Just click on the flight you need and you can play it back. You will also see at bottom of page your actual stick movements watch these and it will tell what you did with sticks during the flight. If you need to post them here just contact me and I will be able to show you how to do it. But check them yourself.

I just checked the flight log in the app. The joystick controls weren't doing anything abnormal. When it lost power and crashed I was doing slight rotation to the left at 39% and no motion at all on the right joystick.   It was two minutes and 30 seconds into a flight with a brand-new battery that was fully charged. I was 2 m above my driveway and the thing fell flat onto the driveway. I have flown it again since then and I am getting a warning about the gimble motor overheating. I bet it was damaged in the crash.  

Was the internal fan still blowing when you picked it up after it crashed?  Is so then the motor turned off and it was not a full shut down.  If that is the case I would bet you did a CSC (you manually turned ofd the motors) as others here have suggested.  The log probably continues to record even after the crash so you will have to go back further and see if you performed a CSC.

Jaylarsondpm Posted at 2017-6-22 14:49
I just checked the flight log in the app. The joystick controls weren't doing anything abnormal. When it lost power and crashed I was doing slight rotation to the left at 39% and no motion at all on the right joystick.   It was two minutes and 30 seconds into a flight with a brand-new battery that was fully charged. I was 2 m above my driveway and the thing fell flat onto the driveway. I have flown it again since then and I am getting a warning about the gimble motor overheating. I bet it was damaged in the crash.

It could have been damaged, that warning means your gimbal is not moving freely, your spark shouldn't just drop to floor like that. And from what you say you did nothing wrong.

I would first sync your flight to cloud it's up in right hand corner of the flight page you were just on, and try get a hold of a moderator here dji Mindy or Natalia are very good at this, ask them to check out your flight and do you need to send in for warranty to be fixed.
Good luck

We are very sorry to hear about the accident. Just to verify, have you contacted our tech support to get a case number and send it in? If so, please provide us your case number so we can follow up it.
To figure out what happened, please provide us the flight data for analysis. Here is the tutorial for your reference, please upload it to Dropbox after exporting it.

Any progress on this? My spark did the exact same thing and online support was not helpful. Told me to restore spark to factory settings using dji assistant 2 and try fly it again. I am thinking if this happens again while the spark is over water I would not even be able to recover it back for analysis or replacement.

My Spark powered down in flight yesterday. It was flying fine then it dropped from about 3 metres high where it was in a static hover with no control inputs (as shown on the flight recorder). Eventually I found it and luckily it was not damaged as some grass softened the impact. The video cuts off at the time of the crash so it makes me think there was some kind of power. The battery was attached when I found it and the flight recorder shows 60% power remaining. I downloaded the logs and sent them to DJI support. I have been told today that I need to send my Spark in for repair! I'm not sure if I think that's the correct approach. Or perhaps there is a hardware issue like the Karma? I don't really want to be without my drone as I have a trip coming up. Surely a replacement rather than repair is more appropriate given it's only a few days old.

I recently had the same experience with a Spark that was less then one month old.  I had many successful flights, everything working very well.  My last flight was in my backyard and I had just started the third flight of the day on battery number 3 which was fully charged.  Somewhere between 1 and 2 minutes into the flight, the Spark was in a hover about 1 meter above my swimming pool when it just shut off and dropped into the pool.  The flight recorder shows a momentary downward stick input of about 24% right before it shut off.  Not sufficient to have shut down the motors.  I am not completely sure since it fell into the pool whether the fan remained running after the motors shut down, but it appeared to have completely shut down, lights went dark too.

Since it fell into the pool, I have sent it back to DJI for repair.  It is currently in transit.  This appears to me to be a hardware issue, perhaps a defective battery, since it was a complete loss of power on a freshly charged battery.  I included the battery with the Spark so that DJI can check out both together.

Did anyone find what caused these issues I just had the same thing happen and could not recover the drone

The exact same issue happened to me with the DJI Air 2S.

V M Posted at 3-4 00:01
The exact same issue happened to me with the DJI Air 2S.

Hi there. Sorry about what happened to your drone. For your flight safety, we suggest sending it back to DJI for further diagnosis. You can submit a Repair Request on the DJI website or use this link: https://repair.dji.com/. We appreciate your patience and understanding. Have a great day ahead.