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ya, I know, just another newb going through a steep learning curve after a little more than a dozen flights.  So if anyone takes the time to give me some feedback, I do appreciate it.  So what happened?  I took off, and it switched to ATTI mode and started flying away.  The adrenaline kicks in, I'm running down the street trying to keep an eye on it.  RTH doesn't work.  I run back home, hop in the car, try to chase it, but have no idea where it is, video feed stops after it leaves the edge of town, and I only have a rough idea of the general direction.  The controller never reconnects.  After driving around for more than 20 minutes, sure enough I get the critical battery warning and unsafe landing area, and I know it's going down.  I thought I just wrote off my new toy; grown men do cry!  I had no idea about how to retrieve information.  It was later that evening that I look into the forums, I learn about healthydrones and I'm delighted to recover the flight path and so I launch the search and rescue team early the next morning.  So what did I do wrong?

It went into ATTI when you were at:  3.6 ft ALT and 1 ft away. Probably you did NOT wait to get GPS lock and you went up and it drifted on you. Also max ALT you had it above 400'??? and you are in PAVED AIRPORT ZONE this is  A NO NO...

You always need to get GPS lock before you take off and DON'T USE AUTO TAKE OFF.

I always let  the engine run for 1 minute, get home lock by the APP and then I do MANUAL home lock to verify. I take off manually LET IT HOVER for another minute making sure GPS LOCK  is on and then I take off.

SAFETY FIRST, FUN SECOND!

dronist Posted at 2017-2-22 19:26
It went into ATTI when you were at:  3.6 ft ALT and 1 ft away. Probably you did NOT wait to get GPS lock and you went up and it drifted on you. Also max ALT you had it above 400'??? and you are in PAVED AIRPORT ZONE this is  A NO NO...

You always need to get GPS lock before you take off and DON'T USE AUTO TAKE OFF.

Good advice, but what's wrong with the auto take off feature?

So you had RC connection, just no video feed? Before you lost that why couldn't you just manually fly it back via the video feed? Not trying to criticize. Just trying to figure out what happened.

Looking through the data one strange notification is the "Mode changed to WiFi_Reconnect" at L. Maybe left over code from the phantom standard that used WiFi?

Any what's even weirder is if it had a bad GPS connection.... How can you see where it was in the flight log???

I guess the learning experience from this is make sure you have at least 15 satellites before taking off to be safe (only had 7).... but that still doesn't explain why it didn't figure itself out once it had a good connection again.

One thing I did notice was that @ 1m22s happy drones calculated a 27mph wind gust @303ft. Just 3 seconds before it switched to atti mode.... Could be bad data or did a wind gust screw up the positioning enough for it to freak out? The other two readings were at around 60 ft. 5mph. They were all around NE.

I had the same problem a couple times after the latest.400 firmware. I would have like 15-17 sat then it'll just go into atti mode. I would try to control it but the right stick was useless and I just start ascending and try my luck with the right stick, it'll start coming to me and will just switch direction without changing right stick. after a minute or so it'll lock back on gps and I get it back closer then lose gps...etc until gps comes back and I get full control to land it.
I flew in the same spots many times and never had loss of gps prior to the .400 firmware. It is very scary to have no control of the drone but I got lucky that both times I eventually get gps back and landed safely. I lost confidence in this thing now and don't really want to fly it far like I used to.

Can you post a screen recording of the flight playback in DJI Go? And if you want a better analysis of what happened, you'll probably need to upload the .dat file from the Mavic for people to take a look at. HealthyDrones is pretty good, but apparently not perfect.

dronist Posted at 2017-2-22 19:26
It went into ATTI when you were at:  3.6 ft ALT and 1 ft away. Probably you did NOT wait to get GPS lock and you went up and it drifted on you. Also max ALT you had it above 400'??? and you are in PAVED AIRPORT ZONE this is  A NO NO...

You always need to get GPS lock before you take off and DON'T USE AUTO TAKE OFF.

Still curious about 'DON'T USE AUTO TAKE OFF.' I use it most of the time. No problems with GPS Lock.

Read manual and youtube..... before flying..

NavigatorNL Posted at 2017-2-22 22:05
Still curious about 'DON'T USE AUTO TAKE OFF.' I use it most of the time. No problems with GPS Lock.

To have a better control of your drone when just taking off and wait for lock GPS and checking to see if everything is OK and so that what happened to the OP doesn't happened again.

Reason in my first paragraph, he push auto take off AND took the AC to 366' in one shot without giving himself time to check and lock.

Sometimes it might take up to a minute to get a lock so hence come my third paragraph in post # 2.
It is all about being safe and taking your time and then having fun.

geofox784 Posted at 2017-2-22 20:22
Good advice, but what's wrong with the auto take off feature?

There is nothing wrong with auto take off feature. You just need more time for the drone to get enough info before taking off. Once you see green status, then you can either auto take off or manually take it off.

It almost went straight into Atti mode, you must have pushed left stick forward for it to rise so high in Atti mode your AC shouldn't rise but will move on the wind, so I'm presuming you had some stick input whether by choice or panic. You can replay your stick movements in the app or just upload them here if you need help.
However at critical battery it did as it was supposed to do, so you found it ok , and lesson learned.

When starting flying it's useful to have a checklist that you use all the time for preflight .

I would also recommend after starting your AC you wait a half minute rise your AC up to ten feet, fly forward two feet fly backwards two feet fly left fly right yaw left yaw right up two feet down two feet and make sure each time your AC returns to a level position and is doing as you command, this will ensure your compass IMU and gps are all working it takes a couple of minutes, but at least if something is wrong , you won't need to get in the car to go looking for your AC..

Good luck...

Glad you found it and that it survived. I appreciate you posting this as I now know about Healthy Drones and have subscribed to their service and downloaded the Android app and enabled auto sync.  Hopefully, I never need to use it like you did, but even still I love seeing all of the data being recorded (I now use it as my flight log).

It would be nice if the OP returns to provide more information/data about the flight and some confirmation of any action that may have contributed to the fly away.  I think a lot of us could draw on this experience if more information would be shared and confirmed.

Glad the Mavic was found and in flying condition......

If you read the manual, you would know you should of been able to kill the motors in the beginning.

FrequentFlyer Posted at 2017-2-23 14:56
If you read the manual, you would know you should of been able to kill the motors in the beginning.

Im at work so I cant see the video.

FrequentFlyer Posted at 2017-2-23 14:56
Im at work so I cant see the video.

I'm not at work and still couldn't view the video.  I believe its because the YouTube channel can't be viewed from other sites.  If you open in YouTube, it can be viewed.  That's what I did.  Hope this helps......

Wow, I can't believe that I'm returning to this post 8 hours later to add a very similar story of my Mavic switching to ATTI mode and then flying away.

At about 5:00 PM this evening I was flying at a reservoir/conservation area; my Mavic was only about 150 meters from me when the Android DJI Go 4 app crashed on my Nexus 6P running Android 7.1.1. Actually, a few things seemed to happen at about the same time: the video feed went really choppy then froze, the GPS signal was lost, the controller went into ATTI mode and the DJI Go 4 app crashed.

At this point, I took my eyes off of the bird leaving it to hover while I focused on rebooting the Android app. When the app reconnected the map showed my Mavic on a road trip about 600 meters away and growing. The app crashed yet again and I decided to give up on it and to rely solely on the controller. According to my controller, the Mavic was now at about 700 m away and growing. I hit the Return To Home button on the controller and got the message NO RTH.

I played with the joysticks on the controller and noticed that seemed to affect the numbers on the bottom of the display. So I continued to experiment with them until I saw the range number declining, indicating that the drone was getting closer to me. I continued with that and watched it slowly count down to about 200 meters. At about this point I was greeted with the most welcome message that the RTH mode had kicked in.  I don't know if this was from one of my many repeated attempts to hit the RTH button or because the battery level had dropped to a critical level. Nonetheless, my Mavic was soon hovering directly overhead and coming in for a perfect landing.

So what the hell happened? Do I blame this on myself as a user error,  the Android DJI Go 4 app or is it a problem with the GPS in my new, 3-day old Mavic?

The firmware on the controller, the Mavic and batteries were all up to date. The DJI Go 4 app was just updated today.  
Here is a link to the flight data at Healthy Drones. http://healthydrones.com/main?share=CEvZpU   Notice that the timer starts at 12m 58s. This is a 'continuation' from a previous flight where I had taken off from a different point, landed here, stopped the rotors, confirmed the new home point, and took off again.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

michaeln416 Posted at 2017-2-23 18:37
Wow, I can't believe that I'm returning to this post 8 hours later to add a very similar story of my Mavic switching to ATTI mode and then flying away.

At about 5:00 PM this evening I was flying at a reservoir/conservation area; my Mavic was only about 150 meters from me when the Android DJI Go 4 app crashed on my Nexus 6P running Android 7.1.1. Actually, a few things seemed to happen at about the same time: the video feed went really choppy then froze, the GPS signal was lost, the controller went into ATTI mode and the DJI Go 4 app crashed.

I think it would be really beneficial to all of us if you could upload your .dat files and let some people analyze them.

The most worrying thing to me about both of these incidents is the fact that your Mavics went into ATTI mode while quite high in the air, and stayed in ATTI mode for minutes at a time. In both cases it looks like quite sparsely populated areas. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reasons for why your Mavics should not have been able to get a GPS lock that high up in the air.

michaeln416 Posted at 2017-2-23 18:37
Wow, I can't believe that I'm returning to this post 8 hours later to add a very similar story of my Mavic switching to ATTI mode and then flying away.

At about 5:00 PM this evening I was flying at a reservoir/conservation area; my Mavic was only about 150 meters from me when the Android DJI Go 4 app crashed on my Nexus 6P running Android 7.1.1. Actually, a few things seemed to happen at about the same time: the video feed went really choppy then froze, the GPS signal was lost, the controller went into ATTI mode and the DJI Go 4 app crashed.

A lot of the blame lies with you if not all, you were flying in controlled airspace D mistake, you lost radio control as marked by the red,  signal purple you were in this zone for most of your flight. I don't know but can only guess you lost signal because of all the trees or geofence, your AC should have gone into RTH sooner don't know why it didn't whether this was to do with your app crashing, but this shouldn't be the case when you loose radio control RTH should kick in maybe it did.
You also had wind warnings you were traveling at 9 m/s and wind was at 7.7 m/s maybe this had something to do with how your Mavic was taking its time coming home.

Long and short is , it is up to you to make sure before flying that you are in a safe area and environment for flying, you can count yourself lucky and hopefully lesson learned.

I think your Mavic did all that was asked of it and that's the bes we can hope for in these situations.

Good luck..

hallmark007 Posted at 2017-2-24 03:45
A lot of the blame lies with you if not all, you were flying in controlled airspace D mistake, you lost radio control as marked by the red,  signal purple you were in this zone for most of your flight. I don't know but can only guess you lost signal because of all the trees or geofence, your AC should have gone into RTH sooner don't know why it didn't whether this was to do with your app crashing, but this shouldn't be the case when you loose radio control RTH should kick in maybe it did.
You also had wind warnings you were traveling at 9 m/s and wind was at 7.7 m/s maybe this had something to do with how your Mavic was taking its time coming home.

The Controlled airspace warning was ignored because it was pertaining to a local parachute club that is closed for the season. No geofence in the area. No sources of metal or wireless interference for kilometers in any direction. I was approximately 20m above open water, within line of sight less than 200m away when the problem occurred. Yes, it was windy (average 20 km/h), which is why I was keeping it very close to me.

I'm willing to accept blame, even all of it; but I still don't see any evidence of that based on what I just said.

Jason Lane Posted at 2017-2-23 22:14
I think it would be really beneficial to all of us if you could upload your .dat files and let some people analyze them.

The most worrying thing to me about both of these incidents is the fact that your Mavics went into ATTI mode while quite high in the air, and stayed in ATTI mode for minutes at a time. In both cases it looks like quite sparsely populated areas. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reasons for why your Mavics should not have been able to get a GPS lock that high up in the air.

I'll download the DJI Assistant and extract the DAT files.

michaeln416 Posted at 2017-2-24 06:40
I'll download the DJI Assistant and extract the DAT files.

This might merit its own thread.  I would be interested in the findings of your specific situation, but also hope the OP returns to update this thread with more details......

Jason Lane Posted at 2017-2-23 22:14
I think it would be really beneficial to all of us if you could upload your .dat files and let some people analyze them.

The most worrying thing to me about both of these incidents is the fact that your Mavics went into ATTI mode while quite high in the air, and stayed in ATTI mode for minutes at a time. In both cases it looks like quite sparsely populated areas. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reasons for why your Mavics should not have been able to get a GPS lock that high up in the air.

Jason although OP's AC was nearly all the time in ATTI mode, michaeln14 had gps for all his flight except for 1 sec around 14 mins , he just had no radio connection.

I'm willing to move to a new thread if this is considered to be unrelated. I chose to post here as I believed that the issue of losing GPS and going into ATTI mode sounded similar and therefore my data may be beneficial to the OP.

I have exported my DAT file and posted it onto Google Drive. I'm not sure how to access it for review as it says that it has been encrypted. Is there something that I must do within DJI Assistant 2 in order to export that data in clear text? I attempted to Report the DAT file to DJI within DJI Assistant; however, I kept getting a server error message. Hopefully, they take notice of this thread.

Google Drive link to exported Flight DAT file (encrypted)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/ ... 2s/view?usp=sharing

michaeln416 Posted at 2017-2-24 06:37
The Controlled airspace warning was ignored because it was pertaining to a local parachute club that is closed for the season. No geofence in the area. No sources of metal or wireless interference for kilometers in any direction. I was approximately 20m above open water, within line of sight less than 200m away when the problem occurred. Yes, it was windy (average 20 km/h), which is why I was keeping it very close to me.

I'm willing to accept blame, even all of it; but I still don't see any evidence of that based on what I just said.

Well ok are you saying you had permission to fly in the area, I don't know if you had, but looking at your HD logs you lost RC signal , it doesn't matter how many times you press RTH it won't send signal to aircraft to RTH if you don't have a signal or at the very least it signal will be delayed .

There was major interference in the area you were flying in whether this is because of class D or because your aircraft was now flying over trees and signal was blocked, but your logs show major interference.

Although you might not have known this area was prone to something like the high level of interference, it was this that caused your aircraft to loose signal.
It had nothing judging by these logs to do with any malfunction of the AC.

You can post your flight log from dji go 4 app to see if and what the stick movements were through all of this, it will also show warnings and how and why RTH kicked in, but for me this happened because of critical battery if you had it set at something like 20% or delayed signal because of interference.

Thanks for your time and the feedback hallmark007.

When I lost the video feed and went into ATTI mode, there were only a few small tree branches in the path (no leaves), my view was 95% clear and I could both see and hear the AC. Immediately prior to this flight, I had flown the exact same path at the exact same altitude with zero signal or GPS loss. The only change was the takeoff, Home Point.

Damn! I think I may have found the answer in that last sentence "The only change was the takeoff, Home Point."  If so this was 100% user error; let me explain. Attached isa a satellite view of the area showing the first Home Point for the original flight along with the second updated Home Point for the take off and landing before the second trip when all hell broke loose.
I'm also attaching a photo taken from the Mavic looking back at me and the 2nd Home Point. Notice anything? Look what's below me, there are 5 large metal culverts. I'm willing to bet that this threw off the compass while the 2nd Home Point was being recorded.

UPDATE - IT WAS ME!
I withdraw my concerns about the Mavic unexpectedly going into ATTI mode and flying away. This was 100% my fault for not being completely aware of my surroundings and noticing the giant metal culverts that were just below the surface of where I was standing. I would like to commend DJI on the amazing fail safes that they have included within this product which took control and brought my Mavic back to me safe and sound even after this egregious user error.

michaeln416 Posted at 2017-2-24 09:51
Thanks for your time and the feedback hallmark007.

When I lost the video feed and went into ATTI mode, there were only a few small tree branches in the path (no leaves), my view was 95% clear and I could both see and hear the AC. Immediately prior to this flight, I had flown the exact same path at the exact same altitude with zero signal or GPS loss. The only change was the takeoff, Home Point.

You know michaeln416, the reason we post these mishaps is not to apportion blame all of us are on a learning curve which is sometimes exciting and sometimes frightening, but when someone like yourself posts there situation and endeavours to get to the bottom of it, it helps all of us, so thank you for posting it's a big help to all of us, who are always learning and it makes this hobby all the more interesting.

I wish you all the best and more exciting times in the future which I'm sure you will have..

Good luck..

hallmark007 Posted at 2017-2-24 08:19
Jason although OP's AC was nearly all the time in ATTI mode, michaeln14 had gps for all his flight except for 1 sec around 14 mins , he just had no radio connection.

But if I'm reading the HealthyDrones data correctly, it looks like michaeln14's Mavic was also in ATTI mode for over a minute between 14m 53s and 16m 07s while it was at a height of 46-50m.

Jason Lane Posted at 2017-2-24 12:17
But if I'm reading the HealthyDrones data correctly, it looks like michaeln14's Mavic was also in ATTI mode for over a minute between 14m 53s and 16m 07s while it was at a height of 46-50m.

At 14.53 mode changed to Atti at 14.54 satellite positioning off colour change to orange, I think although not 100% this is still in gps but just weaker gps.