Gabriel Tallon
 lvl.3
Flight distance : 1579465 ft
United States
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Rob Irving Posted at 5-1 04:07
DJI MINI 3 PRO They do not recommend that you fly your DJI Mini 3 pro drone in the rain. I have to admit, that all sounds like common sense. We were on holiday in Scotland last August and we were staying for a week on the beautiful Isle of Arran. It was the last night of the holiday and I decided that before we left, I needed to get some drone footage of Lochranza castle. This is a ruin of a very old castle, and it is on the north coast of the island. It was getting late and although it was a little windy, the mini 3 pro could easily handle it. It was all going well and as I lifted the drone above the castle, I could see the interior. My final move was to pull the drone backwards and upwards. It was about 9pm and the light was fading and so was the battery. But I still had enough time. The mini 3 pro was now about 200 feet up in the air and about 300 feet behind me when the message came up on the screen to say that the controller had lost contact with the aircraft. Naturally, I pressed the return to home button, but lost contact meant lost contact. There was no control. I could still see the castle on my screen, so I knew that the drone was high up and a long way behind me. I turned around to see if I could actually see the drone but all I could see was that it was above a very dense forest. I tried switching the controller off because that should also initiate the return to home, but this had no effect. Eventually the battery said, “You are out of time.” I checked the controller to see if there was any way to recover it and luckily, it keeps the coordinates of where it last had contact with the aircraft. I imagined my drone plummeting from 200 feet up into the forest. It was now getting late, and we were leaving the following morning. I had to accept that I was not going to find my drone, but I did have its last known coordinates. If you don’t know, it’s a function called “Find my drone.” Saddened at the loss, I decided to come back for another holiday and to look for the lost drone. I lost the drone on August 18th, 2023, and I booked a holiday to return to the Isle of Arran in February 2024, 6 months later. I had accepted that the drone would have spent those last 6 months outside in a forest throughout a Scottish winter but some of the footage that I had lost was of my daughter’s wedding and I really didn’t want to lose that. Plus, it was a 256GB Sandisk Extreme card. February came and we arrived on the Island. We headed straight for the forest only to be told by some of the locals that the forest was not really accessible. It was very dense with lots of steep muddy ravines and very dangerous. There wasn’t really a way into it and we had to climb over barbed wire fences just to get in. My controller was fully charged and still had the coordinates of the lost drone. It was February, it was Scotland, and it was raining. There was no path through the forest, and we had to scramble through rhododendrons, steep ravines and lots of swampy mud but we were getting closer. After about an hour and a half we were, according to the controller within just a few feet of it. I was told that the accuracy of the controller would be to within about 3metres by 3 metres. We could not give up now. My boots were soaked because the mud had come over the top. We had both fallen over several times as rivers of mud ran down through the undergrowth and our clothes were covered in wet mud. Eventually my wife screamed as she crawled though yet another bush. She had been scratched by hawthorn and brambles and I thought she may have seriously hurt herself, but her scream turned to joy as she shouted, “I found it!” I checked the little arrow on the controller that shows you where the drone is, and it was spot on with the coordinates. This was unbelievable. Six months after losing my DJI Mini 3 pro, it was back in my possession. It was the SD card that I was hoping to save more than anything. We took it to the cottage we were staying in. I bought some rice and packed the drone in the rice. It certainly looked like it had spent a rough winter in Scotland. The following day I tried to get it to work but the battery was completely destroyed. I tried a new battery, and it powered up. I tried to start it but one of the propellers was stuck and would not rotate. I was too close now to give up. I kept trying and eventually my lost Mini 3 pro took to the air. I noticed that it lost the ND filter that had been on the camera, but I tried recording on a different card. It worked. I checked the original card, and all my film and photos were intact. During that winter, I had bought a DJI Mini4 pro to replace my drone never believing that I would actually find it again but to not only find it but still be able to use it and to find that it performs just as it did the day I bought it, well this was indeed a miracle. As I said at the beginning, it is good advice not to fly your drone in the rain but if you ever lose your DJI drone and you think that it’s lost and gone forever, I am convinced that you can find it and the chances are that it will still work. Written by Rob Irving
Wow! That's crazy! Good job finding it. Congratulations. |
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