NyxOTNC
 lvl.2
Flight distance : 36959 ft
Australia
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This evening I unboxed my brand new Neo and decided to take it out with my Goggles 3 and FPV RC 3 for a maiden. Because it was dark, I decided to use the lit empty parking garage across the street where I test my smaller custom-built quads. The drone could not acquire a GPS lock before takeoff on account of the hundreds of tons of concrete and rebar above me, but no problem, just flip it into Manual and take off to rip around the ground floor as I normally do. First thing I noticed is that this drone is hella twitchy on its default rates for some reason, even moreso than any of my other 2" whoops, and has a terrible throttle response curve, but thats besides the point.
Regardless, about 10 seconds into the flight, right as I had figured out the rates enough to go for the (very large) gap between the barrier at the ticket station and the ground, I guess the drone acquired enough GPS lock to determine where it was. I live in an Extended Warning Zone according to DJI, so normally before taking off from my back yard with my Avata 2 or Mini 4 Pro I get a warning that fills about the middle third of the screen and darkens the rest asking me to confirm that I take responsibility and all that.
Until today, I did not know that this warning can come up mid-flight.
To make matters worse, unlike when you exceed an altitude limit zone in Manual and the drone flips itself into Normal mode and stops, when this warning came up the Neo remained in Manual despite the pilot no longer being able to see, which was rather important as I was hurtling towards an obstacle about as fast as the tiny thing is capable of going. The only way to dismiss this warning is to take my hand off of my right stick and click the 5d joystick. This, again, is not ideal when flying a quad that feels like whatever the exact opposite of "locked" is. I didn't even get the chance however as not even a half-second later the Neo clipped the edge of the barrier and tumbled out of control, bouncing several times across the concrete before coming to rest upside down. I will express that I am impressed that it survived this without even a scratch (even without the removable top guards), and the battery even stayed in (not like that mattered since I couldn't find a setting for turtle mode, so I'm assuming that the Neo lacks bi-directional ESCs and is not capable of it). However, this raises an interesting concern. If I had been flying my Avata 2 in the same situation, it would have at least been damaged, if not totalled by hitting that barrier at full speed.
DJI, I would recommend that you either reduce the visual interruption of these warnings while the aircraft is in flight, or at least have the drone switch to Normal and brake and hover like it does for altitude zone violations and the like. The Neo and the Avata 2 are designed as cinewhoops to fly near people and property and indoors where GPS signal might be inconsistent or intermittent. Just blocking the entire field of view of the pilot while having the drone maintain now uncontrollable flight is dangerous not only to the drone and will result in crashes, but dangerous to people and their property as well. I realize that this was somewhat of an edgecase, but nevertheless I feel like that is an issue that is easily fixed with a firmware update. As previously addressed, the capability for the drone to override the pilot's mode setting for flight zone warnings already exists, and it's probably only a matter of changing a couple lines of code.
Please address this.
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