I originally posted this on a thread to day but not im going to make a new thread with it since I am very curious on what happened here.  Ok so about 3 months ago I had a incident with my phantom 2.  I bought a new battery from the store and didn't charge it like I should have.  It said it was at 50% when I put it into the phantom for take off.

I had only intended to fly for 4 minutes to film some waterfowl on our property before coming back to home point.  Well shortly afterwards my battery dropped down to 30 then to 15 percent in a matter of seconds.  It automatically started coming home and once it hit 6 percent it decided to land amongst some trees over a swamp.  You have never seen someone in so much distress like me before!  My buddy and I tore out into the waist deep swamp planning on catching the Phantom 2 but it rested gently in the limbs above about 35 feet.  Long story short after going to Wal-Mart to get supplies to get the phantom out and 4 hours later we successfully got the bird down from the limbs using a tennis ball tied to fishing line.  

And it never touched the water below since my friend caught it after it bounced off a smaller tree.  One thing I noticed though is that the camera didn't have any of the recording leading up to the time of the crash?  It recorded the entire event while it was sitting in the tree though?  WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK HAPPENED HERE?  How does a go pro in record mode not have any recordings while in flight up until the time of the crash but yet it has 3 hours of footage while sitting in the tree??  Please explain that?

And yes now I have 3 batteries and I am very smart on when I choose to fly the Phantom based on battery percentage.

I'm starting to think we may just be starting to get some decent feedback on these mysterious flyaways...... How many times have we been told "the camera shut off about 30 seconds before it went crazy"? (My guess is it's much less than 30 seconds, it just seems that way!)

Does the Gopro have its own power supply, or does it use the flight battery?

Are these mishaps occurring to both types of camera?

I'm wondering if it gets a momentary "critical battery alarm" (for reasons unknown), and immediately shuts the camera down. Then it comes back, but is already committed to RTH/fail safe?  We then sometimes panic and make mistakes.

As for coming back on in the tree, maybe once the load of driving four props is done it finds enough juice to close the previous recording and start again?

All just my WAG's of course.

Cheers,
Ian

i_anderson@iclo Posted at 2015-4-10 00:29
I'm starting to think we may just be starting to get some decent feedback on these mysterious flyawa ...

While I would not consider this a flyaway, you are correct about the video cutting off prior to it. I have seen many threads that state this. The GoPro does have it's own battery and will charge using the Phantom battery. Once you power on camera, the charging stops. At least that's my belief. I had to remove my GoPro the other day to fully charge it because it would not stay powered on. I thought it was a little strange since I noticed the charge led come on when I powered the Phantom, so I assumed it was getting charged up when I used it. I am pretty sure once the camera is powered on, the charging stops.

Raybro Posted at 2015-4-10 00:57
While I would not consider this a flyaway, you are correct about the video cutting off prior to it ...

Indeed, poor choice of terms on my part, sorry. The poor thing was simply doing it's best to come back home....

However, and again, this is just some WAG's, I certainly don't claim to know, but the one somewhat consistent thing most report is that the camera shutdown ahead of time. Why would it do that?

Cheers,
Ian

Ian
My guess is the flight controller locks up. much like a computer and the blue screen of death. Once it locks up, you can't do anything but reboot. I know some of the flyaways are more likely pilot error but there are a lot that aren't.  I suppose DJI knows what happens, but I don't think they will ever let the public know, especially if it's hardware related and can't be fixed with a firmware update.
Ray

Once the motors stopped there was enough in the battery to run the camera.  The draw from the motors was more than the battery could handle as it was running.  That is my theory.

Interesting theories here, its a mystery that beats all that Ive ever seen.  So somewhere along the line when the phantom was running out of juice and initiated the auto land mode it caused the go pro to not save its current recording.  The phantom 2 knew it couldn't make it to its home point destination so it chosed to land 30 yards short of where I was and that just so happened was over the trees.  So once the phantom powered down then the Go Pro kicked back on to continue recording.

I wish I could tell you guys if I had a full charge on the go pro prior to the flight or not which might of made a difference.  I wonder if it was fully charged and wasn't relying on the phantom battery for juice if it would of never corrupted during recording.

So this brings up another point about the new software update.  If I had the phantom updated then would I been able to override of where it was trying to land at and make it overshoot the swamp while it was  descending?