DJI Thor Posted at 2018-3-1 21:34
Is the battery has appearance damage after the crash? Basically, I might not think it is a good idea to fly with the battery that had crashed before especially if it might have appearance damage.

Besides a few scratches the battery does not show any signs of damage. But you are right. I will use the battery only as backup. No sense in risking to crash a $1200 drone because a $150 battery failed...

Joerg62 Posted at 2018-3-2 12:53
Besides a few scratches the battery does not show any signs of damage. But you are right. I will use the battery only as backup. No sense in risking to crash a $1200 drone because a $150 battery failed...

This thread is a few months old, but I wanted to add that I had to use the battery in question today, the one involved in the crash. My other batteries were depleted and I wanted to get some additional stills of a remote mining cabin. Flying slow and at low altitude the P4P acted fine for a few minutes. Then it appeared to become unstable, followed by the same picture freeze I experienced before the fatal crash with the other drone. Fortunately I had line of sight and brought it back safely. When I landed it did not slow down just above the ground as it normally does, but landed somewhat hard. Fortunately from very low altitude and in sand. No damage to the drone. Bottom line, it was good advice to discard the battery. I certainly will now!

Joerg62 Posted at 2018-7-25 17:16
This thread is a few months old, but I wanted to add that I had to use the battery in question today, the one involved in the crash. My other batteries were depleted and I wanted to get some additional stills of a remote mining cabin. Flying slow and at low altitude the P4P acted fine for a few minutes. Then it appeared to become unstable, followed by the same picture freeze I experienced before the fatal crash with the other drone. Fortunately I had line of sight and brought it back safely. When I landed it did not slow down just above the ground as it normally does, but landed somewhat hard. Fortunately from very low altitude and in sand. No damage to the drone. Bottom line, it was good advice to discard the battery. I certainly will now!

Thanks for getting back to us, like Thor said, it is not recommended to keep using the damaged battery for the safety concern, please let us know if there is any other issue.

I share your disappointment. Bought a P4P and a P4A last summer, and both were destroyed. Something is wrong with these newer models. The P4P was at 350' taking video of a pond, 80% charge, and within sight. The screen went blank, the P4P tipped down as if in sports mode, motors went to full throttle, and drilled itself into the ground. The video was good up until the controller screen went black. A month later the same thing happened with a new P4A, it flipped over and motored full power into a stream. My old P3-4K and old P4 do not have this issue, and work perfectly. I am not buying anymore DJI products.

Paperlessociety Posted at 1-13 15:23
I share your disappointment. Bought a P4P and a P4A last summer, and both were destroyed. Something is wrong with these newer models. The P4P was at 350' taking video of a pond, 80% charge, and within sight. The screen went blank, the P4P tipped down as if in sports mode, motors went to full throttle, and drilled itself into the ground. The video was good up until the controller screen went black. A month later the same thing happened with a new P4A, it flipped over and motored full power into a stream. My old P3-4K and old P4 do not have this issue, and work perfectly. I am not buying anymore DJI products.

I am really sorry to hear about the wrecks. I recommend you get in touch with DJI to figure out what went wrong. As you can see in this somewhat dated thread I eventually received a replacement drone. Since my mishap I have logged many hours of flying the new P4P without any issues whatsoever. Both with Litchi and the DJI software.

Did you use the same battery in both cases? As mentioned above I finally retired the battery that was involved in the crash. It seemed to work fine, but occasionally without warning made the drone behave oddly. That ONLY happened with that one battery. Upon close inspection I noticed some very minor deformation around one of the contacts that may prevent it from getting good contact.

My advice, be persistent. I am sure DJI gets a lot of claims from people who crashed their drones due to operator error. I can't blame them for trying to weed those out. But if you are persistent they will work with you.

Joerg62 Posted at 1-13 16:02
I am really sorry to hear about the wrecks. I recommend you get in touch with DJI to figure out what went wrong. As you can see in this somewhat dated thread I eventually received a replacement drone. Since my mishap I have logged many hours of flying the new P4P without any issues whatsoever. Both with Litchi and the DJI software.

Did you use the same battery in both cases? As mentioned above I finally retired the battery that was involved in the crash. It seemed to work fine, but occasionally without warning made the drone behave oddly. That ONLY happened with that one battery. Upon close inspection I noticed some very minor deformation around one of the contacts that may prevent it from getting good contact.

Here are some of the videos I have taken over the past year with my P4P. I hope this does not violate forum policy.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6YQxKgPA-lFt3g5U9biQA/videos

Most of these are programmed Litchi missions. In at least one mission my programmed path got a bit too close to terrain. The P4P performed perfectly, following the terrain and flying around/over the obstacle in about 10ft distance instead of crashing into it.

Paperlessociety Posted at 1-13 15:23
I share your disappointment. Bought a P4P and a P4A last summer, and both were destroyed. Something is wrong with these newer models. The P4P was at 350' taking video of a pond, 80% charge, and within sight. The screen went blank, the P4P tipped down as if in sports mode, motors went to full throttle, and drilled itself into the ground. The video was good up until the controller screen went black. A month later the same thing happened with a new P4A, it flipped over and motored full power into a stream. My old P3-4K and old P4 do not have this issue, and work perfectly. I am not buying anymore DJI products.

Sorry for the crash accident and the unpleasant experience with our product, did you contact our support team www.dji.com/support for the data analysis to figure out what happened?