Good evening everyone!

Tonight, I wanted to film a monument in Liege/Cointe, Belgium.
I started the remote control, then the Mavic Pro, then the smartphone.
The checklist was displayed. EVERYTHING was OK Interference almost zero, compass ok, IMU ok, GPS ok (12-14 satellites), ALL was ok, except the front sensors because of low light.

I took off and climbed up to 3 or 4 meters. Suddenly, there was a generalized error. I did not have time to see everything on the screen because it went too fast, but I lost all the GPS, the signals, the system of ultrasonic landing has deactivated. The compass also in my opinion because the Mavic began to rotate a half turn and then it started to fly away at high speed then to go "land" with force a dozen meters away (it was more of a crash than a landing) then it took off again and re-crush again 4 or 5 meters further (the propellers are broken, obviously ...)

You would think that the area is bad to fly with a lot of interference or something like that but remind that there were NO ANY problem before taking off. More, there are 4 or 5 videos on Youtube, made with drones in the same place. Some unidentified drones but also a Mavic Pro like me and two DJI Fantom. None of them have been disturbed in flight so I think it's really a problem that came from my Mavic ... How do I know? What could it be?

Thank you!

Hi Arkel,

Contact DJI Customer Support and they will be able to answer your questions.  There email is  support@dji.com or if you are in the US email:  support.us@dji.com

Good Luck

Wow.! My first thought was some kind of scrambler, activated by a drone hater.

Dear. We are sincerely sorry that your drone has experienced such accident.
For your case, we do recommend you to contact our support team to set up a case. We will try our best to help.
BTW, if your drone is still within the warranty period, you can provide us your flight record, so that we can analyze the cause of the error.
You can contact the team via https://www.dji.com/support.

Thank you for your first impressions.

It actually looks like a scrambling effect but I would be surprised if it was the case because there was nobody at this place.
It is lit artificially at night but the places are very little frequented and everything occured very fast: just the time to deploy the Mavic Pro, launch the application, check and take off, 3 or 4 minutes at most.

It would have been necessary for someone with bad intentions to see me, go home to take a jammer, come back and take action. it's a lot in few time.

@DJI Paladin:
I sent a message via DJI support. It's not easy to navigate, there are several possible paths. I have a valid Care Refresh but in this case, I'm not sure I have to use it: the Care Refresh still invites me to pay when it is quite plausible that the Mavic had a technical problem .

I will keep you informed of the continuation.

Major malfunction or indeed scrambling! Will be interesting to see the cause. Good luck

Here are more details:
The process lasts 1 minute and 42 seconds from the moment the engines are running.
I have 13 satellites, I am a little less than two meters from the drone and the signal is excellent.

• At 1 minute 29 seconds, I take off cool ans softly. The homepoint is automatically saved in the right place.
• At 1 minute 32 seconds, I'm two meters high.
• From there, I do not control anything anymore ...
• At 1 minute 34, he climbed higher than 5 meters and started to deviate, completely out of control.
• It goes at a speed of about 6 to 8km per hour while down at a speed of about 11km per hour (so to go crashing). At this point, the number of satellites goes to 14, so the reception indeed looks better.
• At 1 minute 36, the satellite reception disappears completely (GPS signal weak) and the drone rises to about 4 meters before going down then up and down. The satellites number oscillates between 12 and 14 but with the reception bars at zero
• At 1 minute 37, I get a message "Megnetic field interference - exit P-GPS mode" but the drone has already gone into a spin.
• At 1 minute 42, it hit the ground one last time.
  

OMG - that must have been a scary experience! This sounds like the drone lost satellite connection (the bars are more accurate than the numeric count) and the drone compass malfunctioned - this may have been caused by an external influence such as a huge electromagnetic disturbance in the immediate area or indeed something else... With the GPS lost and the compass malfunctioning the drone lost its orientation and it seems the VPS didn’t work to prevent the collision. It could also be an IMU failure or a combination of the above. It will be interesting to see what the official diagnostic is but definitely looks like a defective unit in which case this should be replaced under warranty free of charge and not care refresh which requires an excess payment for the replacement.

There's normally  no perturbations at that place...

Here's the place were I was... Other drone pilots didn't experienced that kind of thing :

(Mavic Pro) => at 1:00, it is the exact place from where I took of with the same model of drone.

(With DJI Phantom)