Bullitt
lvl.1
Flight distance : 272700 ft
United States
Offline
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About a week ago I was piloting my Phantom 4 Pro + in a remote outdoors area, there was no apparent signal interference, good weather, a calm day. All conditions were well suited for flying.
I had been flying for about half an hour, landed, moved to a different location, and took off near a creek. As I was preparing my shot above the creek, the controller suddenly said "LANDING" and proceeded to descend where it was hovering. It did not attempt a return to home. I tried to manuver the aircraft and hit the cancel button several times on screen, none of which responded.
The drone landed in the creek, (which was about 2-3 feet deep) and after bobbing up and down in the water for about a minute struggling to land, it picked itself back up and then initiated return to home proceedure. It came down a little off course and tried to go through a small tree. My colleague grabbed it out of the air before it hit the tree and we recovered it successfully, of course now heavily water damaged.
I sent the drone back to DJI for repair and explained the whole thing, including the video clip it recorded during the incident which was not corrupted.
This is what they sent me:
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1. Unit took off with normal GPS signal, unit was responsive. 2. At t=278s,unit triggered rth due to lost RC signal. 3. At t=306s, unit returned above home and initiated auto landing. 4. At t=397s, unit clipped object in air during auto landing and fell. Conclusion: User was not familiar with RTH logic. Hazardous flight environment. No unit malfunction found.
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Their assessment of the events is about half-way correct. The unit did trigger RTH, and it did clip an object (the tree) but it did not fall and it clipping the tree was not what caused the damage, but they are completly ignoring the fact that it decided to land in the stream before it even tried to RTH. It was not a hazardous flight environment and I am familiar with how RTH works. This was clearly a case of aircraft malfunction and I have no idea what triggered it. I have tried to explain this to DJI tech support to no success, so i'm looking for other options.
Video clip of the event here:
https://vimeo.com/265660737/b3ed377a62 |
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