Hi guys, first time poster here.
I was on vacation in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, where I lost my beloved Spark. I prepared the drone for flying, (I had all the software updated to the latest version the day before), doing the initial checks, I waited for the GPS to kick in (I had a solid 15 satellites), after take off I let it hover at 1 meter hight for a few seconds, then flew it straight up for about 40 meters (using the RC and my Sony Xperia XZ Premium). At this point I received a screen notification that said "Magnetic Field Interference. Exit P-GPS Mode". I immediately pushed the Return Home button, after which I saw the "Weak GPS signal.Positioning accuracy may be compromised. Please fly with caution." notification. I pushed the return home button once again. After that I saw the "Return to Home - unknown error" notification. The drone was hovering all this time, after the last notification, the one with the unknown error, my Spark just flew away, extremely fast and I (and my spotter) soon lost track of it. The DJI GO4 app was saying that the drone was disconnected at this point. We immediately headed to its general direction, while pushing and pushing the return home button. I left another person at the take off point just in case the drone returned there, which it never did. After a few minutes of still not seeing or hearing it flying, I went into the Find my drone section of the DJI GO4 app and located it. It took a while to get there, as the area we were in has a lot of gated resorts and we couldn't go in a straight line, and by this time the battery (which was fully loaded initially) must have been drained. I kept trying to reconnect with the drone, with no favorable outcome. The area the app located my drone was behind a hotel that was surrounded by a gated fence. After a while of shouting and trying to get someone's attention we managed to find a person that opened the gate for us and we entered the site. My Spark was nowhere to be found. We searched for more than 2 hours, I even had to pay that person some money to keep letting us search for it, as he said he was really busy and we were keeping him from his work. We returned the next 2 days and kept searching for it, with no luck. After that my vacation was over and I left for Romania.
The area I flew my Spark is mainly hotels, resorts and beaches, no military bases, radars or other visible types of antennae. I asked the hotel staff if it's ok to fly a drone on the beach, they said yes. During my previous flights the Spark never behaved out of order. The Spark was a gift from my wife's brother, who bought it in the US and brought it to Romania. I bought the RC separately, here, from a DJI authorized reseller.
I sent all this, with screenshots of my flight record and errors to the DJI US support team, do you think I stand any chance of getting a new drone?

Adrian, sorry for your loss!  The one thing I noticed is you said "I received a screen notification that said "Magnetic Field Interference. Exit P-GPS Mode". I immediately pushed the Return Home button".  Once Spark exit's P-GPS mode, it's in atti mode and the RTH does not work.  I know it's too late now, but once that happens, you should have tried to control it with the sticks to bring it back.

Sorry to hear that. You have to wait for the DJI support answer.

Hddeuce Posted at 2018-5-2 06:52
Adrian, sorry for your loss!  The one thing I noticed is you said "I received a screen notification that said "Magnetic Field Interference. Exit P-GPS Mode". I immediately pushed the Return Home button".  Once Spark exit's P-GPS mode, it's in atti mode and the RTH does not work.  I know it's too late now, but once that happens, you should have tried to control it with the sticks to bring it back.

Thank you for your answer. The truth is, seeing that Spark fly away and away and away broke my heart. I believe I pushed the left stick down too, not only the RTH, but I was rushing with anxiety at that moment and can't really say if I did so or not. The connection loss happened a few seconds later, the whole thing happened in 16 seconds.

http://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/EK22BDAO9VWSA2UFVSJ6/

This is the flight log, if anyone is interested. I will do some internet research to try and find out what went wrong.

Adrian Axinia Posted at 2018-5-2 06:52
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Sorry for your loss. From the images above I can see that you have 15 sats visible but the GPS signal strength is nil.
Do you know how to fly your drone in Atti mode ?  As mentioned above when you lose GPS you should take control of your drone and bring it down safely as RTH will not work. It too late now but remember for future use.

Adrian Axinia Posted at 2018-5-2 06:52
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In ATTI mode the RTH is not available. ATTI mode is full manual control.

There can be many reasons for what happened here, the most likely is you picked up compass problem on the ground, if your craft was laid on concrete floor with rebar concrete, or close to metal, your symptoms show this could have happened. I will explain below, it doesn’t mean that dji won’t give you warranty, I can’t tell you that and I wish you luck with it.

The best way I can explain this is. If you put your Aircraft on the ground in normal circumstances, start it up, then lift it up and turn it 90 degrees to the right both your compass heading and IMU will both move together 90 degrees and no problems.
If you put your Aircraft on the ground and there is magnetic interference only the heading of your compass will change, your aircraft will still take off. But when it clears magnetic interference compass will then move to correct heading which you would think was great. But No, what happens is IMU is then conflicted and confused because of this sudden movement by compass, so you receive IMU exceptional heading warning, your aircraft cannot deal with data conflict so decides to switch to Atti mode dropping gps in favour of compass simply because aircraft can fly without gps but not compass.

While I can’t be certain you picked up interference from the ground or surrounding area it is the most common cause.
I have seen many cases where people start their aircraft in or on their car in their house and then bring it outside so damage is already done and we will see exact same warnings and and reaction from aircraft.

We all should check our compass when we start our aircraft and maybe more of this could be avoided, you can do this by checking the small red triangle in the lower left corner of your telemetry.

One last thing I will say is we must always try to land aircraft immediately when this occurs.

Ram-UK Posted at 2018-5-2 11:48
Sorry for your loss. From the images above I can see that you have 15 sats visible but the GPS signal strength is nil.
Do you know how to fly your drone in Atti mode ?  As mentioned above when you lose GPS you should take control of your drone and bring it down safely as RTH will not work. It too late now but remember for future use.

It was full two seconds earlier, it dropped to zero suddenly.

So was that fact that he hit RTH after losing GPS and was in ATTI mode why it flew off?  Did hitting that button even though at that point it had no GPS send it to a fictitious "HOME"?  I would think if it loses GPS it would just sit there or continue to do whatever you were doing with the joysticks at the time.  Just trying to understand the programming in the Spark.  I flew mine from outside into my garage and it went into ATTI.  It wiggled a bit but I got it under control but it never tried to fly away.  Just curious on the theories of the fly aways.  If you're in ATTI mode you're still in control of your drone at that point.  Now its different if you had it on a heading and you lost connection completely and it just kept going and got out of range or something.

hallmark007 Posted at 2018-5-2 12:03
There can be many reasons for what happened here, the most likely is you picked up compass problem on the ground, if your craft was laid on concrete floor with rebar concrete, or close to metal, your symptoms show this could have happened. I will explain below, it doesn’t mean that dji won’t give you warranty, I can’t tell you that and I wish you luck with it.

The best way I can explain this is. If you put your Aircraft on the ground in normal circumstances, start it up, then lift it up and turn it 90 degrees to the right both your compass heading and IMU will both move together 90 degrees and no problems.

I took off from a small beach, and put the Spark on a flat rock. There was no metal around.

HTWEELZ Posted at 2018-5-2 12:08
So was that fact that he hit RTH after losing GPS and was in ATTI mode why it flew off?  Did hitting that button even though at that point it had no GPS send it to a fictitious "HOME"?  I would think if it loses GPS it would just sit there or continue to do whatever you were doing with the joysticks at the time.  Just trying to understand the programming in the Spark.  I flew mine from outside into my garage and it went into ATTI.  It wiggled a bit but I got it under control but it never tried to fly away.  Just curious on the theories of the fly aways.  If you're in ATTI mode you're still in control of your drone at that point.  Now its different if you had it on a heading and you lost connection completely and it just kept going and got out of range or something.

The fly away is caused by wind and lack of stick input by controller, if it’s a very calm day it makes it a lot simpler, hitting RTH will have no effect, Aircraft will maintain horizontal if it is low enough it will also be helped by vision sensors to hold its position, but higher up it depends on gps for lock. It’s impossible to control unless you have experience and you need to continually use sticks 100% full on.

Adrian Axinia Posted at 2018-5-2 12:09
I took off from a small beach, and put the Spark on a flat rock. There was no metal around.

I’m not saying you picked up interference from the ground, but it’s highly unlikely you picked it up in the air,
It’s very easy to check compass heading while aircraft is on the ground by checking small red triangle left hand bottom corner you just need to check it’s on the same heading as aircraft.

HTWEELZ Posted at 2018-5-2 12:08
So was that fact that he hit RTH after losing GPS and was in ATTI mode why it flew off?  Did hitting that button even though at that point it had no GPS send it to a fictitious "HOME"?  I would think if it loses GPS it would just sit there or continue to do whatever you were doing with the joysticks at the time.  Just trying to understand the programming in the Spark.  I flew mine from outside into my garage and it went into ATTI.  It wiggled a bit but I got it under control but it never tried to fly away.  Just curious on the theories of the fly aways.  If you're in ATTI mode you're still in control of your drone at that point.  Now its different if you had it on a heading and you lost connection completely and it just kept going and got out of range or something.

Probably not.. Pressing RTH in this case didn't cause it to fly away...  It just blew away in the wind. Once it lost connection to the RC it would have landed wherever the wind had taken it.

They should add  "Return to home will no longer function" to the end of all the error messages.     Any error on the spark means you need to get the drone down manually and quick.  At the first sign of trouble pull the stick down.. pilot it toward yourself if you can but come down close to the ground where wind will be less of an issue.  Better to land somewhere that you know where to look for it than to have it blown way.

LouisP Posted at 2018-5-2 12:31
Probably not.. Pressing RTH in this case didn't cause it to fly away...  It just blew away in the wind. Once it lost connection to the RC it would have landed wherever the wind had taken it.

Once it looses connection with RC it will start to land not drift away, it will drift as its landing , I found this out awhile ago and for some reason dji are keeping it a secret.

hallmark007 Posted at 2018-5-2 13:06
Once it looses connection with RC it will start to land not drift away, it will drift as its landing , I found this out awhile ago and for some reason dji are keeping it a secret.

That is what I meant to say... But if it has altitude it may blow on the wind for a while before it actually loses the signal from the RC. Then it starts to land but the spark does not come down fast, so from a couple hundred feet up, it could easily be blown quite a distance as it is landing.  If there really was a loss of control (not signal from the RC).. the best course of action might be to turn the RC off to force it to start landing hopefully while you still have a visual on it... but  I doubt anyone would actually do that.

LouisP Posted at 2018-5-2 13:29
That is what I meant to say... But if it has altitude it may blow on the wind for a while before it actually loses the signal from the RC. Then it starts to land but the spark does not come down fast, so from a couple hundred feet up, it could easily be blown quite a distance as it is landing.  If there really was a loss of control (not signal from the RC).. the best course of action might be to turn the RC off to force it to start landing hopefully while you still have a visual on it... but  I doubt anyone would actually do that.

That’s right just turn off RC once it’s going to be safe it’s a good plan.

Odd that ATTItude mode is the death knell for Spark pilots.  That kind of stabilization would have been a dream for radio control model pilots.  Something that self levels and maintains altitude would be such a pleasure to fly.  I wish my aircraft had ATTI mode.  I could make a sandwich and check my email while flying the plane or helicopter.

I got a response from Venencio at DJI support, he says I have to have a US shipping address to create a case. The European support sends me to the US one, as the drone was bought there, US tells me I need a US address, which I certainly do not have. What am I to do?

I just had the same issue with mine. Some are asking if you tried to bring it home in atti mode. As for me once the signal for the GPS failed and the magnetic field error came up the spark just spiraled then took off on its tour of the area. about 10 sec after gps fail the spark disconnected and return to home was useless as was the remote in controlling it.

Personally the spark had a hardware failure IMO, I have my flight record and Video to support that.

It is now in DJI's hands to review, I am sure they will do the right thing.
good luck

Ken W

All the theories here are correct. There is a thing that no one can explain though. I'll get to that, but first:
When in ATTI is useless to hit RTH. Do NOT press the RTH button.
Then, ALWAYS do a preflight check: compass, wifi interference, battery, couple of manouvres at low altitude. I think Hallmark published a post here around preflight checklist. I may be wrong..
Now, coming back to my point, there is a truth that is constantly reported in all these flyaways and i experienced it as well.
When Compass Error pops up, due to magnetic interference or any other reason, there are situations when Spark do fly away. It is NOT carried by the wind, but accelerating to a random (i think) direction.
In my case, i was flying it indoor, at the office. Before telling me what was wrong, i can day i am able to fly in ATTI. Questionable or not, i have some experiences with RC models. Anyway, as expected, a compas error popped in, and before i was able to react in any way, Spark started to accelerate towards a wall and it hit it. Fortunatelly, it was 3 metters away so it did not gain too much speed. I would say it was accelerating towards the wall as there was the strongest magnetic interference: fake wall with a lot of wires and some other iron reinforcements.

So, there may be cases when the pilot is not able to regain the control, but i would say there are cases where Spark is accelerating very fast and there is no time to react. Connectivity is lost and due to Compass error and no GPS there will be no RTH.

My two cents..

dj_dread Posted at 2018-5-2 14:47
All the theories here are correct. There is a thing that no one can explain though. I'll get to that, but first:
When in ATTI is useless to hit RTH. Do NOT press the RTH button.
Then, ALWAYS do a preflight check: compass, wifi interference, battery, couple of manouvres at low altitude. I think Hallmark published a post here around preflight checklist. I may be wrong..

I'm positive this was the case with my Spark. It kept flying in a certain direction until I lost sight of it. It moved much faster than the wind, also I didn't get any strong wind notifications.

Anyway, if I manage to embed it correctly, this is its las flight. The moment it disconnects from the RC

Spark must maintain GPS signal for RTH to work. The Spark will hover in Atti Mode if no GPS signal is found, in which case you were watching it hover and it would have landed if the battery drained. Good luck with your discussions with DJI, I hope you can get back up and flying soon.

Hddeuce Posted at 2018-5-2 06:52
Adrian, sorry for your loss!  The one thing I noticed is you said "I received a screen notification that said "Magnetic Field Interference. Exit P-GPS Mode". I immediately pushed the Return Home button".  Once Spark exit's P-GPS mode, it's in atti mode and the RTH does not work.  I know it's too late now, but once that happens, you should have tried to control it with the sticks to bring it back.

i had the same experience from SPARK, but in the end SPARK returned home on RTH . May be in this case the pilot was flying at very low altitude. The best acton in such a cicumstance is to raise the spark at a higher altitude( Minimum 50 meter addional height) before doing any manual control.

LouisP Posted at 2018-5-2 13:29
That is what I meant to say... But if it has altitude it may blow on the wind for a while before it actually loses the signal from the RC. Then it starts to land but the spark does not come down fast, so from a couple hundred feet up, it could easily be blown quite a distance as it is landing.  If there really was a loss of control (not signal from the RC).. the best course of action might be to turn the RC off to force it to start landing hopefully while you still have a visual on it... but  I doubt anyone would actually do that.

this is also an accepted alternate solution to turn off the RC for SPARK to do a live reset in mid air and from my experience when the RC is switched ON again ,SPARK regains control and RTH will work.
Ofcourse the other option is raise the height of the drone.

Turning Off RC sounds like a good plan if you're having a hard time manually controlling your AC.

My question is, will the AC land if it is above waters?

S.J Posted at 2018-5-2 16:50
i had the same experience from SPARK, but in the end SPARK returned home on RTH . May be in this case the pilot was flying at very low altitude. The best acton in such a cicumstance is to raise the spark at a higher altitude( Minimum 50 meter addional height) before doing any manual control.

His spark had experienced errors and was flying in ATTI mode.. so it would not have returned to home

Adrian, please contact our support and start a case first: http://www.dji.com/support I believe our support will help you deal with the situation. Please wait patiently for the data analysis.

DJI Elektra Posted at 2018-5-2 20:29
Adrian, please contact our support and start a case first: http://www.dji.com/support I believe our support will help you deal with the situation. Please wait patiently for the data analysis.

I did contact them, they told me to provide a US shipping address to start a case, after tracking down long lost immigrant family members I did provide them with a US shipping address, now I'm just waiting for them to open the case.

I suspect the problem was in the first sentence of your post "updated to the latest firmware" I've now seen over a dozen posts with GPS/Compass problems that only have running .900 firmware in common. I've also experienced this as my first ever control problem with the Spark. I've now rolled back to .700 and won't be updating until the next firmware after .900 is released, which i hope is soon considering the number of incidents that have been happening!

MKPSG12 Posted at 2018-5-2 23:10
I suspect the problem was in the first sentence of your post "updated to the latest firmware" I've now seen over a dozen posts with GPS/Compass problems that only have running .900 firmware in common. I've also experienced this as my first ever control problem with the Spark. I've now rolled back to .700 and won't be updating until the next firmware after .900 is released, which i hope is soon considering the number of incidents that have been happening!

Well, it would be bloody ironic if a firmware update caused my loss, as DJI advises to always update to their latest.

LouisP Posted at 2018-5-2 12:31
Probably not.. Pressing RTH in this case didn't cause it to fly away...  It just blew away in the wind. Once it lost connection to the RC it would have landed wherever the wind had taken it.

I know some (including some very smart and experienced members of this forum) have said that when the RC disconnects from the aircraft and the aircraft is in ATTI mode, it will automatically start descending after 3 seconds and try to land.

I've never seen this documented and this particular log does not demonstrate this.  

At the very end of this log, we can see that there were various disconnects that occurred.  One of them was for 34.6 seconds.  When this happened, the aircraft was at an altitude of 92.2 ft.  When it reconnected 34.6 seconds later, it was at 92.5 feet.

To me, this demonstrates that even though the aircraft was in ATTI mode and the remote was disconnected for a long period of time, the aircraft did not go into any sort of auto descent or landing mode.

KlooGee Posted at 2018-5-3 10:04
I know some (including some very smart and experienced members of this forum) have said that when the RC disconnects from the aircraft and the aircraft is in ATTI mode, it will automatically start descending and try to land.

DJI does not document this and this particular log does not demonstrate this.  

Thank you for your thoughts.

Sooooooo, I bought a new Spark today. Couldn't live without it.

KlooGee Posted at 2018-5-3 10:04
I know some (including some very smart and experienced members of this forum) have said that when the RC disconnects from the aircraft and the aircraft is in ATTI mode, it will automatically start descending after 3 seconds and try to land.

I've never seen this documented and this particular log does not demonstrate this.  

I think downlink maybe referring to video downlink lost.

Adrian Axinia Posted at 2018-5-3 10:08
Thank you for your thoughts.

Sooooooo, I bought a new Spark today. Couldn't live without it.

That is awesome!  I hope you have many safe and fun flights in your future!

I think there was some very good advice in the thread above that we can all be mindful of to help us all try to minimize problems.  Definitely make sure to do a good pre-flight routine.  Make sure your compass heading shows correct compared to the physical heading of your aircraft.  Compass problems will always throw it into ATTI mode where it will be subject to the environment and pilot inputs.  It is hard for us to say whether there is anything you could have done to prevent the compass errors.  It could have been a hardware/software issue with DJI or it could have been external environmental issues.  If you do a good pre-flight check, it just helps to minimize the potential for problems (but certainly can't guarantee).

If it does go into ATTI mode, don't worry about RTH, just keep trying to manually fly it yourself and DON'T GIVE UP!  

Have fun with your new Spark!

hallmark007 Posted at 2018-5-3 10:28
I think downlink maybe referring to video downlink lost.

If it was only the video that was lost, wouldn't you expect the logging to continue during that period?

KlooGee Posted at 2018-5-3 10:37
If it was only the video that was lost, wouldn't you expect the logging to continue during that period?

Downlink Restored refers to the downlink signal - the signal from the spark back to your controller, carrying the video and telemetry.
It is normal to lose that before you lose Control Signal (from the controller to Spark)

I know what your saying about logging data, If it carries other data I’m not sure, but from experience I have seen downlink restored after periods of time data was not recorded but controller still worked.
But as I say I’m not 100% sure.

KlooGee Posted at 2018-5-3 10:36
That is awesome!  I hope you have many safe and fun flights in your future!

I think there was some very good advice in the thread above that we can all be mindful of to help us all try to minimize problems.  Definitely make sure to do a good pre-flight routine.  Make sure your compass heading shows correct compared to the physical heading of your aircraft.  Compass problems will always throw it into ATTI mode where it will be subject to the environment and pilot inputs.  It is hard for us to say whether there is anything you could have done to prevent the compass errors.  It could have been a hardware/software issue with DJI or it could have been external environmental issues.  If you do a good pre-flight check, it just helps to minimize the potential for problems (but certainly can't guarantee).

Sound advice.
I flew it today, burned through 3 batteries. I kept it in beginner's mode and looked at the screen more than at the drone. I always did the pre flight checks, now I also check the sensors, compass, all that.
Officially, it's my wife's drone, as mine was lost, so I'm being punished for it.
Will also write my name, e-mail and phone number on the drone, just in case.
I really hope my case with DJI support ends favorably, I'm sick of flying my wife's drone, like a mere peasant.