Got a Pro from Santa and tried out Active Track in my driveway. Worked ok unless I got under the drone then it would lose me. Seems like I needed it to have a backup mode engaged...or have it set to maintain a certain distance.

Anyway, the low battery warning started when I was just flying it around (after stopping active track) and I kept flying it for a little bit and was gonna land, when I decided, heck,  I'll fly it over to my garage and land it there. Why carry it? LOL

So I fly it over there, around some large ponderosas, and was right where I wanted to land and about 5' or so from the ground and descending when another battery alert sounded and apparently the aircraft decided to try to return to home. But, two 50' ponderosas were between it and where I'd taken off from out in the open part of our gravel driveway. It started ascending!  I was like....NOOO!!!

I could only get it to come down to about 6' via holding down stick and finally I was able to maneuver it to a place I could fly it through a gap in the trees and out to the open space, but it apparently couldn't figure where home was, cuz it still wouldn't land.

Finally, the battery level hit like 10% and land now took over and it set itself down gently.

WHEW!

So, what was the dang thing doing when ascending?  I'm thinking it was trying to get over the trees that were between it and 'home', but I'm not sure it was facing the trees to know they were in the way. Is there no way I can cancel RTH and land it myself??  I was tryin!!

Just fyi, on its initial flights I've done lots of loops between the trees (in beginner mode) so their proximity to the craft shouldn't matter. This was my first flight outside of beginner mode.

Thanks for any words of wisdom.

Hi, we are so sorry for the difficulties that you had experienced with your Mavic Pro. Please be more extra careful of landing your Aircraft and avoid landing it with lots of obstacle on the ground to avoid any issue. Please fly with caution. If you have any technical question, please let us know. Thank you!

Good recovery. Nicely learned experience; you'll probably be using those recovery skills again.

My only word of wisdom would be "On the first battery beep(30%) Bring your baby home."

Thanks for the story. Glad you made a safe recovery.

The new CAPTCHA crap is the last straw.
Im tired of DJIs crap and am removing my posts and will be on my way.

I agree with B1. Once the low battery warning sounds bring that bird in.

Glad you recovered it in one piece. You just became a more alert flyer.

Brett Brandon Posted at 1-5 16:03
When RTH is activated, the drone will ascend to the height set in the app, then fly to the home point and drop straight down.
I thought I read that pressing the rth button while rth is in progress, stops rth. Don't know for sure about that one...

Thanks for the responses everyone!  As some of you stated, LAND when you get the alarm!  I did exactly that on the next flight.

Brett - I'll try to find confirmation of what you said.  Scary that it'd do that where I live cuz not only are there alot of big trees, but there are two wires too.  Not a good area for a drone to just go do some maneuvers with no collision avoidance sensors other than forward.

What Brett said is spot-on.  I don't know if you had set your height different on your controller, but mine was set at 50, so that when it goes into an auto return it goes up to get away from nearby obstacles and fly back to the start point.;  In fact I set my height to 20 before I read the description and found that is way too low, have to reset it.  Sure glad you got it home in one piece.,

The new CAPTCHA crap is the last straw.
Im tired of DJIs crap and am removing my posts and will be on my way.

If you find that your app says"Battery only enough for rth, going home"you can cancel that on the app itself on the pop up notification, if RTH is in progress you can also cancel rth by pressing the pause button and bring it home manually. If the battery reaches 10% or lower then the drone will start to auto land which cannot be cancelled but you can still ascend by pushing the left stick full up and manage to bring it in.

is it a battery issue where you have, let's say, 70% then all of the sudden 40?

Good job recovery. always have or try to have back up plan in place in case prob

Kandomere Posted at 1-6 16:10
is it a battery issue where you have, let's say, 70% then all of the sudden 40?

DO NOT START A FLIGHT WITH A PARTIALLY CHARGED BATTERY.

Randy

We live and we learn I bet you'll never make that mistake again glad to see everything worked out for the best. I learned with a previous drone not to fly with a low battery, I was at a friend's auto shop showing it to him and he said fly it into the neighbors shop go check them out. While in route to their roll up door it went into low battery return to home from fifty feet mode while it was about 3 ft away from entering their shop, had it gone a little farther that could have been a big mess.

rwynant V1 Posted at 1-6 19:11
DO NOT START A FLIGHT WITH A PARTIALLY CHARGED BATTERY.

Randy

not what I meant, but ok, let's say you have 100% then in 30sec, it's suddenly at 45%.

Kandomere Posted at 1-7 02:22
not what I meant, but ok, let's say you have 100% then in 30sec, it's suddenly at 45%.

OK,  I;ve done that with a 2.5 year old battery......in my Inspire,  my first one.

8 min into the flight the battery started to fail causing the AC to shoot straight up as to RTH height, then the battery puffed itself out of the cradle.......destroying the I-1.

You need to cycle your battery, then charge to 100%...... take off and hover over grass at 6ft or so.....then check your individual cells......after a couple min they should NOT drop below 3.9vdc/cell.

Test carefully and safely.

Randy