Hoping there is a solution.  I have a P3 Pro I purchased new.  Probably less than 8 hours flight time.  During a 18 min flight on full battery screen said disconnect 269 meters away from launch location.  The drone was flying in the home direction so I continued manual flight without the iphone application.  I got the drone to our house with no problem.  It was perhaps 50 ft in the air and TOTAL POWER LOSS.  It fell to the gound barely missing my son and our autos parked outside on the driveway.  The camera snapped off as it hit the ground and one motor is bent upwards.  The battery was reading 40% prior to disconnect and app screen going blank.  Please advise as to what we can do now?  Just bought our son a Mavic for Christmas and we are a little concerned that a power loss like this could occur.  

Hi, PB71. Thanks for reaching out and we're sorry to read about what just happened. It was truly an unfortunate event. We recommend reaching immediately our Customer Support to help you open a ticket and return your unit back to our Service Center for further inspection and investigation.

Sorry for your loss.  If you want, you can post the flight log data using the site linked below and a knowledgeable member may be able to tell you what likely went wrong.  Use this link to convert the flight log data:  

https://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/Upload/#

Then post the link back here.  Good luck.  

It is important to complete the steps in post #3 and upload your flight log to Phantom Help so we can see exactly what has gone wrong, otherwise we would be just guessing.  On the information you provided, however, there seems to be an anomaly already.   

You indicate you had an 18 minute flight and the battery reading was 40%.  Seeing that the endurance/charge duration of a typical Phantom 3 battery in good condition is around 23 minutes, those figures do not seem accurate.  18 minutes flight time would be closer to 75% of the battery capacity.  This sort of behaviour has been reported before on the forum and is typical of a partly charged battery which is assumed to be fully charged.   If the battery has sat fully charged for weeks or even a few days and then flown, or briefly flown in the days before and partially discharged, the charge estimate will be inaccurate.  Your "intelligent battery" contains circuitry that will slowly discharge a full battery to an ideal storage level of around 50% without you having to do anything.  This is in order to prevent damage to the battery.  It is always advisable to charge the battery fully before each flight, even topping them up to make sure they are actually full.  This is stipulated in the manual, although the point isn't stressed enough..  The charge indicated on the app is a calculated value, not an absolute, and partially used batteries tend to report high initially, but exhaust themselves quickly when put under load, thereby not giving you the expected flight time.

As to the reason the power cut out and fell to the ground would also be guessing unless you didn't notice or ignored critical error messages telling you to land.  The error messages and reason will be able to be determined from the flight record once you post the link back here and we can analyse it.  Many of us here take pride in being able to analyse the logs and determine a fault or a cause of the crash, with great accuracy and fact based, not supposition.  Here's looking forward to seeing the logs.  Sorry for the accident.  

If there is evidence of a fault, you should have a good case for a warranty repair/replacement from DJI if you have only recently purchased it new, even though the Phantom 3 has been out of production for some time.

Thanks everyone for the comments.  Couple of replies on the above.  I just looked into the app for the fatal flight data (without download as I am not with my Mac at present) the battery was at exactly 34% when the disconnect occurred (I stated 40% as that was my recollection prior to my disconnect).  Prior to the flight (as I do every time I fly the drone) this battery was charged to 100% an hour prior to take off.  Exact flight time was 18:51 at a distance of 3358.6.  A lot of the flight time was at hover to take photos if that makes and difference or not as to the rate of battery discharge.  The drone was only 269.2m away at the time of the disconnect.  I will try to post the flight data posted when get back to my Mac in the next couple of weeks.  

PB71 Posted at 12-29 11:30
Thanks everyone for the comments.  Couple of replies on the above.  I just looked into the app for the fatal flight data (without download as I am not with my Mac at present) the battery was at exactly 34% when the disconnect occurred (I stated 40% as that was my recollection prior to my disconnect).  Prior to the flight (as I do every time I fly the drone) this battery was charged to 100% an hour prior to take off.  Exact flight time was 18:51 at a distance of 3358.6.  A lot of the flight time was at hover to take photos if that makes and difference or not as to the rate of battery discharge.  The drone was only 269.2m away at the time of the disconnect.  I will try to post the flight data posted when get back to my Mac in the next couple of weeks.

Even though you were flying for 82% of your battery's capacity, it does not necessarily correlate to charge remaining at 18%.  If it were flown flat out with lots of aerobatics or fighting strong headwinds etc, the battery could deplete faster.  Even hovering in a stable fixed location could require a large expenditure of battery if it was a particularly windy day.  Hovering on a calm day could rightly be expected to give a full 23 minutes or more.  However until we examine the flight data it is all speculation.  It is good to get more details in the meantime, which helps later on.  In this case we will start with the assumption the battery is fully charged and therefore not the common cause of failure.

Are you able to say whether the app crashed completely, or did it just disconnect from the aircraft and not receive a signal/video?  The latter could be caused by flying low and having obstructions like trees or houses preventing line of sight, or poor antenna alignment, so the telemetry signal couldn't be received.  That's unusual because it generally gets better and reestablishes itself the closer you get to home.  Also you will lose video earlier and more readily than a loss of control signals.  If the app crashed completely it makes things more difficult because the data from the last leg of the return will likely be missing from the flight record.  In this case it may be necessary to connect directly to the aircraft via USB and extract the black-box flight recorder data to see what the aircraft was doing, minus the record of some of your controller/app commands.

Also can you advise if it was a particularly windy day?  Or abnormally hot or cold?   When you were flying home manually, were you fighting a headwind (returning slower than expected) or did you have difficulty maintaining your altitude?  Having to climb and push the stick up significantly might indicate you were fighting against the critical battery landing procedure.  In this case it will try to land where ever it is to avoid a crash.  You are still able to steer and climb to counteract this somewhat.  If you did not have a functioning screen, you may have been getting sent lots of critical battery warnings but not able to see them, until the point when the battery shuts itself off at 3.0 volts per cell to protect itself from over-discharge (and potential damage/fire).

Looking forward to analysing this case, it has been quite a while since we've had a crash investigation done on the P3 forum!

PB71 Posted at 12-29 11:30
Thanks everyone for the comments.  Couple of replies on the above.  I just looked into the app for the fatal flight data (without download as I am not with my Mac at present) the battery was at exactly 34% when the disconnect occurred (I stated 40% as that was my recollection prior to my disconnect).  Prior to the flight (as I do every time I fly the drone) this battery was charged to 100% an hour prior to take off.  Exact flight time was 18:51 at a distance of 3358.6.  A lot of the flight time was at hover to take photos if that makes and difference or not as to the rate of battery discharge.  The drone was only 269.2m away at the time of the disconnect.  I will try to post the flight data posted when get back to my Mac in the next couple of weeks.

How did you "just look into the App for the flight data", how did you access the .txt  file without a computer handy??

Presumably you are using the same iPhone to post this thread so you should be able to send the .txt file to us???