I have a Phantom 3 Professional and I took it out to take some photos yesterday. After uploading the photos to my computer, the disk was somehow corrupted. I formatted it, installed the firmware from this sight and I was back in business. I decided to test it today and started at 57% power in the battery. I hovered about 5 feet off the ground for less than 15 seconds and got an error message on my I pad stating "critically low power, aircraft must land" or something to that effect. I was still showing 57% power and had 3 bars lighting up on the battery.

I tried with a second battery and everything worked as it should.

Anyone have any ideas what may be going on?

Hello there Johnnyv. I am sorry for the trouble this has caused and thank you for reaching out. Can you please try to check if the said intelligent flight battery is properly placed on your DJI Phantom 3 Pro. In addition this issue was due to battery communication is not working properly. I would recommend checking the pins on the battery as well on the aircraft if it has damage. If none, you may clean the pins using the dry soft brush to check if there will be changes or if you would encounter this error message again. Please keep us posted on the latest progress. Thank you for your support and fly safe always.

Welcome Johnnyv ! Make sure battery contacts are clean  ,Baterry itself and Drone Contacts

If the temperature of the battery does not exceed 20º, it is better to wait to fly until the minimum value is reached.


A cold battery does not have a good voltage to fly, and it can give reading errors in your Dji go application, better wait until the right temperature

All good battery information but does not address the fact that part of intelligent battery protocol is never take off with a partial battery (57%) on the next day...

I decided to test it today and started at 57% power in the battery. I hovered about 5 feet off the ground for less than 15 seconds and got an error message on my I pad stating "critically low power, aircraft must land" or something to that effect.
The percentage indicator only gives an accurate indication when you start with a fully charged battery.
If the battery has been lying around a few days, the % shown could be quite misleading.
What's important is the voltage and you could see that in the recorded flight data.

Go to: https://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/Upload/
... where you'll find instructions.
That will give a report you can post a link for the report here.
Or just post the .txt file.

AS has been said Johnnyv, a battery doing nothing will give a very different reading when off load to when on full load like firing up four motors to lift the drone up.
Please post your .txt file here so we can have a look at it and see exactly what is what.

Very helpful. I figured it out.

So what was the problem/solution please?