Tim Gn
 lvl.2
United States
Offline
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Go ahead and add me to the list. I have been in aviation for well over 30 years and worked with gyros, IRU, INS, GPS, altimetry, radar altimeters and barometers BUT I am new to drones. I finally got comfortable with my Mavic 2 Pro and took it last week to National Forest in Tennessee to do some videography and photography. I went through my checklist and the only thing unusual was I had to align the drone compass. Once that was complete I took off and switched to tripod mode. I captured some nice video of a mountain stream adjacent to the road and had no issues going up the hillside and back down to the road. Once at the road I flew the drone down the road about 40 yds then moved it out over the river and began flying up the river doing video at an altitude of about 7 feet agl. The drone was now only about 20 yds from me I would guess and flying wonderfully. I glanced down at my smart controller to adjust the camera and then things happened fast. All I really can remember was I received a "drone disconnect" red message and when I looked back at the drone it was sinking in the fast moving stream. I searched for about 3 hours but with the depth and speed of the river the drone was not recovered.
I have reported this to support today and provided them with all of the details and logs.
Since then I have looked all over and found that these drones seem to have an issue with flying over water (at least for some people). I have watched tons of videos of people doing test with some saying turn off the optical etc and others saying not to. I also see where the manual says to do that but unfortunately, I did not have it off.
Now the equipment I deal with on a daily basis always has a failsafe backup in case a component gets confused, in other words, if the optical system provided erroneous data then it would be backed up by for instance the baro altimeter which would obviously not be as accurate. There is always a chain of priority.
I assume there is no such priority in these drones, but I am looking for help in understanding what went wrong, what I can do to prevent this in the future, and how reliable and trustworthy these systems are. This is exactly the type of flying that I will be doing with drones to augment my photography, so I need to learn and have confidence the equipment will work to my expectations and learn what I need to do.
Obviously, if the drone cannot handle this type of environment then I will need to look for something that can. I have seen others that don't seem to have issues so I need to determine if it was a malfunction or operator error.
Any help will be appreciated, I will attach a .csv to this post.
signed a somewhat distraught new/past drone owner
tim
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Core User of DJI
DJI team
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