I’ve flown the Mavic Air 2 and the Air 2s many times and this has never happened to me until today.

I was flying my Air 2s directly overhead about 390 ft up. It was doing fine. Seemed like a strong signal. No video lag. Then I tap the screen to set the exposure for a sunset I’m trying to capture. It looks good. I take a couple pics.  Then bam. Video freezes.  I get some warning about losing visual sensors and the screen goes black.  I then get a message that it’s returning to home. I cancel that and land it myself. Video feed never comes back. I try quitting the app. It’s still black. I try rebooting the controller. It’s still black. Only after I power the drone off and back on did the video start working again.

Is it normal for restoring the video feed to require a reboot of the drone?  The Air 2s I was flying is one I got back from a recent DJI care refresh express replacement. I’m a bit worried that I got a refurbished unit that wasn’t truly fixed.  It looked brand new (sealed box and stickers) but maybe that’s how the refurbished ones look too.

I’m on the latest drone firmware and iOS app. My phone is an iPhone 11 Pro running iOS 14.5.

Thanks for any help or reassurance you can give me.

I am always wary of any company sending me a defective product from the "repair pool " that has not been exhaustively retested. I used to work for a large company that did that kind of exchange and very often they could find no apparent problem, so put it back "on the shelf".

Try changing transmission mode between HD and smooth, it solved not having video feed for me on the tablet... but I was landed when that happened.

I doubt you will have got a repaired Air2S as the drone is still very new and would not be much failures there as yet, maybe it was a lemon.

Hello there ForceBlast. I am sorry for the trouble this ha caused and thank you for reaching out. Can you please fly your DJI Air 2S to a different location to see if the issue will still persist? The said DJI drone might have picked up magnetic interference from the area. That might be the reason why you are experiencing these issues. In addition, I will post a diagram on how to get optimal transmission for your DJI Air 2S. Thank you.

DJI Stephen Posted at 5-2 21:30
Hello there ForceBlast. I am sorry for the trouble this ha caused and thank you for reaching out. Can you please fly your DJI Air 2S to a different location to see if the issue will still persist? The said DJI drone might have picked up magnetic interference from the area. That might be the reason why you are experiencing these issues. In addition, I will post a diagram on how to get optimal transmission for your DJI Air 2S. Thank you.

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Stephen,

Thank you for the reply.  I will try this.  

A part of my original question was not addressed:

Is it normal for a lost (black screen) video feed to require a reboot of the drone to reestablish the video feed?  I would expect it to reestablish the feed automatically once it was back in range.

ForceBlast Posted at 5-3 01:24
Stephen,

Thank you for the reply.  I will try this.  

I just want to bump this one more time since it was missed in the initial responses.

Is it normal for a lost (black screen) video feed to require a reboot of the drone to reestablish the video feed?  I would expect it to reestablish the feed automatically once it had a good signal again.  Once I landed it the drone was about 1 meter from the remote and still no video until I rebooted the drone.

ForceBlast Posted at 5-4 04:45
I just want to bump this one more time since it was missed in the initial responses.

Is it normal for a lost (black screen) video feed to require a reboot of the drone to reestablish the video feed?  I would expect it to reestablish the feed automatically once it had a good signal again.  Once I landed it the drone was about 1 meter from the remote and still no video until I rebooted the drone.

No once signal is back, normal video will be returned without any reboot, and yes Stephen is correct most likely due to bad stick alignment, signal comes from back/Front of antennas not the tips.

hallmark007 Posted at 5-4 04:58
No once signal is back, normal video will be returned without any reboot, and yes Stephen is correct most likely due to bad stick alignment, signal comes from back/Front of antennas not the tips.

So I think there might be a bigger problem here.  As I said, my video did not return even when the drone was 1 meter away from the remote.  There's no way it was a signal issue at that point.  I even rebooted the remote and killed/restarted the DJI Fly App prior to finally rebooting the drone.  Only rebooting the drone restored the video.  
I'm not sure where to go from here.  I just hope this thing doesn't crash due to lost visual sensors at some point.  It hasn't happened again so far, but I haven't done a ton of flying either.  

Interesting and not good reading about this as I use a normal iPhone 11 w/iOS 14.5. I would assume video would return when the drone is 1meter away as well, so it seems something is not right.

Can you share your flight log from this from AirData? Curious if something in that area might have caused this maybe?

Also I would probably try and refresh the FW on the drone and controller and see if this issue returns.

ForceBlast Posted at 5-4 06:02
So I think there might be a bigger problem here.  As I said, my video did not return even when the drone was 1 meter away from the remote.  There's no way it was a signal issue at that point.  I even rebooted the remote and killed/restarted the DJI Fly App prior to finally rebooting the drone.  Only rebooting the drone restored the video.  
I'm not sure where to go from here.  I just hope this thing doesn't crash due to lost visual sensors at some point.  It hasn't happened again so far, but I haven't done a ton of flying either.

I would say from experience you should do a complete refresh of both FW and SW, particularly FW, many times when updating dji FW you reach 100% but for some reason it doesn’t fully complete and can cause similar issues , so before sending back plug into dji assistant and refresh try it then and see if this helps. Alternative is return and wait for a replacement that will require an update anyway, or just carry on and hope it corrects itself. Ive seen it happen before and usually refreshing last FW does the job.

hallmark007 Posted at 5-4 08:29
I would say from experience you should do a complete refresh of both FW and SW, particularly FW, many times when updating dji FW you reach 100% but for some reason it doesn’t fully complete and can cause similar issues , so before sending back plug into dji assistant and refresh try it then and see if this helps. Alternative is return and wait for a replacement that will require an update anyway, or just carry on and hope it corrects itself. Ive seen it happen before and usually refreshing last FW does the job.

Thanks everyone for the replies.  I will try re-flashing the firmware and will look into the AirData log.

ForceBlast Posted at 5-4 09:46
Thanks everyone for the replies.  I will try re-flashing the firmware and will look into the AirData log.

Is there a way to re-flash firmware that doesn't involve DJI Assistant?  


I'm not crazy about a) entering my system's admin password into the prompt for the Assistant Installer, and b) installing an unsigned System Extension on my Mac.  It's MacOS Big Sur so I'm not even sure it'll work.  (I know they put more restrictions in place for System Extensions in this release.)


Perhaps there's a way to factory reset the drone, then re-update through the iOS app?

Edit: Also, which one do I use for the Air 2s?  The "Mavic" release?  

I might try installing it on a Windows VM, then just revert the VM once I'm done.  

ForceBlast Posted at 5-4 10:04
Is there a way to re-flash firmware that doesn't involve DJI Assistant?  

Yea for some reason now there are 2 separate 'DJI Assistant 2' apps... for the Air 2S make sure to use the "DJI Assistant 2 (Consumer Drone Series)".  The '...for Mavic' is for the regular Air 2.

ForceBlast Posted at 5-4 10:04
Is there a way to re-flash firmware that doesn't involve DJI Assistant?  

If you feel that way I’d first suggest delete app, make sure you back up first , reinstall app and see if that works, if it does then your good to go. If not you have eliminated this.
I can understand the problems people have with assistant and why some detest using it, and yes I believe you might need to use inspire version .

Try app first and see how that goes.

hallmark007 Posted at 5-4 10:59
If you feel that way I’d first suggest delete app, make sure you back up first , reinstall app and see if that works, if it does then your good to go. If not you have eliminated this.
I can understand the problems people have with assistant and why some detest using it, and yes I believe you might need to use inspire version .

Thanks for everyone's replies.

I ended up installing it on a Windows VM, re-flashing the drone firmware, then just reverting the Windows VM to its former state.  The firmware re-flash went off without a hitch.  I guess we'll see if the problem comes up again.  

I have had the same thing happen to me. The video feed was lost but due to an obsticle between the drone and the controller however the drone had not regained the connection when I brought it all the way to where I was sending. Restarting the app did nothing. I was forced to land and reset the drone.

Live My Journey Posted at 5-6 10:19
I have had the same thing happen to me. The video feed was lost but due to an obsticle between the drone and the controller however the drone had not regained the connection when I brought it all the way to where I was sending. Restarting the app did nothing. I was forced to land and reset the drone.

Interesting. So it’s not just my drone that did that. I wonder if it’s a bug. If this is common behavior for this drone, DJI needs to fix it right away.  It could be disastrous under the wrong conditions.

Fortunately when it happened I was in an area that was wide open and easy to land. It would have sucked if I were near a bunch of trees and needed to rely more heavily on the camera feed to land.

I had something similar happen yesterday with an Air 2S and iphone iOX 15.4.1.  Had a successful first flight, changed batteries, started everything up in usual order, then noticed that the video feed was frozen on initial position of the drone. But with the screen frozen I could take a video and pictures with no problem. After shutting down and restarting everything a couple of times, including taking the battery out, it went back to normal.