Hello. I'm quite expirienced Mavic user (38 hours of flight total). Believed that my Mavic 2 Pro is very reliable device but it suddenly drowned under unknown circumstances . There was almost no wind. A typical summer day. I flew at location for the second day without any problems for filming a commercial. It was an Authorization and Warning Zone (blue and orange, max altitude limited to 60 m). I had all the legal permissions and paper scans with stamps.


I was flying forward in normal mode above water with no obstacles in front of Mavic and suddenly the drone spun and fell into the water. Everything happened so quickly that I did not understand what caused it. The drone could not be obtained, since this is the water area of the port. There is a deep and silted bottom.

DJI Flight Record Viewer shows that battery was ok. May I ask experienced users to analyze the flight record please?
Airdata Flight Record: https://app.airdata.com/share/yzJtbn

Hello there tourist07. I am sorry to read and to know what happened to your DJI drone. Since this unfortunate incident happened and you have lost the said DJI drone. I would recommend for you to contact our DJI Support Team at https://www.dji.com/support?site=brandsite&from=nav for further assistance. We have a team that will do there best to help and will give out the best resolution for this issue. DJI will perform a data analysis service for products under warranty to determine the cause of the accident and provide the proper resolution. If it is evaluated as a non-pilot error, the warranty service will be provided. Again I am sorry your loss and thank you.

Hi there, we are sorry to hear about your loss. We may suggest you contact our online support to report this incident. If the drone is under warranty, we may diagnose it for free. If not, our related team will provide you with the corresponding solution as well. Thanks for your support.

Hello

Sorry that you lost your drone. Looking at the txt file you have provided I have noticed the following:

• @ 7m7.4s a “high wind velocity” message was triggered followed by a 2s time gap
• @ 7m15.4s the drone flipped about 90° to the right at an altitude of 164.4 feet
• @ 7m15.6s auto landing was triggered
• @ 7m18.4s the battery voltage increases by 0.415V at an altitude of 91.9 feet
  

        

Questions

Was there a large / high ship at the location where the wind warning was triggered? If so:

• Did you fly through the exhaust gases?
• Is it possible that you have hit or caught something at 7m15.4s causing the drone to flip?
  

I can only guess what the cause of the voltage increase could be. Probably a power offload; in other words, the motors have stopped spinning.

MeAtHome Posted at 8-5 03:07
Hello
Sorry that you lost your drone. Looking at the txt file you have provided I have noticed the following:

I was filming how two tugs pushed the ship out of the water area.  It was the last scene in my schedule).
Tugboats pushed the ship from the pier where I took off near grain terminal silos. It was a small ship around 70m (230ft) long and under 20m (65 ft) tall. It was grain bulker with cranes.

I flew over them a couple of times (camera tilting from the water to the ship and drones flies over ship) and performed radius tracking shots before the crash. You may see how carefully I flew, checking the space around often so as not to crash into the crane or something else. Then I moved to film from another perspecttive.

The high wind velocity message apeared when I was above the crane. The pier near that crane is non functional now and there were no ships there for around one year. The only ship was to the left from the drone (in the middle of the water area) when Mavic crashed.

So I did not flied right above the exhaust when things started to go wrong. But for the future I would like to clarify whether there is so much danger of flying over the ship pipes and wat clearance may be dangerous?

tourist07 Posted at 8-5 04:42
I was filming how two tugs pushed the ship out of the water area.  It was the last scene in my schedule).
Tugboats pushed the ship from the pier where I took off near grain terminal silos. It was a small ship around 70m (230ft) long and under 20m (65 ft) tall. It was grain bulker with cranes.

What the previous guy didn't notice was that your drone was nearly 200 feet high at the time.
Of course the vessel's exhaust had no effect on your drone.
Even if you had only been 10 ft above the exhaust, it would have had no significant effect.

I see you've already had some good analysis in your post in the other forum, so there's nothing else I would add.

DJI technical support recognized this accident  as a warranty case and sent another unit. Thank You for analysis, guys!

I was suggested by experienced pilots to switch off VPS by flying above water.

kovat53 Posted at 9-1 03:32
I was suggested by experienced pilots to switch off VPS by flying above water.

Completely irrelevant when flying at 200 ft like the OP was.
Also irrelevant at any other altitude.
It's just a myth pushed by people that don't understand what the sensors do and what they can't do.

Labroides Posted at 9-1 05:57
Completely irrelevant when flying at 200 ft like the OP was.
Also irrelevant at any other altitude.
It's just a myth pushed by people that don't understand what the sensors do and what they can't do.

OK, I believe you although the A2 exam here in Europe contained a question about this, and the correct answer was: flying above water it's needed to turn off VPS (because of the changing muster). Yes, at 60-70 m height it is really irrelevant. Anyway thank you.

kovat53 Posted at 9-11 08:19
OK, I believe you although the A2 exam here in Europe contained a question about this, and the correct answer was: flying above water it's needed to turn off VPS (because of the changing muster). Yes, at 60-70 m height it is really irrelevant. Anyway thank you.

Whoever wrote that exam question doesn't understand much about drones.
There's no need to disable downward facing sensors when flying over water.
It's a common myth but it's not true.

Labroides Posted at 9-12 05:23
Whoever wrote that exam question doesn't understand much about drones.
There's no need to disable downward facing sensors when flying over water.
It's a common myth but it's not true.

There is no dispute between us. I'm just saying what I red and lernt. It is said: if you fly close above the continually changing water surface, the VPS can not recognize or identify formerly recorded muster and at landing it can fall into the water. I don't know really , but I have red some cases here in Forum about falling planes into the ocean, etc., I don't know what were behind these cases AFIK ( from the Manual) M2P's downward Vision System makes it possible to hoover without GPS availability and works best at 0.5 - 11 m height. Thank You, good flight.

kovat53 Posted at 9-13 00:14
There is no dispute between us. I'm just saying what I red and lernt. It is said: if you fly close above the continually changing water surface, the VPS can not recognize or identify formerly recorded muster and at landing it can fall into the water. I don't know really , but I have red some cases here in Forum about falling planes into the ocean, etc., I don't know what were behind these cases AFIK ( from the Manual) M2P's downward Vision System makes it possible to hoover without GPS availability and works best at 0.5 - 11 m height. Thank You, good flight.

I don't know really , but I have red some cases here in Forum about falling planes into the ocean, etc., I don't know what were behind these cases

It's a common myth that has no basis in reality.
The VPS can provide horizontal position holding and can have trouble reading a water surface, but that doesn't cause a drone to fall from the sky.

Labroides Posted at 9-13 03:16
I don't know really , but I have red some cases here in Forum about falling planes into the ocean, etc., I don't know what were behind these cases

It's a common myth that has no basis in reality.

OK, no more words from my side. Thank You.