Hello all!

We’re had several issues with emergency/forced landings over our first two months. Usually because of ESC 3 overheating. But when emergency landing happens for us it’s very dangerous!! I would love to be able to pause the landing just 10 seconds to find a clear spot that’s close. I’m always flying over trees. So being able ti find a clear spot in time is critical to not completely wrecking these things. We’re only about 20-30 feet above the trees. I literally have about 5 seconds to react. My head wants ti explode. It’s happened three times already.

Happened to me once so far, have you tried holding the "throttle up" stick? it helped me to hold the altitude while returning the drone to a safe landing spot

THANK YOU!  I'll certainly remember that "WHEN" it happens again.

Well, I tried the Throttle Up solution and it didn't override the emergency landing.  When i reached out to my dealer about it they said they were trying to work with DJI support to get them to implement something.

kapchur.us Posted at 7-18 12:57
Well, I tried the Throttle Up solution and it didn't override the emergency landing.  When i reached out to my dealer about it they said they were trying to work with DJI support to get them to implement something.

Hey Kapchur

Have you made any progress with this? We operate on sugarcane estates and when out T30s force land in older fields it does significant damage to the drones and can be very difficult to recover. This has been very frustrating and cost our operation significant significantly in terms of repairs and lost revenue.

I hope that they come up with something or hope they have corrected these issues in the T40.

Well, I have a couple of suggestions.

First, document, document, document.  Your dealer can submit crashes like this to DJI for warrantee repairs and they will pay for all damages to the drone (or have for me so far for EVERY forced landing).  If you have a GREAT dealer, they will mail you replacement parts while THEY (they dealer) work out with DJI to get the parts paid for. This means much less downtime for you.

Second, when leaving "home" and heading to the starting point (or resume point) on the map, I always fly manually and backwards to the start location.  This seems to reduce the overheats!  I think it's because the battery is the heaviest part and is on the back side of the drone and thus the drone would have to work much harder to keep the battery side UP in order to fly forward.  But by flying backward the drone works slightly less hard because the front side is lifted more to fly backward.  It appeared to me that sustained RPMs on Motor 3 went from 2300 or 2400 to about 2000 when flying backwards.  We would still get a battery connector overheat message occasionally, but it has never caused a forced landing. While flying backwards manually it's important to still keep the speed under control and not maxed out.  Usually 18-20 feet per second seemed to be just fine.

Third, buy a couple of extra motors to have as backups. Even though DJI may warrantee the replacement, it's important to keep your drone in the air and operational. And of course have a LOT of extra props (which they've paid to replace as well if there's a crash landing that caused them to break).  If you happen to buy third-party blades (AliExpress - which you can buy a box of 50 sets for a pretty reasonable price) remember to pair them with the same brand.  Meaning don't have one DJI and one NON on the same motor.  They may look almost exact, but they will likely have different manufacturing tolerances and may also cause the motor to overheat.

are these issues arising in T40? We have been using more than 40 T30s in the field and every T30 gets in to this problem and damages itself a lot.