Yesterday I had my first crash with my DJI Avata.    And it was not a good one.  The Avata is now completely unflyable.

The crash happened because the SD card flap got into the propeller and made the drone just fall out of the sky.    And now the Avata is so damaged that it cannot even fly anymore.
I have a video about it here :   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUHHyPfd-5A&t=211s

So now my question is....  what is my right with this?   I have taken out DJI Carte Refresh.  Would this crash be covered by that and how do I go about making a claim?

And it is definetely not just the props that are bent or something.   I replaced the props and the situation is still the same.  I think somehow the prop guards has shifted a little bit.   It is mainly the two front props that are now touching the propgaurds.

Care refresh you’re going to be fine. But no care refresh its not likely warranty will sort it. You are responsible for closing this doo correctly before flying . You would be on very thin ice but check it out.

Care refresh will take care of that. I'm sure you did, but to anyone else, be sure you check that stupid cover before every flight to be sure it's closed, locked, and flush with the prop guards. It was a stupid idea to put that thing there in the first place. I have thought about taking mine off and just leaving it open.
To get care refresh, go to this link https://www.dji.com/support/product/avata?site=brandsite&from=nav  then scroll down till you see "Online Customer Support". That pops up a window. In that window, click on "DJI Care Service".

FPVTrendz Posted at 10-8 14:44
Care refresh will take care of that. I'm sure you did, but to anyone else, be sure you check that stupid cover before every flight to be sure it's closed, locked, and flush with the prop guards. It was a stupid idea to put that thing there in the first place. I have thought about taking mine off and just leaving it open.

Yeah....     it is possible that I might have left the flap open accidentally.   Earlier that day I upgraded to to V 01.01.0200  and initially thought I had to plug into the USB port and may have omitted to properly close the flap.   I cannot distinctly remember closing it properly and when I took off, the drone did sound unusually load to me.   (The props must have been hitting the flap already at that stage.)

In future I will probably just remove the flap permanently.   But I wonder if wind vortexes etc will affect the flight characteristics and/or sound if you remove it completely.

hallmark007 Posted at 10-8 14:25
Care refresh you’re going to be fine. But no care refresh its not likely warranty will sort it. You are responsible for closing this doo correctly before flying . You would be on very thin ice but check it out.

Thank you.   I did send it in now to our local DJI repair centre and did mark it a warrantee claim.   Will have to see what they say once thei receive it.

djiuser_oxGsWbPgguEK Posted at 10-8 14:51
Yeah....     it is possible that I might have left the flap open accidentally.   Earlier that day I upgraded to to V 01.01.0200  and initially thought I had to plug into the USB port and may have omitted to properly close the flap.   I cannot distinctly remember closing it properly and when I took off, the drone did sound unusually load to me.   (The props must have been hitting the flap already at that stage.)

In future I will probably just remove the flap permanently.   But I wonder if wind vortexes etc will affect the flight characteristics and/or sound if you remove it completely.

I can't say for sure if removing it would cause it to fly differently, the only way to know is to test it. I may test it (if I can remember to do that lol) and post the video on my YouTube channel.

Amazing how badly it was engineered

Hi there. Thank you for reaching out and we're sorry for the unpleasant experience. In this kind of situation, I'm afraid that you may consider sending the unit in for a proper diagnosis. You can contact our support team to start up a ticket at https://www.dji.com/support . Also, the warranty can be applied depending on the outcome of the damage assessment including the warranty period of your unit. Thank you for your kind and understanding.

FPVTrendz Posted at 10-8 14:44
Care refresh will take care of that. I'm sure you did, but to anyone else, be sure you check that stupid cover before every flight to be sure it's closed, locked, and flush with the prop guards. It was a stupid idea to put that thing there in the first place. I have thought about taking mine off and just leaving it open.
To get care refresh, go to this link https://www.dji.com/support/product/avata?site=brandsite&from=nav  then scroll down till you see "Online Customer Support". That pops up a window. In that window, click on "DJI Care Service".

It was a stupid idea to put that thing there in the first place.

No doubt about that being a poor engineering design.

Removed the USB door was the first thing I did, did not have and flying issues whatsoever.
I was more concerned about dirt being forced into the USB and SD ports but so far, no problem with that.

Truly a horrific engineering design flaw...like the fit of the Goggles 2...quite shocking for a company like DJI to release something like this

guidodg Posted at 10-9 08:26
Truly a horrific engineering design flaw...like the fit of the Goggles 2...quite shocking for a company like DJI to release something like this

Yeah, it was probably  difficult to find a more suitably place.  It is a bit  difficult to access the card, but not impossible.   For me personally the small size and how well it flies and how good the video image is, makes up for this small flaw.     I just hope they can repair it for me.

jimmylee Posted at 10-9 08:21
Removed the USB door was the first thing I did, did not have and flying issues whatsoever.
I was more concerned about dirt being forced into the USB and SD ports but so far, no problem with that.

I think I will do that too going forward.  This was an expensive mistake.

Besides removing USB door, I never take out the SD card and use a 90-degree USB-C adapter that works great to transfer the video.

My opinion, if you look at the footage, you can see something is wrong before you crashed. The drone was very wobblys/shaking, so i guess the flap wasnt closed fully at the start of the flight and was slowly hitting it already?

Nees Posted at 10-13 14:01
My opinion, if you look at the footage, you can see something is wrong before you crashed. The drone was very wobblys/shaking, so i guess the flap wasnt closed fully at the start of the flight and was slowly hitting it already?

Yeah I agree.   To be honest....  When I took off, I thought the drone was a lot more noisy than usual.   That should have been a sign  to me that something is wrong.    In fact I did initially land and inspected the props and saw some marks on them.   So I thought that props might be a bit damaged and that is why it was so noisy.   

I also think that I probably did not close the flap properly before the flight started.    The way  the flap mounts so flush makes it unlikely that it will come out by itself.      But its still not great that you can easily forget to close the flap and then something like this happens.

I am also a bit surprised at the damage to the drone.  I have seen a lot of videos where people were saying how tough the Avata is.   But in this one crash from a relatively low height and grassy sandy soil, the drone was so badly damaged that it could no longer fly.   I am still unsure why the other props start touching the frame.    Maybe the frame bent or shifted a bit.

So....  I contacted the local New Zealand certified DJI repair shop.  They informed me to send the drone in to them asap which I did on the same day that I had the crash.     Now a few  days later I finally managed to get in touch with them to find out how long it is going to take and they told me they sent it to DJI Australia and it will take 4 to 6 weeks just to get an answer whether this is covered by warranty or by DJI Refresh.   Dammit if I knew they were going to keep the drone that long I would have rather tried a bit harder to fix it myself.      Not a happy chappie anymore.