While flying a drone over a lake a low battery triggered a forced RTH. Unknown to me I had accidentally slid the RTH altitude to max (1640 FT). By the time I could locate the drone by eye sight, I had a lot of tree weaving to do to hand catch it. In fact as soon as I saw it start coming down I took over manually as I was sure on its own it would tangle with all the trees. One of the toughest locations Ive launched and landed from by far,

RTH should be your last resort to bring it back.

If everything was without manual input expect for the last one or two seconds then, given the turn at 1:07, it looks to me as if the drone was executing a precision landing  .
If that is correct then it looks to me as if, low down, it was hunting for a place that matched its memory, that looks to be a rather tricky landing spot.

Always return your drone manually if possible, if you don't know where you are, use the compass in the DJI Fly app, you can switch from compass to map as well.

And how high was that? It seemed higher than 400 ft.
I don't blame you for flying higher than allowed, because I don't know the real height at that time however visually it seems closer to 800 ft.

Yaros1 Posted at 2-18 03:39
And how high was that? It seemed higher than 400 ft. I don't blame you for flying higher than allowed, because I don't know the real height at that time however visually it seems closer to 800 ft.

That's a weird thing to say regarding a flight over what may be a lake, excluding wave oscillations and storm driven surges in very large lakes, lakes tend to have horizontal surfaces.

RTH is the BEST way to return as long as you have a good GPS lock for home point. But, for precision landing, even changing shadows can fool the sensors. Your drone returned perfectly until you took over and landed it in a very difficult location. Good job!!

You SHOULD not have used RTH in an environment like that. That environment will cause you to crash your drone or get it stuck in a tree top. You should have returned manually, low and landed your drone. It seems that your drone had difficulty trying to identify the proper landing point that it took off from given all the trees below it.

That was far in excess of 400ft AGL.  : )

I never used RTH personally, but it seems to have done a good job.

Suren Posted at 2-18 10:22
You SHOULD not have used RTH in an environment like that. That environment will cause you to crash your drone or get it stuck in a tree top. You should have returned manually, low and landed your drone. It seems that your drone had difficulty trying to identify the proper landing point that it took off from given all the trees below it.

I think that is the PERFECT time to use RTH to get close, then finish the landing manually, just as he did here.