At present the flight planning can only be done with the bird (Phantom Vision 2+) fully switched on. Hence the flight batteried get drained during this procedure. Since the flight time of 20-25 min as advertised is wishfull thinking, it would be good to save this power from the flight battery. The GPS data are available on the smartphone / pad anyway. Why can't you do the flight planning on the App and download it to the bird once you switch on the flight batteries. Should not be too complicated. Something for the development team to put their thinking cap on.....

When you have everything turned on, but the Phantom is not turning props. the battery will last a lot longer than 20 to 25 minutes.  I setup the Phantom on a box in the car, pointed out the windshield, and made a 45 minute trip in a snowstorm.  The flight battery was down only 25% when finished.  It's the motors that use all the power.

At first I thought you were saying you flew a 45 min mission - lol

I know that the props use the majority of the power. But still, the Gimbel, Flight controls, camera, LEDs is all on. But still when I take off after flight planning the app shows only 18-19 min of capacity left.  It cannot be a big deal to transfer the (offline) flight planning to the app and download to the kopter once connected. Another nice feature would be if you could store flight missions on the app for repeated use.
I am not saying that there is something wrong with the system. Just a few nice-to-have to make the system even more perfect. is there anyone from DJI copying??

What would really be nice would be to import a .CSV or .TXT file with a list of the LAT/Long points in decimal degrees into the app. This would seem very easy to add to the app. This way the Phantom would have the exact and correct points of property corners or points of interest that could be taken from Google Earth or GIS software. Then each of these points would become the center of any pictures taken when looking straight down and could be geo-referenced into other software. Also, this would make flying an exact grid very possible and increace accuracy in data collection.

@manfred_wolff  @raysmitheclipse
Thanks for your reminds! Will take them into consideration!

Any luck with storing the missions?

dummy157@aol.co Posted at 2015-2-24 03:16
Any luck with storing the missions?

I believe the new DJI Ultimate Flight does that.  (That may be beta only.  Not sure if it's in the release yet.)

Friffy1 Posted at 2015-2-24 03:35
I believe the new DJI Ultimate Flight does that.  (That may be beta only.  Not sure if it's in the ...

Correct, currently in pre-release to all members of the app's Google Group, GS missions can be edited, saved, loaded and are stored in csv format so you could even, if you wish load (or create) then on a PC and copy to the Android device for loading as a mission later..

Waypoint missions can be created, edited, saved and loaded with the Phantom not connected and when connect the mission readjusts the starting and ending based on the current Phantom location.