Hi all,
Next heart attack experience with my PA just now.

i went out for a short night flight and after 12 mins of flying at 52m height i got 3 consecutive warnings in the app that "motor idling or propeller missing" or something related.

Although the bird was flying perfectly i landed it immediately. i check all 4 props and they were tight. i also checked the motors for any strange sounds but nothing out of the ordinary. I did 2 short flights just to reproduce the error but i got nothing.

All FW and SW are up to date. The only thing done differently today was the fact that i used brand new props (the ones with the silver stripes) instead of the plain stock ones i was using on other flights.

any ideas if this was a false error or something else becasue i might not be as lucky next time.

thank you

Update: i cant post a photo but i checked the flight log and the warnings were "motor obstructed" and " flight limited altitutde mode" along with the one mentioned above

Replay your flight in the app & read exactly what the warning said...it'll come up again in the replay.

nigelwilkins Posted at 2015-12-24 21:55
Replay your flight in the app & read exactly what the warning said...it'll come up again in the repl ...

Please check the update to my post above, i did that.

Thank you

I can only guess, but it sounds like excessive loading on a motor...could be a foreign body in one of the motors maybe? dirt? or impending motor failure?  You probably want to contact support with all the data from the flight.

nigelwilkins Posted at 2015-12-24 22:07
I can only guess, but it sounds like excessive loading on a motor...could be a foreign body in one o ...

Do you think the new props might have something to do with this?

yianni.ioannide Posted at 2015-12-24 20:19
Do you think the new props might have something to do with this?

I wouldn't have thought so, but I'm no expert.  I'd get it checked by DJI to avoid a crash.

Its strange that i saw the "idling error" on screen but i cant find it anyhwere. I uploaded the logs to healthy drones and it seems that something went way wrong with the signal at some point as the errors went up to 11400 for a moment. Healthy drones is showing different errors that the ones i saw and are in the app.

In all my other flights the signal score was 100 and on this flight it was 10.9 ?? no compass or gps errors though


E        10m 23s        52 m        77 m        Warning        Warning:Aircraft is out of distance limit.
F        10m 23s        52 m        75 m        Data Loss        Downlink data connection lost for 1148 seconds

According to the description on the page:

Downlink data connection lost ( Data Loss ) means that the remote got partial or no flight data from the aircraft for more than 1 second, which means the data downlink had issues.
It is possible that during this time there is a sense of full control of the aircraft via the remote as well as clear video, however typically the video gets choppy and the remote controls may have some delay.

Being a night flight maybe i didnt notice the choppines??

I think i will redo a test in another area and see how it goes.

Maybe they have metal hubs and it detected the self locking failing for a brief moment.

Please confirm you are using the compatible 9450 props and try an IMU calibration . Try a test flight if that still happens . Thank you !

DJI-Patrick Posted at 2015-12-25 08:33
Please confirm you are using the compatible 9450 props and try an IMU calibration . Try a test fligh ...

Just as an update, i did the IMU calibration and 2 test flights with the plain props and everything was ok.

Full disclosure: i did not do an IMU calibration after the update 2 days ago before the strange flight last night so it was probably my fault.

I will upload the 2 flights i did today at healthydrones and see if there were any errors i did not see.

Thank you for the help

yianni.ioannide Posted at 2015-12-25 18:03
Just as an update, i did the IMU calibration and 2 test flights with the plain props and everythin ...

Please remember to try it with your new props . If that problem happens again , that should be the props' problem .

I'd be interested to know the outcome for future reference.  Thanks.

This very same thing happened to me yesterday on  my brand new Phantom 4.