Hi All,

First time posting here. I am a new pilot. I was flying  at 200' in tripod mode, right stick full forward. Noticed a yellow  message flash on Go 4 app screen. Looked down to read message about weak  gps signal and heard the props rev up. Looked up and AC was already  almost out of sight over trees. It had switched to ATTI mode and since i  had stick full forward it shot away at max speed. Had gone quite a  distance in a hurry, luckily i was above any obstacles. Once I let go of  the sticks and AC hovered it was back in tripod mode and i landed  safely.

Any advice on what I may have done wrong or can do to  prevent this from happening in first place? My first thought was to make  it SOP to let go the sticks if notice an alert from Go 4, but this  isn't very practical. For example, geofencing messages are yellow and I  know what those are going to say before I take off.

I don't know  the cause of losing GPS signal. I had clear view of clear sky. I have  flight logs, would that help determine root cause?

Thanks,

Don

New pilot... First lesson... Read the manual, top to bottom. Second practice in the Academy for all kind of scenarios. Third fly outside in Beginner mode until you are familiar with everything on the app and drone and practiced on the ATTI.

Please download your log files to www.healthydrones.com so we can take a look and see what happened. That is the only way to know for sure of the cause of your accident. Lucky dude...

Hi. If you're in Tripod Mode and the craft loses GPS connecton And the visual system has degraded (e.g. due to low light conditions), the craft will drop into ATTI mode. If that's what you experienced, it's in the manual on P.26, although I can't offer advice on why connection or visuals were lost.

Thanks Punchbuggy and Dronist.

I did read the manual and was aware that if both vision positioning and gps are lost it will switch to ATTI. I had 16 satellites and 4 bars of GPS. It may have lost vision positioning as it was directly over the pitched roof of a house. Reviewing the log it went from 16 satellites to 0 and switched to ATTI mode in the blink of an eye, barely enough time to react. I have seen YouTubes of pilots who do a lot of shooting in Tripod mode, however, I will now only use it when the AC is hovering, since it can apparently switch to ATTI mode immediately.  Is it common to lose all GPS satellites at once?

I bought a cheap practice drone and flew it for hours before purchasing the P4P. It was much less stable and easily blown around than the P4P so good practice. Will try ATTI in beginner mode and sim. Also going to upload log to healthydrones.com. thanks for the advice.

Yes somehow you lost gps for a short time, practice Atti is always a good idea, when your not sure what's happening always remove fingers from sticks , at least you the pilot can do know more wrong, in gps your AC will just hover in place giving you time to make a measured decision on what to do next.
Same in Atti release fingers your AC will stay at same height but will drift on the wind, no need to panic if your flying in the right environment you will have time to rethink your next move, it's not as difficult as it seems, panicked pilots can be the cause of many crashes..

Good luck..

Basically, you didn't necessarily do anything wrong. It's possible there is nothing you could have done to prevent what happened, so be prepared to adjust your flight (and responses to it) at any time.

hallmark007 Posted at 2017-2-22 11:15
Yes somehow you lost gps for a short time, practice Atti is always a good idea, when your not sure what's happening always remove fingers from sticks , at least you the pilot can do know more wrong, in gps your AC will just hover in place giving you time to make a measured decision on what to do next.
Same in Atti release fingers your AC will stay at same height but will drift on the wind, no need to panic if your flying in the right environment you will have time to rethink your next move, it's not as difficult as it seems, panicked pilots can be the cause of many crashes..

Thanks, Hallmark. Letting go of sticks, got it. ATTI mode is like my cheap practice drone that has no GPS.

theGrindLab.com Posted at 2017-2-22 11:34
Basically, you didn't necessarily do anything wrong. It's possible there is nothing you could have done to prevent what happened, so be prepared to adjust your flight (and responses to it) at any time.

I think I could have let go of the stick sooner! Thanks, GrindLab

dronist Posted at 2017-2-21 20:11
New pilot... First lesson... Read the manual, top to bottom. Second practice in the Academy for all kind of scenarios. Third fly outside in Beginner mode until you are familiar with everything on the app and drone and practiced on the ATTI.

Please download your log files to www.healthydrones.com so we can take a look and see what happened. That is the only way to know for sure of the cause of your accident. Lucky dude...

Thanks Dronist, I registered on the HD site and Google group and uploaded the flight log to HD. I made a post under name Fontinalis to ask if i need to provide a link for someone to be able to access to review the flight log.

Fontinalis Posted at 2017-2-22 12:09
I think I could have let go of the stick sooner! Thanks, GrindLab

Oops! I thought you were referring to what you could have done to prevent it from going into ATTI mode in the first place.

Fontinalis Posted at 2017-2-22 12:12
Thanks Dronist, I registered on the HD site and Google group and uploaded the flight log to HD. I made a post under name Fontinalis to ask if i need to provide a link for someone to be able to access to review the flight log.

You need to post the link in here.

dronist Posted at 2017-2-22 12:48
You need to post the link in here.

http://healthydrones.com/main?share=Vuhkyt

Fontinalis Posted at 2017-2-22 13:55
http://healthydrones.com/main?share=Vuhkyt

You figured out most of your mistakes by yourself and that is the first step of being a good pilot.

I think the issue was with the ANTENNA POSITIONING.

As you said you were flying straight above your head and under your pitched roof and that is the worse LOCATION to be because if you don't adjust your antenna horizontally to the AC it looses connection to the AC.

I would suggest:

* Taking off from the middle of your drive way or your backyard instead of too close to the house.

* DON'T FLY straight above your head.

* Raise the ALT for RTH, I would put it to 200' since you are at the top of hill in case you fly downward and the AC needs to come back up.

* As you know Tripod mode will slow every feature of the AC so the last thing you need to do is FULL F0RWARD or BACKWARD. You need to be slow and gentle in case to what happened to you changed to ATTI and the AC is back to full power.

Safe Flying!

Good advice from the different posters here, I would also add that flying by only looking at the radar, for when you lose LOS with the AC will lead to a much more confident flying experience. ATTI mode is nothing to be worried about as long as you are flying in the right environment. I remember being a newb and freaking out when I lost sight of the drone, but flying by radar made a big difference to my confidence. Another piece of advice is to use tripod mode only when you are filming with the drone and not just flying. The smoothness from the controls in tripod mode is meant for cinematics.

Thanks very much to all that replied.  I really appreciate your time reviewing my incident and making recommendations.

I got exactly the same situation last night, but I was in FPV mode in Litchi. I was also shocked, because seconds before I was getting strong signal from 16 satellites and out of a sudden it switched to ATTI.
Taking my fingers off the sticks was the best I could do and it switched back to P mode after just few seconds.
When it happened the AC was some 500 ft out in the field at 300 ft altitude, but there were no major obstacles around, except a couple of trees, so I was really surprised that it happened.
Before I took off I got a compass calibration error, because there were some metal railings around the patio I was trying to launch the AC from, so I moved away, calibrated the compass properly and took off. I am not sure if it had any significance, because later on I landed and took off 3 more times, while changing the batteries and there was no problem whatsoever with the satellite connection and the P mode.

How often do you experience something like that?

Thanks for all the great responses. I bit of follow up here. In an attempt to get a bigger screen I was using a cheap tablet from Walmart when this and some other strange things happened. I don't know how the tablet could have caused losing GPS at the AC, however I do know that since going back to using my Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone i have had zero problems.

dronist Posted at 2017-2-21 20:11
New pilot... First lesson... Read the manual, top to bottom. Second practice in the Academy for all kind of scenarios. Third fly outside in Beginner mode until you are familiar with everything on the app and drone and practiced on the ATTI.

Please download your log files to www.healthydrones.com so we can take a look and see what happened. That is the only way to know for sure of the cause of your accident. Lucky dude...

Hi was just reading your post and  was wondering what is the academy ? To practice ...I am quite new to this so sorry if this is a obvious post
Cheers

wobbles Posted at 2017-5-1 09:45
Hi was just reading your post and  was wondering what is the academy ? To practice ...I am quite new to this so sorry if this is a obvious post
Cheers

No problem... When you turn on the GO4 APP on the top right you have the 3lines on top of each others (drop menu) you click on it and you will the first item is the ACADEMY.

It has the flight simulator which you can use to practice all kind of scenarios and then you have tutorials for beginners and flight tutorials and user manuals.

I suggest you go thru all of them before you do any serious flying.

Cheers!

dronist Posted at 2017-5-1 09:49
No problem... When you turn on the GO4 APP on the top right you have the 3lines on top of each others (drop menu) you click on it and you will the first item is the ACADEMY.

It has the flight simulator which you can use to practice all kind of scenarios and then you have tutorials for beginners and flight tutorials and user manuals.

many thanks digging drone out now to have a look ...
cheers

wobbles Posted at 2017-5-1 09:51
many thanks digging drone out now to have a look ...
cheers

My pleasure! Happy droning!

Fontinalis Posted at 2017-5-1 07:55
Thanks for all the great responses. I bit of follow up here. In an attempt to get a bigger screen I was using a cheap tablet from Walmart when this and some other strange things happened. I don't know how the tablet could have caused losing GPS at the AC, however I do know that since going back to using my Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone i have had zero problems.

One thing to keep in mind. The GPS system itself is not 100% reliable and has outages, updates as well as interference testing. I know instances of my phone losing GPS lock and finding out that there was an outage of the GPS system. That is another reason for Glonass as well as it's a totally different system. Whether an outage of one system or another is enough to cause a loss of lock is hard to say.