So I am the prowd new owner of a Mavic Pro... Once I'd read the manuals, charged the batteries, Registered the drone and familiarised myself with the controls I had decided it was time to get in the air so I traveled to my local park with a nice open grass field (trees spotted around the edge).

I set the GPS Home position and took off, Is I am new to fly this type of craft (Have flown RC Heli's) I decided to stay between 2-5m for most of the time and just fly back and forth executing turns and other simple manuvers.

After maybe 10-20 minutes of flight it locked up, Lost connection with the RC (Input was unresponsive) and took off full speed away from the home possition. Scared as hell I ran after it and noticed it was headed directly for one of those trees I had mentioned before. The direct hit with the tree managed to flip the craft upsidedown and it plumeted for the road at the edge of the field. Landing upside down and still full throttle it was going balistic on the ground, I had to pick it up still full throttle the props busted up my hands pretty good (Plenty of blood blisters), It seemed the button on the battery was unresponsive after multiple trys I finally decided to remove the battery (I have read the manual where it says not to do this but there was no other option).

Over all the damage doesn't seem too bad (Was expecting much worse). The gimbal has broken off its mount but is still hanging on by the wires as well as Props and arms are all scratched to hell.

Has anyone else had this happen? What is the cause? As it was not user error am I right in thinking repair/replacement should be covered by warranty?

You didn't mention if you did any calibrations first, IMU, compass etc. I would upload the flight data so it can be looked at.

How do I go about uploading the flight data? Where do I even find it?

Airdata.com formally Healthy Drones find the information there for upload. The data should be in your DJIgo app

KENSY Posted at 2017-4-12 16:55
Airdata.com formally Healthy Drones find the information there for upload. The data should be in your DJIgo app

I uploaded it, Shows quite clearly that it just took off into the tree after a  big mess where i was just going back and forth.

https://app.airdata.com/main?share=fHtGwW

Brody Posted at 2017-4-12 17:13
I uploaded it, Shows quite clearly that it just took off into the tree after a  big mess where i was just going back and forth.

contact DJI support for help.
did you buy care refresh for your Mavic?

hungdang Posted at 2017-4-12 17:17
contact DJI support for help.
did you buy care refresh for your Mavic?

I had not even heard of it till after this indecent, As this was its first flight. I will likely be doing so after this. BUT I don't believe this is my fault and should be covered.

Part of the reason I spent $2200 purchasing this drone was its saftey/RTH features, But it seems those don't work too well... At this rate I've basically spent $129.41 per minute of flight.

Did you have your antennas out properly?  Seems bad data connection constantly that was ignored. Ambient light was too weak for obstacle avoidance to work, and when it returned to home, had you set a return to home alt higher than any surrounding object?

Series of mistakes maybe....  

I am not sure what DJI will report on this one, but it may not be good.

Note that these things are not crazy $$$ to repair.  If your gimbal survived, the aircraft itself is fairly cheap to patch up.  If the gimbal needs to be replaced, then you will be into it for some $$$.

It went the complete oposite direction from the home point. It would not have needed to avoid obsticles if it went the right way. Also it was directly infront of me.

I did have the antena fully out so im not sure why the connection was so bad, I wasnt even made aware of it till lookibg at the log.

I've attached a photo of where the gimbal is broken from its mount.

You would have received numerous warnings on the screen and a beeping noise each time. Perhaps you had the sound turned down. The antennas need to be opened out, rotated 90 degrees and then moved forward to around 45 degrees. What sort of phone are you using as the signal was very weak and the drone did attempt to return to home. When you say you set the GPS home position, did you do that manually or did you initially takeoff and hover until you were told the Home Point had been set?

Controller was exactly as you described, Phone is a 2 month old Galaxy S7 (not edge).
The remote only started beeping as it was about to hit the tree.
I set the home position just as the manual says to. Photo below.

Your log on Airdata starts with an auto-landing 15m into the flight. Did your app crash completely? Seems like maybe this log was started after the app restarted. Do you have another log that contains the first part of the flight?

This log doesn't explicitly say when or where the Home Point was recorded, but when I click on each of the data points under the Notifications section, it shows the aircraft's distance from Home at each point. Data points A-E all show the distance from to be 0m, implying that's where the Home Point was. At point V (I assume where it crashed) the distance from Home is 24m, indicating it definitely did fly AWAY from the Home Point before the crash. The log indicates a loss of downlink data of 31.4s between points U and V, meaning the RC and app have no way to know what happened during that time. To find out, you'll need to pull the .dat file from the Mavic (using DJI Assistant 2), and share it so that we can take a look at the flight data recording.

ps. That's a ton of disconnections happening in a short space of time. Are you sure your antennae were positioned correctly? This is the recommended position for most flights:

Heres the first log http://app.airdata.com/main?share=CrxPEE

Retrieving the logs won't mess with anything will it? I'm sending it away once support gets back to me so I don't really want to tamper with it. But at the same time I'd like to retrieve the evidence in case they try something shifty. Plus now that I've now gotten over my initial anger I'm kind of enjoying playing detective. haha

The remote was 100% the same as that gif, Do you think mine may have been faulty?

Brody Posted at 2017-4-13 04:51
Heres the first log http://app.airdata.com/main?share=CrxPEE

Retrieving the logs won't mess with anything will it? I'm sending it away once support gets back to me so I don't really want to tamper with it. But at the same time I'd like to retrieve the evidence in case they try something shifty. Plus now that I've now gotten over my initial anger I'm kind of enjoying playing detective. haha

Retrieving logs won't damage anything, and DJI often asks users to retrieve logs when they have issues.

I highly recommend you get the .dat file and put it on Dropbox or someplace similar.

https://datfile.net/DatCon/retrieveV3.html

looks for me that your remote control is faulty .... doo many DC's in your log

Brody Posted at 2017-4-13 04:51
Heres the first log http://app.airdata.com/main?share=CrxPEE

Retrieving the logs won't mess with anything will it? I'm sending it away once support gets back to me so I don't really want to tamper with it. But at the same time I'd like to retrieve the evidence in case they try something shifty. Plus now that I've now gotten over my initial anger I'm kind of enjoying playing detective. haha

Sorry to hear of your crash.

Looking at your logs from airdata, which are very limited show no stick movements, but never the less.

You had serious interference in the area you were flying in or your antennas were not positioned correctly,
Interference can come in many different ways, power lines lots of use in built up areas microwaves and the like.
At 15.12 your aircraft went into auto landing but regained signal or by throttling up you cancelled this, you then were repeatedly loosing radio signal, your aircraft went into RTH mode, you do not tell us what you had this set at, but in trying to do this obstacle avoidance was not working because the light was not good enough, so it collided straight into the tree.

You need first to sync your flight to dji cloud in the djigo4 app, and contact dji support.
Dji will be able to see what happened through the dat file.

If you want to show the stick movements there are ways you can put them up here, if you need help just let me know.

Brody Posted at 2017-4-13 04:51
Heres the first log http://app.airdata.com/main?share=CrxPEE

Retrieving the logs won't mess with anything will it? I'm sending it away once support gets back to me so I don't really want to tamper with it. But at the same time I'd like to retrieve the evidence in case they try something shifty. Plus now that I've now gotten over my initial anger I'm kind of enjoying playing detective. haha

There is another reason you can get bad signal and that is flying directly overhead with the sticks pointing vertically as you say they were, if you were walking around with RC and aircraft directly or close to directly overhead signal will not be good.

These things do have issues occasionally, my Mavic took off to 1.2m then one of the motors conked out it did a backflip and cut through its own leg with the propeller. After seeing the flight data DJI fixed it under warranty. I still had to pay $60 to send it away it was worth it.

However just an observation,

The flight data says take off was at 8:43pm on April 12th. You were flying it in North Lakes QLD Australia where the sunset on April 12 was at 5:34. At 3 hours post sunset it would have been pretty dark apart from lights in the park so there was almost certainly no chance of it seeing that tree.

Also for future reference I am fairly sure in Australia we cant fly at night.
Hope it gets fixed under warranty, I know the feeling of when mine crashed and it sucks

I've retrieved the FLY.DAT files as well as the "Black Box" files. How do i go about reading the data from these files?

hallmark007:
I'm unsure why there would be so much interference, The power lines in my area are all run underground and I was sitting on a bench seat on the path a few meters away from the home position.

Pinoclean:
I wouldn't have expected obstacle avoidance to be an issue because I was never flying close to anything and the home position was set very close with no obstacles between. But as it took off in the other direction from home the were things for it to crash into and I'm glad it did. I feel like it would have just kept going if not for that tree and after seeing what the propellers did to my hands I would hate for it to hit anyone else. I'll be purchasing protective cages in the future.
I was not aware that flying at night was not allowed, I've seen plenty of people doing so but I should check for myself.

https://datfile.net/CsvView/downloads.html