"Aircraft automatically descends and lands if RTH is triggered when the aircraft flies within a 20 meters (65 feet) radius of the Home Point."

Why ?
What´s the point.

Imagine the drone is flying over the water and you loose the signal within a 20 meters (65 feet) radius of the Home Point.  The drone will NOT return to you, but land on water. {:4_142:}

Imagine that you know what you do, you use the control sticks to stop the descent and to manoeuvre the aircraft to a safe landing point. Or you could cancel RTH.

Nobody knows the exact answer, but the logic might have been to benefit those flying indoors, or under canopies. The likelihood of an RTH being accidently triggered when only 20m away are small.

Aardvark Posted at 2017-6-15 09:51
Imagine that you know what you do, you use the control sticks to stop the descent and to manoeuvre the aircraft to a safe landing point. Or you could cancel RTH.

Nobody knows the exact answer, but the logic might have been to benefit those flying indoors, or under canopies. The likelihood of an RTH being accidently triggered when only 20m away are small.

I've often wondered the logic on this as well. Interesting thought, although indoors, there's a high chance of no GPS anyway. Under canopy? Hmm. Maybe. I would like to know DJI's official thoughts on this. Where I am in the woods, an RTH at 20 meters would probably land my phantom in a tree.

I have a 3DR hexacopter..  It has no such restriction.  RTH will land at the home point no matter how close it is.

I have no idea why DJI drones display this behavior.  I guess the best thing to do is make sure that you can land safely in the area 20 meters around your takeoff point.

If someone uses the RTH button and the drone is close to them - it auto lands for them.  That was how it was advertised when the change happened.

Chances are, if it's that close, it's probably not very high, and you wouldn't want it to rise to RTH height before landing would you?  You'd probably prefer it to just land.  

Aardvark Posted at 2017-6-15 09:51
Imagine that you know what you do, you use the control sticks to stop the descent and to manoeuvre the aircraft to a safe landing point. Or you could cancel RTH.

Nobody knows the exact answer, but the logic might have been to benefit those flying indoors, or under canopies. The likelihood of an RTH being accidently triggered when only 20m away are small.

he just said if you lost signal, in that case you would not be able to use the sticks to maneuver.

I agree that the policy makes no logical sense. Sure you can come up with scenarios how it might be better, but I can also come up with plenty of scenarios that would make it a bad idea. To me it should just have the same behavior at any distance so there is no confusion. If you want it to auto-land, there is already that function you can select. Flying indoors? You should change the RTH behavior (hover) in your app before you fly anyway.  
What if they decided for some equally undetermined reason to change the behavior of the control sticks based on distance (up is down, down is up, etc)?  How would that go over?  smh

sometimes too smart becomes stupid and not helpful.
I think the programmer had wrong idea about this feature.
just come back to home point then land, what is wrong with that simple function hehe

Danielfonseca64 Posted at 2017-6-15 15:32
he just said if you lost signal, in that case you would not be able to use the sticks to maneuver.

I was aware of that, but I don't think I've ever seen or read about anybody losing control signal at 20m, unlikely to happen in reality. What I have seen several times is people initiating RTH, and then having no idea what's happening watch it land in a tree or river etc. They were not aware that they could still steer it to a suitable landing spot.

Aardvark Posted at 2017-6-15 16:59
I was aware of that, but I don't think I've ever seen or read about anybody losing control signal at 20m, unlikely to happen in reality. What I have seen several times is people initiating RTH, and then having no idea what's happening watch it land in a tree or river etc. They were not aware that they could still steer it to a suitable landing spot.

I started this topic after a real situation. My friend was flying his Mavic on the beach. The aircraft lost signal and began to land on water.  He ran and took it with his hands.  He was luck that it was shallow water.  Imagine if you were on a boat or at the edge of a cliff.

EmilioCid Posted at 2017-6-19 17:03
I started this topic after a real situation. My friend was flying his Mavic on the beach. The aircraft lost signal and began to land on water.  He ran and took it with his hands.  He was luck that it was shallow water.  Imagine if you were on a boat or at the edge of a cliff.

If I were in a boat I would have set loss of signal to 'hover', I wouldn't want to watch the aircraft heading to a home point several hundred metres away where the boat had been a few minutes ago. But given the real situation you describe I'd be more concerned about why it lost control signal at 20m ? Did the display device crash or the RC run out of power ?

One way to reduce risk would be to make sure your home point has a safe area round about it, at least 20m from any hazard.

I believe most experienced pilots don't land in RTH.  Personally, I've RTH'd roughly 300x and I've landed in RTH maybe 5x.  I think most experienced pilots take control of the AC when it's in sight and land it themselves with the controller - either in a safe place or in-hand.