Dear All,
I'm in Madagascar and had some serious fun filming our kitesurfing trip with my Mavic. Will be sharing video as soon as I'm back.
I'm writing this as yesterday I felt I almost lost the drone, and found myself in a very scary situation, the typical "inexperienced newbie suicide" situation:

1- we went for a hike in a forest
2- we arrived at a small waterfall where I decided to do a quick video, thinking to use tripod mode.
3- the situation was a bit at the limit, with little to no GPS signal, I knew it but I felt confident I could manually control the Mavic in the very small, no wind area where I was. See picture.
4- the take off area was a slightly elevated point in front of the waterfall, plan was to take off, send the Mavic a few meters near the waterfall, rise a few meters to film, come back. Sounded easy.
5- so I take off...send the Mavic forward...and boom...the Mavic decreases its altitude below the take off point (meaning I could not send it back), and doesn't want to rise altitude. I tried to switch into sports mode, but no results. I could move the Mavic but would not rise to a sufficient altitude where I could move it back to my take off area. It was below me and I thought I would have to climb down and manually get it.

End of the story, I didn't loose my cool, I thought there was some kind of automatic limit in altitude and I figured that the Mavic, moving from the take off point, sensed that the ground below declined, and thus followed it. So I simply had it slowly move back and boom...it automatically increased its height and came back successfully.

Investigating the problem I discovered that in opti mode, with downward sensing on, max altitude is 5m and that is ehat happened. I would have had to disable downward sensing and max altitude would be 30m.
Still, I think that in sports mode, or a "full manual" mode, we should have the possibility to force the drone to do whatever we wanted it to do: example...imagine that the ground did not slightly and gently decline, but rather was a cliff...i guess upon moving off the cliff the Mavic would have abruptly descended to the new "max altitude" and I would have never been able to get it back as I could not just "approach" the cliff back to have the Mavic sense the increase in ground height and therefore adjust the altitude like it did in this case.

To be clear, I'm not whining, the instant I took off in opti mode I knew I was entering in a dangerous zone and I consciously took the risk.

The limitation of 5 meters height under OPTI mode is the relative altitude, it should be the 5 meters' height above the takeoff point. So please check the flight record to learn about the altitude when the drone decrease below the takeoff point.
Besides, Sport mode is not ATTI mode. Both GPS and vision positioning system work at Sport mode, only obstacle system is not available. So users should distinguish the difference of ATTI mode and S mode.

Well this is strange, I checked the flight record in the dji app and height range moved between 0, +2 and -1 maximum. The max altitude warning popped up at +2 meters.

Here is the link to the flight record: http://app.airdata.com/main?share=tFrcTN , here download to the .dat file: https://we.tl/2k2jVVwlPU

Vannibombonato Posted at 2017-8-20 22:58
Well this is strange, I checked the flight record in the dji app and height range moved between 0, +2 and -1 maximum. The max altitude warning popped up at +2 meters.

You can also contact our support team support@dji.com to start the data analysis. We will help to analysis the reason of your case. Thank you.