Like many of you have experienced, I experienced my first drone crash last month.
I was flying my DJI spark in beginners mode in front of my house with my son. When the drone went out towards the end of the driveway, the full stick backwards command was put in to bring it back up. Now the drone is only going 3 mph so it was going to take a few seconds to come back up the driveway. Well about 5.4 seconds before hitting the garage, the app went back to the home screen and the device showed “disconnected.” The drone did not stop moving like I would expect. Once I realized it wasn’t going to stop I tried to catch it but decided that wasn’t a good idea and let it hit my garage.
From my perspective it looked like the DJI Go 4 app malfunctioned. DJi data analysis shows the RC was connected throughout the flight and that the backwards command was put in (I.e. I ran my drone into my garage on purpose). It is also worth noting it was in P-GPS mode with 15 satellites.
So with all that being said, I had security camera footage of the last few seconds of the flight. While the camera wasn’t close enough to show the screen disconnect, it does show my fingers off the touchscreen for at least 2 seconds before impact but also as important it shows my confusion at the situation reinforcing the app malfunctioned. It does not show any intention that I wanted to crash my drone. This was also provided for DJI to review but was not deemed as worthy evidence.
So what are your thoughts? Is there any plausible chance this was user error? Any technical explanation as to why?
See below for YouTube video of security camera footage.
Thanks
Sorry for the crash. In this case, I would recommend you contact our support and start a case: http://www.dji.com/support You can provide them the flight record and locate the problem. Thanks for your support.
Random disconnects are kind of gray territory... might be due to malfunction or pilot error.... or bad phone or interference... I would say totally inconclusive.
I’m afraid this just looks like an accident waiting to happen, it looks like your teaching a very small child to fly , it’s very hard to keep VLOS when your looking down at your screen, your aircraft has a breaking distance and from the time you stopped using your phone and you realised aircraft was so close is not enough time.
My opinion is you were lucky that aircrafts altitude was high enough to not hit someone. Dji can’t guarantee app will not crash there are to many variables that can cause your app to crash and this is one of the main reasons you should know where your drone is.
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