Folks,

I had this happen to me the other weekend.

I was flying, wanting to do a panning shot of a railroad bridge.

I was in a gap between some no fly areas. But at least 1mi away from the edge of any no fly zone.

2nd flight, I take off, go over the river, I get a high wind warning, and figure, OK, fly it back to me.

But then on an absolutely clear sky, I get GPS signal loss warning, RTH warning telling me that to RTH, requires flight through a no-fly zone (which is not true). Switch to ATTI and a couple of other error messages.

And then the drone hauls tail straight to some nearby trees and crashes into the trees.  And I mean it hauled butt, flying fast with me not applying any forward stick to it. During the time from when the error messages 1st show up to when it crashed, I have absolutely no control or response from the remote. I try to give it altitude to go over the trees, give it back direction to slow it or stop it, and nothing.

When you look at the flight log, when the thing crashed into the trees, the log shows it still over the middle of the river. Did I get jammed? Or is this another DJI "safety" feature. It thinks it's in a no-fly, and forces a landing, no matter that.

It took me 2 days to get it out of the tree.

Yes, I was in a warning area, but no where near a no-fly zone. I had already done one entire flight along the same path without a problem. GPS signal loss on a perfectly clear day?

I mean I am ready to just sell this damn thing if DJI cannot find a way to allow me to "safely" fly it. It's gotten to a point of such paranoia, that DJI seems to have this thing programmed that if something goes wrong, force a landing with no means for a user to intervene or correct a hazardous flight path they arbitrarily chose.

Any ideas as to what happened here? .

Go here and follow the instructions, then come back and post the link.  Maybe find out exactly what went wrong.          http://www.phantomhelp.com/logviewer/upload/

Maybe you recently updated to new stable version .700 ?

I had similar problem. I staid off that funky update and when people reported .700 to be stable I updated but I didn`t calibrate IMU.
So I was loosing GPS signal and went to ATTI mode with no reason. And in strong winds it could be felt as loss of control (because you don`t expect anything like that to happen. I was in bit of panic when it happened to me. I think being in Tripod mode didn`t help to regain control as fast as I wanted).

I decided to calibrate IMU and to my surprise IMU calibration method had changed completely. After calibration I`m no logner getting these problems.

"I was flying, wanting to do a panning shot of a railroad bridge. "

Was it a big steel railroad bridge ?

In which case there may be lots of compass errors, causing conflict with GPS data.

If you post a link as mentioned in post 2 above, then some reason may be found.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

I want to crack open the drone, to check for water damage before I power it up again. As while the battery died the 1st day, before I could get it down the 2nd day, it started to rain.

Once I check it out, I will make sure to do all of the re-calibration steps.

I'll upload the flight log once I get back home and pull it off of the iPad.

And yes, it was a big steel railroad bridge. And I'm sure I got some compass errors, but I was flying not that close to it. But I'll be more careful. I had flown down the middle of an old abandoned railroad bridget before, and got the compass errors, and was able to keep control of the drone.

As this was an active railroad, I wasn't about to go down the middle of it.

So I was just flying along side of it, a good at least 100 yards away.

Thanks.

Be aware of big metal objects interfering both compasses and that is a problem when you are in midair

guitartoys Posted at 2018-4-23 10:29
Thanks everyone for the feedback.

I want to crack open the drone, to check for water damage before I power it up again. As while the battery died the 1st day, before I could get it down the 2nd day, it started to rain.

If you were a hundred yards away then you would not have got any magnetic interference at that distance.

I am sorry for your crash accident. Please kindly contact our support to start a case and send the drone in, we will help to make data analysis if the drone is under warranty period (within 12 months old) and find out the reason.
Here’s the link to contact us: http://www.dji.com/support