Adrian Axinia
Second Officer
Romania
Offline
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Hi guys, first time poster here.
I was on vacation in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, where I lost my beloved Spark. I prepared the drone for flying, (I had all the software updated to the latest version the day before), doing the initial checks, I waited for the GPS to kick in (I had a solid 15 satellites), after take off I let it hover at 1 meter hight for a few seconds, then flew it straight up for about 40 meters (using the RC and my Sony Xperia XZ Premium). At this point I received a screen notification that said "Magnetic Field Interference. Exit P-GPS Mode". I immediately pushed the Return Home button, after which I saw the "Weak GPS signal.Positioning accuracy may be compromised. Please fly with caution." notification. I pushed the return home button once again. After that I saw the "Return to Home - unknown error" notification. The drone was hovering all this time, after the last notification, the one with the unknown error, my Spark just flew away, extremely fast and I (and my spotter) soon lost track of it. The DJI GO4 app was saying that the drone was disconnected at this point. We immediately headed to its general direction, while pushing and pushing the return home button. I left another person at the take off point just in case the drone returned there, which it never did. After a few minutes of still not seeing or hearing it flying, I went into the Find my drone section of the DJI GO4 app and located it. It took a while to get there, as the area we were in has a lot of gated resorts and we couldn't go in a straight line, and by this time the battery (which was fully loaded initially) must have been drained. I kept trying to reconnect with the drone, with no favorable outcome. The area the app located my drone was behind a hotel that was surrounded by a gated fence. After a while of shouting and trying to get someone's attention we managed to find a person that opened the gate for us and we entered the site. My Spark was nowhere to be found. We searched for more than 2 hours, I even had to pay that person some money to keep letting us search for it, as he said he was really busy and we were keeping him from his work. We returned the next 2 days and kept searching for it, with no luck. After that my vacation was over and I left for Romania.
The area I flew my Spark is mainly hotels, resorts and beaches, no military bases, radars or other visible types of antennae. I asked the hotel staff if it's ok to fly a drone on the beach, they said yes. During my previous flights the Spark never behaved out of order. The Spark was a gift from my wife's brother, who bought it in the US and brought it to Romania. I bought the RC separately, here, from a DJI authorized reseller.
I sent all this, with screenshots of my flight record and errors to the DJI US support team, do you think I stand any chance of getting a new drone?
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