Lost Mavic Pro 2

[Sty Cooper]

Hi!
Unfortunately, my first post in the forum will be in this section... Yesterday I lost my Mavic Pro 2.
After a while the connection with the RC was lost and I was not able to re-establish the connection.
I was calm at first, trusted it would return to RTH when the battery reached critic level.
But it didn't return...

I was out looking for a few hours, using Flight Recorder and Find my Drone, but no luck.
I searched around the area of last contact and I also walked from the RTH to the last location. No Mavic in sight.

If anyone is up for it, I would love to get some help retrieving my beloved drone.
Any tips on where to look would be very helpful.

I am planning to go back tomorrow, the surroundings is really harsh, with a lot of trees, hillsides and rocky ground.
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com

 

[SpinItUp]

Looks like on a collision course with that hillside...trying to pinpoint the area...
Just a guesstimate
on map between and around here on the map


Good luck with that ...it seems you'll need a lot more than luck out there.
The needle has been thrown.

This is only if it was carrying on in the same manner as when it lost all erm! hope.
If you had sight of it you would've known if you could still control the craft, though I gather you didn't.

 

[laurens23]

Assuming it did not land near the home point and no mechanical failure, it looks like one of two things happened:

ONE:
The drone was on a collision course with the hillside. The ridge in the middle obscured the LOS causing the lost connection. Normally after 3 sec the drone will RTH. At the loss of signal you had around 75% forward elevator. The drone might have impacted the hill before RTH kicked in.

Do you have a video from your phone/tablet? the last moments before disconnect should give a pretty good idea how close to the hill you were, as well as pinpoint where it might be if it hit the hill side.

TWO:
the other possibility is that the drone did RTH but hit the ridge on the way back.

According to the elevation from google earth the drone should have cleared the ridge by ~20m but the elevation is not that accurate and/or maybe there was a (tall ) tree there that cough the drone.

Edit: From the pictures in the flightlog the hill and ridge look pretty close, but it's hard to tell.

 

[SpinItUp]

So the hillside is covered, I've tried matching up the GE imagery with the media and I think this is what's shown.

The 2 images used to visualise some sort of topography
Those trees are just waiting to snag an out of control drone.



Totally agree with laurens23 that you went into a trough of the hillside with many ridges losing signal as viewed from the other side of the hillside

 

[Sty Cooper]

I am so grateful for your help and have been out for hours today, following your leads but still no luck...
I have searched on the areas you pointed out to be interesting but I think I need to go through these areas several times.

Beautiful nature but really tough, climbing hills, searching high and low...
A couple of non-drone images from today's hunt, just to describe how the hillsides looks...

 

[Joebie]

**** dude, this really sucks. That's some rough terrain. Hopefully you find it!

 

[SpinItUp]

If you didn't have a bright skin applied to your M2P I'm afraid it's going to be at 1 with nature.
I have trouble spotting mine in a sky void of any other obstacles if I take my eyes off of it, nevermind trees, vegetation and rocks.
Only suggestion is to use another to search up high!

 

[Joebie]

One thing I noticed is the RTH is set at 30M, so I'm wondering if it dropped to 90ft from the 300+ that you were at when it initiated it's RTH. If that's the case, it may not have traveled very far after you lost signal.

 

[SpinItUp]

One thing I noticed is the RTH is set at 30M, so I'm wondering if it dropped to 90ft from the 300+ that you were at when it initiated it's RTH. If that's the case, it may not have traveled very far after you lost signal.

Negative, it would only go up not come down to that setting.

 

[Joebie]

Ahhh got ya! So regardless, in this situation, it would only stay at it's current altitude since it wasn't under 30M.

 

[SpinItUp]

cached video IF available is your only hope so far
as pointed out earlier by laurens23

GE is nowhere near decisive (and slightly lower as in the data provided by the log when set to 300m) but RTH looks like it was good to clear any obstacles but going away from home it certainly has a hill to climb or not as in this case!

 

[Sty Cooper]

I checked my cache, and unfortunately it was full. No video of the incident.
I've now learned the hard way the importance of clearing cache before droning a drone.
Heading back out into the woods tomorrow! I will not give up...

 

[laurens23]

I checked my cache, and unfortunately it was full. No video of the incident.
I've now learned the hard way the importance of clearing cache before droning a drone.
Heading back out into the woods tomorrow! I will not give up...

In the general settings enable Clear Cashe Automatically to avoid this issue

As for trying to find the drone: the search area is quite big and it will be really hard to spot the drone. If you cannot find it on the ground maybe you can take another drone (from a friend) with you on the hike. on GE there seems to be a clear area on the hill near the possible crash site. then fly a search pattern and at home look at the 4K video on a large screen.
But I have to say, with this much uncertainty, I think the chances of finding it are pretty low.

 

[sar104]

It looks, almost certainly, that you flew it into the trees that are visible in the last cached photo. Looking at the final recorded motion;



Extrapolating the flight path on Google Earth:



It was going to hit the hillside anyway, but there are some very tall trees on the flight path, and so the predicted impact with the Google DEM is not useful. Looking at the height differences, the marked location should be 40 m lower than the flight path but, as the photos show, the DEM does not reflect the terrain (typical in that kind of steep tree-covered area).



Comparing gimbal yaw when the photo was taken with the subsequent flight path, the most likely offending tree is shown above. It's visible on GE, and is the location of the marker above. It is only around 20 m from the last recorded point.

 

[Sty Cooper]

Thank you @sar104 !!
I'm heading back out there in a few minutes, will climb to that tree and have a serious talk with it.

I´ll check in again in a few hours to let you know how it goes...

 

[CarlStarke]

Thank you @sar104 !!
I'm heading back out there in a few minutes, will climb to that tree and have a serious talk with it.

I´ll check in again in a few hours to let you know how it goes...

Good luck, really hope you find it.

 

[Broken Arrow]

@sar104, just one simple question I have always wondered. Does sar stand for Search and Rescue? OP, I hope you find your drone and sar104 is the man to help.

 

[Sty Cooper]

Glory to the persistent!

I have retrieved the drone.. I can't really believe it, but it is saved.
When I was hiking up the hill to the presumed crash site and the nearby location where the suspected tree is lurking, I took a slightly different path than previous hikes.
About half way up the hill, I suddenly saw this sad little gizmo lying on the ground...

The location was not really on any of the routes or locations where I focused my search, I don't know where it was heading really.
Not a single scratch on the drone, not even the propellers were broken.
Of course I will let it dry and attend to it before I try flying again.

Here comes the bonus! When finding the drone, I also got the images and video from the incident.
HI hope this will shed more light on what happened.
In the the video you can see the drone suddenly stopping, turning around and on its way back to the RTH the way got blocked by the tree (Yes, I think its THE tree @sar104 ) . It hovered there for about 5 minutes before taking of in a direction pretty far from the route back to the RTH.
This is where I found the drone.
60.657022,15.033512


I hope the video and seeing what happened will help you in future hunts for lost drones.
At last, thank you for your great support. You are the best.

The video (The connection was lost at approx at 0.10 , just before it starts panning.) :

 

[Joebie]

Holy frick. That's honestly the coolest thing I've heard in the past few weeks. Congrats!!

 

[Sty Cooper]

Holy frick. That's honestly the coolest thing I've heard in the past few weeks. Congrats!!

Thank you