??
If you were 100 ft over the sea, why would losing GPS be unsurprising?
That has no impact on flight.
As usual, the recorded flight data is needed to tell what happened.
To post your flight data there are a couple of options ...
1. Go to...
Here's what that flight looks like:
https://www.phantomhelp.com/logviewer/20251211Z3TS4ETAUENHYI4UFBAW7XYP18YAGBSJ
Is that the right one?
It shows a crash at 42.68211 -74.96542
With an automated mission, we have no joystick inputs showing pilot actions.
All we can tell is what you already said, that the flyer set things up so that the drone was going to fly straight through the tower to commence the mission.
No, there is no setting to make the drone startup by putting the joysticks in the CSC position.
It sounds like either the controller does not work or the controller has not been linked to the drone.
How are you suggesting that static electricity build up can cause or contribute to an incident like this?
If this was genuinely an issue for drone flyers, wouldn't we have heard of hundreds of incidents just like it?