All these fly away's!?!?

[Meta4]

My understanding is that magnetic interference will only cause the drone to fly in a circular path when it attempts to hold position ( "toilet bowling" ). It will not cause flyaway or the drone dropping out of the sky.

Magnetic interference during a flight such as descending toward a steel roof might cause toilet bowling when the drone gets close to the steel roof.
It won't cause the drone to fall from the sky and climbing away from the magnetic field will make the problem go away.

But magnetic interference during the startup period can have much more serious affects.
If the strength of the magnetic field is strong enough, the flight controller identifies it as a problem and warns the pilot - Magnetic Field Interference - Move the aircraft or calibrate compass.
When that happens, the correct action is not to calibrate the compass as that won't fix the problem.
The correct action is always to shut down the drone, move away from the steel causing the problem and start again.

The real problem comes when the magnetic field is not strong enough to be identified as a problem, so there is no warning.
The IMU initialises and gets a false sense of where north is and when the drone is turned it senses that it's going the wrong way and tries to correct.
But the correcting is in the wrong direction and more correction is applied ... this goes on and on very quickly.
The drone picks up speed, often flying faster than normal in a curved course and will disappear or crash if there are obstacles in its path.
It happens too fast to do anything about and the drone is unable to respond properly to any stick input.
In only a few cases, the difference in yaw angles is small and the effect is not large enough for the problem to be as serious.
But usually the flight ends badly.

Launching from reinforced concrete surfaces is the most common cause of these issues but it has been seen with launching from a wooden deck or a table with a steel frame, bolts or nails positioned close below the compass.

 

[Phantomrain.org]

Reading all these reports of fly away's has me concerned. I bought my M2P last April. To date, I have 174 successful takes offs and landings. I read about these fly away's and advice about calibrating compuss, IMU etc. Out of the box, other than Software Updates, I haven't had a single problem. Never calibrated anything. Also have only flown within 25 miles from my home.

My concern, how do I know my M2P needs calibrating anything?

Even Seasoned Pros have to Negotiate Wind and Magnetic Interference and be on alert with every single flight.

Here is how Magnetic Interference can get you.

You find your spot, set up camp, spit in the wind, check off your check list and than carefully watch your drone lift off with the precision and confidence.

What you dont know is while you were watching the glorified take off , the magnetic warning flickered on screen for just a few seconds and you missed it.

Like it or not the drone is compromised and the odds have changed that you may experience the fly away panic mode.

I am sure many new pilots and older pilots catch themselves watching the take off as its natural but not smart.

So this may save you.

Phantomrain.org
Elite gear for your Mavic
Coal

 

[Steve LaBranche]

And one day Steve your M2P will look like a fly away.!
DON’T panic.!
When it loses signal for what ever reason
It will fly back to we’re the last place it had signal and then if it cannot squire the signal it Will Return home (at agony ing pace) ... it happens it is amazing to watch
If you can calm down enough to injoy
The RTH

....cR

Ha!, I've experienced that already, flying above redwood forest I lost VLOS, got disoriented. Long story short, what a relief it was to hear that buzzing sound overhead.

 

[DanMan32]

Powering up at location A then moving to point B and taking off there may also exhibit problems.

 

[Camino Ken]

The last thing I do before I take off is double check that the little red triangle is pointing in the same general direction as the aircraft relative to real world surroundings. This ensures that the compass has minimal interference.

 

[Olav van Gerven]

I had a fly away, at least I thought so. But sending in the flightlog here, I soon found out and had to admit (that hurt the most...) that it was my mistake. Being concentrated on getting the "good shot" I wanted, I simply did not do the requiered checks. Forgot to wait the 10 or 20 seconds until the green "gps" light was shown on my screen, ignored the fact that I took of without "homepoint being recorded..." message and more of those "I know what I am doing" mistakes. Lucky for me, as the drone went "independend" I was able to pull it up above the trees, regain control and landed. No damage to the drone, some scratches to my self esteem and the proof, that there is only a small line between being proud and being haughty.

And since I am not rich enough to simply replace a drone nor foolish enough to think that I don't make mistakes, I am even more precise in how I act when flying out. Not only to safe my money, but also for the safety of those, who do not expect to have an encouter with a crashing drone.

 

[Johnmcl7]

Unexpected flyaways?
If you are looking at "flyaway" posts, look for the ones where they post flight data for analysis and see what really caused the problem.
The term flyaway is used way too much in forums.
It suggests that drones are likely to get a mind of their own and zoom off.
But really all it indicates is that someone lost their drone and doesn't understand why.

Don't worry about recalibrating things.
It's not a normal thing that you need to do.
And if you think the drone is telling you to, as you found out, it is often just poor wording in DJI's warning message.

This is very true and I've wondered if the forum should have tagging so the mods and perhaps certain users could update a thread tag to show the cause of a problem. People expressing concern about the number of flyaways seems a fairly constant concern and I can understand why if you glance at some of the forums on here it does look bad but then of course when you look into the actual detail in the threads it's almost never as it appears and frequently pilot error.

 

[Johnmcl7]

I had a fly away, at least I thought so. But sending in the flightlog here, I soon found out and had to admit (that hurt the most...) that it was my mistake. Being concentrated on getting the "good shot" I wanted, I simply did not do the requiered checks. Forgot to wait the 10 or 20 seconds until the green "gps" light was shown on my screen, ignored the fact that I took of without "homepoint being recorded..." message and more of those "I know what I am doing" mistakes. Lucky for me, as the drone went "independend" I was able to pull it up above the trees, regain control and landed. No damage to the drone, some scratches to my self esteem and the proof, that there is only a small line between being proud and being haughty.

And since I am not rich enough to simply replace a drone nor foolish enough to think that I don't make mistakes, I am even more precise in how I act when flying out. Not only to safe my money, but also for the safety of those, who do not expect to have an encouter with a crashing drone.

Good on you for accepting what happened and improving yourself, the drones are complex devices and it can be easy to make mistakes with them. I spend time reading through accident threads to understand what went wrong and how to avoid making the same mistake myself.

 

[wco81]

I always calibrate compass if the app. indicates to do so.

I flew about 2 kilometers away and the app. reported connection lost. I didn't panic but had had several warnings about poor connection before.

The live video cut out so I pressed RTH on the controller and fortunately it came back. It must have had some connection or else the RTH command wouldn't have been executed?

I thought when it lost connection to the controller it would automatically RTH?

What are the most common causes of flyaways?

RF interference or jamming?

 

[sar104]

My understanding is that magnetic interference will only cause the drone to fly in a circular path when it attempts to hold position ( "toilet bowling" ). It will not cause flyaway or the drone dropping out of the sky.

No - it's more complicated than that, and the resulting flight characteristics depend strongly on the magnitude of the yaw error. Toilet bowl flight results from a yaw error of around 90°, which leads the FC to apply thrust orthogonally to the intended direction - exactly the required condition for circular motion. However, if the yaw error is 180° then the thrust is opposite to the desired direction, leading to the aircraft simply accelerating away in a straight line. Intermediate yaw errors produce a combination of those effects.

 

[new2mavic]

No - it's more complicated than that, and the resulting flight characteristics depend strongly on the magnitude of the yaw error. Toilet bowl flight results from a yaw error of around 90°, which leads the FC to apply thrust orthogonally to the intended direction - exactly the required condition for circular motion. However, if the yaw error is 180° then the thrust is opposite to the desired direction, leading to the aircraft simply accelerating away in a straight line. Intermediate yaw errors produce a combination of those effects.

Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

 

[Deleted member 94047]

This is very true and I've wondered if the forum should have tagging so the mods and perhaps certain users could update a thread tag to show the cause of a problem

This is a very good suggestion. Like putting a final verdict - I really like the idea. Mods, what say you?

 

[Thomas B]

This is a very good suggestion. Like putting a final verdict - I really like the idea. Mods, what say you?

Not sure I understand tagging mode.... but you can bookmark any post (an active link) and recall the list as you desire. Then click the one you want and there you are.

 

[Deleted member 94047]

Not sure I understand tagging mode.... but you can bookmark any post (an active link) and recall the list as you desire. Then click the one you want and there you are.

I understood it as a final judgment on the cause of a crash or loss of aircraft. Tags could include "pilot error", "hardware problem", "sudden loss of power", "software malfunction", "compass error", etc and could be appended to threads in the flyaway&crash section once the cause has been eatablished. I really think this is an excellent idea, please give it some consideration.

 

[Johnmcl7]

Not sure I understand tagging mode.... but you can bookmark any post (an active link) and recall the list as you desire. Then click the one you want and there you are.

Tagging adds a visible prefix alongside the thread topic which can be used in a variety of ways, for example on another forum they have tags set up in their trading forum so you can easily see what is for sale or wanted and filter on those tags:

For here what I was thinking was a tagging system that only certain users could set (admin, mods and a select group of users) after the cause had been identified so it could be clearly seen from anyone glancing at the forum. If you look at the Mavic Crash and Flyaway forum it's quite alarming for potential Mavic Mini owners because it looks a fairly high chance the Mini is going to fly off on its own but a quick look in some of them it seems it's down to being flown in winds too high for the small drone.