An acquaintance I know lost his Mavic Air in the water!

drewdrones · Sep 29, 2019

Hey guys,

Since you guys were so helpful with finding my drone (im looking at you @sar104) - I've been talking about this forum a whole bunch with the community here in Shanghai.

A guy in our group said he lost his Mavic Air into a creek, wasn't able to get it back.

But out of curiosity, I got him to send me the .txt and .dat files to get analyzed to see what happened?

If anyone can give me any insight, i'll forward it to him and I'm sure he'd be happy to know what happened, because right now he's saying: "signal jam" but, I don't think thats right becauseI fly there all the time

skyrex · Sep 30, 2019

I've had something similar happen only once before.. RC completely and totally disconnected from the AC out of the blue, however the AC executed RTH, climbed to 50m and came back to me within 3" of where it took off from.
My suspicion is that similar has happened to your friend, however with low battery complication it could have possibly suffered from a cell collapse.
However there were no warnings or alerts/confirmation that there was a power issue other than a very minor voltage deviation.

Their RTH was set to 30m, so presuming there was nothing in the way RTH should have been a clear path to the home point on the other side of the river.
Unless the RTH point recorded wasn't until the AC was just over the water (doesn't appear that way), then your friend would have watched the AC execute a RTH and land in the water right in-front of them.

All is only speculation without their record of events of watching the AC and it's behavior after the AC disconnected.

Meta4 · Sep 30, 2019

drewdrones said:
A guy in our group said he lost his Mavic Air into a creek, wasn't able to get it back.

If anyone can give me any insight, i'll forward it to him and I'm sure he'd be happy to know what happened, because right now he's saying: "signal jam" but, I don't think thats right because fly there all the time

That flight data doesn't solve the mystery of what happened to your friend's drone.
Here's what the data looks like: DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
It ends with the drone 31 metres up in the air, across the river and 100 metres from home.
It was hovering in stable flight and the data just stops.
The Loss of Signal Action was set to RTH.
The data does not show anything that helps explain the loss.

sar104 · Sep 30, 2019

Meta4 said:
That flight data doesn't solve the mystery of what happened to your friend's drone.
Here's what the data looks like: DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
It ends with the drone 31 metres up in the air, across the river and 100 metres from home.
It was hovering in stable flight and the data just stops.
The Loss of Signal Action was set to RTH.
The data does not show anything that helps explain the loss.

Agreed. Both the txt and the DAT log just stop. There's nothing particularly suggestive in the event stream. FC failure or power loss.