I almost lost my Mavic Air the other day, and thought it would be useful to share my experience.
While traveling on a road along the edge of a deep forested canyon after some recent rains, I spied a distant waterfall a couple of miles away. There was somewhat of a breeze, but it did not some that significant at the time. Launching my drone to check out the waterfall, I almost reached it before getting the usual warning message that I need to turn around in order to have enough battery to make it back. In the past, I have noticed that when letting the drone return automatically in this circumstance I would still have about ~15-20% battery life left over after the return. In this case I wanted to get a little closer to the waterfall for some better pictures, so I overrode the return-to-home action and kept going further away for about another 15 seconds(?) before returning. On the return back I also did some video as the drone overflew some interesting canyon terrain. But as time went on I realized that my distance versus remaining battery life on the drone was starting to look iffy, as I believe I may have been running into headwinds on the return. So I turned off further video recording to save battery life and also decided to slowly descend the drone as it returned so that it would be potentially exposed to less winds and spend less time in the air by the time it got back. But at about 380 feet away from me I got a "battery critically low message" at about 6% left, and the drone exited the return-to-home mode and started descending. When I looked back from controller phone screen to the drone, I lost sight of it as it started descending below the rim of the canyon. But by quickly switching to the map function on the controller I saw it had also changed course and descending away from me. At this point I manually turned it around and increased the altitude, and was able to successfully bring it in for a landing with about 3% battery life remaining. Looking at the flight logs afterwards, the drone had covered 25,049' over a time of 16:58, with the maximum distance about 2.3 miles away. I was also using the Master Airscrew quiet props.
The lessons I learned from this close call are the following:
- Don't underestimate the controller's return-to-home messaging, especially if you have any sort of winds that could alter the flight variables in a significant way.
- I am not sure that manually reducing the altitude on the way back (from the set return-to-home altitude) was the right thing to do. I think the drone at some threshold decided the battery life was to short to go further and that it needed to land NOW, despite it had not reached home, and oblivious to the landing conditions at that point. If I was at a high altitude when this action commenced, perhaps I would have more margin to take corrective actions to recover from this situation.
- Given close-calls like this, I am in no hurry to plunk down money for a more expensive drone that I might live to regret such a loss.
While traveling on a road along the edge of a deep forested canyon after some recent rains, I spied a distant waterfall a couple of miles away. There was somewhat of a breeze, but it did not some that significant at the time. Launching my drone to check out the waterfall, I almost reached it before getting the usual warning message that I need to turn around in order to have enough battery to make it back. In the past, I have noticed that when letting the drone return automatically in this circumstance I would still have about ~15-20% battery life left over after the return. In this case I wanted to get a little closer to the waterfall for some better pictures, so I overrode the return-to-home action and kept going further away for about another 15 seconds(?) before returning. On the return back I also did some video as the drone overflew some interesting canyon terrain. But as time went on I realized that my distance versus remaining battery life on the drone was starting to look iffy, as I believe I may have been running into headwinds on the return. So I turned off further video recording to save battery life and also decided to slowly descend the drone as it returned so that it would be potentially exposed to less winds and spend less time in the air by the time it got back. But at about 380 feet away from me I got a "battery critically low message" at about 6% left, and the drone exited the return-to-home mode and started descending. When I looked back from controller phone screen to the drone, I lost sight of it as it started descending below the rim of the canyon. But by quickly switching to the map function on the controller I saw it had also changed course and descending away from me. At this point I manually turned it around and increased the altitude, and was able to successfully bring it in for a landing with about 3% battery life remaining. Looking at the flight logs afterwards, the drone had covered 25,049' over a time of 16:58, with the maximum distance about 2.3 miles away. I was also using the Master Airscrew quiet props.
The lessons I learned from this close call are the following:
- Don't underestimate the controller's return-to-home messaging, especially if you have any sort of winds that could alter the flight variables in a significant way.
- I am not sure that manually reducing the altitude on the way back (from the set return-to-home altitude) was the right thing to do. I think the drone at some threshold decided the battery life was to short to go further and that it needed to land NOW, despite it had not reached home, and oblivious to the landing conditions at that point. If I was at a high altitude when this action commenced, perhaps I would have more margin to take corrective actions to recover from this situation.
- Given close-calls like this, I am in no hurry to plunk down money for a more expensive drone that I might live to regret such a loss.
