With the introduction of the Mavic Mini there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of posts requesting help with lost or crashed aircraft. While there is plenty of help and advice available on this forum, and detailed guidance and options on several other websites, I thought that perhaps a single summary of the subject might be useful. If it does prove useful then I'll try to keep it updated, either in this post or followup posts, and perhaps other forum members will contribute additional thoughts on the subject to address errors and omissions.
So on April 16th I made a trip to Puerto Galara, Philippines, with my Mavic 3 Pro. It's a great place to fly a drone because there are no airports around so you can go up to 1,000 meters. It's a peninsula that has a lot of hills and coastline. I had flown my Mavic Pro Platinum there in 2018. But I was excited about the Mavic 3 Pro's better capabilities. So first I flew up to 1,000 meters. Then I flew two out of signal range waypoint missions. So it was getting dark, around 6, and I made the mistake of making another flight. This was around Sabang Beach, the major tourist destination...