Flying your Mavic at higher altitudes. Some observations.

[Former Member]

Im not sure where Mavics were designed and tested to fly, but they do have their operational altitude limits set at 6,000 meters for the M2 and 5,000 meters for the Mavic Pro. This is MSL not AGL.

So what does that mean to the everyday drone pilot? It means that as you go higher in altitude, your drone will have a tougher time doing what is does effortlessly at sea level.

Think about a fit person who lives at sea level and climbs a flight of stairs. Easy peasy right? Move that person to Denver, and that same flight of stairs becomes alot harder because it's harder to breathe. Move that same person to the Himalayas, and they might only get up to the first step without requiring oxygen. Your drone is no different.

At higher altitudes, you can expect the aircraft to climb slower, fly slower, and use more battery to maintain it's altitude. You need to take this into consideration because at sea level you might get 20 minutes from a battery. In Denver maybe only 18 minutes. In Quito, Ecuador, a favorite place for retirees, with an elevation of 9,200', dont expect much of anyting to be the same about how your drone flies at sea level. The air temperature can also have a diminishing effect, so be careful when you fly in higher altitude destinations!

 

[MichiganMavic]

I came across this when flying in the mountains in Maui. I went 1639’up and 23550’ out and had only 15 minutes. It climbed very slowly at that height.

 

[Former Member]

I came across this when flying in the mountains in Maui. I went 1639’up and 23550’ out and had only 15 minutes. It climbed very slowly at that height.

Thats an excellent example, and that was only 1639' up.

 

[MichiganMavic]

At that height, it said “Max Height Reached” on my screen too. Too bad I couldn’t pass the 500m max height. I was in a narrow valley in the mountains. Reminded me of Jurassic park.

 

[sar104]

Thats an excellent example, and that was only 1639' up.

But not 1639 ft MSL. At that elevation the air density is around 95% of sea level density, so relatively little effect. The mountains there go up to around 10,000 ft though, at which point the air density falls to less than 70% sea level density. That's enough to notice a difference, although I get much better than 15 minutes at that elevation. The 23,550 ft excursion likely had a major influence on that.

 

[Johnmcl7]

I think the Pikes Peak International hill climb is an impressive demonstration of this with petrol cars losing up to 30% of their performance from the race start point by the time they reach the top from the lack of oxygen. This means the cars have to be absolute monsters to cope with this loss of power, Loeb's Peugeot 208 T16 weighed under a ton but its V6 engine churned out 875bhp.

Similarly in the high Mexican rally stages the WRC cars are also up to 30% down on power also from the lack of oxygen which is a significant engineering problem for the lowered powered rally cars which are only producing 320bhp to begin with.

 

[Wille]

Mavic is Indeed good up to -1552 m with some lift drop off, but nothing spectacular.

The weather would have more of an effect on air density at those altitudes