Yesterday I flew to try to get a cool shot of the lame sunset on the gloomy, snowy day. Temps were in the mid 30s (Farenheit) and I had 17 Satilites. This was the 116th flight with my month-old Mavic Pro, and IMU, compass, and everything else looked normal. It was getting dark, not to the pitch black point, but obviously darker than takeoff, so I elected to bring it home. I selected the Auto RTH feature, which I had previously tested (and I am amazed by!!) Everything was looking good until about 30ft from the landing site, I was spot-on for a good landing. Then, the Mavic started drifting... slowly at first. (This was into the wind by the way) I grabbed the controls but couldn’t do anything but watch my baby smack into a tree. (I tried the sticks, the pause button, the cancel button, everything!!) there wasn’t that much time so I am not completely sure if all those actually didn’t work, but I tried them. I am not sure I was disconnected though, as I successfully performed a CSC to kill the motors. As a side note, obstacle avoidance and possibly VPS were inactive due to the low ambient light.
The carnage report.... pretty light actually. A single rear blade was damaged, about 1/2 inch off the end. This was the first flight I ever used the gimbal dome... before I took off I saw a little snow coming down and elected to use it... and it saved my gimbal. The drone crashed about 15ft high into the tree, then toppled to it’s final resting place on the lowest branch 10ft off the ground. I found the drone hanging by one of the front landing legs swinging back and forth in the tree. If that landing gear hadn’t caught, my drone would have freefalled the rest of the way to the pavement, and shattered into a million pieces. Boy am I lucky.
I wish this crash was human error, but now I am skeptical if my drone will do this again the next time I fly.
Here are my ideas of why it crashed:
-Low ambient light (no sensors)
-compass issue (although I wasn’t warned pre-flight)
-new firmware.... maybe? I updated to the latest version about a week ago.
So... what now? I really would hate for this to happen again, as I likely wouldn’t be so lucky.
I will post the footage below, and I could possibly give some flight records, but I don’t see that helping, as it looks just like any other Mavic crash.... nothing abnormal until the “motors obstructed” message appears. It was in GoHome mode the entire time, and no stick inputs.
Here is the crash report... pretty much everything I said above
Let’s get to the bottom of this!
The carnage report.... pretty light actually. A single rear blade was damaged, about 1/2 inch off the end. This was the first flight I ever used the gimbal dome... before I took off I saw a little snow coming down and elected to use it... and it saved my gimbal. The drone crashed about 15ft high into the tree, then toppled to it’s final resting place on the lowest branch 10ft off the ground. I found the drone hanging by one of the front landing legs swinging back and forth in the tree. If that landing gear hadn’t caught, my drone would have freefalled the rest of the way to the pavement, and shattered into a million pieces. Boy am I lucky.
I wish this crash was human error, but now I am skeptical if my drone will do this again the next time I fly.
Here are my ideas of why it crashed:
-Low ambient light (no sensors)
-compass issue (although I wasn’t warned pre-flight)
-new firmware.... maybe? I updated to the latest version about a week ago.
So... what now? I really would hate for this to happen again, as I likely wouldn’t be so lucky.
I will post the footage below, and I could possibly give some flight records, but I don’t see that helping, as it looks just like any other Mavic crash.... nothing abnormal until the “motors obstructed” message appears. It was in GoHome mode the entire time, and no stick inputs.
Here is the crash report... pretty much everything I said above
Let’s get to the bottom of this!
