Help with lost drone

[Ervapa]

Hi!

Yesterday wind carried away my magic mini at just 30 m of height and like 80 m away from me. It started moving Ina random direction until at ~900meters my controller lost connection for some reason.

Here is the flight record in case you think you could help
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
I have searched all arround the last location known. But also, I drew a line from the point I was (home) to point the drone was and projected the line. Searching all over those places assuming the wind direction would be constant.

Thanks!

 

[scooot]

Someone with greater knowledge than me will be along soon and I have seen many drones been found by the experts on here.
For now though,have you tried the find my drone feature in the fly app.Good luck

 

[Skyflyer129]

There is an app I use called spot assist. It’s designed to help find parachutes that were cutaways after a malfunction. It’s may help locate your mini mavic. It takes in consideration height, wind speed/direction and drift distance. At that height there shouldn’t be much variance in wind direction or speed to the ground.
Blue skies , from SoCal

 

[Skyflyer129]

Someone with greater knowledge than me will be along soon and I have seen many drones been found by the experts on here.
For now though,have you tried the find my drone feature in the fly app.Good luck

Oh yea, there is that feature also, I thought you had already tried that, but if not, there is your 1st task to try ?

 

[SecureHttp]

Same thing happened to me, I lost mine to, the wind carried it. I hit the return to home but it didn't follow the designated path and went off course

 

[Meta4]

Yesterday wind carried away my magic mini at just 30 m of height and like 80 m away from me. It started moving Ina random direction until at ~900meters my controller lost connection for some reason.

There was nothing random about the drone's movement.
You climbed to 124 metres and the drone was being slowly blown away so you initiated RTH.
RTH flies at less than full speed, so it's not going to help much when you are fighting a strong wind.
You had the RTH height set to 164 metres.
In strong winds, the wind will be even stronger at higher altitudes so going higher was a bad idea as the drone is now blowing further away at a faster speed.
You should have brought it down to 30 metres or less and it would have come home on its own, or cancelled RTH and flown home manually at a lower altitude.
Even better, you should have avoided flying away in the direction of the wind and should have gone into the wind for a slow flight out and an easy flight home.

You got lucky when the wind eased at 2:46 and the drone started to make slow headway in the right direction.
The wind came back again at 3:51 and you were being blown backwards again.

Signal was lost at 9:10.5 with the drone at 123 metres and blowing further away at 3-4 metres/sec, battery was at 23%.

The drone will have blown further on the same line until it reached critical low battery level and autolanded.
@sar104 might be able to help further.

 

[Ervapa]

There was nothing random about the drone's movement.
You climbed to 124 metres and the drone was being slowly blown away so you initiated RTH.
RTH flies at less than full speed, so it's not going to help much when you are fighting a strong wind.
You had the RTH height set to 164 metres.
In strong winds, the wind will be even stronger at higher altitudes so going higher was a bad idea as the drone is now blowing further away at a faster speed.
You should have brought it down to 30 metres or less and it would have come home on its own, or cancelled RTH and flown home manually at a lower altitude.
Even better, you should have avoided flying away in the direction of the wind and should have gone into the wind for a slow flight out and an easy flight home.

You got lucky when the wind eased at 2:46 and the drone started to make slow headway in the right direction.
The wind came back again at 3:51 and you were being blown backwards again.

Signal was lost at 9:10.5 with the drone at 123 metres and blowing further away at 3-4 metres/sec, battery was at 23%.

The drone will have blown further on the same line until it reached critical low battery level and autolanded.
@sar104 might be able to help further.

Only thing there is that rth was set up at 50m, not 164m. It would be 164ft not mt. Would changing it to sports mode and pressing the stick had helped in something?

 

[DanMan32]

He's right, log shows 124/164ft, not meters.
Sport mode would have allowed a greater attack angle to combat the wind, so that likely would have helped, as well as descending to a lower safe altitude. You're already facing the right direction home, RTH having already pointed you in the right heading so you would only need to go forward while in sport mode.

 

[sar104]

There was nothing random about the drone's movement.
You climbed to 124 metres and the drone was being slowly blown away so you initiated RTH.
RTH flies at less than full speed, so it's not going to help much when you are fighting a strong wind.
You had the RTH height set to 164 metres.
In strong winds, the wind will be even stronger at higher altitudes so going higher was a bad idea as the drone is now blowing further away at a faster speed.
You should have brought it down to 30 metres or less and it would have come home on its own, or cancelled RTH and flown home manually at a lower altitude.
Even better, you should have avoided flying away in the direction of the wind and should have gone into the wind for a slow flight out and an easy flight home.

You got lucky when the wind eased at 2:46 and the drone started to make slow headway in the right direction.
The wind came back again at 3:51 and you were being blown backwards again.

Signal was lost at 9:10.5 with the drone at 123 metres and blowing further away at 3-4 metres/sec, battery was at 23%.

The drone will have blown further on the same line until it reached critical low battery level and autolanded.
@sar104 might be able to help further.

Yes - that's a high wind speed problem. It was fairly consistent though, so the following extrapolation may be reasonably accurate:



This is based on including some late time data points that Airdata sees in the log file but don't appear in the TXTlogToCSVtool conversion. I'm assuming that they are valid.

Using those data the aircraft should have commenced autolanding at 700 seconds, and been on the ground 20 seconds later. That would put it at 1175 meters from the home point and on a bearing of 224° from the last recorded point. Plotting that gives the following: predicted flight path:



A closer view of the predicted landing area:



I'd look there, and probably 50 - 100 meters around that point.

 

[Prmath]

Hi!

Yesterday wind carried away my magic mini at just 30 m of height and like 80 m away from me. It started moving Ina random direction until at ~900meters my controller lost connection for some reason.

Here is the flight record in case you think you could help
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
I have searched all arround the last location known. But also, I drew a line from the point I was (home) to point the drone was and projected the line. Searching all over those places assuming the wind direction would be constant.

Thanks!

IF........ you put reflective tape on all four legs, get a buddy with a drone with night light and when you get close, turn on the floods.
Exactly how I found mine up in the Bama deer woods.
Good Luck

 

[floyd]

There was nothing random about the drone's movement.
You climbed to 124 metres and the drone was being slowly blown away so you initiated RTH.
RTH flies at less than full speed, so it's not going to help much when you are fighting a strong wind.
You had the RTH height set to 164 metres.
In strong winds, the wind will be even stronger at higher altitudes so going higher was a bad idea as the drone is now blowing further away at a faster speed.
You should have brought it down to 30 metres or less and it would have come home on its own, or cancelled RTH and flown home manually at a lower altitude.
Even better, you should have avoided flying away in the direction of the wind and should have gone into the wind for a slow flight out and an easy flight home.

You got lucky when the wind eased at 2:46 and the drone started to make slow headway in the right direction.
The wind came back again at 3:51 and you were being blown backwards again.

Signal was lost at 9:10.5 with the drone at 123 metres and blowing further away at 3-4 metres/sec, battery was at 23%.

The drone will have blown further on the same line until it reached critical low battery level and autolanded.
@sar104 might be able to help further.

While educational and likely helpful to the OP in future flights (should he find the drone or buy another), it does nothing to help him find the drone now, which is the point of the thread.

 

[Meta4]

While educational and likely helpful to the OP in future flights (should he find the drone or buy another), it does nothing to help him find the drone now, which is the point of the thread.

Thanks for pointing out the deficiency in my posting.
I went as far as I could and called in someone that could go further.
The audience is a lot bigger than the OP.
Many members can learn a lot from reading incident reports to find out what can go wrong and strategies to ensure they avoid the same problems.

I didn't notice any contribution from you.
Perhaps you'll find the next lost drone??

 

[Thomas B]

You can continue this in the OP’s original post about the same incident. It’s here:

I think I lost my mavic mini

Hi! Today wind carried away my magic mini at just 30 m of height and like 80 m away from me. It started moving Ina random direction until at ~900meters my controller lost connection for some reason. Anyway I have two questions 1- is there a way to avoid this form happening? What will the drone...

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