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I did something stupid today

bzmot

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Well, there is this road a little ways out of Cape Town, called Chapman's Peak Drive, incredibly scenic. So I thought: why not test the Mavic (2 Zoom) and its Active Track 2.0. Traffic was minimal (see below), so I pulled over into a rest area, launched it from a big rock next to the road, set it to follow the car over the sea, just in case, and started driving. My gf was checking on the screen, making sure we stayed connected. The bird initially followed without a problem but I think I drove a little too fast and around one of those bends suddenly all connectivity disappeared, just like that, no video no radio. It was then that I realized that it was set to RTH rather than hover! Well.. I wanted to turn around and chase it as quickly as possible, seeing as the shoulder from which I had launched it was about 5 feet wide and then a sheer dropoff to the sea.... You can imagine my panic. But it is a mountain road, narrow and plenty of blind curves ahead. So I had to drive on another couple minutes until I found a spot to turn around. I drove as quickly as reasonably possible, nearly crapping my pants in the process. Then suddenly signal returned. Mavic was sitting safely on the shoulder of the road again. When we reached the spot, I saw it had landed around 3-4 inches from the spot from which I had launched it. Perfect precision. But also very lucky, a few inches to the right and... welcome Mr. Cliff and bye bye birdie. Whew! Anyway, this is just to praise DJI for their incredible landing precision and well... may it serve as a lesson for me and possibly some of you: always set it to "hover" when you do tracking. We have a saying in Polish: "you have more luck than wits" and it fits perfectly here. Incidentally, the footage I got was amazing... One of the most beautiful places on this planet. (the images I posted are screengrabs and heavily compressed cause the originals were too large to post; the second was taken immediately after it landed and I regained signal).
 

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Thanks for letting us learn from your mistake, and I'm very happy that it turned out so well. We could all do better by considering the failure modes when we fly.
 
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