Mini Les Chutes Coulonge

[Zbip57]

The Chutes Coulonge Park is located north-west of Ottawa, in Fort Coulonge, Quebec.

This was shot last September using my Mavic Mini.

 

[Zbip57]

I had a couple of scary moments while shooting this video.

These incidents were discussed in an earlier thread where people were questioning whether to blame the VPS sensors for crashing their drones into water.
mavicpilots.com/threads/loss-of-control-over-water-explained.117029/

My first incident is right in the opening shot of my video. The drone was hovering low over the water, down deep in the canyon, when it lost GPS lock. The vision sensor suddenly started tracking the movement of the water. The Mini did that initial tracking shot all by itself. See this post for explanation:
mavicpilots.com/threads/loss-of-control-over-water-explained.117029/page-2#post-1320455

The other much scarier incident occurred when the app suddenly announced "Landing" while the drone was still over the river! I was bringing the Mini back down to my location at the time. The platform where I'm standing is about 30ft above the river, and the drone was yet another 25ft still above me, when it suddenly stopped and announced "Landing" out over the water!

The log file showed the VPS.height at only 2ft, when there was nothing under the drone. Huh? It turns out the infrared sensors detected the cloud of mist from the waterfall, thought it was only 2ft off the ground, and as I was holding the throttle more than 85% down at the time, that triggered auto-landing. Yikes!

Fortunately I had plenty of time to cancel the landing, but it had already descended by 15ft before I eventually reacted. That incident was further analyzed in the same thread, starting here:
mavicpilots.com/threads/loss-of-control-over-water-explained.117029/page-2#post-1320474

All stuff to be aware of...

 

[4006448]

Pretty area to fly. Good lessons you’ve discovered.