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Litchi questions

Simmmo

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Sep 26, 2017
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Hi been using Litchi Waypoints for a while now on Android but just recently bought an Ipad Mini 4 with cellular as my viewing platform. Done a few test missions and everything seemed perfect.

Thursday I went to a location to fly some pre planned missions around an old Lead Mine in the Peak District.
Its quite a remote area and relatively flat. The missions are all compact focusing on the old workings and machinery.

I loaded the 1st Mission and pressed play (at this point having blind faith in the app and Mavic) I fly my missions slow usually 4km an hour and have learnt from previous programming errors when I got a trees height wrong by a meter to pay attention to the screen. The Mavic sets off for the 1st waypoint approximately 40 meters away. At this point I am expecting a faultless mission and believing totally, it is approaching the 1st waypoint which is next to what will ultimately be the final one. The mission will take 13 minutes. So you can imagine my surprise when I almost immediately hear "Mission ended" and the Mavic takes off at speed in the opposite direction fortunately across an open field. What follows next is a catalog of what I should have done prior to starting the mission both on site and previous.

I am sharing my ineptitude in hope that it will stop others making similar mistakes and prevent loss of the drone or third party damage.

I blindly loaded the mission(bird was hovering for a few minutes prior) and pressed play as the mission was short and quite contained I payed no attention to GPS or a Home Point. Will never do that again.

As the drone sped off away from me I panicked badly especially when looking for RTH and not finding it. The drone is now getting further and further away and I am convinced I have a flyaway. The landscape is new to me and all looks the same especially when in a state of panic. I hit the land button thinking a damaged drone is better than no drone I still have line of sight and appear to have some control over it having gone to FPV.
What then follows and is evidenced by the video is me blindly with my heart racing trying to fight the drone and bring it back to me as it is trying to land with one unbelievable escape concerning barb wire and a pond that I never relised was there until viewing the footage later. This all highlighted to me you need to have a plan for this possible scenario and a thorough understanding of your equipment. I finally got the Mavic back when I had a picture that I was able to land mark and bring it back to me backwards. I personally find the Mavic difficult to orientate by eye. This highlighted to me my lack of understanding of the tools I have on offer to me as I never thought to use the Mavic on the map which shows orientation until after the event.

After this incident I didn't want to risk flying another mission and just flew it manually around the site. I have since done some test flights incorporating mission failures so as to be able to regain control more smoothly and will continue to so practice.

The obvious moral being be prepared to take control manually at anytime which my lucky escape has highlighted to me.

Any ideas why it might have said "Mission ended" and flew away in the opposite direction?

Updated Litchi IOS yesterday and took it out to fly. 1st flight (I have video set to auto record) said video started then a second later video stopped and repeated this process continuously Mavic was no more than 10 meters away. Every time the controller said video stopped the Mavic twitched in flight was flying very slow and even when hovering still twitched. Landed it turned everything off and back on it then worked faultlessly flying a test mission numerous times. Again any ideas?

Am flying Litchi with DJI Go disabled.

Can someone tell if I will have any flight logs and where and how I can find them please?

Andy
 
Any ideas why it might have said "Mission ended" and flew away in the opposite direction?
Any chance that you launched before you got a firm GPS lock, and so it started the route, found GPS, updated home, and reinterpreted the route with this new information?
 
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