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Locating Aircraft Following Crash or Fly Away

Rod NCHRST

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I don't have the problem, yet, thank God. I read about folks who've crashed or the ac has gone down some distance away, and they are able to locate it somehow or another with GPS or other data resident on (where?) the controller, the iPad?
  • I imagine them walking, if possible, to a set of coordinates that they've accessed somewhere.
  • Sure enough, there is the ac, right where the GPS indicated it would be (nice ending to the event).
  • If the battery is exhausted, can the GPS still locate the ac?

So, rather than waiting for a problem to develop, I'd like to know, in advance, what/how to recover the ac after locating it.

Thanks, in advance, for your thoughts.

rodb4Jesus

Rod
 
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Welcome to our forum!

Use the "Find My Drone" function which is built into both DJI Go4 and DJI Fly. For some strange reason, it's not documented in the manuals. Before you fly, make sure you have cached a map of the area you'll be flying. Not mandatory, but it makes finding a lost drone much easier.

Here's how it works in DJI Go4:
You're flying. You crash. Press the DJI logo in the upper left corner of your screen. This will take you to the DJI Go4 home screen. Then press the "hamburger" or "stack of pancakes" icon in the upper right corner of your screen. This opens up a menu in which Find My Drone is one of the options. Your screen will display the map, with the last known location of your drone, with GPS coordinates, and the present location of your controller. You can now plot a path leading to your lost drone. You have the option of activating and audible "beep" and/or a visual blinking LED, if the drone still has battery life.

I have not owned an MA2 or Mini, so I haven't used DJI Fly. But I think it works similarly. Hope this helps.

Thanks for joining!
 
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So, rather than waiting for a problem to develop, I'd like to know, in advance, what/how to recover the ac after locating it.
Your drone reports back to the app with details of exactly where it is and over a hundred other parameters every 1/10th of a second.
All you need to do is post your recorded flight data here and a data interpreter might be able to help you.
If the drone crashed or landed without losing signal, it's easy to extract the location straight from the data.
If signal was lost while the drone was still flying, it's more complicated but often there are enough clues in the data to come up with a likely search area.
 
Three possibilities.
1. The drone goes down with some battery left in range of the controller. I had this, a prop-strike cause the drone to stop it's motors and it fell less than it's own length. The camera was transmitting, I had location data, but I couldn't restart the motors remotely. Now it's a simple case of going to where the GPS says the drone is.
Note. If you can't fly back to the start point, a forced landing with some battery left gives you a chance of finding the drone. The find my drone feature will get the drone to send it's location and make noises / flash its lights to help you find it.
Try it: point the camera straight down so you can there is no hazard, and land a little way from the home point, activate the feature and go find your drone.
2. The drone runs out of battery within range of controller, and lands. Much like 1 you know where the drone finished but it can't help you find it when you're close.
3. The drone is flying and loses signal. You have to extrapolate from the battery data when it will go into forced landing mode and where it will when that happens, and how far it will drift on the way down. Some experts here have models for doing that from the logs.
 
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