Lost Mavic 2

dj NIMBUS · Jul 26, 2020

I have a Mavic 2 I lost signal with, and consequently lost the drone. I was doing a Hyperlapse, and it was returning home, when it said, signal block, adjust antenna or change location. I figured the drone was still on it's way back as it was only 1200 ft away, but it never came back. So I drove over to the location last shown on Go4 app, which of course had trees.... and didn't find the drone. I later found Airdata, loaded flight data,... and saw everything it said, which brings me to this question.

It says "LANDING BATTERY - 22%".... is this an accurate description of it recording a landing? If so, that means it landed in a tree. If signal was lost at 22% between the controller and aircraft at 22%, or any other battery level, does Airdata assume landing because of no further communication??

any insight would be helpful. I even flew a drone deploy mission with my P4P V2 over the tree cover to see if I could spot the drone in vegetation health map as well a visual inspection... no luck

sar104 · Jul 26, 2020

This has all the hallmarks of a sudden power disconnect or FC crash. I can't see any precursor indications of a problem. Battery looked good.

If that is the case then it is fairly simple to calculate the descent trajectory using reasonable drag model for the M2 and the AirData computed wind velocity. That yields the following trajectory:

Visualizing that on Google Earth, with the descent track in green:

So you don't want to look at the last recorded position (the end of the yellow track), but it would be worth looking where the green trajectory intersects the trees.

dj NIMBUS · Jul 27, 2020

I calculated a similar trajectory,.... that tree is tall and has thick coverage. I wish there was some type of scanning device that could more easily “see” into the tree. Here’s pics I took underneath.