Mavic 3 Pro realistic flight time

[AroundTheWorld]

Hello,

Even though we all know that DJI's advertised flight time for each of its drones is difficult to achieve in real-world flying conditions, I didn't expect the Mavic 3 Pro to be that bad in that regard until I watched this video:

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The guy is getting a 27 minutes autonomy so I would like to call on all Mavic 3 Pro owners to find out if it is an isolated case or if it happens often.

How much flight time do you usually get?

Thanks for your help

 

[AlanL]

Here is my data for my Mavic 3 Pro from Airdata UAV:


According to the log for the 32 minute flight I landed with 15% battery left. I have had many more flights where I was forced to land with 5% battery that were shorter in distance.

 

[AroundTheWorld]

Here is my data for my Mavic 3 Pro from Airdata UAV:

View attachment 175142
According to the log for the 32 minute flight I landed with 15% battery left. I have had many more flights where I was forced to land with 5% battery that were shorter in distance.

32 minutes is a pretty good result considering that I didn't achieve that with my Mavic 3 Classic!

Knowing that it was your longer flight, can we safely assume that it is possible to get over 30 minutes almost every time?

 

[AlanL]

32 minutes is a pretty good result considering that I didn't achieve that with my Mavic 3 Classic!

Knowing that it was your longer flight, can we safely assume that it is possible to get over 30 minutes almost every time?

I would say no - that flight was the longest out of 182 flights and was one where I went up to 380' above my house and just hovered while turning and shooting images of a sunset. Most other flights including quite a few where I had to land to change batteries involved flying around instead of just hovering and all showed shorter flight times.

This is the flight log map from Airdata:


The flight warnings were for the battery levels.

 

[AroundTheWorld]

I would say no - that flight was the longest out of 182 flights and was one where I went up to 380' above my house and just hovered while turning and shooting images of a sunset. Most other flights including quite a few where I had to land to change batteries involved flying around instead of just hovering and all showed shorter flight times.

This is the flight log map from Airdata:

View attachment 175144
The flight warnings were for the battery levels.

Ah yeah you flew under very specific conditions

I believe that hovering consumes the battery more quickly because the motors have to work more to keep the drone in place so I think that you might even have been able to last more than 32 minutes by flying at low speed

 

[AlanL]

Ah yeah you flew under very specific conditions

I believe that hovering consumes the battery more quickly because the motors have to work more to keep the drone in place so I think that you might even have been able to last more than 32 minutes by flying at low speed

Possibly so but the other observation is that I do fly around on most flights and have never exceeded the 32 minutes of this specific flight.

 

[AroundTheWorld]

Possibly so but the other observation is that I do fly around on most flights and have never exceeded the 32 minutes of this specific flight.

Thanks for your report

Even though 32 minutes seems great, I expected the Mavic 3 Pro to fly consistently around that mark

 

[Suren]

My longest flight with he Pro was 38+ minutes. Set it to Cruise at 32km/h and a long distance flight away.

 

[Filmarik]

My longest flight with he Pro was 38+ minutes. Set it to Cruise at 32km/h and a long distance flight away.

View attachment 175145

From my experience around the 26min mark is pretty much what I get when changing cameras, dirrections and altitude while shooting videos and photos with about 20% left in the tank. Even though it is far less than the specs would suggest it is still ok for what I need and landing with a good battery capacity safety margin. If needed I could probaly push it to over 30 min but I've got 3 batteries so I can be in the air for almost hour and half in total.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Thanks for your report

Even though 32 minutes seems great, I expected the Mavic 3 Pro to fly consistently around that mark

32 minutes is realistic if you truly start with a freshly charged 100% battery (not a 96% charge remaining, after fully charging to 100% 3 days ago) and fly to between 5% and 10% remaining battery. If you insist upon landing at 15-20%, you'll never get over 30 minutes, and are leaving lots of gas in the tank. The Mavic 3 Pro can still fly for a full two minutes after reaching 0% remaining battery and 0% remaining battery is still above 3.5V on each cell. 0% remaining won't damage your battery. Flying past 0% may reduce longevity, but replacing batteries is a lot cheaper than replacing unrecovered drones. Better to limp home safely than to hope to recover a drone ditch-landed unnecessarily, which may be gone by the time you get to it, if you can even get to it!

Pro Tip: To maximize flight time, warm up the GPS with a different battery, and after the drone has acquired the Home Point on the ground, power down, and swap out with a 100% charged battery for flight. It will immediately reacquire the Home Point with no delay, and fly off with 100% battery instead of 97% battery. Every percentage point counts!

 

[Filmarik]

32 minutes is realistic if you truly start with a freshly charged 100% battery (not a 96% charge remaining, after fully charging to 100% 3 days ago) and fly to between 5% and 10% remaining battery. If you insist upon landing at 15-20%, you'll never get over 30 minutes, and are leaving lots of gas in the tank. The Mavic 3 Pro can still fly for a full two minutes after reaching 0% remaining battery and 0% remaining battery is still above 3.5V on each cell. 0% remaining won't damage your battery. Flying past 0% may reduce longevity, but replacing batteries is a lot cheaper than replacing unrecovered drones. Better to limp home safely than to hope to recover a drone ditch-landed unnecessarily, which may be gone by the time you get to it, if you can even get to it!

Pro Tip: To maximize flight time, warm up the GPS with a different battery, and after the drone has acquired the Home Point on the ground, power down, and swap out with a 100% charged battery for flight. It will immediately reacquire the Home Point with no delay, and fly off with 100% battery instead of 97% battery. Every percentage point counts!

TBH this has been a big revelation to me that M3 can fly for another 2 minutes with the FlyApp showing 0% battery level. I thought 0% means completely depleted battery discharged down to near 0 voltage. Apparently not so in this case. DJI must have taken a different approach for a safety reason and 0% does not really mean 0% .
I come from hand build RC planes and helicopters and used to measure the LiPo batteries with dedicated battery tester. I was tought to time the flight
to have 20% capacity left upon landing. That was not only for safety reason but also to prolong the lifespan of batteries. Discharging down to 0% was a big NO NO as repeating this bad practice just a few times would pretty much kill the battery rendering it swollen and anusable pretty quickly. But they were just simple batteries, not "smart" batteries with protective circuits etc.
If your information is indeed true and correct I might adopt different approach to how I operate M3 and not land with battery showing 20% capacity left as I have been doing but perhaps flying down to 5%. BTW is this mentioned anywhere in the Manual that flying down to 5% or 0% is actually safe and ok??

 

[AroundTheWorld]

32 minutes is realistic if you truly start with a freshly charged 100% battery (not a 96% charge remaining, after fully charging to 100% 3 days ago) and fly to between 5% and 10% remaining battery. If you insist upon landing at 15-20%, you'll never get over 30 minutes, and are leaving lots of gas in the tank. The Mavic 3 Pro can still fly for a full two minutes after reaching 0% remaining battery and 0% remaining battery is still above 3.5V on each cell. 0% remaining won't damage your battery. Flying past 0% may reduce longevity, but replacing batteries is a lot cheaper than replacing unrecovered drones. Better to limp home safely than to hope to recover a drone ditch-landed unnecessarily, which may be gone by the time you get to it, if you can even get to it!

Pro Tip: To maximize flight time, warm up the GPS with a different battery, and after the drone has acquired the Home Point on the ground, power down, and swap out with a 100% charged battery for flight. It will immediately reacquire the Home Point with no delay, and fly off with 100% battery instead of 97% battery. Every percentage point counts!

TBH this has been a big revelation to me that M3 can fly for another 2 minutes with the FlyApp showing 0% battery level. I thought 0% means completely depleted battery discharged down to near 0 voltage. Apparently not so in this case. DJI must have taken a different approach for a safety reason and 0% does not really means 0% .
I come from hand build RC planes and helicopters and used to measure the LiPo batteries with dedicated battery tester. I was tought to time the flight
to have 20% capacity left upon landing. That was not only for safety reason but also to prolong the lifespan of batteries. Discharging down to 0% was a big NO NO as repeating this bad practice just a few times would pretty much kill the battery rendering it swollen and anusable pretty quickly. But they were just simple batteries, not "smart" batteries with protective circuits etc.
If your information is indeed true and correct I might adopt different approach to how I operate M3 and not land with battery showing 20% capacity left as I have been doing but perhaps flying down to 5%. BTW is this mentioned anywhere in the Manual that flying down to 5% or 0% is actually safe and ok??

That's very interesting. I didn't know that it was possible to fly 2 more minutes with a 0% battery level and I also thought that it was recommended to land around 15% to preserve the battery life. I might change my habits then.

I didn't know either about that trick with the GPS. I always thought that changing battery once the home point has been updated would reset the position.

Very useful post, thank you!

 

[AroundTheWorld]

My longest flight with he Pro was 38+ minutes. Set it to Cruise at 32km/h and a long distance flight away.

View attachment 175145

Wow that's an impressive result! Were you filming too?

 

[Meta4]

I didn't know either about that trick with the GPS. I always thought that changing battery once the home point has been updated would reset the position.

When your drone is powered down, the homepoint is lost and a new homepoint will be established after it's powered up again and receives good GPS location data.
The "trick" is simply that GPS will be rapidly acquired if the drone was only recently used.
It's the difference between a hot fix and a cold fix.

More info here:

Time to first fix - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Meta4]

Next time .. don't start three separate threads for the same topic, all within 30 minutes.
You could have added additional thoughts to the original thread.

 

[GadgetGuy]

TBH this has been a big revelation to me that M3 can fly for another 2 minutes with the FlyApp showing 0% battery level. I thought 0% means completely depleted battery discharged down to near 0 voltage. Apparently not so in this case. DJI must have taken a different approach for a safety reason and 0% does not really mean 0% .
I come from hand build RC planes and helicopters and used to measure the LiPo batteries with dedicated battery tester. I was tought to time the flight
to have 20% capacity left upon landing. That was not only for safety reason but also to prolong the lifespan of batteries. Discharging down to 0% was a big NO NO as repeating this bad practice just a few times would pretty much kill the battery rendering it swollen and anusable pretty quickly. But they were just simple batteries, not "smart" batteries with protective circuits etc.
If your information is indeed true and correct I might adopt different approach to how I operate M3 and not land with battery showing 20% capacity left as I have been doing but perhaps flying down to 5%. BTW is this mentioned anywhere in the Manual that flying down to 5% or 0% is actually safe and ok??

It's been that way since the Phantom 4. DJI now holds back two minutes of flight time after displaying 0% battery remaining. Battery damage only occurs when any cell voltage drops below 3.3V. Voltage at 0% is still above 3.5V on each cell. Below 3.0V, it's going to crash quickly. It goes from 3.3V to below 3.0V in mere seconds after the two minutes below 0%! Not for the feint of heart! Hardest part is controlling the drone below 10% under Autoland. If you haven't practiced that, don't go below 10%, unless you are already ready to land with the drone directly above you. Hand catching is also highly recommended.

 

[AroundTheWorld]

Next time .. don't start three separate threads for the same topic, all within 30 minutes.
You could have added additional thoughts to the original thread.

Yeah you're right. I didn't know where to post a topic that would have concerned each variation of the Mavic 3 so I decided to separate the talk between each model

 

[AroundTheWorld]

When your drone is powered down, the homepoint is lost and a new homepoint will be established after it's powered up again and receives good GPS location data.
The "trick" is simply that GPS will be rapidly acquired if the drone was only recently used.
It's the difference between a hot fix and a cold fix.

More info here:

Time to first fix - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Thanks for the details, I just learned something

 

[AroundTheWorld]

It's been that way since the Phantom 4. DJI now holds back two minutes of flight time after displaying 0% battery remaining. Battery damage only occurs when any cell voltage drops below 3.3V. Voltage at 0% is still above 3.5V on each cell. Below 3.0V, it's going to crash quickly. It goes from 3.3V to below 3.0V in mere seconds after the two minutes below 0%! Not for the feint of heart! Hardest part is controlling the drone below 10% under Autoland. If you haven't practiced that, don't go below 10%, unless you are already ready to land with the drone directly above you. Hand catching is also highly recommended.

That's exactly how I crashed my first Mavic 2 Pro. I was flying over a cliff when I first discovered that the drone
was programmed to execute a forced landing at 10 %. Since I took off from the highest point, I got scared when I saw the drone starting its descent to the river at the bottom of the gorge and I didn't know that it was possible to regain control of the altitude at that time.

I tried to control it before it went below the edge of the cliff, but the stress, my lack of experience and knowledge of the drone behaviour at the time, combined with the deactivation of the obstacle sensors at that battery level and the fact that the drone was facing me and that I wasn't yet comfortable with reverse manoeuvres led to my drone to crash .

 

[Suren]

Wow that's an impressive result! Were you filming too?

Thanks, No just flying. I wanted to see how far I could could with trying Dji's expected flight time. Turned off all sensors etc as well.