I was flying my Mavic air over some local state land, was a sunny day with very little wind. This is an area I've flown into before to see if I can get some interesting video of the environment or animals. Drone was about a mile away so unfortunately I did not have clear visual sight of it. Being that this area is devoid of human activity I felt the risk was minimal. I was using tapfly flying at a steady 120ft or so and just letting the drone hold a straight course with minor corrections to follow the river. About 20 seconds into the video you can see I started to pan the drone to the left to line it up with the lake in the shot and to correct flying into the bright light. Shortly thereafter the drone flew right then proceeded to take a hard turn left angled down. I immediately suspected a bird attack and put it in sport mode and as able to gain altitude up to 200 feet during a chaotic few seconds, but the drone lost signal shortly after. In my panic I stopped recording as I was concerned about preserving battery power for the flight back that never happened. It was one of those ooooooooohhh crap moments.
Versus hiking a mile into swap, I jumped in the car and was able to access that area hiking about 1/4 mile into the swamp to recover the drone. Once i got into the area the drone reconnected and gave me updated GPS location location (thank God). I actually picked it up about 400 feet east of where the video and flight records end. Other then a few new scratches the drone flies fine. So fortunate that it didn't land in water or a tree!
Scary part of the video:
Airdata.com has the flight updated; under [General] on the left then the [Notifications] tab you can play the flight back using the HD flight player. Open the KML file in google earth to see a 3D chart of the flight.
When needing to recover a drone is there a way to make it beep? As I got close to it I could hear the drone fan noise which immediately helped in a difficult area. Here is a shot of what the swamp looked like from ground level, not far from where the drone was found:
3 of the 4 arms were folded in, not sure if that is something that happened in flight, or upon crashing from 200 feet.
Versus hiking a mile into swap, I jumped in the car and was able to access that area hiking about 1/4 mile into the swamp to recover the drone. Once i got into the area the drone reconnected and gave me updated GPS location location (thank God). I actually picked it up about 400 feet east of where the video and flight records end. Other then a few new scratches the drone flies fine. So fortunate that it didn't land in water or a tree!
Scary part of the video:
Airdata.com has the flight updated; under [General] on the left then the [Notifications] tab you can play the flight back using the HD flight player. Open the KML file in google earth to see a 3D chart of the flight.
When needing to recover a drone is there a way to make it beep? As I got close to it I could hear the drone fan noise which immediately helped in a difficult area. Here is a shot of what the swamp looked like from ground level, not far from where the drone was found:
3 of the 4 arms were folded in, not sure if that is something that happened in flight, or upon crashing from 200 feet.
