Over water risk reduction

[Meta4]

The reason why is because you do not watch the videos of the performance and you have not tested it yourself.
And for some reason you are against the whole idea.
But that is your choice.
Mine is not taking a chance.

I see .. the reason the people selling such things won't give details of how much they affect performance is because I won't watch videos .
Got it.

The main point you can take from the video is that the additional drag has had a significant effect on the flight distance.
Unencumbered DJI indicate a possible max range of 18 km for the Air 2 but the video flight only made 6.1 km total distance.

btw .. that video of the "very, very windy day" is quite misleading.
The water surface and trees show pretty clearly that winds were very, very gentle.
The wind speed shown by Airdata is calculated from the drone's pitch angle.
To overcome the additional drag the drone has to tilt further which messes up the Airdata wind speed.
What would be revealing is the pitch angles the drone was using for the flight.

 

[Meta4]

And for some reason you are against the whole idea.
But that is your choice.

The reason is that I do almost all my flying over open water and understand the critical relation between of wind/speed and range.
And I don't like taking unnecessary risks.

 

[eaglesurfing]

Most of the time I am not on solid ground but out in the middle of the lake.
Taking off from the pontoon on one lake or another.
For me I do not want to worry about if I need to put it down on the water or take off from it.
I like having that option and I will not fly over open water without.
It is a "head shaker" every time I read a post of another drone lost in some kind of water.
I have no problem with you flying over water but I really cannot see why you have a problem with people who do not want to take that chance.
If I want to give up 5 minutes of flight time then I am good with that as long as I still have a drone.

 

[FlyBackOU812]

I won't deny there is a certain risk flying over water but has nothing to do with sensors. Ive got over a thousand hours of over water flying a lone and its just as likely to have an issue over land as water as long as you keep it from from going too low to where it thinks you're trying to land it. Anytime you crash or it comes down over land you have a possibility it won't kill it and even if you do most have refresh. Same thing happens over deep or dark water its gone. Thats the only problem with flying over water. I would highly suggest learning all you can over land b4 taking long flights over water

 

[ErikBad]

Not really,
GPS is never used for altitude.
Altitude is fused from imu, baro and ultrasonic, and it's that fusing that runs into problems, specially over water. You never knows what it's up to

Ultrasonic is also used to avoid slamming into ground. It's initiates landing mode when below 1.2m.

I don't know how uneven landing surface is detected though. You might be correct in this one.

Starting from air 2 the vision sensors detects water, and make all sort of strange things. Sometimes it just stops if you fly to low over water. I think it is this problem TS has, but I don't know for sure.

Thanks for the reply, Surbird!
Seems different pilots have different experiences when it comes to flying over water. Some say (and show in filmclips) that there's no problem what so ever. Others have bad experiences. As a newbie I don't yet know what to think about trusting my Mini to fly over water. I'll keep looking for info.
Cheers!

 

[scro]

Thanks for the reply, Surbird!
Seems different pilots have different experiences when it comes to flying over water. Some say (and show in filmclips) that there's no problem what so ever. Others have bad experiences. As a newbie I don't yet know what to think about trusting my Mini to fly over water. I'll keep looking for info.
Cheers!

The Mavic Mini and Mini2 don't have ultrasonic sensors, but do have infra red sensors. They behave in much the same way as the ultrasonic sensor @surfbird describes, with a max range of 30m.

 

[surfbird]

The Mavic Mini and Mini2 don't have ultrasonic sensors, but do have infra red sensors. They behave in much the same way as the ultrasonic sensor @surfbird describes, with a max range of 30m.

Ahh that was new info for me. Thanks. I have a mini2 in the post tomorrow, so I will check that out.
You don't happen to know at which attitude these sensors stop working? On mavic 2 it seems be around 30 degrees.

 

[scro]

Ahh that was new info for me. Thanks. I have a mini2 in the post tomorrow, so I will check that out.
You don't happen to know at which attitude these sensors stop working? On mavic 2 it seems be around 30 degrees.

From the mini1 manual:

• side to side range is +/-28 deg
• fwd/aft is +/-35.5deg

I expect the Mini2 is exactly the same.