That's not true. You probably misunderstand the new system.
In the battery percentage circle, there are three colors:
Green - normal flight;
Orange - time to use for returning;
Red - Forced landing.
During the
green portion of the battery life, nothing will happen - flight as normal.
When the battery percentage reaches the
orange portion, the following will happen:
- You will hear "The battery level is low, the aircraft will go to the homepoint in 10 seconds"
- You will see a pop-up message asking you what do you want to do, cancel and keep flying (caution) or Auto Return to home. I personally click cancel, fly for about 20 - 30 seconds more, finish the shot (if I was recording one) and return manually using the sticks
- If you ignore that message and don't click anything in 10 seconds, the drone will start returning to you. You can click cancel on the screen or the pause button on the remote to stop the auto RTH.
- If you didn't do anything, and didn't even stop RTH, after hovering over the homepoint, it will start landing.
When the battery percentage reaches the
red portion, the following will happen:
- You will see a pop-up message saying that the drone will land in 10 seconds. You can't cancel this message
- After these 10 seconds the drone will start landing! You can still move it around, but it will be slow, less responsive and going down automatically.
- If you hold the throttle (left) stick up then you can make it go up a little, and not descend.
If you don't land it in time the battery will eventually reach
0% which is very dangerous. The following will happen:
- The drone will still allow you to fly it for a bit if the battery is in good condition, but that's NOT RECOMMENDED AT ALL. If you see your battery level going below 5%, and you're still not landed, do so immediately in a safe manner.
- The drone will fly until one of the cells reaches 3.0V, then it will just very fast land and you can't do anything.
- If the mentioned above happened, you REALLY need to be careful, as if it reaches 3.0V on any cell and starts fast-landing not on a safe area this could damage something or injure someone. If the drone didn't have time enough to land, it eventually will just fall and the battery will never charge again.
Finally, a word of caution: This system doesn't count the wind, so if you fly with the wind somewhere far away and you just reached the orange section, you probably will not have time to return to your homepoint, keep in mind the direction of the wind when flying, ALWAYS.
How do I know that? Well, I learned it the hard way, and actually 2 times landed on 0% battery, I was lucky, but that doesn't mean that you will have the same luck flying to 0%, just DON'T DO THAT...
Keep it safe
A tip to know the direction of the wind: So while we're talking about wind here, how do you know where the wind is heading without checking any app like Windy. There is an easy way to do it inside the DJI Fly app. Here is the step-by-step instruction:
- Hover the drone steady, don't move it. Wait for it to stop (normally takes a few seconds)
- Click on the map icon on the bottom left to preview it (in the small window, don't make it full-screen)
- Click on the compass icon like shown in the image below:View attachment 139066
- In the compass you will see two gray lines, this is the inclination of the drone. The drone will always be incline into the wind. Let me see an example. In the image below I indicated with the arrow where the wind is heading, and with the orange circles, the lines I was talking about:View attachment 139064