Summary of drone crashes from the crash/flyaway forum

[Johnmcl7]

There's been a few posts by people concerned about the number of 'flyaways' which of course are mostly not the case so i decided to trawl through the crash/flyaway section here and for each thread note the model of the drone and whether the crash/flyaway was caused by pilot error, a fault with the drone or unknown based on the the verdict of the resident forum experts. Posts which didn't include much information and didn't progress I've skipped so there were 226 entered in total, for causes I wanted to try and summarise them in one word which I chose Wind, Collision, Water or Takeoff which mostly are too broad a generalisation but it's difficult to to narrow many different causes into a small number of them. Takeoff is mostly for when basic prechecks were not done and drones took off in ATTI mode and almost immediately collided with something, the drone angle wasn't checked so there was a yaw problem, the battery was too low and a few others such as losing the drone at extreme range I've put in there as well.

There's a lot of caveats but the main one to bear in mind is that these numbers only include crashes so while it looks like there are still a relatively high number of drone faults, it's likely a very small percentage against the large number of Mavics that have never had a problem which includes both of mine. The Mavic Mini is an exception due to the uncommanded descent issue which unfortunately seems to have caused a reasonable number of the crashes here whereas drone faults for the other three were a wider variety of causes.

What stands out is that the majority of accidents are caused by pilot error and in many cases, the accidents could have been easily avoided. I don't say this to criticise anyone but to reassure anyone concerned about losing their expensive drone, msinger has written a detailed guide here which is highly recommended:

Prevent a Crash or Flyaway with Your Mavic | Mavic Help

Mavic Help is a site for help with DJI Mavic drones. Find the latest fixes, how-tos, guides, accessories, modifications, and more.

www.mavichelp.com

Here's the breakdown showing the overall summary for all the drones, what percentage of accidents there were for each model of drone and then for each model of Mavic a summary of the causes of accidents and the causes of pilot errors:

 

[sar104]

Nice work. I'm a little surprised by the high percentage of accidents with the M2 and MA that you have listed as aircraft fault though.

 

[Johnmcl7]

Nice work. I'm a little surprised by the high percentage of accidents with the M2 and MA that you have listed as aircraft fault though.

If DJI repaired it under warranty or you or one of the others here thought it was an aircraft fault from the logs, I put it down as that. If on the other hand you or others checked the logs but couldn't see a definite culprit (especially if the drone itself wasn't recovered to give any clues or the dat was missing)I put it down as unknown, I haven't made any judgements or analysis myself on causes. There a good few posts where someone has posted once then never followed up with a log or anything more which I didn't categorise at all, sometimes not even mentioning a drone model so I excluded these even if it looked like pilot error and thought I should stick with the more clearly defined cases. That probably skews the results slightly away from pilot error.

 

[Camino Ken]

Great work. Major kudos to you. I think it is important to reiterate and highlight that for every person that has a mishap there are a huge number that do not.

 

[Jetdriver100]

I read that whole guide a few times! Very helpful!

 

[Simone L]

There's been a few posts by people concerned about the number of 'flyaways' which of course are mostly not the case so i decided to trawl through the crash/flyaway section here and for each thread note the model of the drone and whether the crash/flyaway was caused by pilot error, a fault with the drone or unknown based on the the verdict of the resident forum experts. Posts which didn't include much information and didn't progress I've skipped so there were 226 entered in total, for causes I wanted to try and summarise them in one word which I chose Wind, Collision, Water or Takeoff which mostly are too broad a generalisation but it's difficult to to narrow many different causes into a small number of them. Takeoff is mostly for when basic prechecks were not done and drones took off in ATTI mode and almost immediately collided with something, the drone angle wasn't checked so there was a yaw problem, the battery was too low and a few others such as losing the drone at extreme range I've put in there as well.

There's a lot of caveats but the main one to bear in mind is that these numbers only include crashes so while it looks like there are still a relatively high number of drone faults, it's likely a very small percentage against the large number of Mavics that have never had a problem which includes both of mine. The Mavic Mini is an exception due to the uncommanded descent issue which unfortunately seems to have caused a reasonable number of the crashes here whereas drone faults for the other three were a wider variety of causes.

What stands out is that the majority of accidents are caused by pilot error and in many cases, the accidents could have been easily avoided. I don't say this to criticise anyone but to reassure anyone concerned about losing their expensive drone, msinger has written a detailed guide here which is highly recommended:

Prevent a Crash or Flyaway with Your Mavic | Mavic Help

Mavic Help is a site for help with DJI Mavic drones. Find the latest fixes, how-tos, guides, accessories, modifications, and more.

www.mavichelp.com

Here's the breakdown showing the overall summary for all the drones, what percentage of accidents there were for each model of drone and then for each model of Mavic a summary of the causes of accidents and the causes of pilot errors:

View attachment 100328

Fantastic research. And very helpful. I mentioned to a friend the other day that as a new pilot I was quite overwhelmed with the number of flyaway issues. This helps. And as I fly more I see where pilot error could make it look like it was a surprise crash or flyaway. I review myself, my attention and presence and the environment around me as I fly. This is a great reminder to continue to be very mindful about preflight safety checks as well as inflight diligence. And baby steps for me. Learning to trust myself and how I handle the controls.

 

[Gindra]

Great data mining! Interesting to see it laid out like this.

 

[PointJoe]

Good work. In addition, would be interesting to know percentage of all Mavic owners involved in flyaways. How many total Mavic owners are there? If there are, say, 10,000 ... then 226 is a minuscule percentage. There are 110,000 members on this forum; 6,000,000 drone users total. So flyaways are not as prevalent as it seems when scanning this forum each day.

 

[Deleted member 94047]

Excellent work! Having the total numbers of aircraft in each category would have been nice but let that not detract the fantastic job you did presenting this in such a simple way. Kudos!

 

[Johnmcl7]

Good work. In addition, would be interesting to know percentage of all Mavic owners involved in flyaways. How many total Mavic owners are there? If there are, say, 10,000 ... then 226 is a minuscule percentage. There are 110,000 members on this forum; 6,000,000 drone users total. So flyaways are not as prevalent as it seems when scanning this forum each day.

It's definitely a big problem with the figures and I tried to see if I could measure them against something such as the total posts in each forum section or look at post rates but nothing seemed actually useful. Even though this forum is one of the main Mavic forums and probably the best for crash analysis I'd still think the numbers here are a small fraction of total drones and sar104 is likely right that the drone fault figures I have above are a bit high.

 

[Johnmcl7]

Fantastic research. And very helpful. I mentioned to a friend the other day that as a new pilot I was quite overwhelmed with the number of flyaway issues. This helps. And as I fly more I see where pilot error could make it look like it was a surprise crash or flyaway. I review myself, my attention and presence and the environment around me as I fly. This is a great reminder to continue to be very mindful about preflight safety checks as well as inflight diligence. And baby steps for me. Learning to trust myself and how I handle the controls.

When I bought my Mavic 1 Pro it was my first drone and I was so worried about crashing it especially seeing so many problems in the forums but I found it reassuring on reading through the crash threads to see what to avoid and crucially how to react when a problem started. My Mavic 1 Pro did briefly go into atti mode unexpectedly but I was well aware what that meant and quickly brought the drone back before the high winds could take it away and no problem.

 

[slup]

It's also a fair number of "crash" investigations going on in each model's "help" section also ...

 

[Xanadu]

Awesome work, thank you!

 

[Johnmcl7]

It's also a fair number of "crash" investigations going on in each model's "help" section also ...

I did consider going through the help forums as well but at a quick glance I thought it was going to be more time consuming because there's more a mix of threads and also after 22 pages in the crash/flyaway forum I was happy to finish at that.