I can't believe that I have come to write one of these posts that we see too often.
No doubt there was some pilot error but who will know.
400 fw. android limitations removed app.
I'm a relatively experienced flyer and today I was doing a Litchi waypoint mission. I meticulously planned this and flew at approximately 50 m. I have done numerous waypoint missions before.
Yes, I broke the rules and it went out of VLOS.
When it first went up into the air it kept dropping signal even though it was only 50 feet away. Foolishly I ignored this and after a couple of failed attempts to upload the waypoints it finally accepted it and set off on its mission.with the frequent disconnects I was getting initially I should have just landed it and reconnected but I was impatient. Pretty much straight away signal was lost and I was unable to abort as it went off on its mission.
I did my usual watching the clock waiting for it to return and I did get some blips of signal when it was 150 m. There was no live video feed, no location on the map. Later at 15minutes i reconnected (just the controller) The distance kept hovering around 150 m. I couldn't hear or see it.
I tried the return home button and nothing happened. The controller was totally unresponsive and kept beeping and wouldn't turn off (in fact it's still beeping now will not turn off).Moving sticks had no effect .I could just watch the battery level dropping until it started to auto land at 2% .there was no video feed, no GPS location on litchi.
it landed somewhere or crashed somewhere. I walked the last 500 m of the route but there are many trees and bushes so it's unlikely that I would spot it.
I have the litchi log (csv) but am not sure how to view the last location recorded. I looked here-
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com and it only goes into the mission for first 4mins, so the litchi app never communicated with it after that.
lesson learnt-
any small issues at takeoff take as a serious warning especially when using waypoint missions