Crashed P3S During RTH

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I am doing a bit of evening flying and was elevating to about 390 feet with a distance of 15-20 feet from when the remote start telling me it lost signal and began RTH. During the RTH she begins an uncontrolled spiraling decent at about 290 ft. Needless to say she crashes pretty hard on the bank of a small pond..battery and bird end up in the drink. My question....do i have any chance of DJI covering this under warranty since I didn't do anything to cause this crash(in my opinion at least :-( Thanks!
 
If you use this link and post your results back here, some of the clever folk can interrogate your flight data. Sounds like incorrect antenna orientation with the drone above your head led to the signal disconnect.
https://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/Upload/

Thanks for the quick reply...a disconnect at less than 390 feet up and 30 feet away seems like a very short distance but why the spiral out of control on the RTH?
 
This sounds like the home point was not recorded prior to take off. When the phantoms don't have a home point recorded and you hit RTH, they will get crazy because they don't know where the home point it's.
 
This sounds like the home point was not recorded prior to take off. When the phantoms don't have a home point recorded and you hit RTH, they will get crazy because they don't know where the home point it's.
I had a home point recorded or so said the app prior to take off.
 
This sounds like the home point was not recorded prior to take off. When the phantoms don't have a home point recorded and you hit RTH, they will get crazy because they don't know where the home point it's.

If you could take off before the home point is recorded, the Phantom would record it's home point shortly after you launched and there would be no problems doing that.

If it was possible to prevent home point from being recorded, on initiating RTH, the Phantom would not fall from the sky.

The flight data shows that the home point was recorded from the first data point.
 
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I had a home point recorded or so said the app prior to take off.
Apart from the myriad of strong interference warnings (possibly the area you were flying in), you lost signal (possible antenna orientation at that height and distance from the controller) and it was returning to the homepoint albeit very slowly (wind?) It then switched over to auto land when again you lost signal which is weird as the drone will return home regardless of signal as long as that is what your RTH settings are. The rate of descent during auto land doesn't look that dramatic and am wondering if you attempted to control it by using the joysticks.
Hopefully @Meta4 or @With The Birds are on the forum and can chime in.
 
IDuring the RTH she begins an uncontrolled spiraling decent at about 290 ft. Needless to say she crashes pretty hard on the bank of a small pond..battery and bird end up in the drink. My question....do i have any chance of DJI covering this under warranty since I didn't do anything to cause this crash(in my opinion at least :-( Thanks!
Looking at your flight data, I can see that things started to get dicey at around 10:09.2 when the pitch and roll data started changing with no stick input and at 10:12 it starts spinning.
It should be a good case for DJI to investigate as there's no evidence that the incident was related to what you did.
Upload your flight record to DJI by clicking on the cloud icon on the app flight record page.
Then go to DJI's online help and chat with one of their people to get things started.
..a disconnect at less than 390 feet up and 30 feet away seems like a very short distance
The loss of signal is unrelated to the incident.
You get optimum signal strength when the controller and Phantom antennas are parallel and facing each other.
That's easy when you are flying at the same level as the controller is but when you are straight up above the controller it's impossible to orient the controller in a way that its antenna is parallel to the antennas in the Phantom's legs.
Because of the geometry, going straight up is the worst angle to maintain controller signal.
 
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Looking at your flight data, I can see that things started to get dicey at around 10:09.2 when the pitch and roll data started changing with no stick input and at 10:12 it starts spinning.
It should be a good case for DJI to investigate as there's no evidence that the incident was related to what you did.
Upload your flight record to DJI by clicking on the cloud icon on the app flight record page.
Then go to DJI's online help and chat with one of their people to get things started.

The loss of signal is unrelated to the incident.
You get optimum signal strength when the controller and Phantom antennas are parallel and facing each other.
That's easy when you are flying at the same level as the controller is but when you are straight up above the controller it's impossible to orient the controller in a way that its antenna is parallel to the antennas in the Phantom's legs.
Because of the geometry, going straight up is the worst angle to maintain controller signal.
The bird is on its way back to DJI as we speak. I’ll be sure to update the post as I hear back. Thanks for the responses.
 
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Just a quick update...DJI is covering repairs under warranty. Thanks again for all of the feedback.
 

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