Fly Away P4

[28wins]

It is indeed. It is awful.

Here is another situation which seems rather odd and unexplained.
I spent a huge of time on forums to learn about this devices. And that's why I call them toys and call myself a BETA tester. Sales would drop through the floor if DJI acknowledged all of this or even labeled their packaging to reflect the risks involved.

Spontaneous 40' ascend with no input

 

[henick]

At the same time .. their price includes an ability to absorb acceptable loss to hardware failure so it's a stupid game to prove them wrong if you can find a hook lol. Every component fails.. if it happens while flying it sucks. First lesson of flight school lol

Good luck. I find their customer service getting better fast. It really depends on the rep in my experience... with any luck you'll find a failure of some type that isn't your fault.

 

[Meta4]

The facts are the facts - .... i.e no home point recorded in the log despite the DJI Go reported positive!

Despite everything submitted regarding the Fly Away of my P4 they refuse to look at any of the logs easily presented by Healthy Drones and maintain that the final flight of my drones altitude starting at over 2000 ft and fluctuating between 2888 ft and 90 ft and the time resetting to zero half way through the flight and the drone not RTH despite being set was completely normal.

I've just revisited this one and will clarify some misinformation in this thread and possibly solve the mystery.
It is confusing reading through all the (sometimes inaccurate) conjecture that has been posted in two threads and discussion on Facebook so far.
I have gone back to the flight record for information and my comments come from here:
Phantom Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com

The data in the altitude and time fields at the start of the flight shows some scrambling.
The time corrects itself from 26 seconds and the altitude data is correct from 5:30.
Although the numbers recorded are erroneous, they do not appear to have affected the actual flight.

The Phantom did record the home point at the start of the flight.
HomeLatitude 54.52712 HomeLongitude -1.63239

The important point from the flight record is shown before takeoff:
Aircraft will land if RC signal is lost.__Return to Home Altitude:98FT
ie In the event of lost signal for more than 3 seconds, the Phantom WILL NOT RTH.
It will land where it is at the time of lost signal.

There are momentary loss of downlink messages 13 times through the flight, indicating that for whatever reason, radio communication was not optimum.

The flight record ends at 7:39 with the Phantom 1160 feet from home and at an altitude of 91 feet.
Given the warnings of poor radio communications, it would be expected that continued flight further away would eventually result in a complete loss of signal and it is likely that this is what happened.
There is no indication that RTH was initiated.
With the RTH setting being Aircraft will land if RC signal is lost, it would be expected that on losing RC signal, the Phantom did as it was programmed and landed close to the last point recorded at 54.52548 -1.62769.

The likely landing spot is in trees behind this house in Merrybent Rd.

In this case, the Phantom did not "fly away" and it appears that all DJI service are guilty of is poor communications.
25% off would have been a good offer in the circumstances.

 

[WWK888]

Looks like pilot error in setting the RTH feature, an easy mistake to make but costly.

By the way, did you have any contact information on your bird? I have a phone number and a reward offer if found on mine which I hope I never have to use.


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots mobile app

 

[28wins]

[...]

The important point from the flight record is shown before takeoff:
Aircraft will land if RC signal is lost.__Return to Home Altitude:98FT
ie In the event of lost signal for more than 3 seconds, the Phantom WILL NOT RTH.
It will land where it is at the time of lost signal.

[...]

Could you please tell us how to verify and change our settings to prevent this problem?

 

[Meta4]

Could you please tell us how to verify and change our settings to prevent this problem?

Here in the app settings, you can select RTH, Land or Hover for what you want your Phantom to do in the event of signal loss.
The default setting is RTH and this is appropriate in most situations.
If you were on a boat you might want to select hover, but you would need to keep the Phantom in sight.
The Phantom in the original post had been set to land if signal was lost (Throttle Down)

 

[28wins]

I don't remember looking there in the app and mine is still set to its default probably.

This is crucial. Hope more people read this thread.

Thank you very much for pointing this out.