Hello everyone,
I've been reading and learning on this forum since I purchased my P3P in November 2015. I hoped to never have to post this message but here I go ....
I put about 50 flights on my bird, all of them went perfectly. Ive read and followed all the suggestions shared on this forum and I fly very carefully. I read many posts about RTH crashes and I set my RTH altitude to 50M to avoid issues in this area.
3 weeks ago, I was up north on my friends boat filming some ariel shots. i was riding in the boat with the P3P flying above us. We started in one area and drove approximately 1.5 km. As we moved along, I periodically updated my RTH location. We turned around within this bay and I was bringing her in for landing, usually I have her hover and I grab the landing gear while shutting the motors down. As I brought her in, she was about 40 from me at an altitude of appox 15 feet. Suddenly, the drone just flew off at full speed away from me, crossed the bay and smashed into a rock before falling into the water. The camera was smashed right off the bottom and three props broken. Luckily my friend and his family were standing near that rock and recovered it within seconds of it falling in the water. It was fully submerged for a few seconds however.
I was totally perplexed as to what happened as I totally lost control and had no user input when it took off and crashed. I reviewed the logs on my iPad and then it was clear what happened. Apparently, my RTH location wasn't updated properly and my battery was at the point where I just had enough power to return to the perceived incorrect RTH location (1km away). Evidently this triggered an auto RTH sequence that took control away from me, flying the drone into the rock which stood between my location and the RTH point.
The other crazy part is I had previously set my RTH altitude to 50M. This didn't happen.... when the auto RTH started, it just flew off at the same landing altitude without rising to 50M as I had initially programmed.
I went through the whole DJI warranty procedure, they took over 2 weeks to review my flight logs and eventually said, they would like to assist me by offering me 15% off a new P3P !!!! I responded saying that it was a malfunction in their software that caused the crash and they just responded yesterday saying they will offer 20% off a new P3P and thats their final offer. They didn't explain what their 2 week investigation revealed or what their position was regarding the reason for the crash. I find this totally unacceptable.
I mentioned to the customer service rep when I called that it was very lucky that this happened in a rural area away from people. An auto RTH like this happening within a populated area could cause serious injury or damage to property ! They need to address this by a dialog box confirming RTH requiring the user to press OK before initiating the RTH. I still have no idea why it ignored my setting of 50M for the RTH altitude.
If anyone has any thoughts or advice in dealing with DJI I would be very happy to hear it. I plan to call them again on Monday to argue this further.