p2v fell out of the sky on friday

Migmon · Feb 2, 2014

so i bought a new battery from B&H and it got here thursday night so i charged it up and plugged it in to the assistant and saw no updates, then i took it out friday afternoon to test it out. The new battery powers up and off fine so looks good.

i got a 48 second normal flight and was 20 feet up when the power shut off and it fell down like a rock landing prop side down in the mud, the props all have grit in them, so i haven't bothered to see if it flys. the battery once powered on cannot be powered off now and it just sits there with the scrolling light as if you pressed it once to see the charge.

just got off the phone with b&h and they will gladly replace or refund THE BATTERY ONLY.

so i am going to call DJI on monday and see whats up. but its not looking good in my mind at the moment.

any suggestions?

I have the video, and it cuts off before anything happens due to the power loss, also what is interesting is that the date and time of the video is 1/1/2008 12am

Pull_Up · Feb 2, 2014

Ouch, sorry to hear that. Does sound like a defective battery - might well be worth contacting DJI support before sending the battery to B&H. If they can confirm it was a bad battery then perhaps they will agree to repair the consequential damage for you? Consequential losses are usually pretty difficult to chase, though. Any chance of an insurance claim?

Regarding the date/time stamp: I believe that is what always appears when you rescue lost footage where the aircraft was shut down before the app stopped the recording process. I have three or four videos with that time on them where I forgot I was recording then powered down.

Migmon · Feb 2, 2014

That explains the date and time then.... Not sure about an insurance claim I haven't purchased any special insurance for it...
Definetly will contact DJI about the issue and see what happens.

LeoS · Feb 2, 2014

Did you try powering off the battery by double-pressing, like you would normally do on a P2/P2V?
The battery will turn on\off with the double press, regardless if it's plugged into the Phantom or not.

I believe the video's header (which contains the file format information, length\size, gps location, dates, etc) is written only when you stop the recording.... so when it gets suddenly disrupted (powered off) before it has a chance to write the proper file header, it'll have the default time stamp (jan 1 2008) and sometimes you can't even play the resulting file.

If the file is corrupted and cannot be played, you can pop it back inside the P2V camera, turn the phantom back on and it'll fix the file header so it becomes playable. Unfortunately it cannot know the date\time\location of when the movie was taken, so it'll still have the default date and no location info.

Skipholiday · Feb 2, 2014

WOW sorry about your accident, hope you can get all fixed.
How can you recover video's that were not ended correctly? (if I fail to stop videos using the app they will not play)