P3P suddenly fell from the sky
- Thread starter Buddy Moran
- Start date
I think, from a "warranty hopeful" perspective, you may be facing something exactly like this:
We can try to do the best we can to analyze everything for you but in the end, they will decide whether it's covered or not.
I truly hope they cover it for you and hope they explain why!
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2016
- Messages
- 1,551
- Reaction score
- 589
- Age
- 47
Nice video, nice time of day, nice lighting, great plan. It did appear that, at times during the video, I noticed evidence of birds close by in the right part of the image. Birds don't attack from bottom up. They attack from the top. The camera will not likely pick them up. When attempting to grab your drone from the top, they will do damage to the props and likely sustain injury to themselves. I have an island on my lake that is inhabited by eagles. I keep my drone away from the island and try not to have extended flights that might attack their attention.
Look closely at the 2:53 mark of the video. What is the object on the right side of the screen that flashes and then is gone?
A bird was my thinking. Whatever it was it was very close but never touched the aircraft as evidenced by the continued normal flight. There were other instances of distant birds in the video.
It's between the camera and the landing gear - it would have to be perched on the horizontal strut. That would be one crazy bird. It's not a bird.
I had a similar failure 2 or 3 weeks back when flying my P3S above my home it was with a genuine DJI battery that I had bought off Ebay, Seller insists is is Genuine, at about 70m high after 3 or 4 minutes I noticed a Battery damaged warning where the remaining battery shows on the app, so tried to descend ASAP, at around 40m I saw it lose power and drop like a rock, hit the Garage roof, bounce off onto the ground, I was sure it was going to be completely destroyed, But was wrong, The quick release prop guards had all come off, and 3 of the 4 props damaged, Landing gear legs bent but still held, minor hairline crack on the body, but fairly substantial damage to the Camera and Gimbel.
After replacing the props I decided to test it , and it actually still flew, although the Live Feed to my phone doesn't work, so in a sense you are flying blindly hoping the camera is seeing what you want, still takes photos and video, but the video isn't 100% stable like before the crash, the Gimbel still rotates and moves up and down, and when I tested it with the battery from Ebay it worked faultlessly, So I am at a complete loss why it lost power and dropped.
I have sent it back to my seller, but don't really expect it to be covered as they are most likely to say it was operator error as I have nothing to really back up my story.
After replacing the props I decided to test it , and it actually still flew, although the Live Feed to my phone doesn't work, so in a sense you are flying blindly hoping the camera is seeing what you want, still takes photos and video, but the video isn't 100% stable like before the crash, the Gimbel still rotates and moves up and down, and when I tested it with the battery from Ebay it worked faultlessly, So I am at a complete loss why it lost power and dropped.
I have sent it back to my seller, but don't really expect it to be covered as they are most likely to say it was operator error as I have nothing to really back up my story.
Attachments
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2017
- Messages
- 157
- Reaction score
- 51
- Age
- 73
What is the dark object that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the camera view at about the 1 minute mark? It enters the view from the upper right-hand corner of the screen, then exits the same way out. Obviously there were birds flying about that morning - you can see them down lower toward the ground. I have watched videos of where eagles or other raptor-type birds have been trained to take down a drone by flying down from up above it and grabbing the body of the drone in the very center - keeping away from the props, of course. Some of those birds are very territorial and will go to great extremes to protect "their area" - especially if they have chicks somewhere near.
Sorry for your loss. One thing I became aware of when I regularly flew my first P3P was after a mid to long flight 10-20mins duration and doing a post flight check I found the props would be warm and sometimes hot. Now I live and fly in Thailand, so its mostly hot days here anyway but even on the cooler days and early evening flights for sunset vids they would be warm to touch. I know on more than one occasion I had to retighten one or two props. Then I started to use the prop tool and give it 1/8 more than finger tight every time. Since then I have never had this problem. I can suggest that maybe one prop might have warmed enough to become loose and ultimately come off. Just a theory but very real if combined with stick control movements at the critical time.
Hi @Rob65. This was flown in Thailand, too. But at 6:00am, and about 28C. I don't notice any significant warmth in the props after flying here. In fact, the props seem tighter and require more effort to remove after flying 10-20 minutes. But thanks for the suggestion. I will consciously tighten more than finger tight next time. Do you think that will cause more wear on the prop thread, though?
I had to send my P3P to the dealer for their inspection prior to any action on the warranty. It's quite likely they will then send it to DJI.
Me, too. Thanks for your, and everyone else's, contributions to this post.
@hwortman, @sar104, @Jthomp, LOL! sar104 is right. It's not a bird. It's the edge of my iPad cover. This video was from my iPhone camera recording my laptop running the recovered video on VLC. (The video was truncated because the camera didn't shut down properly. I could only recover the video in h.264 format, which only VLC could play.) My phone was resting on my wife's iPad because it has a flexible stand (mine is fixed angle). But her iPad is white, so I tried to use my black iPad to cover the reflection. But it went into my iPhone's range.
I've since discovered how to record the screen directly. This is a version without reflections and iPad cases coming into view.
Similar threads
