After just about two weeks spent with my phantom 3 the unthinkable happened. I had flown it on a daily basis since the day of delivery (except from one or two days with rainy weather) and at all those occasions I had done it on a location in my neighborhood. On several of these performed flights I had tried to maximize the distance it could reach but I rarely reached past the 2 km mark, which of course anyway is a good and acceptable distance.
However, this past weekend I would spend on a location which I in advance found very suitable for flying. Near the shore, with a bunch of opportunities to catch some real good footage with boats and overall the nice environment. After some good flights and when I started to feel confident about the surroundings I got a feel to perform a flight at nighttime. It was completely dark outside and it was really cool to see the green and red lights blinking in the sky. As there wasn’t much to catch on camera at this time of the day I decided to bring it as far as possible out over the ocean. I waited for the signal to be broken but it never happened, it just kept flying further and further away and now after watching the logs I can see that it got as far out as 7, 7 km away from the transmitter.
When finally deciding to return (without a loss of signal) at 60 % battery level, the problems started. As the speed on the way back showed to be a couple of m/s lower than on the way from the start off point I started to get a bad feeling about the returning at an early stage. At two occasions on the way back I lost signal for a couple of seconds, which of course led to additional stress, other than that the pilot app also crashed at one occasion and the ipad did a whole reboot which never had happened before until that time. Anyway, on the last remaining, perhaps 20 % of the battery I knew that it wouldn’t reach all the way home. Instead I tried to control it to the nearest edge of the shore I had visual onscreen but even that attempt was futile. As I never before really had drained the battery I didn’t know that it lost percentage at a much higher rate in the end of every cycle. Unaware of that at that point I got really frustrated when the like 10 last percent lasted for just 1, 5 minutes. At the exact moment it reached 1 % my screen got black and I had a hard time to believe what really had happened.
After watching the logs the day after, I saw that it was just a 100 meters from reaching the shore and this increased the frustration inside me even more. Me and a few friends went out with a boat to the approximate spot which where it’s last known gps position and supposedly the location where it should have crashed into the water. As it still was about 100 meters from land it was impossible to even visually see the bottom and at that moment I didn’t see a point in keeping up the search, it was just to start realizing that the phantom was gone forever.
Now, a few days after this event I can’t blame no one other than me for the outcome of that flight. There wasn’t any type of wrong with my unit or anything like that, it was just a complete idiot move by the pilot, me in this case .I ignored the return to home warning and I flew it way too far. At this moment I’m just pissed and disappointed at myself because under the 2 weeks I had it, it gave me a lot of joy and happiness and some amazing moments caught on tape. I can genuinely say that the phantom 3 is an amazing drone.
I didn’t write this to get sympathy of any kind, I just wanted to share my story with the intuition that it could be of any use to all of you phantompilots out there, who might not now make the same mistake as I did.
Also, I would like to ask the persons who might have had a similar experience with a crashed phantom, did you buy a new unit afterwards?I mean, it´s an amazing machine but for me, at this moment it´s more of a financial matter. All the accessories I had plans to buy, or even had ordered, such as an extra battery, case and hdmi board will in a scenario where I buy a new unit be impossible to fund for me at this time.
Would it still be worth, without out all the accessories which many people see as a matter of course? Give me your opinions!
/An 18 year old boy who recently lost his dearest toy
