Phantom 3 crashed into the ocean

I can name several things that happened that you were not ready for unless of course you had more experience with your P3.

1. 7.7 km and 60% battery still left sounds like you were going with the wind to reach such far distances in little time.

2. The mph heading back was decrease because now you were going against wind. Something you should have tested before your last journey with it.

3. Perfect signal and no crashes at the beginning and then when you were heading back app crashing and choppy video feed or weak signal. Was most likely your device whether you were using a phone or tablet was probably getting too hot and now causing interference. My Samsung S5 does that all the time. The first 40% battery life goes very well. Then after the Samsung S5 starts to heat up it loses signal often and app crashes often.

4. You were extremely lucky to even have some type of control at 20%. If I'm not mistaken once your P3 reaches critical battery level (20% out of the box). It will automatic land and will not let you control it. You may have switched this setting or unaware of this setting, I'm not sure. Well you learned your lesson the hard way. Sorry to hear.
 
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This is a really interesting thread - (CapnBob's responses most so) but my tuppence worth as a former private pilot, a yachtsman, a geographer and many years of living on planet earth:

The general rule I apply before launching the drone is to check the wind direction and strength. That includes grass bits dropped to gauge the exact direction of the wind so I take off and land facing into it, but also for tree movements.

OK, night flying makes wind direction observation difficult to impossible, but as far as flying at the coast is concerned, my experience / understanding is that there is an on-shore wind during the day and and off-shore wind at night - which may well be the basic issue with not reaching one's launch point even with 60% of battery on turning back. The wind strength effect tends to increase with height.

Reading Alex's 7.7km outward journey fills me with awe and trepidation - *gives nervous giggle* - cos my drone is set to 100m distant and 65m height. Oh to be 18 again!
 
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One thing I forgot to mention. If filming or snapping photos of import, I will use Ground Station Mode, especially over water. I prefer Ken Argo's DJI Ultimate Flight App; he is very responsive to input. Whichever app you use, the main advantage is, the bird has all the info it needs to fly and return home before it lifts off. Transmitter range becomes a non-issue. As long as SAT lock is good, the batts are topped off and you have done due diligence in planning, I would say there is a 99% change of a successful mission, barring mechanical failure, a sudden squall, or other act of the Almighty... The vast majority of the horror stories I read have the same cause as most plane crashes - pilot error. Let the bird fly itself. If you have planned the mission well, she will come home. If you haven't seen it, check out Ken's app; I find it does all I need, and, now that dji has fixed a plethora of SDK issues, very stable. https://play.google.com/store /apps/details?id=com.kenargo.djiultimateflight2
 
We as a group of folks who love to fly, whatever we fly, have a duty to not do things that bring grief to anyone else! If we who have chosen a hobby that already has a lot of scrutiny from Uncle Sam, don't follow our own rules, such as don't fly past the safe limits of our machines and do anything to jeperdise other people's right to privacy or anything that could interfere with law enforcment, firefighting or EMS activities, our right to own and fly our wonderful flying machines could vanish!!! Come on folks use common sence!! Just my thoughts from an old retired firefighter
 
I used to think like that, but when the quad is a mile away it's exactly the same as if it's in top of your head. If something goes wrong there's not much salvaged. Fly with confidence. You can fly openly 20 feet up and total it if that's in the cards.

Exactly right.. your Phantom is no more likely to fail if it's 1 mile away or 100 feet away. Either way if it fails and falls there is little you can do, so don't stress to much about distance. Just watch what you fly over and mind your battery levels.
 
Exactly right.. your Phantom is no more likely to fail if it's 1 mile away or 100 feet away. Either way if it fails and falls there is little you can do, so don't stress to much about distance. Just watch what you fly over and mind your battery levels.
"Just watch what you fly over and mind your battery levels."
Great advice:)
 
Don't beat yourself up for not switching to ATTI mode--it wouldn't have helped you anyway... it doesn't let you fly faster, nor more efficiently--at least in cruise.

The only thing that could have potentially "helped" (once you realized you were in trouble--besides landing on the island you mentioned earlier); would have been to fly as low as possible to face potentially slower head winds. (Of course setting one's RTH altitude to 3m, [assuming calm seas] and engaging the RTH feature would have negated worries about losing reception at low altitude). :p

ATTI mode WOULD have made the Phantom fly faster. It's a well known fact and that could have made thew difference between him not making it back and making it back by the skin of his teeth. Either way it's water under the bridge and a learning experience. Don't put yourself out there unless you can afford the loss. It was risky and he lost.. now he's learned and hopefully will fly more responsibly / conservatively with his replacement Phantom.
 
Just trying to understand but why would ATTI mode be faster? RTH I don't think returns at full speed whichever mode your in but if he was in ATTI mode when the signal was lost wouldn't he have had no chance of returning?

I would have thought the only way to go faster would be to adjust the gain setting but then your going to drain the battery faster right?
 
Just trying to understand but why would ATTI mode be faster? RTH I don't think returns at full speed whichever mode your in but if he was in ATTI mode when the signal was lost wouldn't he have had no chance of returning?

I would have thought the only way to go faster would be to adjust the gain setting but then your going to drain the battery faster right?
I think the point is that if it is RTH , at some point in the return, signal will return.
 
Just trying to understand but why would ATTI mode be faster? RTH I don't think returns at full speed whichever mode your in but if he was in ATTI mode when the signal was lost wouldn't he have had no chance of returning?

I would have thought the only way to go faster would be to adjust the gain setting but then your going to drain the battery faster right?

I think ATTI mode may be faster as there is less position holding taking place which can impede momentum. Actually I don't know. I have tested it though and it does seem faster.

I believe when in ATTI the P3 will switch to P-GPS for a RTH, provided you had a home point set and still have Sat coverage. Otherwise I guess it would just land? Probably something to test out also.
 
Just trying to understand but why would ATTI mode be faster? RTH I don't think returns at full speed whichever mode your in but if he was in ATTI mode when the signal was lost wouldn't he have had no chance of returning?

I would have thought the only way to go faster would be to adjust the gain setting but then your going to drain the battery faster right?

The Phantom uses less corrections for flight in atti, it also pitches harder into the wind and uses extra thrust. You get more distance out of it vs any extra tiny bit of extra voltage you may use from further pitching into the sky. You will get at least an extra 5mph faster or more (depending on conditions) flying in ATTI vs P-GPS mode and that little bit can make all the difference in the world.
 
These distance records seem to just be asking for trouble. Yes, I'm guilty of doing it too, but when the bird is miles away, if something goes wrong it will probably not end well. As others have said, you probably went downwind going out which was the kiss of death. I was shaking scared when I flew my P3 15,100 feet (4.6km) away. Nothing went wrong and I was able to bring it home and land safely, but I was still nervous as a nerd on his first date.
 
i can feel your pain really. i would buy another one. because you paid a lot of bucks for this "experience" and next time you are prepared.
 
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

You should have bought a GetterBack and attached it to the leg. It's sends out it's 100 foot line to the surface if Phantom sinks. Then you just pull the Phantom back up.
 
fly close downwind,,, fly far upwind. sorry for ur loss. i lost mine a week ago. sill bitchin about dji, i have another p3p


How did you lose yours? I'm not sure if this is how it goes when DJI releases a new product. I had the P2 V+ 3.0 for a few months (didn't fly that much) and now have the P3P. I don't remember seeing so many lost/crashed postings when I initially purchased the P2
 
Oh man sorry to hear bro.

7.7 km is a very long way, if you got it out that far with 60% of battery left there was likely some tail wind on the way out, which then made it more difficult to get it back. I had a similar issue but my P3 had to autoland about 2km away from home. Luckily I managed to land it in a clear paddock away from people or animals.

People are attempting these distance 'records' and not considering what they'll do if they need to safely land somewhere in between as a plan B.
If a couple of these attempts get the media's attention because they were crash landed in among unsuspecting people, the authorities will have a field day.

At least in your case you didn't put anyone at risk (hat off to you) although contaminating the ocean is to be frowned upon.

It's a tough lesson to learn but it's only money mate, nobody got hurt - you'll be making plenty in the years to come.


Well said Scotty.

On a side note, I wonder how many Phantoms or drones overall are in the ocean :/

Wouldn't it be cool if DJI had some automatic magic button that would have them all rise up from the dead with reserve battery and fly back to a predefined location. Heh
 

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