Phantom 3 Professional - Crashed into Lake

I tried to smartly buy my backup bird yesterday. It wouldn't activate. Going back today to try again. It's a brand new unit, buy I'm buying it from an individual - not a store (so there's only one to choose from).

Any ideas why a brand new Phantom would refuse to activate?
It might need to be repaired with the transmitter. Find one you can activate. :cool:
 
Yes, they are 100% still spinning at a high rate in both pictures. They are 100% not stopped.

Here again is the difference in how the props looked before things went wrong compared to as things were going wrong... Do you still think it's just an imaging artifact or does it look like they're actually stopped in the second pic?

Before any trouble started...
View attachment 55687

Just before I lost connection...
View attachment 55688

And as a special treat, here is the final 11 seconds of video - after things had gone really wonky but then appeared to stabilize for 5-6 seconds....

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They are crap. It is a community based thing. A LOT of people around you, people you do not know, need to have this app on their phone and running for this product to triangulate a near location to your property. In real life, it just does not work.
Just saw this below, I'm going to try two at first, I'm really not sure if they would be hardy enough but shall see and don't know if they have already had a post on them.
They seem cheap, maybe cheap isn't good.

How to track your bike in case of theft, using your mobile phone? | Techie Fans
 
GPS trackers are only good if the craft lands with the trackers GPS module facing the sky. I have tried them. They are not really accurate under ideal conditions. The best thing I found to use is a radio beacon or a loud alarm or beeper that starts beeping after a preset time. So you set the timer for say 20 minutes, turn it on before you take off. If the craft goes down and the 20 minutes elapse, it starts beeping, LOUDLY, so if you know the general direction it went down, all you have to do it follow the beeps. Some have bright LEDs also so you can use the darkness to your advantage. They can use their own small batteries which last hours to a full day.
I had a look and its useless where I live in the UK as it depends on other peoples phones picking it up.

I wonder about this sort of thing, maybe need another thread:

[$26.99] Mini GPS Tracker Locater Spy Vehicle Real time GPS/GSM/GPRS Car Vehicle Tracker
 
GPS trackers are only good if the craft lands with the trackers GPS module facing the sky. I have tried them. They are not really accurate under ideal conditions. The best thing I found to use is a radio beacon or a loud alarm or beeper that starts beeping after a preset time. So you set the timer for say 20 minutes, turn it on before you take off. If the craft goes down and the 20 minutes elapse, it starts beeping, LOUDLY, so if you know the general direction it went down, all you have to do it follow the beeps. Some have bright LEDs also so you can use the darkness to your advantage. They can use their own small batteries which last hours to a full day.

What would have been useful in this situation is some sort of contraption packed in a gel that dissolves when submerged. After being dissolved, it would release 50' of fishing line with an LED blinker that flashes brightly, once every 15 seconds for 12 hours. With something like that, I could have located and retrieved my drone immediately.

Where are the engineers here? Let's get something like this engineered and on the market! Ideally (but not necessarily), the fishing line would be strong enough to pull up the phantom with - and the dissolvable substance would need to be submerged for 5 minutes or so before dissolving and would not be triggered/ruined by a light mist!

Send me a link to the ordering page!
 
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Is the water too polluted to snorkel in? If the depth is only 15 feet or so, that's a swimming pool depth, and you should be able to even snorkel from the surface to locate it. The white color should standout from the bottom. Then just dive down and pick her up.

I didn't see this message until now. The lake (I think) is not that deep. Some areas are thick with weeds though and I think this is one of them. Now that I have a temporary replacement drone, I'm going to try flying over the area to see if I can see anything on the bottom - or better yet, stuck in the TOP of the weeds! The only problem is that *if* my incident wasn't mechanical and was caused by somebody with a drone zapper - then as soon as this one gets close to that same area, the same *** could zap me again...

If I find it, I'll pay a local kid to dive for it... :)

Has anyone ever reported any kind of success in drying one of these things out?
(Never mind, I googled it after I posted. It seems the normal hair dryer/bag of rice trick works to some degree - except for the battery - but the first step is going to be the hardest - finding it!)
 
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That product us already made and some use it on their aircraft.
It's called getterback. There are mixed reviews. There is another brand that has the led, but the reviews are not very well as sometimes it didn't deploy and it uses a ballon as the float. Which at depths greater that several feet, would not inflate due to water pressure.
Amazon.com : GetterBack Rod Recovery System with Black Velcro Strap, Yellow : Fishing Reel Care Accessories : Sports & Outdoors
What would have been useful in this situation is some sort of contraption packed in a gel that dissolves when submerged. After being dissolved, it would release 50' of fishing line with an LED blinker that flashes brightly, once every 15 seconds for 12 hours. With something like that, I could have located and retrieved my drone immediately.

Where are the engineers here? Let's get something like this engineered and on the market! Ideally (but not necessarily), the fishing line would be strong enough to pull up the phantom with - and the dissolvable substance would need to be submerged for 5 minutes or so before dissolving and would not be triggered/ruined by a light mist!

Send me a link to the ordering page!
 
That product us already made and some use it on their aircraft.
It's called getterback. There are mixed reviews. There is another brand that has the led, but the reviews are not very well as sometimes it didn't deploy and it uses a ballon as the float. Which at depths greater that several feet, would not inflate due to water pressure.
Amazon.com : GetterBack Rod Recovery System with Black Velcro Strap, Yellow : Fishing Reel Care Accessories : Sports & Outdoors

Thanks. Someone else suggested that and I ordered a pair of them 4 hours ago! I fly over water a lot so I figured the $32 is a reasonable investment!
 
It looks like the craft initiated the auto land when the battery falls to 10%, once the battery gets to that point there is nothing you can do but let it land. It's a safety feature.
How come the guy using the getter back in the video above didn't just toggle the right hand stick when it went into return to home and take back control?
 
This is a frame grab from a 4K video shot from 120 feet above the general area the phantom was lost in. I'm not sure how deep the water is here - but there a spec here which to me looks like it *might* be the lost phantom. Does anybody else have an opinion?

ImageUploadedByPhantomPilots1465104576.018194.jpg


ImageUploadedByPhantomPilots1465104587.515702.jpg
 
Yes. They're after market carbon fiber props. Fairly new, but not brand new. I had used them in at least 8 previous fights and I always inspect them for wear and tightness before each flight. They were fine.

But if it were a prop breaking or spinning off - that 5 second period of recovery could never have happened....

Just curious whether using anything after market could void your warranty especially since the problem looks prop / motor related.
 
Just curious whether using anything after market could void your warranty especially since the problem looks prop / motor related.

Only if its directly related. So - if a prop broke and caused the accident - there would be no warranty. But if a motor failed because it wasn't soldered to the system board properly - it would still be covered because that has nothing to do with the prop.

If for some reason, DJI tried to suggest that the aftermarket prop somehow caused the motor to fail - they would have to prove that to be the case.

As others have suggested, it's pretty much impossible for this to have been a prop failure because of the 5-7 seconds of recovered, stable flight right before the crash. A broken or missing prop simply couldn't do that!
 
I had assumed that HD wouldn't be adequate. In this case it does tell the story, although indirectly. Very likely your P3 suffered a broken or lost prop. In HD if you go to the Sensors page and select the Compass tab you'll see that HD is saying you had multiple compass errors at the end of the flight. HD arrives at this conclusion by assuming that a high rotation rate can't possibly be happening and it must be a faulty compass incorrectly saying the AC is rotating at a high rate. But the AC is spinning due to the rotational torque caused by the loss of one prop.

As soon as I looked at the Healthy Drones upload I noticed the compass error report. At one point you show an 85.3 turn rate in 1/10th of a second. That's a pretty fast change in direction.

Sorry you lost your Phantom. I hope you have some success with DJI.
 
I've been piloting a P3S since just before Christmas and have not yet experienced a flyaway. In fact, I've actually shown people what happens when the signal is lost by turning off my controller and setting it on the ground. In just a matter of minutes, it comes right back to where it started - with the controller still in the OFF position. The furthest away I've ever had my P3S is 5365 ft - over water. At that point, I lost my video and signal simultaneously. After about 4-5 minutes, here it came. I re-established control and landed. At the very end if this video, where the camera is looking off towards the sunset, I am standing on the bridge at the very top of the screen - a little over a mile away.
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