REMAIN CALM - The best advice

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Yesterday I had my P4 out for work taking footage and stills of a job site / building the engineering firm I work for designed. It was a blustery day. According to the weather app on my phone 9mph with 16mph gusts... Marginal for my comfort but I really wanted to wow the brass at work with the results of the flight so I set out with my bird and launched it over the project site. It was windy to be sure but she appeared to be coping well.

During my first manual "waypoint" to orient the camera for an overall shot of site, the DJI Go app crashed. Of course the manner of the crash was quite disturbing as it made it look like the bird had started to fall from the air based on the appearance of the remains of the app on the display.

Thanks to many hours of reading on here, I knew that by remaining calm and simply looking at the status light on my controller, I could tell I was still connected to the aircraft and that it was presumably still hovering right where I left it when I took my hands off the sticks. I initiated a manual RTH just to be safe and bring it into a safe area while I restarted the app. About the time I was able to hear my bird coming home to me I got the app reconnected and resumed what turned out to be an uneventful remainder of the flight. Unless you consider limping the gimble from hard cornering and yawing at the same time and event. LOL

The point of the post is simple. These are VERY intelligent machines if you know how to use them and understand the fail safe functions. You can trust your bird to do what it is supposed to do, however it's imperative to keep in mind that it will do EXACTLY what you tell it to. Know your RTH altitude settings and how that they may need to be changed based on your flight location. Ensure that you have gotten confirmation of RTH home point etc.

I've had may heart stopping moments over my many flights, only to find that my bird had me covered and did what it was supposed to. Sometimes these things are smarter than we are at any given moment.

Project site:
 

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DJI GO 4 seems to crash more then the older version.
It is good that you remained calm. Nothing happens besides the lack of a screen. You still have full control. Next time just reconnect the USB cable and Go will restart.
The other day Go even crashed my tablet (Nvidea shield).
 
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I feel ya ... I was in open space but above trees at one of the points of failure ... my tablet or the Go App ... seems to be on the fritz lately too.
In the same day .. tablet rebooted with 60% battery .... just let it hover and pray controller and AC stay connected.. after restart unplug n plug USB and GO app picks up where it left off. previous times where both GO and Litchi just shut down in mid flight... seems particular to taking pictures .. I lose video feed signal momentarily sometimes and sometimes it just drops back to Android home Screen. Calm is fine when I know I have battery available...but fear is it will happen when I am near the bottom end and bird is racing back to my area at my control..... app or tablet problems at critical junctures are things that keep me up at night....and frankly still holds me back from doing big adventures....trust was higher a few months ago... my trust factor has gone down some in recently months. That said still love the vids and pics she produces.
 
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I feel ya ... I was in open space but above trees at one of the points of failure ... my tablet or the Go App ... seems to be on the fritz lately too.
In the same day .. tablet rebooted with 60% battery .... just let it hover and pray controller and AC stay connected.. after restart unplug n plug USB and GO app picks up where it left off. previous times where both GO and Litchi just shut down in mid flight... seems particular to taking pictures .. I lose video feed signal momentarily sometimes and sometimes it just drops back to Android home Screen. Calm is fine when I know I have battery available...but fear is it will happen when I am near the bottom end and bird is racing back to my area at my control..... app or tablet problems at critical junctures are things that keep me up at night....and frankly still holds me back from doing big adventures....trust was higher a few months ago... my trust factor has gone down some in recently months. That said still love the vids and pics she produces.
I have to agree with you on this (picture taking) especially with Litchi (Litchi goes down, but comes back up)..I keep my phone in my pocket while I fly (it won't stay on the RC), and I fly FPV while getting video and pics anyway. I have Litchi verabally report: Alt: xxx Depthxxxx ...Battery: every so often. Last time I flew 2000 feet, I had over 60% battery and it reported: "loss of signal" ;"Disconnected" "Battery level zero," and [because I had read posts like this before], I didn't freak out (but I was nervous), I just waited with my fingers off the controls for 2 seconds, and then I slowly pivoted (left stick) the aircraft in a circle to see if I could get signal back (this happened 3 or four times on that trip, and I'm not sure why, but I think part of it was pilot error). I also raised the altitude from 160 feet to 200 to get better line of sight (shouldn't have mattered). My heart pounded; but the aircraft was fine--and reviewing the SD footage during that time--there was no issue with the aircraft at all. During this timeframe I heard a car behind me (sounded like it was on top of me-- I was flying FPV near a sidestreet), and I raised the googles to see where the vehicle was and realized I was not pointing the RC in the correct direction. So, maybe mostly my own fault. Point being: you CAN recover, you CAN reconnect, you have to think it through, and you have to trust the aircraft.
 
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I was just wondering about p4 and p4p issues with iOS and other devices.
Has anyone done or seen any statistics on how frequent system problems versus pilot errors occur? If tens of thousands of these are sold the horror stories in this forum are a low percentage, but if most are mot reported in this forum or sales are much lower my fear factor is probably justified? Any thoughts from the "wise" ones?


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots
 
it is nerve-racking, one other tip because it caused my drone To mini crash. . When it returned home the wind shifted a bit and it started to come down on a small shrub. I had not read the manual close enough to know that if you want to cancel RTH, you have to press down the RTH BUTTON but for a couple seconds before it takes. When it's in RTH mode, you can't really use the sticks…I was helpless.
 
it is nerve-racking, one other tip because it caused my drone To mini crash. . When it returned home the wind shifted a bit and it started to come down on a small shrub. I had not read the manual close enough to know that if you want to cancel RTH, you have to press down the RTH BUTTON but for a couple seconds before it takes. When it's in RTH mode, you can't really use the sticks…I was helpless.
RTH can be off by several feet, GPS is not pinpoint accurate. I always cancel RTH before it lands.
 
DJI GO 4 seems to crash more then the older version.
It is good that you remained calm. Nothing happens besides the lack of a screen. You still have full control. Next time just reconnect the USB cable and Go will restart.
The other day Go even crashed my tablet (Nvidea shield).
Crashes on me all the time as well...
 

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