Vision 2 fell from the sky

Mark9362 · Sep 17, 2014

Ive only had the Vision 2 for about three weeks, and never had any problems. Last night, it just fell from the sky from about 150' and landed on the neighbors new Honda Accord and caused significant damage. The camera, gimbal, landing gear are trashed, and the insets for most of the screws have come out. I have no idea if will still works, but to be honest, I don't trust it enough to try and fly it again. WTF?? I still haven't told the neighbor about her car or gotten an estimate yet. Do I have any recourse? Am I without a drone, the $1000 I paid for it, and the money to fix the neighbors car? I'm 45 years old, and I've been building custom swimming pools for the past 25 years. The main reason for buying the DJI was to take pictures of completed projects. The only reason for flying it recently was for pilot training, and this happened before I felt comfortable enough taking it to a job site! Any advice or solutions to my problem would be greatly appreciated.

Mark

ProfessorStein · Sep 17, 2014

Start talking with DJI.
Were the LEDs on or off when it came down, do you remember? If they were off (dark), you had a battery failure or, more likely, a battery contact failure. And DJI has been known to replace rigs that crashed due to this issue. Don't count on it, but it's worth beginning the conversation. Might turn out to be fruitful, might not.

If the LEDs were on, you either had a motor/ESC go bad, or maybe you experienced VRS (you didn't mention if you were trying to descend, or how fast it actually came down). Probably not a whole lot DJI will do for you. But who did you buy it from? If it was a reputable dealer, they might replace it for you or at least give you some store credit.

There's probably no recourse for the car, however. You're likely stuck with paying that yourself (or through your insurance). Unfortunately, you're not supposed to be flying over things like that... and any damage will be considered due to pilot error (flying where you're not supposed to).

Geoelectro · Sep 17, 2014

I feel bad for you on this. My first Phantom flew into a lake. My fault. My new bird was flying perfectly when one day it too fell out of the sky from 80'. In that case I had an error message on the screen saying "battery communication error". It fell with no power. I determined it was a problem with the battery data pins. After repairing it I have flown problem free. I clean the battery contacts regularly.

The bottom line is we fly with risks. We have to take all the precautions we can and still understand something beyond our control can happen with a bad ending.

I hope you can recover and get back in the air. I still cringe when over water!

Geo

gcoxusa · Sep 18, 2014

Assuming that you purchased this P2V new with a credit card... I would submit a dispute immediately for a defective product. Do not delay. There is a time limit. If this product worked "as advertised" then this crap should not happen.

And to man who flew the Phantom into a lake... I'm curious... did it float? It sounds like you were able to recover it. What do you clean the pins with?

Geoelectro · Sep 19, 2014

I flew into a lake by testing speed in ATTI mode not realizing it doesn't hold altitude in ATTI mode. Yes it floats, like a rock!
I did recover it but lost the camera and battery. Eventually I had to replace the NAZA module and motors as well but it now flies.

As for the pins I have a pencil eraser that I use to slightly polish the surfaces and I apply a very small amount of DeOxit contact cleaner. About every 5 flights I cleans the contact surfaces with alcohol to prevent any buildup.

Geo

Mark9362 · Sep 19, 2014

Thank you for the responses. I did purchase the unit at a local hobby store with a credit card. I'll check on that. I did get 2 responses from DJI. Here they are:
Dear Sir,
We are sorry about your terrible experience.
Could you inform us where you've purchased this product?
We will guide you to deal with this problem.
Thanks

Thank you for the timely response. I purchased it in Lafayette, LA at Big Boys Toys.

Dear Sir,
We recommend you to contact our LA office to diagnosis and repair of the drone.
Or ask you dealer to contact and send the support center repair.
They will find out the reason and help you deal with this.
The contact info of LA office:

Phone: +1 (818) 235 0789
Email: [email protected]

About the damaged neighbors vehicle, we are really sorry about that, could the insurance company help?

Thanks

Best regards,
DJI Sales Dept.

My insurance? Are they kidding? Even if my insurance company did cover the damage, they would still try and recover the damages from DJI for product liability! So, I sent the same text to [email protected]. I'll post the response if i get one.

JimDE · Sep 20, 2014

This is why mine has been sitting on a shelf in a closet for the past several months...... I have zero confidence in this product and refuse to risk a liability suit because this product is so unreliable and capable of significant human or property damage if it does decide to fly away or dropout of the sky. I worked far too hard to see a liability lawyer suck my savings away because of a friggin toy with no redundancy or reliability. I refuse to even sell it to someone else for fear they may have a incident and come back at me in some way. Right now I look at it as a $1300 life lesson to research a product more fully before buying. Someday it will just go out with the trash and I will be totally done with this mistake.

Sorry for what happened to you but you can come on any of the DJI forums on the web any day and find similar horror stories about users and this product.... just be thankful it did not fall on your neighbors childs head instead. I have been off this site for over a month or so and come on tonight and see your story and a fly away story within a few post of each other. SOS just a different day and month.

ProfessorStein · Sep 20, 2014

So... I'm curious... why did you even get into drones in the first place, then, JimDE??

I mean... think about it. You're putting a 3 pound piece of hardware and electronics into the air. Common sense says something can go wrong (look at all your other hardware and electronics and how often they have issues... how often does your computer crash, or even your phone not work right?).
And you have to have understood that "something going wrong" would mean a drone would have nowhere to go but down. There's not an invisible hand holding the thing up.

RC planes and helicopters have been crashing for decades. Some of them much heavier than the Phantom. And issues are not unique to the Phantom or to DJI. Every drone on the market can experience problems in the sky. Even the big military drones come down sometimes. Hell, even commercial airliners crash occasionally (and just think about all the redundancy built into THOSE things!). The problem is intrinsic in the fact that a drone is up in the air... and we all learned in preschool that "what goes up must come down".

It's a risk you take when you fly ANYTHING. You mitigate it as best you can, by flying in areas where a crash WON'T result in "significant human or property damage", by keeping your bird well-maintained, by doing adequate pre-flight checks, and by waiting for all the systems to signal ready before taking off.

Will that completely eliminate the possibility of any problems occurring?? Of course not. But it can greatly reduce the risk. Which is all you can hope to do.

And OF COURSE you log on to the board and see posts about fly-aways. Because a forum like this is where people come and post when they have PROBLEMS. But NOT accounted for in feed for the month you've been gone are the 100's of thousands of Phantom flights that experienced no problems at all... because who's going to post here about those?

Like I said, these issues are not unique to DJI. You go to forums for ANY drone (or really ANY RC product) and you'll see the same thing.

So maybe RC cars are your thing. They will still experience system failures and TX communication issues... and they'll even experience the occasional "run-away"... but at least when they have problems, they don't have far to fall.

RipperFox · Sep 20, 2014

JimDE said:
Someday it will just go out with the trash and I will be totally done with this mistake.

I'll give ya $500 and an awesome liability waiver.

ProfessorStein · Sep 20, 2014

For some reason, I now have a mental picture of Geert, standing in the field, sending his Phantom up, and a completely different one coming back.

Kind of like a game where everyone passes their Phantom one seat to the left.

Firestat · Sep 21, 2014

Your insurance company will deal with it as a personal liability problem. They will then pursue a "subrogation" from DJI (or the hobby store) insurance company. This happens all the time.

privy · Sep 22, 2014

So I had an instance where my p2v just flopped to the ground a few times. First was after a flight out over the ocean. After getting back from over water it was just cruising forward and seemed like one motor just cut off. I attached the camera and all the good stuff that fell off started her up and hovered for a bit and then just dropped again. Tried once again hovering for a few minutes and dropped again. Seems like one motor just wants to cut power off randomly. Is it a symptom of a bad motor?

Fplvert · Sep 23, 2014

privy said:
So I had an instance where my p2v just flopped to the ground a few times. First was after a flight out over the ocean. After getting back from over water it was just cruising forward and seemed like one motor just cut off. I attached the camera and all the good stuff that fell off started her up and hovered for a bit and then just dropped again. Tried once again hovering for a few minutes and dropped again. Seems like one motor just wants to cut power off randomly. Is it a symptom of a bad motor?

:roll: Insanity=doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Yes, there is sand in your motor.

privy · Sep 23, 2014

Fplvert said:
:roll: Insanity=doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Yes, there is sand in your motor.

Well yes this is true but the first time it crashed there most likely wasnt any sand in the motors since I took off by hand to stop the possibility of that happening. I did clean the motors and bearings. I shall see the how well that worked once the rain stops.

JimDE · Sep 24, 2014

ProfessorStein said:
So... I'm curious... why did you even get into drones in the first place, then, JimDE??

I mean... think about it. You're putting a 3 pound piece of hardware and electronics into the air. Common sense says something can go wrong (look at all your other hardware and electronics and how often they have issues... how often does your computer crash, or even your phone not work right?).
And you have to have understood that "something going wrong" would mean a drone would have nowhere to go but down. There's not an invisible hand holding the thing up.

RC planes and helicopters have been crashing for decades. Some of them much heavier than the Phantom. And issues are not unique to the Phantom or to DJI. Every drone on the market can experience problems in the sky. Even the big military drones come down sometimes. Hell, even commercial airliners crash occasionally (and just think about all the redundancy built into THOSE things!). The problem is intrinsic in the fact that a drone is up in the air... and we all learned in preschool that "what goes up must come down".

It's a risk you take when you fly ANYTHING. You mitigate it as best you can, by flying in areas where a crash WON'T result in "significant human or property damage", by keeping your bird well-maintained, by doing adequate pre-flight checks, and by waiting for all the systems to signal ready before taking off.

Will that completely eliminate the possibility of any problems occurring?? Of course not. But it can greatly reduce the risk. Which is all you can hope to do.

And OF COURSE you log on to the board and see posts about fly-aways. Because a forum like this is where people come and post when they have PROBLEMS. But NOT accounted for in feed for the month you've been gone are the 100's of thousands of Phantom flights that experienced no problems at all... because who's going to post here about those?

Like I said, these issues are not unique to DJI. You go to forums for ANY drone (or really ANY RC product) and you'll see the same thing.

So maybe RC cars are your thing. They will still experience system failures and TX communication issues... and they'll even experience the occasional "run-away"... but at least when they have problems, they don't have far to fall.

PS I got into drones as a photographer of 41 years looking for a new perspective. Never had a RC anything prior and honestly had no interest in RC modeling before this and definitely not after this little excursion into it with DJI and the Vision. Had to return 3 of them for defects to my primary NYC photography retailer which prior to this I have never had to return anything to them in the past 20 years. I depended on them to sell quality products sadly DJI Phantoms are not. The image IQ that the Visions camera produces can be beat by nearly any cellphone camera on the market today and it's reliability in flight is without question iffy at best. I would do better throwing a cellphone on a helium filled balloon and letting a attachment line out while the cellphone was in interval exposure mode.

That $500 offer with a iron clad release form on any and all liability now or in the future actually does not sound bad...... but it would have to be a bullet proof release form and a lawyer's fee to write something like that up would be nearly half of the $500 so there goes the not sounding half bad idea. Smashing it and throwing it in the trash is worth $250 to me just to get some satisfaction out of the $1300 tuition I paid for this life lesson

ProfessorStein · Sep 25, 2014

Fair enough. If that's the lesson you want to take away from your experience.

Me... I've never had any problems with my Phantom other than one or two that were entirely self-produced (note to self: painting your Phantom with metallic paint... not a good idea). So I guess your assessment of "iffy" isn't as "without question" as you thought. And, maybe I'm in the minority, but I find DJI's quality to be quite good. My Phantom is a solid machine, well designed and assembled, that performs exactly as advertised. The images that get out of my Vision camera are quite good, I think. And if I wanted/needed something better I would move to a higher-end camera. I probably never would've recommended a Vision for a professional photographer... and your photography retailer should've known better, IMHO.

havasuphoto · Sep 25, 2014

The answer to why this happened is in this post;
http://www.phantompilots.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5965
Vortex Ring State(VRS), also called Settling With Power, is a very common occurrence in the Phantom 2's and Vision's. Basically, you start to descend with little or no forward speed, and the rate of descent rapidly increases. The aircraft will also tend to wobble, and be very difficult to control.
The solution to this is to immediately recognized the symptoms, and take immediate action with forward stick, and add power. You need to fly out of your down wash.

This also effects real helicopters; which is why you rarely see them descend vertically. If they do, it's at a very slow rate.
The same applies to your Phantom. When descending, stay out of your downwash by flying forward into the wind, and keep descent rates slow.

NDizzle · Sep 30, 2014

JimDE said:
That $500 offer with a iron clad release form on any and all liability now or in the future actually does not sound bad...... but it would have to be a bullet proof release form and a lawyer's fee to write something like that up would be nearly half of the $500 so there goes the not sounding half bad idea. Smashing it and throwing it in the trash is worth $250 to me just to get some satisfaction out of the $1300 tuition I paid for this life lesson

If you're still serious after two attempts, I have a lawyer friend who will take you up on this. I can't pm you my personal information, due to the fact that I just signed up. I just discovered this site while looking for suggestions for the best price/performance gimbal for a DJI Phantom 2 Vision.

BTW I think I'm going to go with the rotorpixel. I sent their support and email and got a reply within 45 minutes from a real human. Can't beat that.

Message me or just reply, I'll get in touch with you.

general01 · Oct 7, 2014

heck i would take it for parts if no one else gets it(no i wouldn't hold you liable if something happened from it going coo coo)

i have flown my phantom above my own vehicle multiple times(not that i don't worry about this very thing happening)but haven't had it

i would contact the insurance provider about the car(sucks big time)