Almost forced landing on the Medway

General Drone Discussion
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&This happened to me late last year, was going to post it but life got in the way.
It was a bright sunlit day, with a strongish breeze but nothing I hadn’t flown in before. I decided to fly my mavic pro across the Medway river to see if any photo opportunities arose around sheerness docks.
I flew over in sport mode and then began to fly parallel with the docks about 300 meters out.
Then I saw a message on my screen,

“Voltage drop aircraft landing. This cannot be cancelled”

I looked at all the water and instinctively cried out “noooooooooo!”. I was sure she was a goner. Sweating profusely I held up the left stick and saw it stopped the descent though it still wasn’t climbing. When I tried to move horizontally at the same time it again began slowly descending, too quickly to reach land.
Finally I came to my senses and switched from sport mode to gps mode, thank god she stopped descending. Time to come home I thought.
Back into sport mode, beeline for home.
2 minutes later the same thing. This time I immediately switched out of sport mode and regained full control.
I couldn’t find anything in the logs that would explain what happened, The only thing I could think was that the tweaked speed of sport mode and max speed setting was just too much into the headwind. I reset both to the standard settings when I got home and am happy to say it hasn’t happened again.

Lesson learned, if in autolanding scenario with plenty of battery power, try toggling sport mode, it just might save your bird.

Happy and safe flying :+1:t2:

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Which drone was this?

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Mavic pro, how could I forget to put this, (slaps forehead to try and wake up the brain)

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How cold was it? Batteries lose power in lower temperatures, especially lipo batteries which have an optimum temperature range in which the chemicals react with each other to produce power.

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Hi Brian, it was a fairly warm day last autumn. I don’t really fly if it’s cold because my fingers Get very stiff.

What I found strange, after it happened I was unable to find any reference to it in any of the flight dara. The dji go4 flight log didn’t even show the message when I replayed the flight, and I couldn’t find any unusual voltage drops on airdata either. I probably should have put it out there with the logs at the time, but I was just so relieved that I got her back safely.

As it only happened that day when in super sport mode I suspect it must have been the stress of trying to maintain the higher speed into the wind.

I just thought it was still relevant to post about it now in order to highlight how the mode toggle switch can be a mavic saver in that type of situation.

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I agree with your summation of the issue, it’s a similar issue to having cold batteries, even tho it was warm. The amount of power it was drawing due to continued spirit mode was more than the chemicals in the battery could keep up with.
A lesson to be learned by everyone, and a safe return of your bird.

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