I’m feeling a bit sad and stupid at the moment after inadvertantly flying my Potensic Atom into a tree, watching it plop into a river and rapidly disappear beneath the surface. Unable to reach it I returned home droneless.
I got straight onto Amazon and after seeing there is a new version, the Atom 2, I decided to buy it. So far today has cost me £300 for a new hobby, although on the bright side, I will end up with a better drone to play with.
Hoping to make me feel not so stoopid, who here has suffered similar fates and how have you “lost” your drones?
If it’s any conciliation bin there seen it done it a couple of times, once through sheer stupidity when I first started out,
Second time just back in January this year when I was a few feet away from my drone & it clipped a branch then came crashing to the ground, got over confident but got caught out unfortunately, is what it is & all a learning curve, no harm done, yes it’s gutting but just brush ya self off & start again is what I say but we’re all different, many on here have experienced it weather it be a case of attack by birds, smashing into a tree, losing it in water the list goes on, sorry for your loss but I’m sure a nice new drone will make you feel all the better even if you are a few hundred quid down, onwards upwards & we learn by our mistakes,
Good luck with the new drone
I have dunked my Atom three times now, but thankfully managed to recover it. I did lose a battery last time as, although it has power, it will no longer communicate with the drone so is unusable. I find that as soon as I lose GPS the drone is prone to drifting and becomes quite unpredictable.
Drone weighed less than 20kg, not a flyaway, visibly drowned in water, cause of crash identified, no injury to persons, no damage to property, no collisions involving manned aircraft, no aviation safety affected, no risk to public safety, the list of reasons to not report this to AAIB goes on
In my very early drone days I had a DJI Phantom 3 SE. 2nd hand it cost me about £50. Anyway, was flying it over a waste water pond at an old mining site and had stopped my flight (was just hovering yer honour] to try and work out what I fancied doing next, when WHOOSH - a gust of wind on an otherwise still day blew my toy into the trees. That or it was an attempt at a fly-away that the trees curtailed.
I used the GPS ‘last position’ to track it to as close as I could get but sadly the undergrowth prevented me getting within 20ft or so of the specific tree, Despite it being all white against an all green and blue setting, I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it. Until the app warned me the battery was dying, and then it died. Came back two days later with family in tow and various implements for undergrowth hacking and despite 3hrs of searching I couldn’t find nor see it.
On a later foray back to this site with my all new drone (original Mavic Air) the undergrowth had died back, leaves had fallen off the tree but it still wasn’t visible. I suspect one of two things, with #1 being more likely:
After the foliage died away it fell out of the tree and disappeared beneath the water or
someone else found it and took it.
Either way, it was gone and would ahve been very soaked through by now.
I’m going back to the river this afternoon armed with a fishing rod and a fishing friend. It’s not easily accessible unfortunately. I’ll let you all know how it goes.
