RIP Mr Drone, lost at sea…

With the landing sensors confused by dark water surface, but I would have thought that RTH would make it descend for a few seconds before the confusion set in and control was lost. There was no descent, I’d been hovering and the drone had just started to move forward as I’d expect under RTH control, then it made like a brick.

RTH will invoke different behaviour depending on the exact %age left in the battery

If it was reporting critical battery level, it would immediately try and land.

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AIUI, and of course I could be wrong, the drone is supposed to go into RTH automatically when the intelligent battery decides it needs to go home, based on the height and distance from the home point; that is not what happened yesterday evening!

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Airdata will show what happened

And yes it works retrospectively

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Yeah, read the manual

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Tough break my friend. I’m told the best evasive tactic for birds is rapid ascent straight up (which birds can’t do) hopefully this will buy enough time to skidaddle out of there.

@TheJohnster

What is your RTH height set to John, ie Hover, Land or RTH?

The Airdata is a useful tool to prove one way or another whether it was pilot error or a tech failure of the drone. The latter would help in a warranty claim if still applicable.

Going fwd, the learned advice on when to RTH is to do so with no less than 20% battery life left so that

a. You have enough battery life for emergency manoeuvres.
b. To protect the life and longevity of the battery.

Losing a drone in such a way must be devastating. I’m sorry for your loss hpoe your replacement arrives soon. :+1:

Not good - old news now following the responses you received below, but hopefully you’ve got a better understanding of RTH/battery management/reduced visibility flying. Any of those in isolation carries risk if you’re not too familiar with behaviour, but put all three together and you’ll likely get a bad outcome. Enjoy the new drone👍

@TheJohnster did you get any closer to sharing the Airdata ?

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I used to smirk at people who ignored low battery levels and then had an incident… Until I ignored it thinking I knew better and nearly lost my drone.
No matter how good you think you are, always keep an eye on the battery data and never ignore a warning unless you’re well within reach!

Patience, Padawan, on the to-do list for this evening! I have to get all the serial numbers &c together first.

Why?

That’s funny

Easy, you just setup an Airdata account and link your DJI account to it. Whenever flight data is uploaded to DJI, go on to Airdata and refresh the list :wink::wink:

@Sparkyws Thanks for the info on airdata.com, I have never heard of it before.
Rod

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And if you hadn’t set up an account already to automatically sync,
image

It’s a great tool Rod. Even the free version has a lot of data. But I stumped up for a bit more info and more records, only cost me a few pints that my body will be quite glad of

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And don’t forget members exclusive discount

https://greyarro.ws/t/airdata-uav-exclusive-discount-for-grey-arrows-drone-club-members/59701

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@The-Hive you might want to check out the member-discount topics to see what else you’re missing out on :smiley:

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Thanks @PingSpike sounds like a good idea, cheers