Crashed Drone and free repairs from DJI?

[notsojazzyjeff]

I'm interested because I heard some stories of people who crashed their phantom due to battery failure an the drone wasn't replaced by DJI. I don't want to get my buddy in trouble but he's not on the forum so I'll just say what happened.

He was flying his P3P (I was there too) and he started to lose signal so he walked away from our home point the equivalent of a couple blocks to regain signal. That was his fatal mistake. After his flight was over he was trying to fly home and didn't realize that the drone was trying back to the old home point and not his current position. So he was getting all turned around and couldn't get in position to land. Before he could figure out why the controls were messed up he was 1000 feet out from his location and the battery was at 1% and finally died. We searched and searched And eventually found it on the ground with a smashed gimbal but the frame was mostly in tact. I love my boy but this was all on him. User error 100%.

Anyway he called DJI and they gave him a shipping labels so they could look it over and examine the flight log. No word about the results of the investigation, but out of no where he gets confirmation that the drone has been repaired and is on its way back to him...no charge.

Of course I'm happy for him, but I'm also very curious if It is common for DJI to cover repairs...just to be nice. Word to the wise: If anyone here crashes just send it in to DJI to be safe because they may just surprise you with a repair!


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[Arvidj]

maybe because it was supposed to land on its own when battery got that low?

 

[AgentOrange2015]

P3's are suppose to return home immediately if the battery level falls below a specific percentage. This simply means that when the voltage falls to a certain level, the Phantom will automatically begin the RTH procedure and can not be over written by the operator. It is a supposed "Fail Safe" operation for the Phantom itself. This however, does not mean that if the OPERATOR is pushing control switches up and down, left and right and trying to regain control, he actually causes more harm than good which in turn causes the Phantom to crash. Simply put again, this means that if you see on your iPad of iPhone that the Phantom has gone into Return to Home Mode automatically, then leave it alone unless it is coming down into a tree or on top of a house, but only cancel that at the last minute to avoid the obstacles. It may be better to land in a tree at a 100 feet that to drop straight down out of the sky at 200 feet.

 

[notsojazzyjeff]

P3's are suppose to return home immediately if the battery level falls below a specific percentage. This simply means that when the voltage falls to a certain level, the Phantom will automatically begin the RTH procedure and can not be over written by the operator. It is a supposed "Fail Safe" operation for the Phantom itself. This however, does not mean that if the OPERATOR is pushing control switches up and down, left and right and trying to regain control, he actually causes more harm than good which in turn causes the Phantom to crash. Simply put again, this means that if you see on your iPad of iPhone that the Phantom has gone into Return to Home Mode automatically, then leave it alone unless it is coming down into a tree or on top of a house, but only cancel that at the last minute to avoid the obstacles. It may be better to land in a tree at a 100 feet that to drop straight down out of the sky at 200 feet.

It with into RTH mode several times before the battery died. The problem was my friend was confused because he had moved so far from the home point without updating the home point. So every time RTH was activated he cancelled it because it was start flying further away from him and (at the time) he didn't know why.

I mean I guess I should just be happy that he got his drone fixed but the main point of this post was to see if anyone else crashed because of their own mistake but DJI covered the repairs for them anyway.



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[shmevin]

Can anyone recommend a place to repair a Phantom 3 on Long Island?

 

[AgentOrange2015]

If you live on Long Island, just go buy you another one considering what it costs to live on Long Island, I used to have a friend who lived and still lives on Long Island, he is no longer a friend because of his money, it got in his way of being a friend and instead became an ******* even though he is a fellow Nam Vet. I would however, highly recommend using Intelligent UAS out of Maryland. 1uas.com