Thank you for the reply, I believe the RTH functionality and low battery warnings are handled by the Go4 app, even though it is closed.
If the Go app is closed, it can't have any effect on your drone's flight.
RTH is baked into the Phantom and does not come from the Go app.
That's how it can work when there is no connection to the controller.
Low battery levels come from the aircraft which relays them to whatever app you are flying with.
I do not see in this file where the home point was ever established at any time during the flight which is odd. Since I know nothing about how Map Pilot operates, I can only assume that the aircraft used a previous home point from a different mission, being that I do not see the establishment of one.
It appears that Map Pilot doesn't display the homepoint separately in the data like most other programs do but it's obvious that a home point was recorded.
It shows a starting location (home) and for each 1/10th of a second it gives a new location and a calculated distance back to home.
The distances start at zero and after 10 seconds of ascending the distance from home is 3 feet.
There is no evidence of an old home point being used (this can't happen anyway).
According to MapPilot the correct procedure is to open up DJI Go4 and set the home point/make sure the drone is prepared to fly/set your camera setting, then force close DJI Go 4 and open up Map Pilot to fly your mission.
They told me that having Go 4 running in the background can cause issues.
They are correct telling you to only have one app running but there's no need to set a home point in DJI Go before closing and opening Map Pilot.
Your Phantom will record the home point itself automatically, even with no app or connection to the controller.
In my case starting to wonder if the battery fell out and the drone dropped at its last known location. I plan on looking out there when some of the snow melts.
That doesn't fit with the description of the incident from the pilot and the coincidence of losing a battery at the same time as initiating RTH seems unlikely.
There are a few things in the initial description that don't quite add up, which isn't all that unusual but it shows that some of the clues cannot be relied upon to be accurate.
one of our pilots hit the home button when the battery gave him a warning at 30%, he stated that the drone stopped, turned toward him, then flew away from him (straight South) for about a mile and half, then hovered. However, it stopped recording any information that I can see during its normal flight, I'm assuming this was when he hit the home button. We have looked everywhere that he thought it might have initiated an autoland procedure, but no luck. I'm hoping that someone with more knowledge than me can look at the data and give me some leads on where this thing might be.
No-one can see a Phantom at 1.5 miles well enough to tell that it's stopped and hovering.
The recorded flight data should not stop when RTH is initiated.
Any RTH activity should be part of the recorded flight data.
If his comment about flying to the south was correct, that eliminates drifting with the wind in atti as an explanation.