I GOT SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY!!!

[Slone Starkey]

Night Flight. Flew from a friends house to a near by Mcdonalds about 1/2 mile away (trying to show off!). App lost video signal. Then app showed No signal and nothing worked on the app. Tried closing app and reopening. Got nothing. unplugged the usb...and nothing. App still shows NO SIGNAL. Map view was completely blank. About 2 minutes in, PANIC set in! I press the return to home button on the RC and it just beeps. But it's not the normal beeping sound it makes when it is working correctly. At this point, My friends and I are just staring at the sky with fingers crossed. I'm just begging for it to return to home like its supposed to. Meanwhile my friend hops in her car to look for it at Mcdonalds. She calls and she says "I CAN SEE IT. ITS HOVERING OVER THE INTERSTATE" I'm thinking, ok? Well, thank God we found it... but if it descends on to the Interstate...that's going to be really bad! She then says it's just circling around above the Mcdonald's / interstate area. At this point im pretty close to 20 minutes into flight time...so my friend drives me to Mcdonalds while My wife stays at the home point JIC it returns home. Right as we get to Mcdonalds My friend calls and says "I FOUND IT. I HAVE IT IN MY HANDS!"........PHEW!!!...... But what happened?

Turns out what she was seeing in the air was a plane :\ ...not the drone. She says she noticed a commotion on the sidewalk next to the main street that runs by the Mcdonalds. She then noticed the red/green flashing lights! When she went to pick it up there were about 5 people circled around, asking her what it was? And they explained it just landed there about 10 minutes ago.

When we got back home, there she was sitting safe and sound on the counter top. Immediately, I noticed the battery was showing 4 bars (almost full). So it seems like as soon as the app showed no signal, it landed immediately.

I GOT SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY! The chances of it landing on the sidewalk, v.s. the middle of the street or a slanted roof top or a power line or tree...etc are incredible. I can not beleive I got my drone back unharmed after all thing considered. So thankful!

 

[JohnK]

Check your failsafe mode - it should have returned home from 1/2 mile away from what I understand. Be interested in hearing responses from more experienced folks.

 

[Slone Starkey]

Check your failsafe mode - it should have returned home from 1/2 mile away from what I understand. Be interested in hearing responses from more experienced folks.

I did. I set it to climb to 65 meters before returning home. and I made sure the home point was accurately set before take off.

 

[Green_Phantom]

Seems to me that as these things move on from generation to generation, their problems get more and more quirky and more unpredictable. Kind of makes the P1.0 seem like a rockstar.

 

[Marlin009]

Seems to me that as these things move on from generation to generation, their problems get more and more quirky and more unpredictable. Kind of makes the P1.0 seem like a rockstar.

Or, maybe it's just a bad idea to fly 1/2 mile to McDonald's, at night, over the interstate, just to show off.

 

[DMac]

Showing off or not, shouldn't the device do what it is intended to? And especially so if all the settings are correct? I cannot speak for everyone, but speaking for myself, I don't want my Phantom to "punish" me by landing in an unsafe place and not doing what I have instructed it to do because I am being bad by "showing off". I've got teenagers, and they're more than enough!!! I don't want my Phantom treating me that way also!!! Just saying...

 

[bobmyers]

Showing off or not, shouldn't the device do what it is intended to? And especially so if all the settings are correct? I cannot speak for everyone, but speaking for myself, I don't want my Phantom to "punish" me by landing in an unsafe place and not doing what I have instructed it to do because I am being bad by "showing off". I've got teenagers, and they're more than enough!!! I don't want my Phantom treating me that way also!!! Just saying...

If you had that Phantom set to Land in the Fail safe mode the is exactly what it did. You have to set it to return to home or land. Apparently it was in land and as soon as you hit the RTH button on the transmitter it landed. Made no difference that you had the height set.
There quads are easy to fly, but you have to know what every thing in the app means and you need to check the RTH failsafe settings everytime you fly. In this case I believe that your incident is pilot error IMHO.

 

[ianwood]

Whether or not a flight to MacDonald's is advisable or not, the P3 should still RTH if configured appropriately and the right procedures are followed. We'd have to see log files to see why this occurred.

 

[etc6849]

Return to home works great. I set my failsafe settings to fly up 60 meters, then return to home. The default height setting was too low for me to feel comfortable, so I raised it.

I'm glad I had studied the app and set this, because one time I was 4500 feet away and lost signal completely. But it returned to home on it's own and the controller automatically gave me manual control back about 2800 feet from home.

It really sounds like the failsafe setting was set incorrectly to land instead of return to home. You also don't have to press any buttons on the controller. Everything will just work on it's own after loss of control signal.

 

[rmfa]

You had to set to land on signal loss. Change that in the app. This is part of my preflight checklist so something like this doesn't happen.

 

[rhj12345]

Night Flight. Flew from a friends house to a near by Mcdonalds about 1/2 mile away (trying to show off!). App lost video signal. Then app showed No signal and nothing worked on the app. Tried closing app and reopening. Got nothing. unplugged the usb...and nothing. App still shows NO SIGNAL. Map view was completely blank. About 2 minutes in, PANIC set in! I press the return to home button on the RC and it just beeps. But it's not the normal beeping sound it makes when it is working correctly. At this point, My friends and I are just staring at the sky with fingers crossed. I'm just begging for it to return to home like its supposed to. Meanwhile my friend hops in her car to look for it at Mcdonalds. She calls and she says "I CAN SEE IT. ITS HOVERING OVER THE INTERSTATE" I'm thinking, ok? Well, thank God we found it... but if it descends on to the Interstate...that's going to be really bad! She then says it's just circling around above the Mcdonald's / interstate area. At this point im pretty close to 20 minutes into flight time...so my friend drives me to Mcdonalds while My wife stays at the home point JIC it returns home. Right as we get to Mcdonalds My friend calls and says "I FOUND IT. I HAVE IT IN MY HANDS!"........PHEW!!!...... But what happened?

Turns out what she was seeing in the air was a plane :\ ...not the drone. She says she noticed a commotion on the sidewalk next to the main street that runs by the Mcdonalds. She then noticed the red/green flashing lights! When she went to pick it up there were about 5 people circled around, asking her what it was? And they explained it just landed there about 10 minutes ago.

When we got back home, there she was sitting safe and sound on the counter top. Immediately, I noticed the battery was showing 4 bars (almost full). So it seems like as soon as the app showed no signal, it landed immediately.

I GOT SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY! The chances of it landing on the sidewalk, v.s. the middle of the street or a slanted roof top or a power line or tree...etc are incredible. I can not beleive I got my drone back unharmed after all thing considered. So thankful!

That was great story, glad everybody and your quad was safe!!!

 

[Meta4]

Check your failsafe mode - it should have returned home from 1/2 mile away from what I understand.

I did. I set it to climb to 65 meters before returning home. and I made sure the home point was accurately set before take off.

It won't matter if you have recorded your home point or set RTH height.
If you have RC signal lost set to Landing instead of RTH, that's what your Phantom will do.
Go into the app and check your settings.

 

[N017RW]

"...shouldn't the device do what it is intended to?"

Famous last words.