Here is the embarrassing story (and video footage) of my crashing a brand new
Phantom 4 Pro V2 on its first flight. I let my excitement get the best of me and contribute to a dumb move. Moral of the story: don't get too comfortable around power lines!
Funny story....
I have been flying RC a long time (since the mid 80's). "Mapping" has become my bread and butter. On a recent out-of-town gig my partner and I ran into problems when the bird wouldn't enter into Intelligent Flight Mode about a mile from a Class D airport. For the record, we had permission to fly there. While flying any DJI product within an NFZ can be impossible, I have hacked the bird past NFZ restrictions, but unbenounced to me, despite being able to fly MANUALLY in Class D airspace, Intelligent Flight Mode is disabled in Class D airspace. Grrrr...another hack for another day. So I'm stressing out because my partner and I just traveled 90+ miles to get to this mapping gig, and we're dead in the water. So I'm wresting with the iPad and the app trying to figure out WTF is going on, and he says, "You know you have power lines right over your head, right?" Sure enough, literally directly over the bird was 3 or 4 power lines...right there...plain as day. Call it divine intervention or whatever that the bird wouldn't launch. Had the bird launched successfully, I have little doubt that I would've missed those power lines. I have cat-like reflexes, so I MIGHT have been able to exit Intelligent Flight Mode in time....or I MIGHT have caught the bird on its rapid decent back down to Earth. But the fact that I could make such a stupid mistake really made me pause. I haven't crashed in YEARS and NOT because I'm lucky, but because I'm cautious, VERY cognizant of my environment and a good pilot. But for whatever reason, on that one day, I simply failed to look up. Lesson learned.
Still haven't hacked the IFM NFZ restriction, but we're working on it.
Oh...and we were able to map by flying the flight lines manually while manually clicking the photo button on the remote. This is definitely NOT an ideal way to map, but it worked. Fortunately, the plot of land was small - about 30 acres as I recall. I was able to fly the entire thing in under 2 hours, which would normally take about 30 minutes. Fortunately, I took enough photos that my partner was able to create a good map.
D