Having a drone crash or a fly away seemingly without pilot’s fault is not a pleasant experience, but rather than pity on it, take this as an opportunity to learn. Besides – understanding what happened increases your chances of successful insurance or warranty claim.
From safety point of view you should notify CAA/FAA asap about the direction of the drone flight and battery life, especially, if you are close to an airport. Having done that – you can start your investigation into what happened and perhaps how to prevent it happening in feature. Yes, you have to do a Post Mortem of you crash or fly away 🙂
Equipment or pilot error?
Although most drone crashes and fly aways are indeed pilots errors, there are instances of things going horribly wrong due to equipment or software failures. Even, if the final conclusion is pilot error – it is good to know what you could’ve done better. Was the wind too strong? Was there some interference? Did you fly into a tree or a power line that the obstacle avoidance not picked up?
The answers are usually in the log files of your drone, your RC and the app you flew with. They do have to be retrieved and analysed quite in depth though. There are many tools for that – usually free (may be subscription based). Some are quite complicated and require the users to be familiar with file conversion, visual interpretation of data and generally the stuff you may have done in your science labs at school… And possibly forgotten by now…
Where to look for help
Below introduction to two sources. First one is a very thorough but extremely technical write up that I found on Mavic Pilots forum on how to retrieve, convert, view and analyse various types of logs that your drone will generate. It’s an absolute wealth of knowledge – as with many other posts on this forum, but very technical. It is definitely worth it to spend some time on understanding and interpreting those files – at least the ones that are easily uploaded to tools such as AirData, that does part of analytics for you. To give you ideas – you will read about the following:
- Introduction and causes of crashes and flight problems
- Types of log files (TXT, DAT, CSV) as well as drone logs, RC logs and app logs
- Retrieval of the files
- Log file conversion and visualisation
- Log analysis
https://mavicpilots.com/threads/mavic-flight-log-retrieval-and-analysis-guide.78627/
Second one is a YouTube video that will definitely help you with DJI Go 4 – very in-depth but still understandable for someone without aviation of engineering background. Some tools (like AirData) will work also with DJI Fly app, but I have not checked the others.
Check those crash subjects on Mavic Pilots Forum!
Remember – prevention is better than any cure or learning, so get your setting right and learn to control your drone in ATTI mode!
Photos used: stock photos