DJI Phantom 3 Professional crashed after pressing return to home

I have recently started using Drone Deploy with my Phantom 3 Professional. I have flown 2 Drone Deploy missions with good results, everything worked well and I had no issues. I started the third mission, (multi battery mission) once the first battery reached 30%, I pressed return home, landed and fitted a fresh battery. I then resumed the mission with everything going as expected. I pressed return to home at 40% to allow extra for the return flight against the wind. At this point the Phantom swung out of control and before I could work out what was happening, the Phantom crashed. It is now a complete write off with the camera destroyed and the airframe severely damaged. The main details are:

• Return home pressed in app at 40% battery capacity
• Wind speed: Northerly 10-15 knots (Checked with anemometer before flight)
• Transmitter switch in ‘F’ position
• Fingers off sticks for the whole flight
• Transmitter firmware up to date (updated last week)
• All propellers were on the Phantom after the crash
• Using iOS iPad Mini, wifi model ME279X/A Version 9.3.5
• No cellular or wifi connection (same as other missions)
• 50m elevation when return home pressed
• 275m from home when return to home pressed

The Phantom and Drone Deploy had been extremely reliable up until this point but I need to work out the root cause of this before I can do any more missions. Can anyone please help me to shed some light on why this has happened. Thank you!

Sorry to hear this happened to you, @ddrone . Could you please send us a note from your DroneDeploy email address to support@dronedeploy.com referencing this post so we can assist?

Best,
Neema

Hi DDrone,

Sorry to hear this happened to you. We have been working with DJI the past few months so that there are SDK logs that will be available very soon which help determine what happened to the drone (along with the regular drone logs).

I would load your logs into healthdrones or something similar and ask people on this forum or something like phantompilots or inspirepilots. It sounds like something happened with the actual drone. DroneDeploy doesn’t do anything to the drone after it takes off besides control the camera.

Let us know if we can help with anything.

Chase