DJI Phantom 4 Pro lost. Аfter takeoff gained a height of 80 m. Ceased to respond to the sticks. Flew in one direction. At loss of communication with the remote control did not return
09.11.2018
DJI Phantom 4 Pro
Device Model Lenovo TB-7504X
Device Operating System Android 7.0
DroneDeploy 2.84.0
Hi @yudin_aa
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve lost your Phantom 4. We take missing drones and drone crashes extremely seriously - our success is your success. I’ll be direct messaging you to open up a support ticket.
To anyone reading this thread in a similar situation - the best way to have DroneDeploy Support analyze a crash is to email us at support@dronedeploy 
Any resolution to yudin_aa issue? My Phantom 4 Pro took off on me this fall also, I was able to get control and bring it home. Scared to fly it with Dronedeploy again. Have flown it with the DJI Go app and all worked fine.
Still in communication with him.
To be clear, DroneDeploy can’t really crash or lose a drone itself. I have not seen it in my tenure here. Having a successful manual flight just means a different set of variables at that moment are affecting the DJI SDK compared to the DD flight and it responds differently. Problems you might have had during a DroneDeploy flight are 100% sitting latent with a chance they might present themselves during a manual flight.
There isn’t a command we send that would cause a drone to lose control in and of itself. If you’re scared to fly with DroneDeploy, your drone needs to be analyzed and inspected. Or, you had a bit of bad luck with the loss of a GPS signal, for example. Sometimes unavoidable.
We are and continue to work very hard on messaging when something is going wrong on the DJI side, but it’s difficult to do without many false positives.
Adam I was not accusing DD of causing the loss of the drone. Just wondering if there was a setting or some settings that needed fixing or something within the area he was flying from that may have caused the fly away.
I also lost my Phantom 4 yesterday… came here looking for answers.
I get what the support is saying about the app not sending a command that would cause it to lose control, but that’s different from the app itself, unable to maintain connection, with RC, and/or GPS AND to have sufficient features to allow you to recover from such loss… big difference. I have several drones, and have been flying for over three years, two as commercial pilot with over 40 paid missions, and have lost connections many times using DJI GO, but in all cases, the app reconnected on it’s own, or flew home safely. Just stating some facts… sorry to jump on your case yudin_aa… I hope you get some help with your issue
I don’n know what happend, but it happened when I turned on “Set Exposure Manually in DJI Go” and “Set Focus Manually in DJI Go”.
Usually I flew with camera settings disabled.
I don’t have the last flight logs. They are not saved in DD.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I have amlost 400 missions to date and have never seen any scenario where a DroneDeploy failure was of a nature that could cause a drone to fly away or just die. We must remember that at the end of the day that it is running on DJI’s platform. Anything RC, signal, GPS or OBS related is a DJI issue and should be taken up with them immediately because it will take you months to get any kind of a substantial response.
I’ve lost 3 drones, 2 being catastrophic power failures and the other I didn’t account for a change in elevation well enough and smacked a billboard 
Lost my P4 yesterday using DroneDeploy. Was mapping 160 hectares of plantation forest (the max area I fly is 250 - 300ha on any one mission) - flew without issue until UAV was returning to home to replace battery when RC lost connection - never saw it again. Best I could do was walk the RC to last known point on display and begin searching from there in hope I was getting closer to the UAV so the RC could reconnect but it did not.
Now you infer that it is a DJI problem judging from other posts and I am aware that DJI app and DD app can clash so I have one device with DJI app for calibrating the UAV and another tablet for the DD app only. I was under the impression that a lost connection would cause the UAV to RTH which it was doing anyway.
Now it is lost in dense undergrowth of blackberry somewhere within a 30% arc of last known point with a remaining battery range of 500m by my calculations. So really lost, needle in the haystack proportions - you could walk to within 2m of the UAV and still not see it, such is the dense vegetation and if it is hung up in a tree difficult to spot. No flight log able to be retrieved - my assumption is the lost RC connection would also lose transmission of flight path.
So what other action can be taken to find th UAV? And what is the fault going on here? Who is accountable? I was on a routine mission following exactly the same process as the many other flights completed successfully so where is the operator error? DD tends to blame DJI for fault - isn’t that just passing the buck? When is DD going to take responsibility for faults? DJI is also almost impossible to get a response from let alone action.
The fact remains - I was using the DroneDeploy App with Pro subscription when the UAV lost RC connection. DD promotes the use of DJI UAVs with DD products so to me that suggests there is a glitch in DD software as I have had no issues in using DJI apps.
Therefore, what is DroneDeploy going to do about it?
There are a number of reasons that can cause a drone to go missing that aren’t even related to software. Compass, GPS and IMU failures can make the drone free act erratically and go in a completely unintended direction even possibly running into something. another that is probably more common is a power failure or battery failure. If the drone loses connection and does not do what it is told in DJI that would be why that is a primary suggestion.
First of all, I was using the DroneDeploy app not a DJI app.
Sure it could be a hardware failure but if you can’t recover the UAV how can the problem be diagnosed?
The UAV was new and had done about 20 missions.
It could have been a bird strike… an EMP… It could of been alot of things, though on an automated flight mission, where is the operator error potential?
At a 120m its not going to run into any trees or structures and the mission was over a flat area.
If it is a software failure - then the software company is going to blame the hardware and visa versa.
My intention is to diagnose the fault, get a result and work on improvement in a collaborative fashion.
The catch22 appears to an inability to diagnose the fault with out the recovery of the hardware. I don’t know - can the fault be diagnosed without the hardware? What information is transmitted in realtime to the DD app? Airdata app can analyse battery health but isn’t that post flight?
Looking for definitive answers not the plethora of possibilities.
A security solution is to put a RF tracker with an independant power source on the UAV in order to recover the hardware after a software/hardware fault.
Still doesn’t help now though. Can anyone help with this?
The DroneDeploy app is basically a mask over the DJI SDK so you are always using the DJI control no matter what app you are flying with. All I was trying to do was explain that there are actually more chances that something other than ANY software failure can occur. You may have been flying at 120m, but if you lost connectivity how do you know that it stayed there?
You best course of action is to email support@dronedeploy.com and just copy and paste your OP. They may be able to retrieve some type of flight log and can also help you get any log that may have stored to your mobile device.
I am aware DD is a mask over the DJI SDK but one blames the other so looking for distinction there. There has been combatibility issues in the past with the DJIgo app and DD with plenty of forum post in the past pointing to that - hence software issues… though I don’t have DD or DJIgo on the same device which I said in my first post to try and avoid this App clash.
RC connectivity was lost but I did not assume the UAV stayed there, that was the starting point of my search, if you read my post thoroughly - I assumed it went into RTH mode as the default reaction but was lost anyway - that is why I made it clear that my calculations place a potential crash landing in a 30 degree arc if RTH with 500m travel potential based on battery from last known location.
I appreciate your attempts to be helpful.
Still waiting for a DroneDeploy representative to front up, tell me they can identify crash site from the app, however unlikely.
Yes unlikely, but not impossible. All future lost drone instances should email support@dronedeploy.com.