DJI Phantom3A Crash Mid Mission

During my last mission my new DJI Phantom3 Advanced simply fell out of the sky and crashed.

DJI put the responsibility purely on the shoulders of the “Third Party App” i.e DroneDeply

As the end user, who do we hold responsible for this type of situation?

From the flight log it is clear that there were no obstructions in the area and from the photos recorded it is clear there was no other moving obstruction such as a bird strike etc.

My personal conclusion is that DJI Phantom Drones are NOT the way to go, and are little more than toys.

Am I wrong?

I am currently putting together a fixed wing plane for mapping.

The app alone could not make it simply fall out of the sky and it would be interesting to see the flight log to understand how DJI came to this conclusion. It sounds more like power loss or mechanical failure to me. It should at least have returned to home if the battery was low or there was a disconnect with the RC signal.

I agree Mark, in my mind it was 100% DJI failure, the flight log and the photos are proof.

I had live video feed while it was falling and even after it hit the ground. By the time I got to it, there were still two bars of battery and video feed.

A couple of days before the total failure it was playing up - cancelling the mission soon after take off and heading to the first waypoint in a zig zagging power up power down manner.

And as soon as the problem appeared is disappeared and gave me a couple of days of no problems at all.

I would really like to hear DJI International’s opinion on this, and not just some local importer / DJI distributor.

You can call DJI Phantoms toys and that’s your opinion which is fine, but you can search YouTube and find hundreds of videos of every type of UAV literally falling from the sky while flying and it had nothing to do with being hobby or professional grade. Something went wrong with your P3A and DJI is scape goating that fact by blaming DD plain and simple. If anything those of us the use DJI products and DD need to pay attention.

I agree, then why do DroneDeploy not defend their position?

We are working with dji on improving this. We are also working to improve the logs available using dronedeploy independently of dji.
Unfortunately at the moment one best ways to guarantee whatever happens you’re ok is to buy the dji insurance package they were selling.

I know it is basically dji offloading blame. It doesn’t help us or you for us say it’s their fault. But I hope me replying let’s you know that we do what we can on.our side to encourage dji to get better logs out with 3rd parties.

Unfortunately that insurance option is not available here in South Africa.

That feeling that every time it takes off could cost me R25,000.00 is not a good one, and really should not be like that.