DroneDeploy Just Caused my Mavic Pro to Plummet Out of the Sky WTF!?

Just tried Drone Deploy for the first time and I’m sorry I did. My Mavic Pro flew the course I’d set, at 300’ to avoid trees, clicking pictures as directed, then returned the home point and …my drone plummeted to earth, landing on my barn roof. Note the battery was still over 50%

I’m sure somewhere in the things I agreed to to when I purchased the software it says you are not responsible for this. At this point I accept that, but I’d really like to know why this happened and make sure you don’t let it happen to anyone else. LIke for instance, can’t the app be designed to pass the control back to the DJI app when it’s done flying the mission. This seems like a small think to do when you’re talking about thousands of dollars with or equipment!

I don’t have first hand familiarity with the Mavic controller, but did you try to manual override while it was descending? If it was falling from 300ft, I would have tried switching to GPS mode to override the system and power out of the fall. When it started falling did it cut all power to the props?

I could not get it into GPS mode. I tried to start the DJI app in hopes that it would take over. Too late unfortunately.

Granted I’m a total newbie at this. I’d only flown like 5 flights before this. I was trying Drone Deploy for the first because I’d hoped to use it for work as I’m an agricultural inspector. I was literally flying it around my farm. One possible cause though, I’d read, I think on this forum, that the DD software causes the drone to take off rapidly and fly at breakneck speed to the first way point, with obstacle avoidance turned off. For this reason, manually had the drone take off, then switched to DD once I was airborne. Could this have been the cause?

The DJI SDK does not allow dronedeploy to fly faster than is safe for the drone. DroneDeploy does not actually control the drone after takeoff, this is all the DJI autopilot. If something happened while it was in the sky it is probably due to some malfunction of the drone.
You don’t need DJI Go open to put it into GPS mode. You only need to toggle it on your RC.

As for whether to pass control to do the DJI app, etc. The person with the RC is always in control. The majority of the drone control is within the computer on the drone itself.

I’ve seen this firsthand and it was my DJI Go settings that killed my bird. All DD does is provide waypoints and besides the camera all controls are defaulted to DJI. I feel your pain and hope you can overcome the accident.