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Phantom 4 Pro lost while using MapPilot

Hey guys, this weekend I flew in the suisse Alps for research reasons of my german university.

My setup: 

dji Phantom 4 Pro + Apple ipad mini + Maps made easy MapPilot 

(flight height; 300m)

My goal was to map a glacier in the southern Alps. I planned three seperate missions, each using 1 battery to cover the whole area. the first and second worked fine. i started each mission from the highest point, so that i could ensure that there`s no collision danger for the phantom. 

At this time theres still a lot of snow in this area (2800m height) so i couldnt reach the very top of the glacier for the last section. So i started about 50m below the plateau of the mapping area of the third mission. 

Drone raised up to 300m then started mapping. but then, as it moved on i lost eye contact and instantly i got a freezed screen on my ipad... (in fact the programm wasnt freezed, i could still use it, later for the return-to-home function...) 

I thought, i let it run for a while, cause the flight path is saved on the drone and either the phantom continues mapping and will return when finished or it stopped mapping and the drone would return automatically. But none of them happed... the drone never returned... risky enough i started climbing up the last part of the glacier to search it but no success. 

I tried to find the drone using the "find-my-drone" function in the dji go app, but it wasnt connected during this last flight, so there was no location saved in the dji GO app... 

are there any solultions to find the drone afterwards using the app? What could be the cause of this issue? 

looking forward to a hard conversation with my research supervisor :/ 

 

Gabriel Brütsch

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Sounds like a wild outing... That is certainly getting up towards the maximum altitude these aircraft are good for. Any little wind and they are going to probably have problems with such thin air to fight back with. 

Did you look at the CSV log file or KML file to see where it was last logged to have been? That would give you a place to start looking. 

If the app or iOS device crashes the aircraft will continue on the programmed flight until it runs out of battery and come back to the landing point. So it if never showed up there was likely an 'incident'.

Honestly, we don't have much experience flying up that high to start with but know there are issues with doing so. Flying 300m of the ground anywhere is asking for a lot more wind than you would normally get. The two combined is pretty spicy!

Zane
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