When I opened DJI Fly this morning to continue my testing of the Litchi Mission Hub Bridge app’s latest fine-tune, I noticed that all my saved waypoint flights in DJI Fly had vanished into the ether.
Because all my waypoint mission planning is done with the superb Litchi Mission Hub which also saves those missions now numbering over 100, the mysterious erasure of all the saved waypoint flights in DJI Fly only amounts to a minor inconvenience that is easily side-stepped by importing whichever waypoint flights I wish to fly with DJI Fly, from Litchi Mission Hub where I can rest assured my endless hours of waypoint flight planning are safely stored.
All the same I am curious to learn if any other Litchi users have noticed this sneaky deletion of their saved waypoint flights in DJI Fly. The subject of mysterious waypoint mission erasure was discussed last year, in the wake of a 2025 DJI firmware “upgrade” that affected users in the USA.
I am really curious to hear from any other DJI Fly users in this forum, who have noticed that cunning trick played via last year’s DJI firmware “upgrade”, which killed off users’ ability to save waypoint missions in DJI Fly’s “history” folder for longer than 24 hours .
As a follow-up question, I’d like to ask Litchi’s developers whether there are any plans to create a version of Litchi that can be used to operate DJI Fly drones, for those of us who would rather remain loyal to Litchi, while completely avoiding all DJI drone apps due to that company’s penchant for sneaking in crippling limitations via voluntarily downloaded "firmware upgrades”, or worse, by automated downloads that wreak their havoc in the background silently, beginning the instant DJI Fly is opened by unwary users preparing to fly their drones.
If the ability to calibrate the drone’s IMU and compass were incorporated into such a direct replacement for DJI Fly by Litchi, I would immediately uninstall DJI Fly and be done with it forever.
If the new Litchi Pilot is intended as the DJI Fly replacement that I yearn to see, then please forgive my ignorance, as I have not yet delved into Litchi Pilot’s capabilities.
Litchi Pilot is the app you are asking for, and it’s android only - no SDK for iOS so we can’t do it for iOS. Also it’s only compatible with some drone models because the new DJI SDK is not compatible with all drone models: [OPEN BETA] Litchi Pilot
Regarding the loss of your saved DJI Fly flights, please contact support@flylitchi.com with details about your setup so we can investigate further. It may be caused by a bug in Litchi Hub Bridge. It does already try to backup your flight database and restore it when transfer issues happen but we’re still early in development and there may be bugs.
Thanks for this explanation, Vico. I can see that Litchi Pilot is not currently compatible with the Air 3, since DJI hasn’t released an SDK for the Air 3. This means that I have no option but to use DJI Fly, at least for the time being.
I’ll send details of IOS revision number and other iPad specs to the Litchi support email address you’ve provided, so they can hopefully determine whether my saved waypoint files aren’t visible due to a bug with the new Hub Bridge, or if it is due to DJI stealthily deleting saved waypoint files as they were found to have done with another of their Trojan Horse firmware “upgrades.” last year.
Have you tried navigating the DJI Fly filesystem while the device running DJI Fly is plugged into your computer? That would be my first step in troubleshooting this. If it is an iOS device you should be able to do this right from the “Files” app on your iPhone/iPad.
Without the DJI MSDK, no one is able to write software for a DJI drone.
Isn’t compass calibration already available in Litchi Pilot? It is in the Litchi app.
Thanks for this reply, Wes. When I connected the iPad with the laptop, I could see the hard drive colored red to indicate it was nearly full, but when I clicked on it to see the folders, there was only one folder named “DCIM”.
Clicked on the DCIM folder and that came back as “empty”, which made no sense since the iPad is showing as being filled up with data that I now know to comprise mostly of the video cache from my Air 3 flights. I’ve got a couple of Apple Lightning cables on order, to eliminate the possibility that the cable is the cause of my inability to see the contents of the iPad.
Now that I have briefly succeeded in copying Litchi Mission Hub waypoint flights into DJI Fly. and thus for the first time been able to explore the Air 3’s capabilities, it is even more frustrating to see all my saved flights mysteriously vanish in DJI Fly.
When the Lightning cables arrive, I will test each in turn by flying the Air 3 with the cables connecting the RC controller to the iPad. If the video feed is normal, that will be proof enough that the cables are genuine. If the issue of the disappearing saved waypoint flights persists after I have replaced my current tattered cable with a new one, then I will conclude that the Mission Hub Bridge might still have a hidden bug or two waiting to be zapped by the developers.
My hopes are high for the Litchi Mission Hub Bridge, and I’ll be scouring this forum regularly to see if any good news emerges in the coming weeks and months. Having used the Air 3 and seen the reach of its signal thanks to Occusync 4, and its phenomenal range with stock batteries, the thought of making do with my old workhorse, the Mavic 2 Pro, holds a lot less appeal.
This does not make any sense to me. If you connect your iPad to a laptop (Windows?), you should not be able to see its hard drive. Instead, you would have to use either iTunes or Apple Devices to navigate only a small portion of the iPad storage.
If you are seeing a folder named “DCIM”, you are navigating a camera’s SD card.
I suspect that the chewed-up Apple cable I’ve had to use until I get a genuine replacement might turn out to be the cause of the appearance of an empty DCIM file when I connect the iPad to the laptop.
That chewed-up cable does work fine for flying the drone with the iPad, as a connection between it and the RC controller, but that doesn’t prove the cable is guaranteed to be a viable link for all data transfer.
By early next week, I expect a couple of genuine Apple Lightning cables with which I’ll finally be able to thoroughly evaluate this connection. There are no Apple stores out here in the sticks, so I have to rely on the selection made by a trusted buyer in the city.
Now that I’ve seen what a phenomenal platform the Air 3 is, I will leave no stone unturned in getting to the root of why the Hub Bridge worked for a while, but then stopped working for me.
If you are looking at a DCIM (Digital Camera IMages) folder, you are looking at an SD card, not an iPad. You cannot browse an iPad’s file system from a computer.
I was so sure that with a genuine cable connecting the two, I would be able to see all files in the iPad after navigating to the iPad’s files using the Dell laptop’s “This PC” directory. This is pure conjecture on my part since this old dinosaur has a limited understanding of these matters.
What continues to baffle me is the fact that I was initially successful in overwriting DJI Fly dummy waypoint missions in the iPad, and then using the Air 3 to fly them without any obvious problems, only for that process to stop working the following morning. The next day, all those saved waypoint missions just vanished despite the flight logs remaining intact in DJI Fly, complete with a map-view playback of those waypoint missions that disappeared..