Big scare with (almost) runaway Mavic 2 Pro

General Discussion
1

Hi all,

A couple days ago I had a big scare flying a Mavic 2 Pro using the Litchi app on a Samsung S21 FE 5G running android 14.
I included the flight logs I could find on my phone below.

What happened was the following:

I took off in FPV mode and flew the drone to about 40m altitude. Then I switched to orbit mode, set the orbit point to the middle of a building I wanted to film, set the radius, etc, etc. And started the orbit mission. So far so good. I let it orbit 2 complete circles, and then I switched back to FPV mode to fly the drone back to me and land. This is where it got scary.
The drone was now in FPV mode, but it was still flying away from me without any input from me. By using controller input, if could “fight” the drone back to me somehow. It was like someone else was also controlling the drone as well. It was very hard to “fight” the drone’s autonomous movements and somehow I got it back above me. But it was all over the place. When I released the sticks, it would fly away again and so some small radius circles by itself. I don’t remember exactly how it was behaving, because I was also focussing on the Litchi app, trying to switch back and forth between orbit mode and FPV mode, hoping that would fix it. But it didn’t. Even tried to switch to the DJI Fly app midflight, but in my haste and slight panic, I forgot to force close Litchi first, so it wouldn’t connect. Then I went back to litchi and tried return to home. This also didn’t work as it should. It was sortoff flying towards home, but it was still also doing other stuff. Like “return to home” was also fighting the drone’s own movement, just like I was trying manually.

In the end, I managed to land it. I still don’t exactly know how, but somehow holding full front (or back, left, right, I dont remember) stick, it was sortoff hovering in the same place and I was able to nudge it to the ground, barely missing tree branches.

I got very lucky. But I’d like to know what the hell happened. This experience made be scared to fly it again in the future, before I find out what went wrong.

Unfortunately I stopped the video recording before all hell broke loose (after the orbits I was filming were completed). But I do have the log files from my phone. See link below. Thanks in advance for any help!

Logs: https://nextcloud.istria.cc/index.php/s/HCoYcSKpZztzny7

1 Like
2

You never stopped the orbit properly by using the red stop button in the left button bar.

3

Hmm, could it really be that simple of a mistake?
So is it expected that when not using that red stop button, and switching to FPV mode, you would have both manual control and the autonomous orbit flying at the same time?
And how could that explain the very weird flight pattern that I see when loading the flight log into DJI Flight Log viewer? It does not seem like it was trying to continue the orbit. It was flying a much smaller orbit radius at some point than was set in the orbit settings.
https://www.phantomhelp.com/logviewer/XS1DPH3XS3U3JLEHE0HHS08BZX5W1E26

4

During the execution of an orbit you have full control over the drone, exept for the fact that it keeps on orbitting.

In other words, by using the sticks you can increase/decrease the radius, the speed, the heading, direction ((counter)clockwise) and altitude of the orbit.

The flightlog shows exactly that.

Example: you can fly a spiral by pulling the right stick during an orbit.

The random stick inputs you made.

5

Well, it’s a big relief it was my ignorance and not some (almost) catastrophic failure. Thanks for clearing that up.

One more question. I’ve been staring at the Orbit page for a while now. And also today while flying another orbit. But I cannot find the “red button” to stop the orbit.
In the end, I quit the orbit by pressing the “go home” button. Am I blind? Or is the button hidden somewhere?