Hi all — hoping someone with more experience reading DJI/Litchi logs can help me understand what happened here. Not looking to blame Litchi or DJI, genuinely just want to understand the failure so I can avoid it next time.
Aircraft: DJI Phantom 3
App: Litchi for Android
Date: September 8, 2026, ~08:04 CEST
What happened:
I started a mission while the IMU was still preheating. The mission did not start. I then started the same mission 3 sec later. The aircraft took off, climbed to about 4,5 meters, stopped, and then fell back to the ground.
What I’ve found in my own logs so far:
Litchi writes two files per flight: a Litchi telemetry CSV (lat/lon, altitude, flight mode, motor status, RC input, app warnings, etc.) and DJI’s own raw encrypted flight record (DJIFlightRecord_*.txt).
For this flight, the Litchi CSV is 0 bytes — no telemetry rows were written at all for this session, unlike every other flight I have on record.
The raw DJI flight record .txt for this flight is only ~23 KB, versus 100 KB–2 MB for my normal flights of a few minutes consistent with a flight lasting only a few seconds.
I’ve uplodaed my logs to airdata.com my hunch is that my battery died after take off.
Attached:
Raw DJI flight record from the crash flight (DJIFlightRecord_2026-09-08_[08-04-35].txt)
An earlier, normal flight’s log for comparison - I can also see some deviation in battery cell data DroneCrashLogs - Google Drive
Appreciate any insight happy to share more log data or answer questions about exact conditions.
My Phantom 3 Standard has flown a cumulative total of thousands of Litchi waypoint miles, therefore, I can attest to the reliability of this ancient DJI model during fully autonomous flight.
Your mention that the Phantom 3 was launched following an aborted takeoff that occurred while the IMU was still initializing might be a clue as to what went wrong. Best practice is always to wait until the voice prompt announces that the home point has been updated, which generally is heard after an adequate number of satellites have been acquired.
There may have been other factors at play, especially when the age of the Phantom 3 is taken into account, but such failures can be difficult to pinpoint since they can occur intermittently, to punctuate hours of normal waypoint mission flight. If the drone survived that drop without any obvious structural damage, I would highly recommend a calibration of the IMU, compass, and controller, before your next test flight.
Thanks, no it’s didn’t survive. I was just looking for someone who is smarter than me since I’m not into droning I just used Litchi to record the same path with missions. It did 30 flights for me on a similar route, so I don’t think it’s a software bug. However, it’s still disturbing at the end of the day that my drone takes off and just falls down to die.
It is always sad to see an old drone buried with full military honors, and I also understand the need to determine why crashes occur, since such analyses offer insights that could prevent such mysterious departures from controlled flight by future replacement drones.
You started the flight with the battery charged to 61%. It is never a good idea to begin a flight with a partially-charged battery unless it was the second of a previous flight the same day.
While the voltage of all four cells of your battery were very low, cell 1 reached a critically low value of 2.972V 6.5 seconds into the flight. Any time a LiPo battery cell falls below 3V a DJI drone will initiate a forced landing. In your case, the voltage was too low to keep the drone aloft and it fell to the ground from a height of 14.7 feet.
What is the history of this battery? How old, how many cycles, the nature of how you maintain it, etc.?