My spark fell out of the air with no reason/pilot error and into water with mud

[The Editor]

I have read about it and it is a product defect. To bad because the spark is really fun to fly in sportmode. Great potential if it worked like it should.

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Source? Link to 'where you read it'?

 

[Criptix]

I am not on my pc right now but I found 2 websites where was stated that dji forces the firmware upgrade of 1 september that is forces is to adress the spark who could drop mid-air. One in Dutch and one English.
The Dutch one is: DJI Spark vliegt na 1 september niet meer als nieuwe firmware wordt geweigerd the English one I don't have link right now but Google it...

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[ed gonzalez]

Why would it be deleted? This forum has no affiliation with DJI and is privately owned.

You're right I thought I was on the DJI forum they have deleted my posts there. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Sparkbart]

I too am skeptic when people make these claims. When they don't cite sources it carries no weight. I also think there are so many variables that people make no mention of, it makes true diagnosis difficult and must rely on the logs.

I'm no t saying there isn't a problem with sparks falling out of the sky, its just hard to determine what is a real equipment issue vs pilot error...

Source? Link to 'where you read it'?

 

[ed gonzalez]

So I kind of get what your are saying but there are too many reports. In my instance I am a pilot and own my own plane, I also am certified in drones. I follow the disciplines of a check list and log all flights to AIRDATA which is a third party flight logging service. I have hundreds of hours flying DJI products and own 4 other Drones from DJI. I purchased a new spark and on the third flight with 60% battery while videoing myself while hovering it stopped dead no warning just turned off and fell like a rock, I watched it fall. I was not even touching the remote other than to hold it. There are too many reports of this and as you know these drones are some of the most pilot proof Drones on the market. DJI is working hard to hide this problem especially since the logs are showing that they are stopping dead. You can't hide the logs. When this happened to the GOPRO drones it killed GOPRO'S stock price, DJI admitting they have an issue could be catastrophic for DJI. A bigger concern for spark drone owners should be liability, if someone gets hurt and the drone owners knew of a potential problem are they negligent?

 

[Criptix]

I don't know... About responsibility... I had this problem to of my spark going down..

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[rcflyingaddict]

So I kind of get what your are saying but there are too many reports. In my instance I am a pilot and own my own plane, I also am certified in drones. I follow the disciplines of a check list and log all flights to AIRDATA which is a third party flight logging service. I have hundreds of hours flying DJI products and own 4 other Drones from DJI. I purchased a new spark and on the third flight with 60% battery while videoing myself while hovering it stopped dead no warning just turned off and fell like a rock, I watched it fall. I was not even touching the remote other than to hold it. There are too many reports of this and as you know these drones are some of the most pilot proof Drones on the market. DJI is working hard to hide this problem especially since the logs are showing that they are stopping dead. You can't hide the logs. When this happened to the GOPRO drones it killed GOPRO'S stock price, DJI admitting they have an issue could be catastrophic for DJI. A bigger concern for spark drone owners should be liability, if someone gets hurt and the drone owners knew of a potential problem are they negligent?

Ok Ed. So with the evidence/logs did dji replace for fee the Spark?

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[Blue Baron]

For anyone sceptical DJI got a problem:
->

at 3:59 (click the link, it falls right into frame )

you see a Spark falling like a brick out of the sky, AFAIK, it is the only incident actually videotaped!

I think it can happen to any Spark (the Spark in the video continued to work after the crash, so, you never know ...). But the longer it performs as it should, the less likely it is. I have one w/o issues, a keeper. Hope I won't crash it ...

P.S.
You can't force-brick a Spark in mid air. The CSC (combined stick command) for motor off don't function on the Spark when in flight. And on critically low battery, the Spark will force land. Therefore, the video requires a broken Spark or another drone lifting a Spark ...

 

[Criptix]

Thx for the share blue baron! It was like mine. But I couldn't recover my spark because it fell into a creek of 0.5m width . It's with dji right now. I hope they can see on my flight record what really happened and they admit that it was a spark failure. Or it's a battery problem. When power supply stops it can drop to. Dunno what the problem exactly was, I couldn't get into the black box because of the water damage...

 

[ageloreyes27]

Hopefully this is a bug pre .600 firmwire

 

[Criptix]

The person in the video had last firmware. That's why she had to do a update on the beach. To update the battery. So with .600 it does that. Its the only update you can do without internet/wifi and has to be done on all the batteries.
So I guess we are not the only one's and wont be in the future.

 

[Blue Baron]

Let me assess the reports received so far from a programmer's perspective.

First, I don't think it is a battery or battery contact failure. We see two types of incidents, sudden motor off and sudden fly away. In both cases, minor glitches often emerged right before the incident, like compass error or Atti mode for no real reason. And remote controller commands are ignored.

I think it is a common root cause: the drone-internal flight control firmware throws exceptions, eventually crashes. At which point the motors will stop as they receive no further command to propell. A crash of this part of the firmware is extremely difficult to reproduce. It requires an exact reproduction of all flight parameters which cause the software to crash. Almost impossible. Only way is a thorough code review. But depending on how contorted the code has become and if all program authors are still on board, this can be an almost impossible task too. This is why a clean software architecture is so important. But is the software education in China up to par with Western standards here? All programming languages are invented in the West.

The hardware will influence which flight parameters emerge in actual flight, therefore, not all units may exhibit the issue to the same extent. But possibly all are vulnerable.

DJI has three options now:
1. Recall / brick all units until cause is found.
2. Update the firmware to make the drone more gracefully fail, like immediate emergency landing if watchdogs observe abnormal behaviour.
3 . Proceed as usual until they can find the cause.

For legal reasons, in order to avoid #1, they probably have to deny the issue.

 

[Dronason]

...
P.S.
You can't force-brick a Spark in mid air. The CSC (combined stick command) for motor off don't function on the Spark when in flight. And on critically low battery, the Spark will force land. Therefore, the video requires a broken Spark or another drone lifting a Spark ...

Funny, user manual page 45, says:
"To perform the CSC midair in case of an emergency, hold for 1.5 seconds to stop the motors mid flight. Stopping the motors mid-flight will cause the aircraft to crash."
but it cannot be done in the flight simulator. I don't like too much the idea to try in the air.

 

[Blue Baron]

Funny, user manual page 45, says:
"To perform the CSC midair in case of an emergency, hold for 1.5 seconds to stop the motors mid flight. "

The sentence has been noted by others and been falsified. The CSC is ignored when in flight (Spark).

 

[Dronason]

The sentence has been noted by others and been falsified. The CSC is ignored when in flight (Spark).

Yes, it is what it seems. I would prefer to still have it as with other DJI products, but maybe the Spark is for some other audience.

 

[Criptix]

Blue baron, I am a partime programmer to. I program for excel(vba), android and Drupal. So I know that the code is important to get it clean. But for that companies they must do that standaard. Otherwise they should ground the spark like with the forced update and rewrite from a version point... It just sucks they don't admit it and handle it like big boys.

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[Blue Baron]

It is not an easy situation for DJI. If they ground / recall all Sparks at this point, it would probably ground DJI w/o help from the Chinese goverment.

If they continue to deny and a fallen Spark goes thru a highway car windshield killing people, it may ground DJI too.

I am sure DJI works on full throttle at the issue. I am therefore concerned how little they achieved in more than a months's time.

 

[Criptix]

Yeah. Only thing I am a bit mad about is my 799€. I lost that money with there fault... For the rest I hope they can figure it out before real bad things happen. If working correctly it's a very good Drone!

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[Blue Baron]

Yeah. Only thing I am a bit mad about is my 799€. I lost that money with there fault... For the rest I hope they can figure it out before real bad things happen. If working correctly it's a very good Drone!

Sent from my SM-G900F using SparkPilots Spark Forum mobile app

Your drone is under warranty. DJI ows you a replacement unit. Just insist. If you are in the US or EU, just inform them you'll notify a consumer rights body. Will work wonder as DJI currently must avoid visibility of the issue at all cost.

 

[notime]

For anyone sceptical DJI got a problem:
->

at 3:59 (click the link, it falls right into frame )

you see a Spark falling like a brick out of the sky, AFAIK, it is the only incident actually videotaped!

I think it can happen to any Spark (the Spark in the video continued to work after the crash, so, you never know ...). But the longer it performs as it should, the less likely it is. I have one w/o issues, a keeper. Hope I won't crash it ...

P.S.
You can't force-brick a Spark in mid air. The CSC (combined stick command) for motor off don't function on the Spark when in flight. And on critically low battery, the Spark will force land. Therefore, the video requires a broken Spark or another drone lifting a Spark ...

Hear lots of reports but never seen it happen until now. The latest update was supposed to fix that. I'm sure you did the calibrations, did updates to RC, drone and batteries. Send flight records into dji and please get back to us on what they find out.

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