Welcome Inspire Pilots!
Join our free DJI Inspire community today!
Sign up

Inspire 1 Pro Complete In-Flight Failure - BATTERY OVERHEAT

TB48 batteries are nothing but trouble. We as a business do not use them any more. Have lost one aircraft and had several close calls. Batteries go from 50% to 2% and aircraft goes into auto land. Data shows temps of over 65C. They are not worth the extra 2mins of Flight time.

do the mod and spare(save) yourself the trouble with two aux batteries.
 
You are right, i was irresponsible according to Transport Canada, but it doesn't change the fact the unit failed....
Love your tag "Smart Like Rock", seriously questionable though. Do folk like you never stop and think that Transport Canada (In your case, in mine its CASA) don't have some little uni student trolling this type of forum looking for ways to earn revenue? Like the nut case in central London (UK) recently. The fact that you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
 
Yesterday was a fantastic day to try out my newly purchased Phantom 4 and Inspire 1 Pro from back in March (yeah for price drop)
After flying for part of the fantastic afternoon, with both units and a few recharges, at 6:40PM EST, I was over 1000ft in altitude, and 6000ft in distance away from my home point when I began getting a "battery overheating malfunction" error at 58% discharge . I was over a heavily wooded area on the shores of the Ottawa River, and started to immediately come back to the home point, I had no opportunity to land, there was simply no where to land. I slowed the Inspire 1 down as much as I could but around 3210ft away at 941ft altitude (still in a heavily wooded area) there was a complete failure on the battery, and the Inspire fell, the last thing I saw was a image from the gimball rotating, and the blades still going and it looked to be branches in its view.


Battery was 97% charged on takeoff- a TB48- flew longer router earlier in the day. No indication at anytime prior to battery failure.... Is this just a freak thing?


BTW, I've started the process with DJI, but I'm sure they are not going to cover the Olympus 12MM lens and filter I had on the X5...

Went back in the morning to with better light to see if I could find anything, within 50ft of the last contact point, I found debris. The Inspire is a total loss, The camera is no where to be found, the gimball is in piecies.
It was a miracle I found anything, it's literally in a swamp.
Sorry to hear about your losses but thanks for sharing your story with us. A word of caution for what's below!
 
I'm a complete idiot, I'm sorry!

Will that make it better?
I thought this was a help fourm?
dude you cant expect everyone falling over themselves to help you out when you where clearly doing the wrong thing. Every day our hobby is at risk due to people who think they are the one person that the law does not apply to. sounds like you had some bad luck, such is life, but dont come on here saying "I was as responsible as I could have been" when clearly you were not. If you were, you would have maintained clear LOS and maintained an altitude below 400ft. Im sure there was nothing stopping you from doing this other than your decision to do what you want.
 
Ok LISTEN UP drone POLICE....

If there IS a potentially catastrophic bug in the latest firmware that will drop Inspire's from the sky, and we insist on beating the **** out of this guy, we'll just have to wait until someone here who is flying below 400ft, within LOS with a 333 exemption, spotter, written authorization from EVERY property owner within 10 miles and a written COA and evidence of filed NOTAM (who also recycles) encounters it before we can finally investigate what happened.

Let's try to see the bigger picture in cases like these folks please. Your Inspire might be next.

Now.

What we need here is the GO app flight record uploaded to healthydrones.com.

OP: in iTunes, under your device under Apps, under files, find the DJI GO app and there will be a directory called "FlightRecords".

Copy that directory (drag and drop it) to your desktop.

Then go to healthydrones.com and create a FREE account and upload the last Flight Record file.

Post that link here please.

OP: If you want a chance at a FREE replacement drone from DJI, please do as asked. If this looks like a DJI firmware or HW failure, you have a real chance at a replacement drone.
 
dude you cant expect everyone falling over themselves to help you out when you where clearly doing the wrong thing. Every day our hobby is at risk due to people who think they are the one person that the law does not apply to. sounds like you had some bad luck, such is life, but dont come on here saying "I was as responsible as I could have been" when clearly you were not. If you were, you would have maintained clear LOS and maintained an altitude below 400ft. Im sure there was nothing stopping you from doing this other than your decision to do what you want.
Who says this is a hobby?
I fly to make money, not to fly around for fun!
 
We can all be judge n jury and we can all see he was taking risks.. but would also like more info from the OP to see if their is a problem. it would be good to know the batt temp at the point of warning and power fail , was he flying in the red? he must have been getting some pre sense of heavy drain..
Give us some more info Smart Like Rock
 
Good riddens.. one less dumny in the air that jepordizes all us pilots... personally I think he never let the batteries cool properly... room temp after flight... and I let my cool again after charge... total of atleast 5hrs down time...and he got two flites in... i smell stupid again...
 
What does that have to do with a failed battery???
I'm completely stumped.....

In the logs there isn't anything concerning the message I was getting (Battery overheat, battery malfunction) which leads me to believe there is a bug in the software that doesn't report battery issues properly. In fact the error started moments after the 2nd generic warning:


Warning:propulsions output is limited to ensure the safety of the battery.

Flight time: 05m 42s
Altitude: 1206.0 ft
Home Distance: 7,919 ft

So what does that tell you? I'm not a rocket scientist, but considering it says there is 35% battery in the logs, and my Inspire fell.... Massive discharge??
 
Looks like a catalogue of disasters really.

What was the wind speed and direction at take off?
Do you know about or did you take into account anabatic or katabatic winds from the slopes?
Appears to be prolonged full cyclic which took battery temp way too high.
This coupled with fighting a headwind means it was only going to end one way.

I'm afraid it's lesson learned and you will be wiser next time.
 
It looks like they're implying that the angle of your drone indicates it fighting too much wind and overheating the battery. Though HealthyDrones seems to indicate a single cell failure. In any case there are way more experienced people than me to chime in here...I'm sure they will soon.
 
Love your tag "Smart Like Rock", seriously questionable though. Do folk like you never stop and think that Transport Canada (In your case, in mine its CASA) don't have some little uni student trolling this type of forum looking for ways to earn revenue? Like the nut case in central London (UK) recently. The fact that you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
Nut case turned out to be a plastic bag.... funny how the media blows things out of proportion eh??
 
It looks like they're implying that the angle of your drone indicates it fighting too much wind and overheating the battery. Though HealthyDrones seems to indicate a single cell failure. In any case there are way more experienced people than me to chime in here...I'm sure they will soon.
Sure... but headwind wont drop your inspire out of the sky when you have power... im not satisfied with DJI's response, doesn't explain anything really.... if batteries fail while underload there is a major problem here... software SHOULD cripple or at least force land unit before it falls out of the sky if the battery is in a known state of distress.
 
Looks like a catalogue of disasters really.

What was the wind speed and direction at take off?
Do you know about or did you take into account anabatic or katabatic winds from the slopes?
Appears to be prolonged full cyclic which took battery temp way too high.
This coupled with fighting a headwind means it was only going to end one way.

I'm afraid it's lesson learned and you will be wiser next time.

Wind was minute maybe 5-10mph max out ofsouth easr
 
Thank you for sharing the HealthyDrones log.

Apart from the very long flight distance and high altitude flown, the calculated wind above the take off point is 7.5m/s (17mph) downwind which helps give the max speed of 28.5m/s (63mph). Note: the HealthyDrone description says the wind arrow indicates the direction that the wind is blowing. This is the opposite of your interpretation. The Inspire 1 max wind speed is given as 10m/s (22mph) so the aircraft would have struggled to fly the return leg. This would explain the very high battery temperature 72C (161F) and the power limitation warnings to protect the battery. The data also shows that Cell 1 was under considerable loading and probably led to the battery failure.

This analysis is based on the data recorded by the app. The full data would be on the aircraft internal card (FLYxxx.DAT) which you would need to send to DJI for analysis as to the true cause of the crash.
 
  • Like
Reactions: slim.slamma
Thank you for sharing the HealthyDrones log.

Apart from the very long flight distance and high altitude flown, the calculated wind above the take off point is 7.5m/s (17mph) downwind which helps give the max speed of 28.5m/s (63mph). Note: the HealthyDrone description says the wind arrow indicates the direction that the wind is blowing. This is the opposite of your interpretation. The Inspire 1 max wind speed is given as 10m/s (22mph) so the aircraft would have struggled to fly the return leg. This would explain the very high battery temperature 72C (161F) and the power limitation warnings to protect the battery. The data also shows that Cell 1 was under considerable loading and probably led to the battery failure.

This analysis is based on the data recorded by the app. The full data would be on the aircraft internal card (FLYxxx.DAT) which you would need to send to DJI for analysis as to the true cause of the crash.
Ok so it is a failed battery...
This is precisly my point, if a failed battery lead to catastrophic loss, then it should be covered by warranty. The output was limited to protect the battery, if that output limitation was not enough to protect the battery, that is a flaw in design as the battery is the most important core technology in the aircraft.
This is really all i need, appreciate all your help guys, this fourm is a good resource.
This is new technology, Dji needs to know how to build better more usable, safer and friendlier technology, this is one way to do it.
Again appreciate the help!
 

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
22,277
Messages
210,655
Members
34,334
Latest member
unitedconveyormktg