I am with you as consumer: My desire is also, that Parrot would implement an adjustable RTH hight for Anafi.
But that does not mean, that I am wrong:
Which scenario would you describe, that absolutely requires a variable RTH hight?
- Starting at the RTH point, flying up a nearby hill, you following the drone by foot, then both drone and you downward on the other side of the hill. Now the RTH point is out of sight, means the hill is between you/the drone and the RTH point.
In this Scenario the drone will of course crash on RTH, if the hill is higher than the RTH point + 20m.
But: What I said was, that the described scenario is not the scenario that Parrot had in mind, when writing the manual:
On page 10: "Parrot recommends pilots to take extra care when moving away from the take-off location of their drone (for example to follow ). In such cases, pilots must cancel the auto-RTH from the orange 1-minute alert which appears on the screen of their device, and keep piloting while monitoring closely its battery level, until it runs out of power and lands."
That means that Parrot assumes, that you DON'T follow the drone and stay near the RTH point.
If you like to follow your drone, you have to be very careful.
This is true now with a fixed return hight. But also with a variable return hight you would have to be careful: In the above example you would have to estimate while walking behind your drone, how high the hill is. Then you would have to adapt the RTH hight to the hill's hight + 20m. Difficult to do in an unknown terrain … and if you climb the next hill, you will have to estimate it's hight again ...
Another question:
If I would like to follow my drone by foot (controlled in manual mode!), then I don't really know, why my drone should return to the first starting point: It is possibly far away and I am also far away from it and after the drone's start of RTH I would have to run to the starting point to get the drone back again.
My point therefore is:
1. An adjustable RTH hight in my opinion gives the consumer a certain "safety feeling" and for this reason is "consumer's desire" (and mine!).
2. An adjustable RTH is -realistically speaking- not necessary, if you use the drone as "flying camera" controlled mainly from the starting point and always in sight, like Parrot sees this as normal use (see manual!).