Lost my Anafi while running Pix4D Capture

[Meowy]

The app froze and seemed to lose all connection to the drone within a couple of minutes of take-off, before it had even reached the start point to take pictures. The controller’s return to home button did not work, nor did the drone return automatically to the take-off point when the battery would have been getting low. In fact, it seems to have continued flying on, uncontrolled, after reaching the start point because I could see no sign of it flying or hovering anywhere over the area that was to be mapped.

While the obvious culprit is the Pix4D Capture app - I have never experienced such a total failure with it before, and it was working OK several days earlier. Could the fact that I had taken out my phone’s sd storage card but forgot to amended the app’s instructions to save images to that card been the trigger for the issue? But I am also wondering if drone jamming technology could have done this? I was flying a few miles from, and (from the altitude of the drone) within line of sight of, a Turkish military base (investigating an archaeological site they had recently destroyed).

 

[ParrotAnafiFan]

What you experienced was a
fly-away.

Jamming/wifi attack is a possibilty to be open to.

That is common for not letting GPS turn green before takeoff. No RTH set.

Did you have strong password and wifi turned off on phone so it cant accidently connect?

Controller charged?

Drone compass calibrated?

Were you standing in a place where your GPS on your phone was blocked or turned off?

Were you on auto wifi or manual wifi?

Using FF6?

Did you accidently set a custom RTH coirdinate.

If you set a strict geo fence I think that would stop it from getting far.

 

[Meowy]

Sorry for the delay in replying. Pix4d Capture has been a standalone app for the Anafi for the past two or three years, so I was not running FF6 at all. In fact, since Capture had become a standalone without the requirement to start FF6 first, I had assumed it should not be run with FF6. So all the FF6 functions like geofence and last known location were not running at the time of the flyaway. The controller was fully charged minus whatever had drained from it during a prior 20 minute Pix4D flight that had gone OK. Battery was fully charged.
Can Pix4d run alongside FF6? I'll have to give it a try since bought a used (but looks almost unused) and claimed non-working Anafi on ebay for just £105 (complete with battery) - tested it this weekend and it seems to fly OK with my leftover controller!

 

[S.C.C.]

So far the only times my Anafi flew away were when the GPS was not yet perfectly set when starting the flight or the mission - as mentioned by ParrotAnafiFan. It's really easy to be distracted or in a hurry and forget to check that tiny icon, make sure it's green, and even better wait for the message "precise home location defined".

I don't count one occasion when it was attacked by a Kestrel (small falcon), and crashed 150 meters away from there, not sure if the bird dragged it away or if the drone couldn't control the flight, but a propeller was broken. The bird was still perched on the tree when I came to pick the Anafi beneath it.

I was lucky in all these cases, I could find it with some logic then by searching the area until I could hear its beeps, controller in hand looking at the map...

Today after the 2nd flight plan without landing, my Anafi hovered on the last point of the grid, instead of flying directly home (in my plans I define the end point same as the 1st/launch point usually), not sure why it happened, but happily enough I was looking at it with my binoculars (for the first time! new bins...), and it responded perfectly to manual controls, so no issue. No warning... and I didn't wait to see what he would do next.

I can't tell more about Pix4D, I don't use it because it needs a GSM/data connection when you start the app (and most likely send your data to their servers), so I only use Flight Plan with FF6 and my own mission designer...

Edit: reading your post again, I see there was an airport, so jamming might be a possibility, in the EU you can't fly closer than 5 kilometers, sometimes the no fly zone is even larger...