DJI Avata “Back On The Horse” After I Lost It In The Lake

Well, I am getting back on the horse, as they say. I'm headed to the location where I lost my DJI Avata in the lake last week. I've got the replacement now. It's not the replacement Avata that DJI is sending; that's actually arriving tomorrow. It's one I ordered on Amazon after that incident. I decided I wanted to have a second backup unit, so it came on Friday, I believe.

But I must say, I'm pretty impressed at how quickly DJI responded. I put my claim in for a replacement unit on Thursday, I believe, and it's going to be here on Tuesday. That's five days, and that's with a weekend in there too. So, that was pretty good. Now, they did charge a fee. It was my mistake because I claimed a refresh right away, a FlyAway. I should have submitted a data analysis before I did that, but I guess it's a lesson learned. But yeah, I'm pretty happy with how they responded quickly.

So, we're almost here now. If you haven't watched that video where I lost my Avada, basically one of the props just kind of came apart mid-flight, about 30 seconds into the flight. I'm not really sure what happened there. Perhaps the memory card cover came open, I'm not even really sure, but it was really unretrievable. It was a fair distance out over the water. And yeah, so we are here.

As you can see, where those ducks are down there, the fire ducks. I don't know if you can see them, that's about basically where it went in. And the other thing I have to contend with here are these birds. I don't know if you can see them flying around down there, I don't even know what they are. They just live on the cliffs here, and they're very aggressive. They like to chase drones, so that's the other thing I'm having to worry about. So, hopefully, they don't take it down today.

I'm going to get the Avata bird up in the air!

Anyways, I'm going to get set up, and as Marcus Crawford always says, I'm going to get the bird up in the air.

Okay, we are all set, so we're just going to go for a quick flight. I'm not going to do anything too aggressive this flight. This is my first time after the crash, so we'll just go up the coast. Just do some nice cruising, and yeah. And, sorry, I can't do a nice FPV stance, I have to sit down. I don't know what it is. As soon as I try to stand up and fly, I just get really dizzy and tip over. So, yeah, I have to sit. So, yeah, let's just get the drone up in the air.

Yeah, so far, so good. It was just right about here. I flew just out like that, and boom! The drone just dropped right in the water. So, so far, we're doing better than last time. Hopefully, we don't have a repeat.

It's the absolute perfect day to fly. There's hardly any wind, which the Avata doesn't really do great in high winds, and we've had a lot of windy days here. Just being right on the coast, yeah, it does get quite windy. And my goggles are starting to fog up, so that's no good. I might have to take them off and wipe them down here in a minute.

So, yeah, we're just going to cruise around, start up high, and then I'll maybe get a little braver and go down a little bit lower. I'm just worried about those birds. And I am actually living, or rather staying, at my aunt's permanent trailer where that peninsula sticks out way off in the distance. It's right up on that cliff, a beautiful spot.

Yeah, it wants me to go down a little bit lower here, but I'm going to get away from the coast a bit. I'm up on the point right over there, you can see where the ‘H' is.

This shoreline is eroding very quickly. Even where I'm at, they said it's from last summer to this summer; it's probably already about six feet that have caved in. Mother Nature is pretty powerful. Maybe we'll do another swoop, but this time I'll go a little bit even lower. We'll try not to scare all these ducks that are up here; we'll just stay off to the side of them.

I really love the Avata; it is definitely my favorite drone to fly. Maybe we'll go circle one of these wind turbines. We've got 65% battery remaining, so we're doing good. And I don't know if you can hear that, but there is a swarm of bees right behind me. There's a tree with flowers on it, and that's all I can hear. Hopefully, I don't get stung. I have to watch for ticks out here too. Last time when I was out here flying, I actually just sat on the ground on the sand, and it wasn't long before I had a tick crawling on me. So, I've got to be careful of that.

Maybe we'll head back, and there's a radio tower there. I have to watch it because there are some very thin guidelines coming off of it. You can see this ravine right here in front of me. There are a couple of natural springs that come out of there, and it's been eroding it away. I'll go down a little bit lower to see if we can see the water coming out. But yeah, you can just see how it's all just sand, so it washes away fairly quickly. There are a lot of birds down in here, along the cliffs, along the sand cliffs, so I've got to be careful. It's steeper than what it looks. I don't know if I could even get down there to retrieve my drone if it happened to go down.

Let's do some low cruising here. The reception is actually quite good, oh, we're just losing it there now. You know, I'm quite a bit below where I took off from, and there's the bank in between the drone and the controller, but we still had good connection. 43% battery, so we're doing good there. Let's maybe go up this little ravine again, and then I'll bring her back home.

Yeah, that looks good. I'm quite pleased with that flight. The propellers stayed in one piece. So, I'm just going to bring the drone home. There I am. So, there we go, we had a safe and successful flight. No props flew apart, no bird strikes, so that's always a good thing.

It's good to get back on the horse. I was a little nervous to fly over water again, but I think, hopefully, that was just some random incident. Now, I have flown since then, since I lost my DJI Avata. I've sent the DJI Mavic 3 and the DJI Mini 3 out over the water. I usually do that every morning and every night, capturing the sunset and sunrise. So, yeah, but it's good to have the DJI Avata out again, and I'm going to be happy to have two because when I am heading north this summer and I'm going to be in very rural areas, I won't be able to really get replacements. So, it'll be nice to have a backup drone, because it's the drone that I do plan on flying most of the time.

Well folks, that is it for this video. Thanks a lot for watching and we'll catch you in the next one.”