My Worst Crash Yet of the DJI Air 3 (Can I Fix It?)

Have I mentioned that I'm a terrible drone pilot?

As much as I love our little buddy for all the cool angles it's able to get, I'm nervous every time it takes to the air, as I know there's a good possibility that it will be the last time it flies. I knew this would be the case when I got it, and on the recommendation of Mike @mk5, I also got the DJI Care insurance. For a mere $250 dollars, they'd give me the privilege of sending in another $99 and my broken drone - up to four times over the course of the 2-year insurance plan - for a brand new replacement buddy.

I don't usually purchase insurance - if the insurance company thinks they'll make money off of me, I'd rather make that money off of myself - but now that I'm on "buddy 3" I'm glad I got it this time. Or I was, until this one went crazy and crashed itself into a tree, three weeks after my two-year DJI Care plan expired.

We were out and about - wandering southern Utah - when it happened. Having just visited Hell Dive Canyon, I'd taken a photo of the Tacoma on the trail back and thought to myself:

I think this shot could be more nicely framed if the camera were further away and a little higher. Then, I could compress the Grey Cliffs in the background, and get a bit more of them in the shot.

Having just put the drone away - I'd figured that I was done using it for the remainder of the trip - I apologized to @mrs.turbodb and set about extracting it from its bag. Not long after, it was airborne, and I pushed the joystick to send it speedily away from the Tacoma in order to frame the shot.

Almost immediately, proximity warnings began to sound. With no obstacles in front of the drone, I chalked it up to the sun - still low on the horizon - blinding the sensors in some way; something that'd I'd experienced before and something that'd never been a problem.

Only this time, for some reason, little buddy 3 took evasive maneuvers. Technically, this is by design - the drone is supposed to fly around obstacles - but in this case there was an actual tree in the avoidance path. Thus, while the sensors were busy freaking out about being blinded by the sun, they failed to notice the actual tree and in seconds the propellers were hacking away at pine needles as the drone began a slow, cascading fall to the ground.

Where it landed on the rear arm and broke the knuckle.

Little Buddy 3 was only four weeks old. The youngest casualty of them all.

Irony was the name of the game here. Little buddy and his first clone were both replaced because I had DJI Care, but mostly out of an abundance of caution - both crashes resulted only in bits of the outer plastic shell being dislodged, and I was able to snap it back together in order to continue flying for the remainder of whatever trip I was on. This time - with the DJI Care expired - there was no putting buddy 3 back together again. I was bummed, and shoved the drone back into the bag. I'd deal with it later.

At some point before we got home, I realized that I might not have been the first person to break a rear arm. I fired up YouTube and sure enough, there was a video showing replacement of the arm with a $32 part from amazon! A few minutes later, a new Air 3 Rear Arm Shaft Hinge was on its way.

The new part. Much more expensive than it used to be, due to tariffs. Remind me again how tariffs are making things better for me, the consumer?

Armed with the new knuckle and way too much that I could disassemble - including unsoldering some components - and rebuild my little buddy, I pulled out a few tools one evening after dinner.

• iFixit Mako Driver Kit
• iFixit Precision Tweezers Set
• Spudger & Pry Tool Kit
• 10X-30X Lighted Magnifying Glass with Stand
• Soldering iron
• Hot glue gun

The first step was easy. All I had to do were remove a few screws that I couldn't even see without the magnifying glass.

My eyes are getting old.

Then, in a series of increasingly risky maneuvers, I followed the instructions of several videos to remove the bottom casing, some control wires of some sort, and the motherboard, before I eventually unsoldered and removed the rear arm itself.

Bottom case removed.

The smallest connectors ever, disconnected.

Little buddy's brains. Apparently.

I swear, my hands are steadier than they seemed as I positioned the tip of the soldering iron over the tiniest pad of solder.

Is amputation success? Sometimes, I suppose, but in this case, not quite.

Old bones extracted, ready for replacement.

Somehow, I was able to get everything back together, mostly the way it seemed to come apart. I'm sure I've done it in such a way that if I ever sent little buddy back to DJI for repairs, they'd laugh at the sloppiness of my work, but I had no screws when I was done, and for me, that's success!

 

In this Series

 

Filed Under