DJI recently announced it will permanently disable the option for US drone pilots to sync their flight logs to DJI’s servers. The drone maker says this decision has been taken following an evaluation of the company’s data policy in line with market demands and privacy expectations. The change will start reflecting in the DJI Fly app from Wednesday. The same day, a bill proposing to ban DJI drones in the US has been scheduled for a Senate hearing amid data security concerns.
Nonetheless, many commercial pilots rely on this feature to track their flight activity. Others count on DJI’s cloud to automatically sync their flight logs with third-party flight planning and drone data management platforms.
For now, drone operators will have to obtain the records of their flights from the next update to the DJI Fly app (v1.13.8). This version will support a batch download of flight records, allowing users to bulk download flight records from the cloud to local mobile devices, provided the SD card is not removed before or during the process.
But going forward, pilots will need to find alternatives to ensure that their flight logs can still be seamlessly accessed for data sharing or analysis. One option is to continue manually exporting the drone flight logs. Others may want to utilize third-party apps such as Litchi or DroneDeploy since software built through DJI’s Mobile SDK will not be affected by this change.
AirData UAV, a specialist in drone flight data analytics, recommends its users directly upload flight logs from their device to the AirData mobile app, bypassing DJI’s cloud. Not only is this method straightforward, but also secure. See here for instructions on how to sync logs with AirData using the company’s mobile app or through the manual upload process.
Read more: DJI ban: What happens to the drones I already own?
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