Stop blowing smoke up my .....
But you did just open the door for my other theoy, which should be held suspect as it dovetails to well with my other theory. Then again, I don't believe in coincidence so...
We have to remember to all the things that were taking place when the 920 was first advertised and released to the U.S. market. Things were looking great for commercial aerial activities and quite a few small aerial businesses had landed some pretty good contracts. They were making pretty good money. But our FAA decided they needed to control sUAS and without legal authority to enforce they sent out letters to all the big outfits that were contracting out for aerial imagery. The threat of enforcement was enough for them to cancel their contracts with aerial vendors, pulling the rug out from under the aerial companies just as the 920 was being released. The marketing was good, and I believe the intent was sincere, but the timing with the FAA throwing their weight around was terrible and not foreseeable. Unless you had a Part 333 authorization, and only 6 companies had them, you were shut down until the court battle between the FAA and Mr.Brendan Schulman, who was representing a European guy named Trappy that had flown over, around, and through everything at an Eastern college, was settled. That went on for a year and a half.
Europe and the U.K. were still doing well for commercial aerial imagery but soon after the FAA started flexing their muscles the EU and UK started coming up wit more sUAS flight regs. The EU was getting real sticky with things like weight limits and parachute requirements. Not insurmountable but Yuneec was just about to release the Typhoon H. This is where I think the real problems came into play. Yuneec has a competitor, and that competitor has no reservations about what he will do to assure he retains his market share. before the H was released there was a campaign mounted to discredit it in every social media forum you can think of. The number of user names that were openly slamming the Typhoon H was absolutely incredible. The lies even more so. The H was supposed to release in March of 2016 and somehow every H had to be brought back for an emergency firmware upgrade. This was more than a little strange as every pre-production H had been extensively test flown to validate the system before the production run started. As soon as the production units started rolling off the line a series of major bugs were found in the Typhoon H flight control system. Almost like the FC suddenly caught a cold, if you understand what I'm saying.
So deliveries of the H were delayed until May of 2016, which caused a lot of people to cancel their pre-orders and place orders for the new Autel platform and a new Phantom version made by a company that just happened to cut their price structures at almost the same time the H was being released. BTW, something similar happened to the 3DR Solo with that same company as the Solo was being released, price cuts and all. Back to the H. So the H was now getting into the hands of the public but as it did so the the anti H slam campaign from DJI shills hit a fever pitch. Videos were made and posted on You Tube showing the H being deliberately run into walls, trees, flailing on take off and landing, and all sorts of stuff that tried to make it look bad. Close reviews of all those videos provided evidence all the "problems" were deliberately induced. We might call all of it an attempt to sabotage. Combine that with a few people that grabbed an H for their first multirotor making some serious operational mistakes and there was some unjustified negative publicity for the H. That hurt sales to some extent for sure. Adding fuel to the fire was Yuneec's taking everything back for any reason for free customer service repairs. That cost a lot of money. All of the above combines to put a pretty big hurt on a relatively small company at a time they had invested a lot of capital in two stellar platforms, the 920 and the Typhoon H. It all benefits DJI greatly but hurts Yuneec badly, as did the BK filing of an outfit in New York last year that owed Yuneec $10.3 million.
The 920 was
and is a good design and I truly believe they had intended to grow the platform. But revenue issues caused them to cease improving it, and were likely the reason they chose to convert it to the 920+. Money is certainly the reason Yuneec chose to unload most of their U.S. management staff and a large portion of their service techs, a process that has yet to cease. The 920 and Typhoon H did not share common system components and likely had different supply chains. As there was an Asian press release that alluded heavily to Yuneec having financial issues with one or more suppliers they may not have been able to continue obtaining parts for the 920 but still had purchasing power with Typhoon H parts suppliers. Suddenly the 920 was using the same flight system as the Typhoon H and the 920 was renamed the 920 Plus, although it should have been named the 920 Minus.
When we look at the situation pragmatically, those that bought a 920 and kept it a 920 don't have all that much to complain about. Yes, the camera/gimbal integration was stopped halfway through the process, but those people still have what they paid for. Complaining about upgrades that never happened is like complaining next year's cars have features the ones from this year do not. Some of their reasoning suggests auto manufacturers should also be upgrading older models with each new model year release. It's the same logic. Those that bought 920's and sent them in for conversion "upgrades" have every right to be mad as ****. We can honestly say that some of what they originally paid for was stolen from them. The battery situation is certainly a problem but alternative solutions that provide flight time as good or better than what they had with their 920's is readily available at
MUCH lower cost. Ultimately batteries are only a problem for people that want to complain about something. It would be to their benefit to shut up and buy a few better batteries, and write off the old ones as a business expense. They would have ended up doing that around the two year mark anyway as they don't last forever. Then again, some of the complainers may be working for the competition, doing the same as they have been continuously doing in publishing negative comments across social media venues. The guy in Australia that alleges he reported the 920 battery situation to CASA is definitely suspect. If he could get the Yuneec fleet grounded, who benefits? Certainly not the owners, or himself.
The 920 in either form is an excellent platform and in no way obsolete. In my view if Yuneec was serious about standing up their commercial division they would revisit the 920 and make a few minor code changes to improve resident functionality and contract with someone for new batteries. After that was done they could devote some effort to adding new operational features to expand capability, perhaps even integrate some new cameras from known quality camera manufacturers. Doing all that would provide an upper level platform for those not terribly interested in mapping. They have the 520 for that, and there's a lot of room for improvement on that end. Diversification is how you expand your customer base as one size has never fit all. You can build a base platform and provide numerous add on options for it but it runs out of room quickly. A better option is to split the product line in directions that align with known customer requirements. The big money is rapidly moving to commercial enterprise endeavors. Commercial provides for larger margins and better funding for R&D. The consumer market is saturated and wallets have been emptied by a continuous process of new product releases. The consumer side also has the liability of providing customer service to a "entitlement" population that cause most of their own problems, but are extremely vocal when they don't get coddled with free repair work. A consumer buys one system, a commercial enterprise might buy 10 or more larger systems. It makes a **** of a lot more sense to target the commercial sector and send out people to meet with potential customers and train them as part of the purchase contracts.
Again, congrats on your new system. I'm pretty sure you will like it, and like it even more as you get some time on it. I'm actually a bit envious of you obtaining an original 920. I didn't think there were any left. BTW, I don't believe the 920 as it was originally released declined in appeal but it was certainly over shadowed by saturation advertising of the Inspire and its camera selections. Yuneec has done themselves no favors with their perpetual silence.