so this happened yesterday and im still kind of shaken by it tbh. was out at a local park, maybe 60 meters up doing a slow pan shot over the tree line, conditions were fine, barely any wind. then out of nowhere the drone just kind of... paused? and dropped maybe 10 feet before the motors kicked back in and it stabilized itself. it landed fine and everything looks okay but that scared the hell out of me.

checked the flight logs in the DJI fly app but im not totally sure what im looking at. saw something about motor error for like half a second but then it cleared. battery was at 67% so it wasnt a low battery thing. this is the standard mavic 3 by the way, not the cine or the enterprise version, bought it new about 14 months ago so warranty might be an issue.

dont really know if i should fly it again or send it in. has anyone seen this before or know what causes it

That motor error flag is the thing to focus on. Could be a few things ? loose motor screws are actually pretty common on the Mavic 3 after extended use and worth checking first before you do anything else. Just grab the props and gently try to wiggle each motor housing, if any have play in them that's probably your culprit. DJI has a known thing where vibration over time can work the screws loose and it causes exactly the kind of momentary dropout you're describing.

If the screws are all fine then honestly I'd pull the full flight data log not just the app summary, you can get way more detail through DJI's assistant software or upload to Airdata if you have an account. That will show you exactly which motor threw the error and whether it recovered cleanly. If it was a genuine ESC hiccup or something in the motor windings you probably want to get it looked at before flying again, especially over people or anything you care about.

ive heard of this happening after firmware updates actually. did you update recently? theres been a couple threads on the DJI forum about similar stuff after the last two updates, might be worth searching over there too. not saying thats defintely it but worth ruling out before you send it in and pay shipping both ways