DJI Air 3! NYPD Public Messaging, Aloft/Drone Responders Partner, Oshkosh 2023!

Welcome to your weekly US News update. We have four stories for you this week. Surprise! We are in Oshkosh this week, and we’re going to discuss the DJI Air 3 that was finally released. We’ll talk about the New York City Police Department, which is using drones as a weather warning. We’ll discuss Aloft and Drone Responders, who are partnering for something pretty cool. Lastly, we’ll talk about everything we’ve seen at Oshkosh so far and give you a little bit of an update. Let’s get to it.

DJI Air 3 drone

The first story this week is obviously the DJI Air 3. You may have seen a bunch of videos online, including ours. We posted some content—pretty long videos because we went quite in-depth. So, if you want to learn more about the entire drone, I invite you to take a look by clicking this link.

We spent a little bit over a week with the drone. It’s quite amazing. I know everybody’s going to say it’s quite amazing because it’s a brand-new drone, but there are certain things that you need to learn and know about before you make the purchase.

We put it through the ringer, as we always do. We tested the charts, the quality of the videos, and the photos. We try to keep these as quantitative rather than qualitative, so we don’t really give you our opinion necessarily, but we’ll show you all the data.

We also have links to the full-size images if you want to see those. But yes, go take a look at the material. The drone is indeed a good hybrid between the DJI Mini 3 and the DJI Mavic 3. It’s the perfect combo of the two, so maybe it’s the right drone for you. Or maybe you want to keep your Air 2S. I’ve been reading through all the comments, and it’s interesting to see your opinions so far.

NYPD using drones

In the next story this week, we talk about the New York City Police Department that is using drones to help with weather information. They’re trying to spread the message using audio messages from the drone to tell people about upcoming weather and maybe to stay inside because there’s flooding coming.

We’ve seen this several times before in other parts of the country, and now it’s being spread into this massive city. Not everyone loves the idea. We love the idea of drones being used for good across the country. In this case, there’s been a bit of pushback.

I’m looking at my notes here from the article we saw, but someone named Albert Fox Cahn, who’s the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, was not a fan of the idea.

He said, “This plan is just not going to fly, I guess pun intended. The city already has countless ways of reaching New Yorkers, and it would take thousands of drones to reach the whole city. He said the drones are a terrible way to alert New Yorkers, but they are a great way to creep us out.”

We’ve seen this pushback from people thinking drones are doing surveillance on them. I think in this case, it’s a great way to alert more people and let them know they should stay inside and stay safe. Let us know what you think in the comments about this. New York was also in the news last week when they finally approved a new way to get approval to fly drones inside the city.

We’ve covered this in a news update a couple of weeks ago when we talked with Vic. We weren’t so sure that the proposal was going to work out. Well, apparently nothing was changed, even though there were hearings and comments that were requested. It looks like it’s going to be a pretty difficult procedure for anyone to get approval to fly in the city. So, at this stage, everything remains unchanged. If you want to fly in the city, it’s more than likely going to be nearly impossible. You’ll have to apply for the permit, and the process is pretty cumbersome. If you want more information, we’ll put a link down in the description to take a look at what was approved. But yes, we’re a bit disappointed in this case.

Aloft and Drone Responders

The next story this week is about Aloft and Drone Responders who are working together to give access to public safety agencies to more information about airspace. Let me read you a bit of the press release they had. It says,

“This groundbreaking collaboration will see Aloft provide complimentary access to Aloft Geo, which is one of their solutions, to all public safety agencies nationwide. It will allow them to publish safety data directly to the Aloft platform, including Before You Fly.”

What this will do is provide direct information to people flying in the area in order to see other aircraft that are flying, making it safer for everyone to operate. This also potentially could have a big impact on the ability to create temporary flight restrictions around specific areas, so that the airspace can be saved for those that need it.

Think about public safety agencies like fire departments and police departments that have to do their job and keep everyone safe out of the airspace. We’ve been working with Drone Responders and Aloft for a very long time, so we’re excited to see both of them joining hands to help our public safety agencies do their job more safely and keep everyone safe in the air.

Oshkosh

The last story is about our experience at Oshkosh. We are at our Airbnb this morning. There was a big storm at 6 a.m., so one of our team members, who lives closer, had to rush to take care of the tent.

This trip has been filled with a lot of excitement, both good and bad. A big storm came in on Saturday and damaged our tent. Thankfully, one of our team members was able to bring the smaller tents on Monday. Sunday and Tuesday were interesting times as we had to reset up our tent. Today, Wednesday, we had to take it down again to avoid any damage from the storm. It looks like it’s calming down a bit today, and we hope to get back and talk to our students.

We met many of you, and we thank you for stopping by. A lot of stickers and giveaways were handed out, and we look forward to seeing more of you for the rest of the week. We know it’s going to get really busy on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. More people will be coming in to help answer all your questions, and we look forward to seeing you.

We’ve been talking to a lot of UAS people at the field here. Yesterday, we talked to Google Wing and got a full presentation of their drone delivery, which was really interesting. We’ll put some photos up, and we plan to talk to more people today.

That’s all we have for you this week. Thanks for watching, and we will be back to normal next week on Friday for the next news update. There’s no live event this Monday because I’ll be traveling back, as will the team. So, we’ll do the live event, answering Q&A’s and everything, the following Monday. See you guys next week.