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Zipline Taught Its Drones to Dive for Speed, and They Got Quieter

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:22:44 GMT

Zipline’s delivery drones now fly a different shape through the sky, and the change arrived as a software download. Co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn posted on September 5 that an over-the-air update Zipline calls “Dynamic Flight Trajectories” cut the median mission by 48 seconds, left an average of 40.6 watt-hours more in the battery on landing, and brought the hottest hover motor home 8.9°C (16°F) cooler. Zipline’s noise model also shows each flight spending 19 seconds less, and 530 meters (1,740 feet) less, at peak noise.

No new hardware of any kind. The aircraft climb while moving toward the customer, dip to pick up speed, deliver from altitude, and climb again to slow down before they hover. Gravity now does work that the motors used to do.

I have written about Zipline’s fight with noise since the Platform 2 reveal in March 2023, when the company’s answer was hardware: a long tether that keeps the aircraft 300 feet (91 meters) up while a small droid comes down to the porch. This update attacks the same problem from the flight-control side, and the physics of why it works are worth a plain-language walk-through.

Zipline’s Update Changes the Shape of Every Flight

Zipline’s old flight profile was a flat-topped box: climb straight up in hover, cruise level on the wing, then stop and come straight down. The new profile is a wave. The drone climbs while already heading out, dips to accelerate, cruises, then climbs again on approach to shed speed.

The diagram in Oksenhorn’s first post labels the four moves as climb while moving, descend to accelerate, deliver from up high, and arrive smoothly. He put it in one sentence: “We let gravity do more of the hard work.”

Zipline's new dynamic trajectory climbs while moving, descends to accelerate, delivers from altitude, and arrives smoothly, compared to its previous flightpath. Photo credit: Zipline

The Platform 2 aircraft, the one Zipline flies in Texas and other US markets, is a hybrid. Lift propellers get it off the pad and hold it in a hover, then it tilts onto a fixed wing and flies like a small airplane. For the delivery itself the aircraft stays high and lowers its droid on a tether, a design I covered in detail when Zipline unveiled Platform 2.

The numbers Oksenhorn posted are Zipline’s own fleet data, and the noise figures come from the company’s noise-at-ground model rather than from microphones under the flight path. Median time to pickup fell 8.2 seconds, time to delivery 24 seconds and the full mission 48 seconds. The mixed-use motors landed 4.9°C cooler and the battery pack 2.4°C cooler.

Gravity Works as a Free Battery

A delivery drone stores energy as battery charge, as height above the ground, and as speed through the air. Motors move energy from the battery into the other two and waste some as heat every time, while gravity trades height for speed, and speed for height, at almost no cost.

Think of a cyclist at the top of a hill. Coasting down converts height into speed without touching the pedals. Pointing the bike back uphill converts that speed into height without touching the brakes. A rider who does both spends less energy than one who sprints on the flat and then grabs the brakes.

Zipline’s drones used to sprint on the flat. They climbed to cruise altitude in hover, then had to buy every bit of forward speed with propeller thrust while sitting in the least efficient part of the flight. On arrival they had to throw that speed away, again with thrust and drag, before they could hover.

The new profile climbs a little higher first, then tips downhill. Stored height becomes airspeed while the wing takes over the lifting. On the way in, the drone climbs instead of braking. The speed it no longer needs turns back into height, and the aircraft arrives at its hover point with far less momentum to kill.

The Transition Phase Is Where Hybrid Drones Get Loud and Hungry

A hybrid VTOL aircraft has two comfortable states. In a pure hover the lift propellers do all the work, and they are built for it. In wing-borne cruise the wing carries the weight and the propellers only fight drag. The transition between them is where the noise and energy go.

During transition the aircraft is moving too slowly for the wing to carry the full load and too quickly for the hover rotors to be happy. The lift propellers are still holding up much of the weight while the aircraft also tries to accelerate, so they spin hard at high blade loading.

Rotor physics punish that state twice. The power a hovering rotor needs rises faster than the thrust it makes, roughly with thrust to the power of one and a half, so a modest increase in load means a much larger jump in watts drawn and heat dumped into the motor. Propeller noise rises even more steeply with tip speed. Spin the blades a bit faster and the decibels climb a lot.

Cruise on the wing is the opposite case. Lift comes from a large, lightly loaded surface, the propellers only need to cancel a modest amount of drag, and they can turn slowly. Slow-turning propellers are quiet and cheap to run. That is why quieter and more efficient are not a trade-off here: the loudest flight mode and the most wasteful flight mode were the same mode, and the update spends less time in it.

Zipline’s model says the average mission now spends 19 fewer seconds and 530 fewer meters at peak noise. The same change shows up on the thermometer: 8.9°C off the hottest hover motor, which is heat that was being paid for out of the battery. Cooler motors also have slightly lower electrical resistance, so a little of the saving compounds on itself.

Altitude Cuts Noise on the Ground Before the Motors Change

What a person on the ground hears depends on three things: how loud the source is, how far away it is, and how long it lasts. Sound intensity falls with the square of distance, so an aircraft twice as far away delivers a quarter of the acoustic energy.

The new profile pushes the loud transition phase up and shortens it. The climb-while-moving segment means the aircraft is already gaining distance from the takeoff point and the ground while it works through its noisiest seconds, and the descend-to-accelerate segment ends the transition sooner. Even if the aircraft’s peak sound level at the source were unchanged, the dose reaching a backyard would drop.

Neighbors decide whether a delivery company gets to expand. Amazon’s Prime Air learned this the hard way in College Station, Texas, where residents near the depot complained about the buzz. Zipline’s hovering-mothership design already put the loud part 300 feet up. This update keeps it up there for a shorter stretch.

Live Replanning Beats a Fixed Route

The old path was a fixed shape flown the same way every time. The new one is computed on board during the flight. Each aircraft estimates wind, airspeed, lift and drag as it flies and keeps adjusting speed and altitude so the flight stays short and cheap without getting louder.

Wind is the main reason a canned path leaves value on the table. A tailwind at altitude is free ground speed and a headwind is a tax, and wind speed usually changes with height. The best cruise altitude on a given afternoon is wherever the cost of climbing there is paid back, and that answer differs from one flight to the next. Oksenhorn compared the whole approach to hypermiling a car.

Air density does the same thing to the propellers. Hot, thin air makes hover and transition more expensive, so on a Texas summer afternoon an optimizer that knows the temperature will cut the transition even shorter than it would on a cool morning.

A visualization later in the thread showed the difference at a site labeled Princeton, Zipline’s Walmart hub in Collin County, Texas, which went live in December 2025. On September 1, an aircraft on firmware zip-2026.22.2 traced a hard-cornered T in the visualization: straight up, straight across, straight down. On September 2, an aircraft on zip-2026.28 drew a smooth arc out to the customer and back. Same site and same job, on different software.

A site-level flight visualization shows Zipline's older, longer flightpath on Sep 1 versus the new, more efficient route on Sep 2. Photo credit: Zipline

He also said this was one of a few hundred changes Zipline shipped this month, and that the network is currently overwhelmed with demand. The 40 watt-hours left in the battery buy more deliveries per charge and less time on the charger, which is throughput, and throughput is the number Zipline has been chasing since it set a target of 1 million deliveries a day with Uber.

DroneXL’s Take

Every drone delivery company talks about noise. Zipline keeps shipping things that reduce it, and this one cost the company zero grams of hardware. A flight-control change that makes an existing fleet faster, quieter and cooler at once is the engineering that separates operators from demo programs.

I want to be precise about what is and is not known here. The timing and telemetry numbers come from Zipline’s fleet data, and I have no reason to doubt them, but they are Zipline’s numbers and nobody outside the company has checked them. The noise numbers are different in kind: they are the output of a model, and Zipline has not published ground-measured decibels for the new profile. Until it does, “quieter” means “the model says quieter.” Zipline should put microphones under a flight path in Princeton and publish the before-and-after. It would cost a weekend and end the argument.

Forty-eight seconds off a flight sounds small. It is not, at scale. A drone that lands with 40 more watt-hours and cooler motors turns around faster and flies more missions before it needs a charger, and Zipline’s business case, which I walked through in the economics of drone delivery, rests on volume: how many deliveries a site can push through in a day with the aircraft it already has. Software that raises that number is worth more to Zipline than a new aircraft, because it applies to every aircraft already in the fleet the moment it downloads.

The contrast with Amazon is hard to miss. Prime Air’s aircraft has to descend to yard level to drop a package, and the College Station complaints were about an aircraft doing exactly that. Zipline chose a two-part system in 2023 and has been layering software gains on top of it since. When a Zip came down under its parachute near Houston last week, the story was how gracefully the failure mode worked. This week the story is how much performance the company squeezed out of aircraft it had already built.

Public acceptance of drone delivery will be won or lost in backyards, by people who never asked for a drone overhead. The company that makes its aircraft boring to live under wins, and boring is a physics problem before it is a marketing problem. Zipline just solved a chunk of it with gravity.

Source: Ryan Oksenhorn on X, City of Princeton, Texas

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI FlyCart 100s Feed Nepal Flood Survivors As US Taxes Them 100%

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:55:00 GMT

Nepal’s army is flying four DJI FlyCart 100 cargo drones, all donated by China, on 10 to 16 relief runs a day across the Trishuli River, two weeks after the government asked foreign governments for exactly that kind of aircraft. The drones carry up to 132 pounds (60 kg) of food, medicine and fuel per trip to villages that lost their roads and bridges on Aug. 26, and drones have also carried bodies out of areas rescuers cannot reach on foot.

The official toll stood at 1,369 dead and 5,132 missing in Nepal as of Sept. 9, among them 587 foreign nationals. Chinese officials count 43 dead and 519 missing on the Tibetan side.

The aircraft doing the lifting is one the United States put in a 100% tariff bracket on Sept. 3, eight days after the glacier broke, and one the Federal Communications Commission proposes to bar from American sale outright.

Nepal’s Army Flies Four Donated FlyCart 100s From Devighat

The four FlyCart 100s arrived in a Chinese aid package and now fly relief across the Trishuli from Devighat in Nuwakot district, Reuters reported on Sept. 9. Each run covers 2 to 2.5 miles (3 to 4 km) with up to 132 pounds (60 kg) of food, medicine and fuel.

“There is no other way to send food, essentials, medicine and fuel, except for drones,” contract army pilot Santosh Budhathoki told Reuters, because the army’s helicopters are tied up in rescue. Milan Pandey of Airlift Technology, the Nepali operator whose crews DroneXL has followed since they replaced Sherpa porters on the Khumbu Icefall in 2024, is running the flights, and told Reuters the crews have been shuttling since early morning.

That closes the question DroneXL left open on Aug. 30, when Nepal had run one schoolyard test flight and asked abroad for heavy-lift drones while China had 47 drones flying on its side of the border. Beijing answered with the heaviest aircraft on the scene. India’s Garuda Aerospace also sent pilots and its Sanjeevani logistics drones, rated for 55 pounds (25 kg), to Rasuwa district, the company said, less than half of what one FlyCart run carries.

The DJI Flycart 100 lowers supplies via winch line to a flood-stricken area in Nepal as onlookers watch. Photo credit: Nepal Photo Library.

By Sept. 9 drones had delivered 1,591 kilograms (3,508 pounds) of food to cut-off villages, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, whose situation report also carries the death and missing figures. Reuters reported that drones have moved flood victims’ bodies in some areas, and reconnaissance drones have been in constant use for search and rescue.

DJI Rates The FlyCart 100 At 187 Pounds And Nepal Flies It At 132

DJI’s own spec sheet rates the FlyCart 100 for 187 pounds (85 kg) on two batteries and 220 pounds (100 kg) on one, hung from a 98-foot (30 m) winch line. Nepal’s crews load 132 pounds (60 kg), a margin that buys range and wind tolerance.

A DJI Flycart 100 lowers a supply container on a winch line while delivering aid in flood-stricken Nepal. Photo credit: Nepal Photo Library.

DJI launched the aircraft globally on Dec. 4, 2025, and DroneXL walked through its sensor stack at the time: LiDAR, front and rear radar, a quad-vision system, a parachute, and an IP55 rating for dust and rain. The same model spent the spring hauling 22,207 pounds (10,073 kg) of cargo between Everest Base Camp and Camp 1, work DroneXL covered in July, which is why Nepal already had licensed pilots for it when the flood came.

DJI’s payload figures are measured at sea level in still air, and the spec sheet says capacity falls with takeoff altitude. Devighat sits low in the valley, well below where that derating bites on DJI’s own numbers, so the gap between 60 and 85 kilograms is operating margin, not the aircraft’s limit.

Small Drones Search Hydropower Tunnels Packed With Mud

Away from the cargo runs, thermal drones are hunting for roughly 900 workers still missing from 12 hydropower projects, about 500 of them believed to be inside plant tunnels, the Associated Press reported. The flood filled some tunnels end to end. A drone can only fly the straight ones.

Filmmaker and drone pilot Manish Maharjan joined the army’s search a day after the flood and told the AP that at the Rasuwagadhi hydropower project he flew a drone to the end of the tunnel and found no air pocket at all. “We found tunnels were filled with mud like toothpaste in a tube,” he said. Bends and zigzags stop the search where the signal drops.

On open hillsides the same drones did better. Maharjan mounted speakers on them to call out to stranded people and play music, and helped rescue teams find survivors that way in the first days after the flood.

Washington Put A 100% Tariff On This Aircraft Eight Days After The Flood

President Trump’s Aug. 13 proclamation put a 100% tariff on imported drones with a maximum takeoff weight above 55 pounds (25 kg), effective Sept. 3. The FlyCart 100 takes off at 330 pounds (149.9 kg). Each of the four aircraft feeding Nuwakot clears that bar six times over.

DroneXL reported the proclamation the day it was signed. One day before the tariff started, on Sept. 2, public comments closed on the FCC’s proposal to end U.S. sales of thermal, LiDAR, docking, spraying and heavy-lift drones it had previously approved, a proceeding DroneXL has tracked since the commission put every foreign drone on the Covered List in December 2025.

The American alternative has been to Nepal and back. This spring the Home Ministry refused Freefly a permit to fly its Alta X Gen 2 on Everest and suspended Airlift’s FlyCart 100 permit in the same stroke; the DJI permit came back in five days, the Freefly one never did, and Airlift flew the Alta X on Ama Dablam instead in June, with the U.S. Embassy applauding. Pandey told The Wall Street Journal, per Ars Technica, that at Everest altitudes the DJI aircraft lifts about 100 pounds to the Freefly’s 11, and costs less. The embassy’s July post on the Ama Dablam flights gave no payload figure.

DroneXL’s Take

Nepal asked the world for heavy-lift drones on Aug. 29. China had four in the air by Sept. 4, the date on the first AFP frames from Trishuli, and they are the best aircraft in the class. That is the whole story, and it is a story about the United States.

I want to be fair to Beijing’s motives, because they are not charitable. Four FlyCarts over Rasuwa are soft power at a price DJI can write off, and China gets to be the country whose drones fed the survivors while its own side of the border counts 519 missing. Nobody in Washington should mistake this for altruism. But the American answer to a donated DJI aircraft doing good work cannot be a customs bill and a docket to ban it, because that answer leaves the next Nepal with the same choice and one fewer bidder.

The tariff, as I see it, protects no one who builds anything. Freefly makes a serious heavy lifter in Washington State, Blue-listed and NDAA-compliant, and Nepal still would not let it fly Everest. The 100% rate does not fix that. It raises the price of the aircraft an American county emergency manager would buy tomorrow if a river took the bridge, and it does so while the FCC weighs whether that manager may buy it at all. Protecting a domestic industry means giving it stages to prove itself on, which is what Ama Dablam was. Taxing the competitor out of the country while the competitor donates aircraft to the disaster of the year is how you lose the argument in front of the people who decide it.

The number I keep coming back to is 11 pounds. If Pandey’s figure holds, and it is one operator’s account relayed through the Journal, the American aircraft lifts a tenth of the Chinese one at altitude. That is an engineering gap, not a policy gap, and no tariff closes it. What closes it is the thing DroneXL has argued for since the FlyCart 30 first flew Everest: American companies competing on the same mountains, in the same disasters, on merit. Nepal’s next request will come after the next glacier. Whether an American aircraft is on the list of what arrives is the question worth watching, and the FCC’s answer to its own docket will decide part of it.

Sources: Reuters (via CBC News), Associated Press, Nepal NDRRMA situation report, DJI, Ars Technica

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Zipline Drone Comes Down Under Parachute Near Houston, TSA Delays Part 108 Security Talks, and FCC Proposal Draws 3,829 Comments

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:41:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. A Zipline drone has a mishap. We have a Part 108 progress update, maybe. And then we have the FCC getting over 3,800 comments to their proposal. Let’s get to it.

Zipline Drone Comes Down Under Parachute Near Houston

First up this week, a Zipline drone near Houston, Texas experienced a mishap this week. According to Zipline, the aircraft was on its way to pick up an order when it experienced a mid-flight issue and deployed a parachute. The aircraft ended up descending under the parachute, coming to rest on the road. No property was damaged and no one was hurt as a result of the mishap.

This is not really the first mishap that we’ve heard from drone delivery. We’ve covered them this year. But this is the first one that has come down under a parachute with really no damage on the ground, which kind of makes a case for using parachutes in these types of operations.

Back in February, we talked about the Amazon drone that hit an apartment building in Richardson, Texas. And then nearly a year ago, two Amazon drones hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona back-to-back, one after the other.

There’s currently no word on what the issue was with the Zipline aircraft, but we’ll keep you updated as we hear more. I’m sure the FAA and probably the NTSB will be taking a look at that.

TSA Plans Closed-Door Part 108 Security Talks After the Final Rule

Next, TSA is planning some closed-door talks about Part 108 security, and the meetings are going to be happening after the final rule is released — at least that’s what they’re telling us. Requests to participate are due on October 19.

What this actually suggests is that the security portion of Part 108 is not ready and won’t be ready until after the FAA publishes their portion. The format of these meetings appears to be round-table style discussions with individual views rather than a group recommendation. In addition to all of this, there is no public comment period that is going to be open for this, which I think is a big mistake.

Currently, Part 108 is with OIRA, which is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA also has private meetings that are booked through September 16. So publication of the rule before all of this is very unlikely.

If you’re not familiar, OIRA’s job is to review major draft rules to make sure that they help the public more than just the cost to run the programs, keep paperwork low, and ensure that the new rules do not conflict with other agency rules.

Now, currently it’s unclear if the TSA rule will be included in Part 108. There was a big section, if you remember from the proposal, if you were there to watch this proposal come through. But we’re not sure if it’s going to be included in Part 108 or if it’s going to come out as a separate rule. We’ll be following this very closely, obviously, and we’ll keep you updated if we see more.

FCC Military-Grade Definition Notice Draws 3,829 Comments

And then last up, the FCC’s military-grade definition notice got 3,829 comments. And guess what? We went through all of them.

I’ll give you some quick facts here, and then I recommend that you go and check out the full video on the proposal that we just put on the channel.

98.6% of the filings oppose the proposal as written. Of the 1,584 filings that engaged with the definition of military grade, 1,575 — that’s a lot — called it overbroad. Only 30 of them agreed with the security risk being as acute as the Commission described. And only one — one out of 3,829 — agreed that the economic impact would be minor and contained.

The full video details all of the stats, provides the quotes from the users, and also shows you how to access the data for yourself. Make sure you go and check it out.

The conversation is going to continue in Postflight, where we talk about all of these stories uncensored in the premium community. We’re also going to see you on Monday for the live Q&A. We’re back after two weeks — we were traveling for one of those, and then there was a holiday in there. So be sure to check out the full breakdown on the responses for the FCC notice, and we’ll see you all then.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full weekly UAS news update on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Eric Schmidt Warns Ukraine's Drone Edge Is Gone. He Sells the Fix

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:07:52 GMT

Eric Schmidt used a Washington Post op-ed on September 9 to tell Washington that Ukraine’s greatest wartime advantage, its ability to field a new drone and rebuild it within weeks, no longer holds against a Russia that has started innovating on top of its industrial mass. His prescription is that the West treat Ukraine’s defense industry as an extension of its own and co-produce interceptors, ammunition and long-range strike weapons at a scale Kyiv cannot reach alone.

The byline identifies Schmidt as the former CEO and chairman of Google and chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project. It does not mention Swift Beat, the drone company Schmidt runs as CEO, which signed a co-production memorandum with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in July 2025 to build interceptor and strike drones for the Ukrainian military. DroneXL has tracked Schmidt’s drone ventures, under a series of names ending in Swift Beat, since January 2024.

The argument in the op-ed is serious and, on the evidence DroneXL has reported all year, correct. The missing line under it is the story.

Schmidt Says Russia Has Closed Ukraine’s Adaptation Gap

Schmidt writes in the Post that Russia now pairs industrial mass with an innovation cycle of its own, erasing the edge Ukraine held when its engineers could modify a system within weeks. He cites jet-powered Shaheds that outrun Ukraine’s interceptors and a Russian satellite network built to replace lost Starlink access.

The jet Shahed point matches what DroneXL reported in December 2025 in Ukraine Interceptors Take On Russia’s New Jet Shaheds, when the Geran-3 first forced Ukrainian interceptor makers to chase a target moving far faster than the piston-engine Geran-2 their quadcopters were built to catch. The countermeasure cycle has kept turning since: in May, DroneXL covered Russia’s Geran-4 jet drone and the interceptor answer to it.

Schmidt’s most quotable field observation is about scarcity, not speed. He says one Ukrainian commander told him his unit had “stopped looking for targets” because it lacked the drones to strike the ones already found. He puts 80 percent of Ukraine’s casualties among troops moving between positions, a figure he attributes to nothing beyond his own trips. Neither claim can be checked from outside Ukraine, and Schmidt offers them as what he saw, which is how they should be read.

He also writes that Russia is weighing another large mobilization, which Ukraine expects this fall, and that Moscow is already using Ukraine’s thin ballistic missile defenses to hit power plants ahead of winter. That second point is not a forecast. On August 20, Russia fired dozens of missiles and 168 drones at Kyiv, killing 17 people and injuring more than 40, according to the Moscow Times, with a school and a children’s hospital among the buildings hit. That is the strike Schmidt describes sheltering from in a Kyiv train station.

Rassvet Gives Russia a Partial Starlink of Its Own

The network Schmidt mentions is Rassvet, built by the private Russian firm Bureau 1440 as a domestic answer to Starlink. Two batches of 16 production satellites launched in March and July 2026, one has since been lost, and commercial service is planned for 2027 with about 250 satellites.

The gap between that and Starlink’s 7,000-plus satellites is the whole point. Ukrainska Pravda reported in August that Serhii Beskrestnov, the Ukrainian presidential adviser known as Flash, puts the current count at up to 40 satellites and the minimum for stable continuous coverage at 200 to 250. A United24 analysis the same week said the constellation passes over Ukraine four times a day and holds a usable link for about an hour to an hour and a half on two of those passes. Russia’s own target, per RBC-Ukraine, is 156 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026. Whether Bureau 1440 can launch at that rate is what Ukraine’s drone units should be watching.

Why Russia needs it at all is a story DroneXL has already told. In March, Starlink cut Russian forces off after SpaceX and Ukraine moved to disable unauthorized terminals, and Ukrainian units took back roughly 300 square kilometers of front where Russian drone control had depended on Musk’s network. Rassvet is Moscow’s attempt to never be in that position again. It is years from doing so.

Swift Beat Is Missing From the Byline

Swift Beat, LLC signed a co-production memorandum with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense on July 3, 2025, in Denmark, Schmidt signing as CEO with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy present. Interceptor drones come first under the deal, with strike drones behind them, at a volume Zelenskyy put in the hundreds of thousands.

Zelenskyy called it a co-production document between Ukraine and the United States in his office’s official statement, and said the drones would go to Ukraine as a priority, on special terms and at cost, the Kyiv Independent reported. Three weeks later, Kyiv Post reported that Ukrainian military sources told Ekonomichna Pravda that Swift Beat’s three drone types accounted for about 90 percent of the Shaheds downed by interceptor drones. That figure comes from anonymous Ukrainian sources, and neither Kyiv nor Swift Beat has confirmed it publicly.

The New York Times filled in more of the picture in January. In Eric Schmidt’s AI Drones Hit 70% Kill Rate as Commercial Tech Goes to War, DroneXL walked through the sales pamphlet the Times obtained. The Bumblebee quadcopter claims an autonomous hit rate above 70 percent. The Hornet fixed-wing strike drone carries an 11-pound payload, with planned production above 6,000 units per month. Schmidt told a Stanford audience in 2024 that the war had made him “a licensed arms dealer.”

None of that is hidden. All of it was available to the Post’s opinion desk. The op-ed itself says Schmidt has spent the war helping the Ukrainian military develop new battlefield technology, which is true and which is not the same as running one of Ukraine’s named drone suppliers.

Kyiv Has Been Making Schmidt’s Production Argument All Year

Schmidt’s central claim, that a good drone built in the hundreds of thousands beats a brilliant one built in the hundreds, is not new to anyone who has followed Ukrainian procurement in 2026. The number Kyiv keeps repeating is the budget, not the design.

In March, Zelenskyy told Reuters that Ukraine could build 2,000 interceptor drones a day if it had the money, a figure DroneXL unpacked in Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Can Build 2,000 Interceptor Drones A Day, But Only With The Money To Do It. The same month, Firepoint was building 200 drones a day from a single Ukrainian line. On the other side, Ukraine’s top commander warned in January that Russia was producing 404 Shahed-type drones daily and planning for 1,000.

The interceptor economics have already reached Washington on their own. In March, the Pentagon and Gulf states started looking at Ukrainian interceptor drones as Patriot stocks ran low against Iranian Shaheds. Schmidt is asking the West to fund the factories that would fill that demand. His company is one of them.

DroneXL’s Take

Schmidt is right, and the Washington Post should have told its readers who was writing.

Start with the argument. Everything I have reported from Ukraine’s drone economy this year points the way Schmidt points: the constraint is units, not ideas. Zelenskyy’s 2,000-a-day figure came with a budget caveat. Syrskyi’s warning about Russian Shahed output came with a production number Ukraine cannot match alone. The Rassvet numbers above show a Russia that is slow but methodical about replacing what Starlink took away. A commander who stops looking for targets because he has run out of drones to hit them is the whole war in one sentence, and I have no reason to think Schmidt made it up.

The concession Schmidt’s critics would want is that he sells the cure he prescribes. It is a fair concession, and it is weaker than it sounds: Zelenskyy’s office says the drones go to Ukraine at cost, and a man photographed signing next to Ukraine’s defense minister is not hiding his line of work. But at cost on hundreds of thousands of units is still how you build a drone company that has customers after the war, and Swift Beat’s interceptors are exactly the product the Pentagon and the Gulf have been shopping for since March. That is a commercial interest in the outcome of the policy he is arguing for. A one-line disclosure would have cost nothing and would have made the piece stronger, because the strongest witness to a production bottleneck is the person trying to produce through it.

My read is that the omission is the Post’s failure more than Schmidt’s. Op-ed pages exist to run arguments from people with skin in the game, and this one has more skin than most. The editing standard for that is disclosure, not exclusion.

The thing to watch is not Schmidt. It is whether Rassvet reaches the 156-satellite end-of-2026 target Bureau 1440 has set for itself, because that is the number that decides whether Russian drone units get back the kind of always-on link Ukraine’s units built their tactics around. If it does, Schmidt’s warning about a Russia that innovates as well as it mass-produces stops being an op-ed and becomes a front-line fact.

Sources: The Washington Post, Office of the President of Ukraine, Kyiv Post, The Moscow Times, Ukrainska Pravda, RBC-Ukraine, United24 Media

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Vic Moss: The Drone Photo Mistakes Quietly Costing Pilots Clients

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Vic Moss walked onto a stage at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas on September 2 with a session title that doubles as an accusation: Your Drone Shots Are Costing You Business. He then spent 54 minutes proving it, and the drone was almost beside the point. The mistakes he listed happen before the aircraft leaves the case, inside the camera menu, on the computer afterward, and in how pilots run their businesses.

Moss has been a working commercial photographer since 1988, shooting for architects, engineers and contractors in the Denver market. Drone pilots know him as the director of the Drone Advocacy Alliance and an FAA DronePro. He opened by asking who in the room had already filed comments on FCC docket 26-189, the proposed ban on foreign military-grade drones, because the comment window closed that same day. Then he put the regulatory hat down and picked up the photographer’s.

DroneXL recorded the full session, and the video is below. What follows is the short version of a talk that Moss admitted could run three or four hours if someone handed him a microphone and said the word photography.

Planning Failures Kill More Drone Jobs Than Bad Flying

Moss put lack of planning at the top of his list, above every camera setting and composition rule. A pilot who skips the pre-flight, leaves the checklist at home, or arrives without a memory card has already lost the job, whatever happens once the drone is airborne.

He said this as a self-confessed offender. He has forgotten tripods and once forgot his computer, and his wife has driven gear out to him on two separate jobs. His video assistant of 20 years, who now lives three houses down, is the one who keeps the checklists.

The memory card rule got the most emphasis. Moss carries only 32 GB and 64 GB cards, never the 256 GB or larger cards most pilots buy, and his crew swaps cards every other battery all day long. “Never fly with more data than you’re willing to lose,” he said. Everyone crashes eventually. He has put drones in dirt, in trees and in a river, and one, in his telling, committed suicide on its own.

The same logic covers backups. His crew does not leave a site until every image sits on two drives, the tethered laptop and a portable SSD. And the card itself has to match the job: a card that cannot sustain 4K at 60 frames per second, or 8K from a 360 camera, produces a corrupted file at exactly the moment the shot mattered.

Auto Modes Hand Your Exposure Decisions to the Camera

Moss shoots manual and RAW by default, and most camera mistakes he described come from letting the camera decide. Auto exposure darkens a backlit tower. Auto white balance averages a green building against blue sky, then shifts hundreds of degrees Kelvin when the pilot moves in on the entry.

One client takes JPEGs, so he always has to check the setting. He once shot an interior in JPEG by mistake and could not fix the color with his gray card, because JPEG is the camera doing the editing for you. He calls the line “if you can’t get it right in camera, you’re not a photographer” a confession that the speaker cannot edit.

Color temperature runs through the whole talk. Daylight sits between roughly 5,200 and 5,800 K, sunset closer to 3,000 to 4,200 K, and a fireplace near 1,500 K. A building shot at a fixed 3,900 K from sunrise onward looks fine at dawn and, in his words, like poop by noon. Purple, he added, is a color digital sensors simply do not like.

His other settings notes were quick. Learn the shutter angle rule before shooting video. Choose a shutter speed that blurs traffic if the client wants the street to look busy, since 1/500 s turns a moving street into a traffic jam. Confirm the record button is actually recording, a mistake Moss said he makes when he gets into a rhythm, and one he wants DJI to fix with a bigger on-screen counter. And use auto exposure bracketing on every still. Pixels are free, and every image on his site has been through an HDR merge.

The histogram got its own segment. It is a graph of pixel brightness from dark on the left to light on the right, and the one rule is to keep the shoulders off the edges. Pixels piled against the left edge are recoverable shadows, noisy but present. Pixels slammed against the right edge are gone, and no software brings them back.

Composition Comes Down to Five Devices and One Job

Moss reduced composition to the rule of thirds, leading lines, contrast, color and foreground against background. The job they all serve is the same: keep the viewer inside the frame long enough to care about whatever the client is selling, whether a building or a cup of coffee.

The rule of thirds is built into the drone’s controller as a grid overlay, and he told struggling pilots to leave it on until it becomes reflex. Horizon low for a strong sky, high for a strong foreground, subject on an intersection. Every rule is made to be broken, he said, but break it for a reason.

Leading lines give the eye a road map and a place to rest. Contrast, whether tonal or warm against cool, is where the eye lands first. And because a photograph has no depth, the pilot has to imply it, which is what a road in the foreground and mountains in the background are doing in his Colorado work. DroneXL’s own composition primer covers the same ground from the pilot’s side of the controller.

Editing Is the Performance, Not the Cheat

Moss leaned on Ansel Adams for this one. “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score,” Adams wrote, and the print is the performance. Moss showed an early and a late print of Moonrise, Hernandez, and the gravestones that barely register in the first glow in the second.

His own workflow is Capture One Pro, which he has used since going digital in 2004, tethered straight to the laptop for interiors. Luminar Neo handles HDR merges, Lightroom stitches panoramas, Topaz DeNoise cleans up files he has upscaled, and Photoshop does the final pass. He uprezzes Mavic 4 Pro stills by roughly 75 percent to match his Nikon files and said nobody can tell.

He offered one test for anyone unsure whether they are improving. Pull up a RAW file from a year or two ago, re-edit it without looking at the old export, then compare. The gap is the progress, and it is also, he admitted, the reason he sometimes gets annoyed at what he delivered to a client 12 months earlier.

Business Mistakes Lose Clients That Good Photos Never Win Back

The last block was business, and Moss said he has made every mistake on the slide. The biggest is chasing jobs instead of relationships. He does no marketing in Denver after nearly 40 years, because an architect’s project becomes the general contractor’s next job and the subcontractor’s after that.

Chasing gear over skill came next, with his standing line for anyone who says “you must have a good camera”: tell the cook they must have good pots. Buy the best lenses you can afford and upgrade the body later. Never stop learning, because there is a fine line between a style and a rut. And carry a second drone, because two is one and one is none.

He also had a word for the crowd that says the industry is oversaturated. Nobody tells a would-be chef there are too many restaurants. And he read out a forum post from a pilot who had already flown an M3E with RTK for a major construction firm, delivered the files, and was now asking what to charge. He declined to comment further.

Professionalism rounded it out. On a mine site, the pilot represents the client as much as the pilot’s own company, and he described a competitor arriving at one in shorts and flip-flops with no hat, no high-visibility vest, and no word to him about where she planned to fly. That was inside military airspace.

DroneXL’s Take

The drone industry spent the first week of September arguing about hardware. The FCC comment window closed the day Moss spoke, and docket 26-189 ended up at 3,770 filings against the ban and 16 for it. Moss had pushed pilots to comment for weeks through the Drone Service Providers Alliance, and we carried that call.

Then he stood up at Commercial UAV Expo and spent almost an hour on histograms, memory cards and Kelvin. DroneXL filed its own comments that same night, so I understand the pull of the docket.

I don’t think that was a coincidence, and I don’t think it was a distraction either. The ban is a real threat to every operator flying DJI, and no amount of editing skill gets a pilot through a season without a legal aircraft. But Moss’s list had nothing to do with which drone anyone was flying. A JPEG at the wrong color temperature loses the architect whether it came out of a Mavic 4 Pro or a Skydio X10. My read is that he was telling a room full of pilots worried about Washington that most of the clients they lose this year will walk for reasons that were entirely within their control.

For disclosure: DroneXL has been a partner of the Drone Advocacy Alliance since June 2024, and Moss said on stage that the group is funded by DJI. We have covered Moss since his PiXL Drone Show appearance in 2021, almost always on the regulatory side. This session was the first time in that stretch I have heard him talk at length about the job he does the other five days of the week, and it may be the more useful hour.

He said on stage that he intends to pitch a 90-minute editing class to Diversified Communications for next year’s show. Whether that lands on the 2027 program is worth watching, because the half of his talk that ran short on time was the half most of the room needed.

Source: DroneXL YouTube channel, Moss Photography, Drone Advocacy Alliance, Drone Service Providers Alliance

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Erik Prince's Swarmer Buys Ukraine's Ratel Robotics for Up to $224M

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:00:37 GMT

Swarmer, the Austin, Texas drone swarm software company chaired by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, has agreed to buy Ratel Robotics, one of Ukraine’s largest makers of unmanned ground vehicles, for up to $224 million in cash and stock. The announcement came Thursday morning, six months after Swarmer went public on the Nasdaq at $5 a share and watched the stock climb 950 percent in two days.

The $224 million figure is the ceiling, not the check. Swarmer’s own filing puts the cash at about $7.2 million at closing plus 1,064,942 shares, with a further $7.2 million and up to 4,422,125 more shares contingent on Ratel hitting revenue and operating income targets through 2028. Most of the price is Swarmer paper.

That matters because of who is buying whom. Ratel has secured $86 million in contracts this year. Swarmer reported $216,413 in revenue for the entire second quarter.

Ratel Robotics Supplies More Than a Third of Ukraine’s Ground Robot Orders

Ratel Robotics, run by founder and army veteran Taras Ostapchuk, won roughly 37 percent of the 11 billion hryvnia ($246.85 million) Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency spent on unmanned ground vehicles from January 1 to April 18 this year. Its 300-plus employees are expected to join Swarmer at closing.

Its Ratel H and Ratel M vehicles run logistics, casualty evacuation, reconnaissance, demining and drone-launch missions along the front, and every serial unit carries a NATO stock number and an AQAP 2110 quality certificate, according to the acquisition announcement. DroneXL covered the Ratel H’s fiber optic FPV launch module in February, when the company said the vehicle could carry up to four tethered drones forward into jammed airspace and deploy them with the crew kept at a distance.

That launcher is the logic of this deal. Alex Fink, Swarmer’s president and U.S. CEO, said the company sees ground vehicles as a universal launch platform for drones, interceptors and other autonomous systems, and that pairing Ratel’s chassis with Swarmer’s coordination software is “the key to creating versatile, interoperable solutions.” Ostapchuk stays on as Ratel’s CEO and reports to Fink.

Ratel, per the Wall Street Journal, made street lighting before the war. It is now in contract talks with several NATO governments under the Build With Ukraine initiative, Swarmer said. Ukraine’s armed ground robots ran more than 9,000 frontline missions in March alone, according to Ministry of Defense figures we reported in April, and the WSJ puts logistics and evacuation runs at 112,000 since the start of the year.

Swarmer Is Paying With Stock Its IPO Created

Swarmer’s second quarter, its first full one as a public company, produced $216,413 in revenue, $7.5 million in operating expenses and a $7.3 million net loss. Cash was $25.3 million at June 30, plus $17.9 million drawn from an equity line by August 10.

The stock is the real currency. The 5,487,067 shares Swarmer could issue under the deal, closing plus full earnout, equal nearly half the 11,284,769 shares it reported outstanding at June 30. Ratel’s sellers get more of Swarmer if Ratel performs, and less of the $224 million if Swarmer’s share price sags before the earnouts pay out. The 8-K filed with the SEC describes the targets as revenue and operating income thresholds for fiscal 2026, 2027 and 2028 and adds a catch-up clause that lets the sellers shift revenue between earnout periods.

None of this was possible in October, when Swarmer raised $17.9 million, then the largest publicly announced round for a Ukrainian defense startup since 2022, and Forbes was guessing at a valuation of $35 million to $70 million. The March listing changed the arithmetic. We reported at the time that Swarmer’s IPO raised $15 million on 2024 revenue of $329,410, and that investors were buying the 100,000-mission dataset, not the income statement. Six months later that dataset is buying a 300-person hardware company.

Erik Prince Announced the Roll-Up in June

Prince has chaired Swarmer’s board since December 2025. In a June 11 letter to shareholders, written after five days in Ukraine, he described exactly this plan: a platform company that acquires and scales defense firms with combat-proven products. Ratel, he said Thursday, “precisely fits that mission.”

The Ratel purchase is the first acquisition under that strategy, and it follows a summer of restructuring. Co-founder Serhii Kupriienko resigned as global CEO on July 26, two days after Swarmer announced he would run a new Swarmer Labs research unit; he keeps his board seat through 2029 and Fink now runs the company. On August 21, Prince and Swarmer formed Vectus Air Defense Systems to sell custom air defense packages to governments and companies.

Prince told the WSJ that Swarmer intends to keep acquiring and partnering with battlefield-tested companies, and that the United States, with its capital markets and defense budget, is where a company like his belongs. Swarmer is also backed by D3, the venture fund tied to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose own Ukraine drone ventures DroneXL has followed since 2024.

Ukraine’s 500-Company Drone Sector Is Starting to Merge

More than 500 Ukrainian drone companies now compete for the same military orders, the Wall Street Journal reports, and the fragmentation traces to how Ukraine buys. Units purchase much of their own equipment. Perry Boyle of MITS Capital told the paper 1,500 combat commands each buy what they judge works.

That structure has been Ukraine’s edge. The Brave1 marketplace lets frontline units order drones directly from the makers they trust, and the result is a sector that iterates in weeks. It also produced 500 companies most of which, in Fink’s words to the WSJ, cannot build the infrastructure to sell abroad on their own.

The deals are now stacking up. The WSJ lists Vyriy Industries buying controlling stakes in five Ukrainian defense-tech firms last year, MITS Capital folding four businesses into MITS Industries, and a company owned by Australian executive Francisco Serra-Martins picking up a smaller Ukrainian peer. When I walked the floor at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf in March, Swarmer had a booth alongside General Cherry, Ukrspecsystems and the Brave1 cluster, and the people running them volunteered the same point without prompting: none of this industry existed before February 2022. Four years in, it is big enough to consolidate.

Closing is expected in the fourth quarter, with an outside date of January 7, 2027. Because the stock consideration exceeds 20 percent of Swarmer’s shares, Nasdaq rules require a shareholder vote, and the 8-K lists the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine as the one Ukrainian approval, and only “if required.” No defense ministry or export-control sign-off appears in the conditions. For a company that holds more than a third of Ukraine’s ground-robot procurement, that is a narrow gate, and Swarmer has not said whether Kyiv has asked for anything more.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered Swarmer since its $17.9 million round last October, and the company has never been the story its stock price tells. It sells a coordination layer, holds real combat data, and books a few hundred thousand dollars a quarter. Ratel has 300 people.

On paper Swarmer is buying Ratel. By any revenue measure, Ratel is the bigger company by two orders of magnitude.

What makes the deal work is the Nasdaq. A $5 IPO that ran to $65 turned a pre-revenue software firm into an acquisition currency, and Prince’s June letter said plainly that the plan was to spend it on battle-proven Ukrainian companies. Ratel’s owners are taking most of their $224 million in that currency, staged over three years of targets. They are betting on SWMR holding its price as much as on their own robots.

Yes, Ratel gets things it could not build alone: a U.S. listing, a sales operation on three continents, an export compliance apparatus, and Prince’s access in Washington. Fink is right that most of Ukraine’s 500 drone makers will never assemble that themselves. Consolidation was coming to a sector where 1,500 commands buy retail. My concern is the structure, not the direction. Ukraine’s best hardware is migrating to Austin holding companies whose valuations rest on IPO momentum, and if that momentum fades, the earnout shares shrink and the Ukrainian founders who did the hard work absorb the loss first.

Watch the SWMR share price against the fourth-quarter closing, and watch whether Kyiv steps in beyond the antitrust review the 8-K anticipates. The first tells you what Ratel actually sold for. The second tells you whether Ukraine intends to keep any say over where its war-built industry ends up.

Sources: Swarmer press release, Swarmer Form 8-K, Swarmer Q2 2026 results, The Wall Street Journal

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

White House Drone List: Three Trump-Family Firms In, Ten Winners Out

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:27:00 GMT

The White House has now put names to the roughly 40 companies it hosted at its first Drone Dominance industry event on August 18, and the list the White House press office provided to DroneXL settles who was in the room. All three drone companies the Trump family is financially tied to were there. Ten of the eleven companies the Pentagon actually paid for attack drones in March were not, or at least do not appear on the list.

Four of the 40 names are headquartered outside the United States, in Germany, Switzerland, Israel and Japan. Eleven are there for parts rather than aircraft: batteries, magnets, motors, chips and cameras. Two trade associations round out the count. I covered the event itself three weeks ago, when the guest list was a number. Now it is a document, and the document says more about the administration’s drone policy than the speeches did.

All Three Trump-Family Drone Companies Sat In The White House Room

Unusual Machines, Powerus and XTEND all appear on the White House attendee list. Those are the three companies whose combined Trump-family holdings Bloomberg valued at about $750 million in March, and they are the three drone stocks that have moved on this administration’s trade and procurement decisions.

Donald Trump Jr. sits on Unusual Machines’ advisory board and held 331,580 shares as of November 2024, per company filings. Both Trump sons backed the Powerus merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings in March, a deal DroneXL examined the week it was announced, and Unusual Machines invested in it. Eric Trump’s exposure to XTEND runs through American Ventures, which backed XTEND’s reverse merger onto the NYSE, a listing that closed on September 3 while I was on a call with its chief executive.

Two of the three had already rallied on a Trump signature. When the president signed the Section 232 drone tariffs on August 13, Unusual Machines closed 24% higher the next day at a record, and shares in the Powerus vehicle gained 4.9%, as I reported at the time. Five days after that signing, both companies had a seat at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building event I reported on at the time, which Breaking Defense first put at roughly 40 companies and nearly 100 attendees.

Nothing on the list shows favoritism in who got invited: Skydio and Zipline were there too, and neither has a Trump in the cap table. What the list does show is that the administration’s drone industrial policy and the family’s drone portfolio now occupy the same room, and the White House has still offered no disclosure or recusal to separate them.

Ten Of The Pentagon’s Eleven Gauntlet I Winners Are Missing From The List

Neros is the only company on the White House list among the eleven that won first-round Drone Dominance orders at Fort Benning in March. Skycutter, which finished first, is absent, and so are Napatree, ModalAI, Auterion, Ukrainian Defense Drones, Griffon Aerospace, Nokturnal AI, Halo Aeronautics, Ascent Aerosystems and Farage Precision.

Those eleven companies hold orders for 24,320 attack drones, per the program’s public leaderboard, and DroneXL published the full ranking in March. They are the companies the Department of War has actually paid under the program the event was named for. The list is what the White House press office supplied and I am treating it as complete, but the caveat stands: an absence here means a company does not appear on the document, not that it was turned away.

A Neros Archer FPV drone in flight. Neros is the only one of the eleven Gauntlet I order winners on the White House list. Photo credit: Neros

The Gauntlet companies that did make the room are the ones that lost or have not yet been scored. XTEND competed at Fort Benning without taking orders, requalified for Gauntlet II at Camp Grayling, and flew at Fort Carson in August; Swarm Defense of Auburn Hills, Michigan, competed in Phase I and was not a top performer; Red Cat, whose Teal subsidiary also went to Gauntlet II, was there as well. Performance Drone Works, which never won a Gauntlet I order, was in the room five weeks after the Office of Strategic Capital offered it up to $820 million to build components in Huntsville.

Three of the biggest names in American military drones are not on the list either. Anduril, AeroVironment and Shield AI do not appear, and neither does Kratos. The room the White House assembled was the small-drone startup economy, not the prime contractor base.

Four Of The ‘American’ Drone Companies Are Headquartered Abroad

Helsing, Wingtra, XTEND and Exedy are on a list the administration framed as a gathering of American drone makers, and none of the four is headquartered here. Helsing is German, Wingtra is Swiss, XTEND began in Tel Aviv, and Exedy is a Japanese clutch maker with a Michigan drone unit.

Helsing's HX-2 strike drone on display. The German company plans to build more than 2,000 a month in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Photo credit: Helsing

Each has an American footprint to point to. Helsing announced a $50 million plant in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 14, designed to build more than 2,000 HX-2 strike drones a month, a story DroneXL covered two days later. XTEND has a factory near Tampa and its US arm, XTEND Reality Inc., is the entity that competes for Pentagon work. Exedy Drones USA builds agricultural spray drones in Michigan for a market the FCC’s Covered List is pushing away from Chinese hardware; the list carries it twice, once as Exedy and once as Exedyusa, and I have counted it once. Wingtra is the odd one out: its site says engineering and manufacturing are based in Zurich, with sales and support teams in the United States, though its WingtraRAY sits on the Blue UAS Cleared List.

Three XTEND drones carrying different payloads hover above a treeline. The Israeli-founded company builds near Tampa and listed on the NYSE on September 4. Photo credit: XTEND

The WingtraRAY takes off at a quarry site. Wingtra engineers and builds its aircraft in Zurich, with sales and support teams in the United States. Photo credit: Wingtra

The tariff order the president signed five days before the meeting draws exactly this line. Drones from the European Union, Japan and Switzerland pay 15% instead of 25% or 100%, but only if substantially all of the hardware and software originates in those countries or the United States. Three of the four foreign firms in the room are from countries that qualify. Whether their supply chains do is the question Commerce has not yet published rules to answer.

Eleven Chairs Went To Batteries, Magnets, Motors And Sensors

Eleven of the 40 names on the list are there for components and materials rather than finished aircraft, and the batteries, magnets and motors they build are the part of the supply chain China still controls. That share says what the administration believes the domestic drone problem actually is.

The battery bench alone had four seats. Sila, the Alameda silicon-anode company, received a conditional loan commitment of up to $1.4 billion from the Office of Strategic Capital on August 7, eleven days before the event, to expand its Moses Lake, Washington, plant and build a cell factory for military and industrial drones. Amprius, another silicon-anode maker, was there, along with EGI Battery of Ann Arbor, which plans 300,000 NDAA-aligned pouch cells a year from a Michigan line starting this quarter, and Packet Digital of Fargo, North Dakota. MP Materials, the rare-earth miner the Pentagon took a stake in last year, covered the magnet end.

Westmag is the next step up that chain. The South San Francisco company emerged from stealth in June with $11 million from Andreessen Horowitz to wind drone motors domestically, and I wrote then that finishing magnets in California does not fix a refining choke point in China. HYFIX brought its H1P positioning chip, launched at XPONENTIAL in May as a US-designed replacement for the imported GNSS modules on most small drones. The list says only “Obsidian,” and the reading that fits the room is Obsidian Sensors of San Diego, a thermal imaging sensor maker with the Department of War among its investors. Teledyne FLIR and GoPro covered cameras, and uAvionix of Montana covered avionics.

Three entries I could not pin to a single company. “Elevon” matches both ElevonX, a Slovenian VTOL maker, and Elevon Aerial Ag, an Illinois dealer for Chinese-built spray drones; “Vantage” most plausibly means Vantage Robotics of San Leandro, California; and “AND” matches nothing I can name. The White House list gives names, not addresses, and I have not guessed where it does not say. Two entries are trade associations rather than manufacturers: AUVSI, and CDA if it is the Commercial Drone Alliance. AUVSI’s chief executive Michael Robbins was on his way out to the semiconductor lobby, an exit DroneXL reported the same day as the meeting.

Delivery, Ag And Public Safety Filled Out The Rest Of The Room

Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline, the three largest drone delivery operators in the United States, were on the list, along with the public safety and agricultural manufacturers whose customers are losing DJI hardware. The commercial half of the industry was in the room after all, in numbers.

The public safety bench had Skydio, BRINC, SkyfireAI, WISPR Systems of Batesville, Mississippi, and, if my reading of the entry is right, Vantage Robotics, which the Army has selected to advance in its Short Range Reconnaissance program. Hylio of Texas and Exedy covered spray drones. Petrel Technologies of Florida, which started out towing advertising banners over Miami Beach and now sells the Army a Group 3 aircraft that launches FPV drones in flight, was there, as were Firestorm and GreenSight. So was Hoverfly, the Orlando tethered-drone maker whose motors come from a Korean partner.

Two counter-drone companies made the cut. Perennial Autonomy, the company Eric Schmidt started as White Stork after meeting Ukrainian officials, holds the $500 million Pentagon interceptor contract awarded in May, and Powerus sells the Guardian-1 interceptor to the Air Force. Albacore, the Philadelphia company building attack drone submarines in a former marble showroom, was the only underwater name on the list.

What the commercial companies got for showing up is less clear than what the defense side got. Emil Michael promised the room that more Office of Strategic Capital deals would follow within two weeks. That window closed on September 1. DroneXL has found no drone-related commitment announced since; the most recent on the record are Sila’s and a magnet loan to Niron Magnetics, both dated August 7, eleven days before the meeting.

DroneXL’s Take

I wrote three weeks ago that the guest list was the policy. Now that I have read it, I would sharpen that: the guest list is the policy, and the policy is components.

Eleven of 40 seats went to companies that make the parts, not the aircraft. That is the right instinct. Every American drone maker in that room, Trump-linked or not, buys the same Chinese cells and the same Chinese magnets, and a $5,000 attack drone built from $4,000 of imported parts is not dominance of anything. Sila’s $1.4 billion loan and PDW’s $820 million are the first money in a decade aimed at the layer of the problem that actually matters, and both borrowers were in the room. I have argued since the first Gauntlet that buying finished drones without fixing the parts bin is theater. This list suggests someone in the West Wing agrees.

Then there is the other pattern, and I will not pretend it is a coincidence of alphabetical order. Every company in the Trump family’s drone portfolio was invited. One of the eleven companies that earned Pentagon orders on merit at Fort Benning was. I do not think the White House rigged a guest list; Skydio and Zipline do not need the president’s sons to get a seat. My read is simpler and less flattering. The invitations went to the companies the administration already talks to, and the administration talks to the companies its family knows. Skycutter finished first at Gauntlet I with a score of 99.3 and holds an order for 2,560 drones. It was not in the room. Powerus, whose 10,000-drones-a-month claim I could not make add up in March, was.

There is a fair counterpoint. Skycutter and ModalAI may simply have declined, or been busy at Fort Carson, and a list of who attended tells you nothing about who was asked. I would take that argument more seriously if the White House would publish the invitation list next to the attendee list. It has not.

The four foreign names bother me less than they will bother some readers. Helsing is spending $50 million in West Virginia and XTEND is building near Tampa, and the tariff order itself carves out allied countries at 15%. A drone dominance program that only admits companies incorporated in Delaware would shut out most of the companies with Ukraine-proven hardware. Fair competition includes allies. What it does not include is calling the result an American industry before the parts are American, which is the test the component bench in that room exists to pass.

Two things to watch. Emil Michael’s two-week promise of more Office of Strategic Capital deals ran out on September 1, and the next borrower’s name will say whether the lending program reaches past the arsenal to the survey pilot whose Mavic doubled in price on September 3. And the Gauntlet II leaderboard, whenever the Department of War posts it, will show whether the companies that were in the room on August 18 are the ones that can actually build.

Sources: attendee list provided to DroneXL by the White House press office; Breaking Defense; U.S. Department of War; Sila; Helsing; Wingtra; EGI Battery; Westmag; The White House

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

St. Paul Pulls $200K Police Drone Grant. There Was No Plan B

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:59:00 GMT

The St. Paul City Council withdrew the police department’s request to apply for a $200,000 Department of Justice grant on Wednesday afternoon, without taking a vote. The money would have added drone docks to the three the city has run since May 30 and carried the program through 2028.

A week earlier, Deputy Chief Kurt Hallstrom had told the same council the department had no budget to expand the program on its own and no way to do it without grant money. The council heard that, laid the item over, and then pulled it.

The three Skydio X10 aircraft DroneXL identified on St. Paul rooftops in June keep flying. Nothing gets added to them.

Council President Noecker ended it before anyone could vote

Council President Rebecca Noecker announced the withdrawal at Wednesday’s meeting, saying the council does not support expanding the drone program until its questions and concerns are addressed. Two members had already committed to voting no, protesters filled the chamber again, and the item never reached a roll call.

“We will not be authorizing this grant application,” Noecker said, as FOX 9 reported. Ward 4’s Molly Coleman and Ward 5’s Hwa Jeong Kim had told the September 2 meeting they would vote against the grant whenever it came back. Coleman’s objection went past this one application: she said she did not want the city deciding surveillance tools one contract and one grant at a time.

The council did not say what information it needs before it would revisit the request, a gap FOX 9 flagged in its own coverage. Anna Madison of the Free Palestine Coalition had also criticized the department for putting the grant on the consent agenda, which limits public comment, according to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.

The department had already said the grant was its only route to more docks

Hallstrom told the council on September 2 that the docked program is expensive to operate and the department had no budget to grow it. If the grant failed, it would look for other grants. “There’s no means for us to do this without grant funding,” he said.

The three docks sit at police headquarters on Grove Street, at the Western District station on Hamline Avenue, and at Fire Station 7 on Ross Avenue on the East Side. Each aircraft flies about 20 minutes on a charge and covers a two-mile (3.2-kilometer) radius, which Hallstrom said leaves parts of the city uncovered. The department told the council the program has logged about 1,500 flights and contributed to 75 arrests since May 30, figures the Spokesman-Recorder relayed and that DroneXL has not seen in a department release. The last set of published numbers, 472 flights and 36 arrests in the first four weeks, already beat the department’s entire 2025 patrol-drone total.

Monday’s rescue was the department’s closing argument, and it did not move the room. A docked drone reached a pond behind the East Side Boys & Girls Club about two minutes before the first officers and put them on a 5-year-old boy with autism who had wandered from home and was going under, according to CBS Minnesota. Officer Adisak Sae Ma pulled him out. The child was checked at Children’s Hospital and had no injuries. St. Paul resident Wyatt Miller told MPR News it was a “disgrace” for the department to post the video the day before the vote.

Flock went first, and Minneapolis went in July

In late August the council voted unanimously to urge the city and Ramsey County to end their Flock Safety contracts, and the city said it would pull its two Flock license plate cameras. Two weeks later the drone request hit the same council. Both surveillance vendors have been turned back.

The opposition in the chamber raised the same objections that sank Minneapolis’s free 75-day Skydio trial on a 6-6 vote in July: the Free Palestine Coalition, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, and Women Against Military Madness, with signs pairing “Drones out of St. Paul” with Skydio’s sales to the Israeli military and to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. St. Paul has flown Skydio aircraft since 2023, so this fight was never about whether the city would use the company. It was about whether it would buy more.

Every public Drone as First Responder rollout in Minnesota has picked Skydio, from Minnetonka’s fire-station launch to Brooklyn Park’s $4.6 million program. The two largest cities in the state have now each turned the same vendor away inside eight weeks.

DroneXL’s Take

The grant did not die on Wednesday. It died on September 2, when Hallstrom told the council there was no other money and two members said no in the same breath. The department had a week to change minds, and it posted a rescue video instead of a contract.

I wrote yesterday that St. Paul would win or lose this on a number it has never released, and I will stand on that. Since June the city has put out flight counts, arrests, rescues, and dock locations. It has not put out what the program costs, what the Skydio agreement says, or who besides the department can pull the flight log. Cedar Larson of the Free Palestine Coalition demanded the contract in the chamber. That is a records question, not a Palestine question, and the department let it stand unanswered for three months.

The activists have a point under the vendor politics. St. Paul turned a 2023 patrol-drone contract into a dock-based DFR program without a new public hearing. Minnesota law requires a comment period to start a police drone program, not to expand one, as Governing reported in June. The department followed the statute and still handed its critics their best argument. Nashville’s police did the same thing in May, flying Skydio docks before the Metro Council signed off, and drew the same fight.

Where I part with the room is on the drones themselves. A drone over a pond two minutes before the first officer is not a surveillance program. It is the thing the technology is for, and the sergeant who flew Monday’s search says the story might not have ended well without it. Miller calling the video a disgrace tells me the coalition is not arguing about docks anymore. Skydio spent years benefiting from the argument that who builds the drone matters more than what it does. Minneapolis and now St. Paul are running that argument back at it, and the department’s remaining three docks are the only thing standing between St. Paul and the outcome Minneapolis got.

What the council wants is the open item. Noecker said the expansion is off until questions are addressed, and neither she nor any member said which questions. Hallstrom says he will hunt for other grants. Whether the department publishes its Skydio contract and an operating cost before it comes back with one is the decision that matters, because the next hearing will go the same way if it does not.

Sources: MPR News, FOX 9, CBS Minnesota, Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Governing

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

1,500 US Agencies Are About To Get Counter-Drone Powers

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:08:33 GMT

The Pentagon’s counter-drone task force brought more than 200 people from 75 departments and agencies to Alexandria, Virginia, on August 21, and the capability its director named as his top near-term priority was low-cost detection covering the entire breadth of the United States.

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 held its second interagency summit almost exactly one year after it was stood up. Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who runs the task force, delivered the opening keynote on the first year’s progress, then spent the sidelines telling reporters he does not believe the problem has been solved.

The Department of War posted its own account of the day on September 9, nineteen days after the fact. It runs through breakout groups, a common operating picture and interagency partnerships. It does not mention the rule that now lets local police take a drone down without a federal escort, or the roughly 1,500 agencies the government expects to certify under it within two years.

JIATF 401 Now Coordinates 75 Agencies Around One Airspace Picture

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 is the War Department’s lead counter-drone organization, created in August 2025 to replace the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. Its second summit centered on building one shared picture of low-altitude air traffic across agencies that had tracked drones separately.

Pete Hegseth signed the establishment memo on August 28, 2025, when the department was still called Defense, and gave the new director authority to approve up to $50 million per development effort. The summit put Defense Department, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Aviation Administration officials in one room.

The slide behind Ross put a number on it: 250 attendees from more than 75 agencies and offices. That list runs well past the obvious ones. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission were represented, along with the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, Sandia National Laboratories, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and National Guard units from Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington, California and the District of Columbia.

The keynote went to Bryan Stevens, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, who opened by noting how unusual it is for an FBI executive to headline a Pentagon event.

“The drone threat does not live neatly inside anyone’s land.”

Ross was blunter than his own department’s press shop. He told the room the gathering was not a victory lap, and told reporters afterward that he does not feel the problem has been solved yet.

“I think we’ve got a ton of work to do.”

That is a very different document from the account the War Department published, which has the task force cutting through bureaucracy to deliver state-of-the-art capabilities worldwide. DroneXL has followed this office since its counter-UAS marketplace went live in February.

Local Police Can Now Detect And Disable Drones Without A Federal Escort

The SAFER SKIES Act was signed on December 18, 2025. A Justice and Homeland Security interim final rule implementing it took effect July 1. Certified state, local, tribal and territorial agencies can now run counter-drone operations under their own authority instead of borrowing a federal deputization.

There are two tiers. Detection and Warning Certification comes from an online course that runs about an hour and issues automatically on completion. Mitigation Certification, which covers everything from jamming a control link to bringing an aircraft down with reasonable force, requires resident instruction at the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center.

When the rule published on July 6, 61 officers across roughly 46 agencies held mitigation certification. The departments wrote that they expect about 1,500 agencies to certify at the detection tier within two years. Micheal Torphy, who runs the FBI’s drone program, put the number of officers trained since the rule took effect at roughly 500.

Steven Willoughby, acting executive director of the Homeland Security program executive office for drones and counter-UAS, described the shift as “opening the floodgates” for state and local agencies, on the reasoning that federal teams cannot staff 300 NFL games and four times as many college games. We covered his shop when it became permanent: DHS created a standing counter-drone office in January with $115 million behind it. By June, the FBI’s counter-drone schoolhouse was already full, mid-World Cup.

The rule does set real limits. Mitigation actions have to be reported within 48 hours, air traffic control has to be notified within five minutes of activation, records of intercepted communications are capped at 180 days, and uncoordinated action can draw civil fines of up to $100,000 per violation. The authority sunsets on December 31, 2031.

What the rule does not do is publish the equipment list. The specific systems a certified sheriff’s office may point at your aircraft sit on two lists hosted on a federal portal and maintained jointly by the Justice and Homeland Security departments with the Pentagon, the Transportation Department, the FCC and NTIA. The rule states outright that those mechanics are not codified in the regulation. The departments expect the opening categories to cover radio-frequency detection that intercepts a drone’s control link and command injection that takes the aircraft over. Which hardware clears that bar is not something a pilot can look up.

The World Cup Numbers Are The Argument For Pushing Authority Down

Federal agencies detected more than 1,600 unauthorized drones across the FIFA World Cup’s 11 American host cities, seized more than 700 aircraft, opened around 120 federal cases and arrested a dozen people. Summit participants spent much of the day on what those six weeks taught them.

DroneXL was on this in July, when the FBI passed 600 seizures at World Cup venues after months of no-drone-zone warnings.

Now run the arithmetic. Seven hundred aircraft taken, twelve people arrested. Willoughby told reporters the task force talked to nearly every operator whose drone was seized, because intent is never really known until someone asks. That ratio is the honest picture of American counter-drone enforcement in 2026.

Stevens said every detection and every seizure was logged to one standard so the White House could be shown exactly what happened. Los Angeles in 2028 is next, and he expects it to be larger on every axis.

Directed Energy Heads To A December Shoot-Off At Dugway

Five installations will host high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves for a 365-day run. Fort Huachuca, Fort Bliss, Naval Base Kitsap, Grand Forks Air Force Base and Whiteman Air Force Base are the sites, with service members operating the systems. A live-fire shoot-off follows in December.

What Ross says he wants out of that year is the fully burdened cost of running these weapons and a set of tactics that does not shut down a base’s own airspace every time a laser fires. The shoot-off runs jointly with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and it moved from Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Systems that perform can convert into a purchase order on the spot, which is how the task force plans to start production lines rather than another study.

None of this is theoretical now. The Army says a $3-a-shot laser has cut cartel drone flights by 75%, and the FAA cleared military anti-drone lasers for use in U.S. airspace in April after a two-month standoff over what those beams do to passenger aircraft.

DroneXL’s Take

The incursions are real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The rule’s own preamble cites the National Football League telling Congress that unauthorized flights over its games climbed from roughly a dozen in 2017 to 2,845 in 2023.

The same preamble points to a Chinese national charged with flying over Vandenberg Space Force Base for nearly an hour. I have written about a drone loitering over a U.S. nuclear weapons base and I meant every word of it. Nobody flying legally is helped by the guy who puts a Mini over a playoff game.

What bothers me is the shape of what local agencies are being handed. The detection tier is an hour online and a policy the agency attests to itself. Around 1,500 agencies are expected to hold it inside two years. Ross’s stated priority is coverage across the entire breadth of the country. Put those together and the destination is a persistent track on nearly every aircraft under 400 feet (122 meters) in American airspace, assembled by hundreds of separate agencies, running equipment from a list the public cannot read.

I read the World Cup numbers as the tell. Seven hundred drones seized and twelve people arrested is not a counterterrorism result. It is a compliance result, and it says most of the people caught by the largest counter-drone operation this country has ever run were pilots who did not check a temporary flight restriction. That is an argument for better warnings and better geofencing. It is being used as the argument for interception hardware in a sheriff’s truck.

Comments on the interim final rule closed September 4 with more than 46,000 filings on the docket, and we filed in the FCC’s military-grade drone ban proceeding the same week. Whether the privacy limits in section 124.14 survive contact with a technology list designed to keep growing is the thing worth watching between now and December, because once prototypes convert into production lines, the hardware starts deciding what the policy can be.

Sources: Department of War, DefenseScoop, Federal Register

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

2,977 Drones Rebuild New York's Twin Towers for 9/11

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:54:43 GMT

Sky Elements flew 2,977 drones over New York Harbor on Wednesday night, one light for every person killed on September 11, 2001, and held them in the shape of the Twin Towers at full architectural scale. The free public show ran two days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

The installation is called “2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor,” a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Creative director Addison Mehr produced it with Sky Elements, the Texas operator DroneXL has been covering since its Guinness World Records run in December 2023. A collective of 9/11 family members and first responders shaped the design, among them FDNY responder Tim Brown and Terry Strada of 9/11 Families United. The score included John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls,” written for the victims.

The drone towers stood beside the Tribute in Light, the xenon beams that mark the anniversary each year. The producers say the piece was designed in dialogue with it.

2,977 lights rose over New York Harbor and rebuilt the Twin Towers at full architectural scale, one light for each life lost on 9/11, in a community gathering of remembrance. Photo credit: Courtesy of 2977 Lights Over New York Harbor

Sky Elements Has Flown Bigger Shows Than This One

Sky Elements has flown nearly 5,000 drones at once and holds at least 17 Guinness World Records. Wednesday’s count was deliberately smaller. The design fixed the fleet at 2,977, the confirmed death toll from the 2001 attacks, so the number itself carried the meaning.

Bigger is normally the headline. The company’s 4,979-drone Vecna formation over Las Vegas last December existed to break a record, and it did. Here the ceiling came from a casualty list.

Tim Brown, who responded to the World Trade Center in 1993 and again in 2001, named three firefighters he lost. “Three of the 2,977 lights are theirs,” he said.

The Helix Traced a Tower New York Never Built

Before the towers assembled, the drones gathered into a rising helix. The producers say that shape points at the THINK team’s World Cultural Center, the unbuilt proposal for the rebuilt World Trade Center, a pair of open lattice towers meant to rise around the original footprints without touching them.

A strange, specific thing to encode in a drone show: a building New York decided not to build, put up where nobody has to approve a floor plan. Then the batteries run down and it is gone.

2,977 lights rose over New York Harbor to rebuild the Twin Towers at full architectural scale beside the Brooklyn Bridge, one light for each life lost on 9/11. Photo credit: Courtesy of 2977 Lights Over New York Harbor

Studio Drift Traced This Back to Notre Dame

The Amsterdam collective Studio Drift is credited as an artistic advisor on the piece. Co-founder Ralph Nauta told NOS the idea began two years ago, on a walk through New York. Drift has drawn vanished architecture in drone light since 2020. The Colosseum and the Sagrada Familia came first.

Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn founded the studio in 2007, and the architectural work started with a fire. After Notre Dame burned in 2019 they began working out how to put a lost building back with light instead of stone. Rome’s Colosseum went up whole. Gaudi’s basilica got the towers it still does not have. DroneXL covered Drift’s Central Park show in October 2023.

Pointing that method at the Twin Towers changes what it is. Those other buildings were lost to fire, to time, or to an architect who ran out of years. The Twin Towers were destroyed in an attack that killed 2,977 people, and that is why the fleet size here is a death toll rather than a production decision.

Nauta could not get to New York and watched remotely. He told NOS that wind is the one factor nobody controls, and that this time it held. The piece put 2,977 aircraft at the towers’ original height, each holding an assigned point in the sky, and a strong enough breeze either blurs the outline or keeps the whole fleet on the ground. Nauta said the silhouette came out sharp over the harbor.

New York Cleared Airspace It Spent $6.5 Million to Defend

IDEKO led federal and city permitting for the flight, plus safety and security operations. New York Harbor sits inside some of the most controlled airspace in the country. The clearance came under four months after the NYPD stood up a unit built to knock drones out of that same sky.

The city would not take it on the eve of the anniversary. Nauta told NOS that permission for September 10 was refused on security grounds, and the flight was cleared for the 9th instead. The date on this artwork was set by a risk assessment.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced $6.5 million in mitigation equipment on May 21, a capability reserved until recently for a handful of federal agencies. The same city signed off on 2,977 aircraft over the water sixteen weeks later.

No public money was involved. Private philanthropy and in-kind gifts covered production, with major support from the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund and 9/11 family members. “Everything in the sky over New York is for them,” Sky Elements CEO Rick Boss said.

A drone light show recreates the Twin Towers at full architectural scale behind the Brooklyn Bridge over New York Harbor, one light for each of the 2,977 lives lost on 9/11. Photo credit: Courtesy of 2977 Lights Over New York Harbor

DroneXL’s Take

The loudest drone story in America this year has been about stopping drones: bans on Chinese airframes, mitigation funding, wider authority to shoot things down. Then 2,977 American-made drones went up over the harbor and rebuilt the towers, on the night the city was willing to grant rather than the one the artists asked for.

Yes, the case against flying thousands of aircraft near crowds is real, and it is Sky Elements’ own case to answer. Its December 2024 Orlando show dropped drones into a crowd of roughly 25,000, and a 7-year-old boy needed emergency heart surgery. The FAA suspended the company’s Part 107 waiver on December 29, the authority that let it fly at night and over people.

It does not change my read. This is the strongest argument for the medium anyone in the United States has made, and it came from the company that had to earn back the right to fly it. The industry went from under 30 shows a year five years ago to roughly 1,500 booked for 2026, most a sponsor logo over a ballpark. This one was 2,977 people, counted one at a time.

Sources: 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor via PR Newswire, NOS

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

I Scored Every FCC Drone Ban Comment. On the Money Question It Was 1,701 to One.

Greg Reverdiau — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:25:45 GMT

The FCC asked the public a set of questions about its proposed drone ban, and almost 4,000 of you answered them. We analyzed every single one of those comments. All of them. Every PDF, every scanned letter, every attachment. And here is a number that should stop everyone at the Commission cold: 1,701 filings talked about the economic impact of this rule. One agreed with the FCC. Just one.

Why I Am Saying 1,701 and Not 3,824

Before I go further, let me handle the obvious question. There were 3,824 comments. So why am I saying 1,701?

Because most comments are short, and most people write about just one thing. A sheriff’s office might write about a missing person it was searching for and never mention the economy. A farmer writes about spraying and never mentions the legal authority question. So when we scored this record, if a filing did not address a question, we marked it as not addressed. We did not guess. We did not put words in anybody’s mouth.

That means every question has its own denominator. 1,584 filings engaged on the definition. 1,701 engaged on the economics. 1,055 engaged on the security case. 443 engaged on the timeline. I could have used 3,824 for everything and gotten bigger, splashier percentages, but that would have been dishonest. That is not how we operate.

So when I say 1,701 to one, I mean 1,701 people chose to answer the FCC’s economic question, and exactly one of them agreed with the FCC.

What the FCC Actually Proposed, and What “Military-Grade” Means

If you are new to this, here is the short version. Back in July, the FCC proposed to ban the import and sale of certain foreign-made drones, mostly Chinese, and the stated reason is national security.

The rule targets what the FCC calls military-grade aircraft. If I say military-grade drone, you are probably picturing something with a missile on it. That is not how the FCC looks at it. Here is how the FCC defines military-grade: any covered drone that has a thermal camera, or a lidar sensor, or that uses a dock station, or can spray, or weighs 55 pounds or more on takeoff, or can be used as a swarm — think light show. Every drone capable of any of that is a military-grade drone.

Read that again. A thermal camera. A roof inspector uses a thermal camera every single day, and a search and rescue volunteer flies one on a three-pound drone to find a kid who has been lost since two in the morning. A lidar sensor. Your phone has a lidar sensor in it. Your car probably has one too. And most recreational drones use lidar for obstacle avoidance. Under this proposal, all of that becomes military-grade.

The comment period closed on September 2, and a lot of you filed to tell the FCC what you think of it.

Obstacle-avoidance lidar sits on ordinary consumer drones like this one. Under the FCC's proposed definition, that sensor is a military-grade capability. Photo credit: DroneXL

What We Did With the Docket

I want to be direct about why we did this. When an agency puts out a proposal like this, it is supposed to read the record and weigh what people told it. That is the entire point of having a comment period. The FCC says it is going to do that. We decided not to wait.

We pulled every filing in the docket. There were 3,829 comments, and 3,824 of them had readable text. 686 had attachments — PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, spreadsheets. Then we scored every single one against the 11 questions the FCC actually asked. Not the questions we wish they had asked. The 11 questions in the public notice.

Then we published all of it: the full analysis, the method, and the raw data as a spreadsheet, one row per filing with a link back to the original FCC record. And I want to be clear about something. You do not have to trust us on this. Every number I am about to give you is verifiable, and every quote is matched word for word against the filed document. If a quote did not match exactly, we threw it out instead of paraphrasing it. Go check the work yourself if you doubt any of the data.

The Headline: 98.6% Oppose the Rule as Written

98.6% of filings oppose the rule as written. Breaking that down, 77% oppose it outright. Another 21% say they support the security goal but still reject how the FCC has drawn it.

Sixteen filings support the proposal as written, out of 3,824. That is 0.4%.

Let me get ahead of the obvious objection, because someone at the Commission will probably make it. Was this a campaign? Did somebody organize a form-letter blast? We checked. About 5.7% of the filings used template language, 218 of them, and that was mostly a letter from the Academy of Model Aeronautics about the 55-pound threshold. Which means 94% of the record is people sitting down and writing their own words about their own business.

Number one, that is awesome. Number two, this is an industry telling a federal agency that it got something wrong.

Question One: 99.4% Say the Definition Is Too Broad

The FCC’s first question was whether its list actually captures military-grade drones. 1,584 filings engaged on that question, and 1,575 said the definition is too broad. That is 99.4%. Five said it was fine. Four said it was too narrow.

Of those, 1,148 filings, or 72%, make the same very specific point: thermal and lidar are ordinary commercial sensors, and they are not weapons.

Here is the Ohio chapter of the Law Enforcement Drone Association: thermal imaging, lidar, autonomous flight and docking capabilities are all dual-use technologies employed every single day for lawful, life-saving and distinctly non-military purposes.

Here is Autel — and yes, I know Autel is a Chinese manufacturer, and no, that does not make the sentence wrong: “A 55-pound aircraft is not military because of its weight.”

And here is the Boulder Emergency Squad, a volunteer search and rescue team: a thermal sensor on a three-pound aircraft flown by volunteers on a sheriff’s callout is not a military capability.

990 filings, 62.5%, did not just complain. They proposed a fix — write the definition around what actually makes something military: weaponization, electronic warfare, targeting, hostile autonomous swarming. The industry handed the FCC a better rule, in writing, 990 times.

Question Two: The Security Case Does Not Hold Up in the Record

The FCC’s second question asked whether this equipment poses a notable, acute national security risk. 1,055 filings addressed it. Thirty, or 2.8%, agreed the risk is acute the way the FCC describes it. 727 filings, 69%, said the risk is overstated. 298, or 28%, said it is real but manageable with the tools we already have.

And 415 filings, 39%, make the point that there is no documented case on the record of any of this equipment being exploited the way the proposal implies.

Then there is the legal problem. 176 filings, 16%, question whether the FCC even has the authority to do any of this, and that includes DJI itself. DJI argues that the underlying determination never mentions the phrase military-grade and never mentions any of the seven categories the FCC built on top of it.

You might be frowning, because DJI is an interested party, so of course they say what they say. But then you have the Commercial Drone Alliance, which represents American manufacturers and is asking for an even stricter ban than the FCC proposed. And the National Sheriffs’ Association. And the Edison Electric Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, rural electric co-ops — all making the same point. At some point the argument stops being about who is making it.

Question Three: The Money, and the One Filing That Agreed

Now the part that matters most. The FCC’s tentative conclusion, in its own words, was that the economic impact would be relatively minor and contained.

1,701 filings addressed economic impact. 1,686 described severe harm. That is 99.1%. One agreed with the Commission.

Let me put a face on what severe means here, because this is not abstract. 24% of those filings put an actual dollar figure on the record, and the median is $16,000.

Sixteen thousand dollars. That number tells you exactly who is filing in this docket. These are not corporations with legal departments. These are one-truck, one-drone, one-person businesses.

Here is Phoenix Drone Pros: replacing my fleet with a domestic alternative that I have priced would cost roughly $200,000, which is 200% of my annual revenue. That is not a cost increase. That is a closing sale.

988 filings, 58%, said there is no domestic alternative for the work they do. 502 filings, 29%, said the American equivalent costs substantially more. We already knew that. It is not a surprise. As one operator put it, DJI drones are not a luxury for small operators — they are the only affordable, reliable and technologically advanced tool available in the United States market today.

And then there is the part I think is genuinely unfair. 653 filings, 38%, point out that they bought this equipment legally, under FCC authorizations that were valid at the time. As one filer wrote, retroactively revoking that authorization does not just block future purchases, it undermines the basis on which we built a business in the first place.

We also filed our own comment in the docket, based on our survey of 8,056 operators. 96.7% of them rely on the equipment this rule would capture, and 76.6% expect significant or business-ending impact.

Business-ending impact. The FCC said this would be minor and contained. The record says otherwise, 1,700 times over.

Public Safety: 513 Filings Say This Rule Will Cost Lives

298 public safety agencies filed in this docket. Police departments, fire departments, search and rescue teams, emergency management. Every single one of them that engaged on the definition called it too broad. Every single one.

598 filings were about search and rescue and firefighting, and 513 of them said the rule is going to cost lives. I am not saying that. They are saying it.

Here is what it sounds like. The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office: we recently completed a search and rescue for a missing autistic person who had been missing for five hours, and we located him with our drone and brought him back safely to his family. A volunteer search and rescue team: a ban on these DJI drones and their maintenance parts would end our search and rescue team. The Blair Police Department in Nebraska: for a 22-officer municipal police department, it can be the difference between having a drone program and not having one at all.

The National Sheriffs’ Association filed on behalf of its member sheriffs, and the ask was modest. Let us keep what we already own. Confirm that the American alternatives actually work. And if you cannot confirm that, give state and local law enforcement the same carve-out you are giving federal agencies.

Because here is a detail a lot of people missed. The proposal exempts equipment for federal government use, but it does not exempt your county sheriff’s office. Same mission, same missing kid, different patch on the shoulder, different drone they are allowed to use.

Agriculture: A Circular Definition That Captures Ag Aircraft by Construction

We had 175 agricultural filings, which is a lot considering the size of that field. The FCC’s spray criterion is drawn from the FAA’s agricultural aircraft rule, which means that by construction, it captures agricultural aircraft.

As one commenter put it, a spray drone is not a chemical weapon merely because it applies pesticides. 561 filings tie this directly to crop yield and food supply. Spray drones let a farmer treat a field that is too wet for a tractor. They cut chemical use, and they replace low-altitude manned crop dusting, which is one of the most dangerous flying jobs in the country.

The repair problem hits agriculture hardest, because a season does not wait. As one ag operator wrote, an aircraft that cannot be repaired is an aircraft that cannot fly, which amounts to a practical ban on equipment already in service.

And frankly, this one is worse than badly drawn. It is circular. The FCC borrowed its definition from the FAA’s rule on dispensing economic poison — the rule that governs agricultural aircraft. So a test built for ag aircraft captures ag aircraft. That looks a lot like it was done by design.

Here is what it costs you. A spray drone flies when the ground rig cannot. The field is too wet for the tractor. The corn is too tall for the ground sprayer. And that is the exact moment fungicide needs to go on — on hillside orchards, on rice, on whatever it is. Every one of these jobs has a clock on it. Crop protection has to happen inside a narrow window set by weather and disease pressure, not by a compliance timeline. Miss it, and you cannot reschedule. You lose the yield.

That is why the repair issue lands harder here than anywhere else in the docket. A season does not wait for parts that are backlogged or unavailable. An aircraft that cannot fly in July is an aircraft you do not have that year.

And the spray criterion reaches well past farming. The American Mosquito Control Association filed, because public health mosquito abatement is spray work too. Under this definition, the drone your county uses to knock down the mosquito population is military-grade.

Mapping, Survey, Energy, Film: This Is Not a Niche

Lidar is the mapping industry: surveying, construction progress, stockpile volumes, utility corridors, crash reconstruction for law enforcement. One firm put it this way — this is not a minor cost increase, it is a barrier that would prevent many small firms from bidding competitively, serving customers and operating safely.

317 filings came from infrastructure inspection and the energy sector, and that one was filed as a block: the Edison Electric Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, rural electric co-ops and natural gas associations.

Then 215 filings from film and media. 766 filings from hobby and recreational flying, with the AMA filing for 150,000 members, mostly over the 55-pound threshold. New York’s MTA filed. Universities filed. A tribal environmental program filed. This is not a niche.

The Other Side: All Sixteen Filings That Backed the Ban

Let me talk about who supported this, because I said we would name them, and I mean it. Sixteen filings support the prohibition as proposed.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, wrote the longest argument on that side. Their case is that heavy-lift, sensor-loaded, long-endurance aircraft are the same class of machine currently flying in combat, and that when an adversary state builds them, the dual-use question resolves against the buyer. They cite Ukraine using Mavic 3 thermals for reconnaissance. That may sound like a real argument, but they fail to mention that the same drone, built in a different country by a different manufacturer, can be used in exactly the same way.

Then there is the Agricultural Drone Initiative, an American ag-drone manufacturer consortium, which argues that Chinese software control over spray aircraft is a food security risk and that Chinese dumping has already killed two American ag-drone companies. They are the only trade group on that side of the docket.

Then two venture capital firms, and a domestic drone manufacturer working in spatial intelligence. And Skydio filed too — and I want to be precise here, to be fair. Skydio filed an ex parte notice, not a full endorsement, and what it actually asked for was careful, calibrated measures with reasonable transition periods. So even Skydio is asking for a longer runway.

That is against 1,686 filings saying this will do severe economic damage. I am not saying those 16 filings are illegitimate. Some are thoughtful, and the Agricultural Drone Initiative makes a real point about a rebranding loophole the FCC should absolutely fix. But 16 is 16. An agency that reads this record and adopts the rule as written is not weighing evidence. It is ignoring it.

To the Commission: You Asked, and 1,584 People Answered

If somebody from the Commission is watching this, and I hope you are, I want to say this plainly and without any heat.

You asked whether the economic impact would be minor and contained. 1,701 people answered. One agreed with you. You asked whether your definition captures military-grade equipment. 1,584 people answered. 1,575 said no.

And you denied three requests to extend this comment period. Then 28% of the record showed up in the last three days anyway, because people were scrambling to be heard.

The industry is not asking you to do nothing. 990 filings landed with a narrower definition. 358 asked for a phased transition. 225 asked you to protect equipment people already own, along with the parts that keep it flying. That is a serious industry trying to help you write a better rule.

If this goes through as written, the thing that fails first is not a Chinese company. It is the two-person mapping business in Ohio. It is the volunteer search and rescue team in Maine. It is the sheriff’s office in Nebraska with 22 officers. You can fix this, and the record tells you exactly how.

What Your Comment Did, and Why This May End Up in Court

Last thing, and this is for the people who actually filed. A lot of you left a comment because we asked you to, or because somebody in the community asked you to. And I know a fair number of you figured it would disappear into the void. It did not. Your comment is in the permanent public record of this proceeding. It has a docket number, and it is cited in our analysis.

I think there is a real chance this ends up in court, and here is why.

First, 176 filings argue that the FCC does not have the legal authority to do this, and that is not a fringe position in this record.

Second, DJI and Autel both built that argument in detail, with citations. DJI’s position is that the statute requires the Commission to make a specific determination about a company or a product, and that a blanket rule based on where something was built does not meet that bar. They also point out that the underlying national security determination never uses the phrase military-grade and never lists the seven categories in this document. When a manufacturer files something that reads like an appellate brief, it is usually because one is coming.

Third, there is a procedural argument. This went out as a public notice inside an existing docket rather than as a full rulemaking, and commenters have already raised that under the Administrative Procedure Act. They also raised the fact that the rule exempts federal agencies but not the county sheriff’s office. Treating two identical drones differently based on who is holding the controller is the kind of thing a court looks at very closely.

I am not a lawyer, and I am not predicting an outcome. What I am telling you is that the groundwork for a challenge is already in the record. And if that happens, this record is the evidence. 1,686 filings describing severe economic harm did not exist before you sat down and wrote one. You made that happen.

Everything is in the analysis: question by question, 202 quotes word for word, all 341 organizations and where they landed, plus the raw spreadsheet so you can check every number I just gave you. DroneXL has also published its own count of the coded record. Thanks for filing.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full video on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Amazon Says Quieter Than a Truck. Its FAA Filing Says 92 Decibels

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:45:00 GMT

Amazon’s Prime Air operations manager in Baton Rouge told a Rotary Club audience Wednesday that the company’s delivery drones are quieter than an idling delivery truck, and that flying them higher to cut the noise is the FAA’s call. The FAA’s own noise filing for that hub puts the loudest moment of a Baton Rouge drone delivery at 92.1 decibels, and benchmarks a diesel truck at 50 feet at 80 to 90.

Tyra Jones, who runs Prime Air in Baton Rouge, spoke on September 9 at the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge, two months after the service began flying from a hub beside the Cortana Place fulfillment center. She said Amazon has another drone model in development and has started offering scheduled deliveries so customers can pick a window instead of taking the package whenever it lands. She declined to give a daily delivery count, saying the number moves with demand.

A Rotarian who lives in Broadmoor, near the hub, told the room they hear about 20 drones an hour. Asked whether Amazon had considered flying higher over Baton Rouge, an Amazon spokesperson at the event said altitude changes require Federal Aviation Administration approval. Six months ago Amazon raised the altitude of the same aircraft over Richardson, Texas, after residents there made the same complaint.

Amazon raised its drone altitude in Texas after the same complaint

Richardson residents raised noise and overflight complaints in January 2026. By March, Amazon had increased the minimum altitude for outbound flights to an average of 225 feet (69 meters) and rerouted some departures eastward over commercial land before they cross a residential neighborhood. The city published the changes itself.

Sam Bailey, a senior manager of economic development policy at Amazon, laid those adjustments out at the Richardson City Council’s March 9 meeting, along with the reasoning behind them. Making the aircraft itself quieter would take a hardware change that is not in near-term development, so altitude is the lever Amazon has. None of it required a new rule. It required a company deciding to fly a different profile inside an envelope the FAA had already approved.

Richardson also tested what a city can actually do. In April the council declined to pursue a rezoning of Amazon’s drone facility on legal advice, and the city manager pointed residents toward the FAA and their congressional delegation instead. Richardson’s own drone page now states plainly that cities cannot set altitude or create airspace limits. Baton Rouge sits in that same position, and so did College Station in 2024.

Amazon’s own FAA filing already puts a number on the noise

The noise estimates for the Baton Rouge hub are public, in the FAA’s environmental filing for the site. That document puts the maximum sound exposure level at 92.1 decibels during a delivery, measured 25 feet from the aircraft, and 63.7 decibels for a drone cruising at 200 feet (61 meters).

Both numbers come with the FAA’s own reference points, and they cut in opposite directions. The agency likens the 63.7-decibel cruise to an air conditioning unit heard from 100 feet. For the 92.1-decibel figure it offers a diesel truck at 50 feet, or a noisy urban street in daytime, at roughly 80 to 90 decibels. Jones’s comparison holds while the MK30 is passing overhead. It inverts at the doorstep.

The doorstep is where the filing gets specific. On a delivery the drone descends to about 13 feet (4 meters) above the drop point and hovers there while it releases the package, which is why the loudest reading in the document is taken 25 feet away. Takeoff and landing measure 90.5 and 91.8 decibels SEL at 20 feet. The FAA compares both to a household vacuum cleaner at 10 feet.

The Amazon Prime Air MK30 at XPONENTIAL Europe in Dusseldorf. The aircraft descends to about 13 feet and hovers to release the package, the loudest phase in the FAA's Baton Rouge filing. Photo: Haye Kesteloo / DroneXL

Broadmoor sits near the Cortana hub rather than under the far end of a delivery route, so the passes a resident counts there are takeoffs and landings, the two loudest phases in the profile. Measured 75 feet from the pad, the filing puts those at about 70 decibels Lmax.

The Baton Rouge hub flies well below what its own filing contemplates

The same filing sets the ceiling. Prime Air asked to run up to 1,000 MK30 flights a day out of Baton Rouge, seven days a week, roughly 365,000 deliveries a year, between 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. Amazon expects to reach that level gradually.

Spread across that 16-and-a-half-hour window, 1,000 flights works out to roughly 60 departures an hour, and every one of them is a round trip. What a Broadmoor resident hears today is nearer the floor than the ceiling. Texas showed the same gap: Bailey told the Richardson council its hub was filling about 150 orders a day while the FAA’s August 2025 approval assessment permitted up to 1,000, the Dallas Observer reported.

Baton Rouge is one of 11 sites Amazon flies today, and the company announced on August 19 that it intends to reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by year’s end. When DroneXL covered the Baton Rouge hub in May, Amazon put 12 to 20 MK30 drones at the site. Jones said the hub holds 20 and can fly 10 at once.

The FAA closed the comment window towns used to get

An operator opening a new metro used to trigger its own environmental assessment, with a published draft and about 30 days for anyone to file an objection under their own name. The FAA did that more than 20 times between 2021 and 2025, and on July 28 it stopped.

That day the agency signed a national Programmatic Environmental Assessment covering Part 135 delivery across the country. A new market now gets checked against that document inside the agency, and if it fits, no fresh review is written and no comment period opens, as DroneXL documented on Monday. Fitting inside it is largely a noise calculation: a ceiling of 1,150 deliveries a day from one hub, and a hub running that volume kept at least 600 feet (183 meters) from homes. The window to challenge the finding in court closes September 26.

Baton Rouge got in under the old system, and its paperwork trail has a loose end. The FAA’s public NEPA page, last updated August 20, still lists the Baton Rouge draft assessment under documents open for review, comment period closed July 22, and no final assessment or Finding of No Significant Impact for the site appears in the completed-reviews section. Amazon began commercial service on July 7, fifteen days before that comment period closed. Neither agency nor company has published anything reconciling the two dates, and the identically dated Omaha filing sits in the same unfinished state.

DroneXL’s Take

Start with the part Amazon has right. Altitude is federal. A city cannot set a floor or route a flight path. Richardson’s council spent months learning that and dropped its zoning threat on legal advice, and a Baton Rouge resident calling City Hall is calling the wrong building.

Which is exactly why pointing at the FAA is not an answer. Amazon changed the altitude in Richardson without a rulemaking and without anyone’s permission but its own, because a council and a few hundred residents made enough noise back. That was a company decision inside an approved envelope. Amazon knows the lever is there. It pulled it six months ago, in a market it is still flying today.

The part that bothers me is the framing, not the aircraft. The numbers were never hidden, and they are more honest than the pitch: quieter than an air conditioner when the drone is passing over, louder than the truck when it is over your yard. A room full of Rotarians got the half that flatters the product. Anyone who wanted the other half had to know a document called Appendix B existed.

The benchmark has a second problem, and this one Amazon built itself. The FAA’s reference point is a diesel truck at 50 feet, and Jones reached for an idling one. Amazon is retiring both. It has more than 40,000 Rivian-built electric vans on US roads against a standing order for 100,000 by 2030, and an electric van has no idle at all, because nothing is running while it waits at the curb. Every year that fleet grows, the yardstick gets shorter. The 92.1 does not move.

None of which is an argument against electrifying the vans. That is the best thing Amazon has done for the streets it delivers on, and it is nowhere near finished: tires still make noise on asphalt, and most of the US fleet still burns fuel today. The point is narrower. Amazon is measuring its aircraft against the vehicle it is spending billions to take off the road. Run that forward to 2030 and what pulls up outside a house in Broadmoor arrives almost silently, while the thing overhead still drops to 13 feet above the lawn at 92 decibels.

I want this to work. Drone delivery done right takes vans off residential streets and gets a sick kid’s medicine to the house without a car trip, and DroneXL has covered that case since the MK27 days. It does not survive a decade of communities discovering that the real number was public the whole time and nobody led with it. “seeing a Prime Air drone in the sky will be like seeing a delivery van” is the future Jones described. Delivery vans do not hover 13 feet over the lawn.

Two dates decide how this reads next month. September 15 is when Amazon’s answers to DroneXL’s fifteen questions come due, sound level among them, and every one so far is logged as unanswered on its page in the Drone Delivery Tracker. September 26 closes the only remaining legal challenge to the national finding that made the comment period disappear. Baton Rouge still got its thirty days. The towns Amazon adds next will not.

Sources: The Advocate, FAA NEPA and Drones, City of Richardson, Community Impact, Dallas Observer, Amazon.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Norway's PM Says A Drone Nearly Hit Zelenskyy's Plane. Kyiv Balks

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:51:00 GMT

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told public broadcaster NRK on Wednesday that a drone almost hit the aircraft carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as it took off from Moldova. Within hours, a source inside Zelenskyy’s own office told AFP that description was overstated.

Both governments agree something happened on September 8. Moldova’s Defense Ministry tracked a Shahed-type drone across the country that afternoon, Romania scrambled Spanish fighters and warned residents to take shelter, and the presidential aircraft reached Oslo that evening. What nobody has published is a distance, a radar track, or a takeoff time.

DroneXL reported the same split in December, when four military-specification drones crossed a no-fly zone as Zelenskyy’s plane approached Dublin, and Kyiv played it down while Dublin called it hybrid warfare.

Moldova Tracked The Drone For Seventeen Minutes

Moldova’s Defense Ministry detected an unmanned aircraft at 4:20 p.m. local time on September 8, entering from the direction of Ukraine. Air surveillance followed it until 4:37 p.m., when it left toward Golaiesti in Romania. That is seventeen minutes across a sovereign country.

Preliminary Moldovan data put the route through Russian-controlled Transnistria, toward Chisinau, then west. Authorities restricted airspace over the central part of the country, which left several civilian aircraft airborne while they waited to land at Chisinau.

Once the drone crossed into Romania, Spanish F/A-18s on NATO air-policing duty launched from Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base. Romanian authorities pushed shelter warnings to residents in several regions. Iasi International Airport stopped takeoffs and landings until the aircraft cleared the area. Romanian radar lost contact just after 5 p.m., and the drone came down near Mihaileni Vechi in Moldova, roughly 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) east of the Romanian border near Botosani County.

None of that is unusual anymore. NATO jets shot down a suspected Russian drone over Romania in a comparable sequence last September, and in May a Russian drone hit an apartment block in Galati while NATO aircraft were airborne. Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruta confirmed another shootdown near the Moldovan border on August 16, which the Kyiv Independent counted as the fourth suspected Russian incursion into Romanian airspace this year.

Oslo And Kyiv Described The Same Flight Differently

Store’s account to NRK was short and carried no supporting detail. “His flight was almost hit by a drone” as it left Moldova, he said, adding that this is the reality Zelenskyy lives in, according to Al Jazeera. He named no source, gave no distance and offered no timing.

NRK went to the prime minister’s office for more. The office had nothing further to add. Danish outlets covering the same NRK interview noted that it remains unclear which drone was involved or whether any deliberate act lay behind it.

Kyiv then contradicted Oslo. A source in the Ukrainian presidency told AFP that what occurred was an alert in Moldova as a Russian drone entered Moldovan and Romanian airspace, and called the claim that Zelenskyy had been at risk “exaggerated.” A separate source told the Kyiv Independent the opposite, saying the drone nearly hit the plane as it departed.

So the host government says near-miss, the traveler’s own office says overstated, and an anonymous Ukrainian source says near-miss. Three versions, one afternoon.

Dublin Produced This Same Split Nine Months Ago

On December 1, 2025, four military-style drones breached the Irish Aviation Authority’s no-fly zone and flew toward the sea leg of Zelenskyy’s approach to Dublin Airport. His plane landed early, just before 11 p.m., moments before the drones reached the point it had been due to cross.

They then circled the naval vessel LE William Butler Yeats, which did not carry the equipment to bring them down, as The Journal first reported. Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin told parliament the circumstances were “suggestive of this being part of a Russian-inspired hybrid campaign” against European Union and Ukrainian interests.

Kyiv’s response at the time will sound familiar. Zelenskyy adviser Dmytro Lytvyn said the host side is responsible for security and that “there were indeed such drones, but this did not affect the visit.” Full coverage of that incident is in DroneXL’s December report.

Moldova Detects These Drones But Does Not Stop Them

Moldova is not a NATO member, and its published record of these events shows detection and notification rather than interception. The September 8 track is the pattern: two timestamps, a temporary airspace closure, an exit heading, and then a wait for the aircraft to leave.

Nobody shot the Shahed down. It came down by itself, on Moldovan soil. The month before was the same, when Moldova reported a Russian S8000 Banderol cruise missile crossing its airspace on August 17 during an attack on Odesa. That one also arrived, transited, and landed without being touched.

Norway understands the shape of this problem from its own airspace. Drone sightings shut down Oslo and Copenhagen airports in September 2025, and Europe’s answer since then has been slower than the threat. The EU’s much-discussed counter-drone wall is still largely missing in action.

The Oslo meeting itself was about that gap. Zelenskyy and Store sat down with the heads of FirePoint, Kongsberg, Weibel, Saab, Diehl Defence, Hensoldt, Thales, Safran, Sener and Leonardo to advance FREYJA, an anti-ballistic program meant to give Europe an alternative to American Patriot interceptors. Zelenskyy said afterward that the group agreed on specific steps and that “Protecting Europe’s skies is our shared responsibility.”

DroneXL’s Take

Two heads of government have now described drones near Zelenskyy’s aircraft, and both times the checkable details went missing while the alarming sentence traveled around the world. Oslo said near-miss on Wednesday. Kyiv said overstated the same day. Neither of them published a number.

Store handed NRK a claim with no distance, no altitude, no radar track and no source, and his own office had nothing to add when NRK asked. The Moldovan and Romanian record, meanwhile, is unusually complete for an incident this fresh: two detection times, an exit heading, a scrambled flight of Spanish fighters, a lost radar contact, a crash site with a village name attached. Nothing in that record places a Shahed near a departing aircraft. It may still have happened. My read is that nobody has yet shown it, and the one office in a position to show it declined to.

The Dublin file makes clear this is not paranoia. Four military-specification drones reached the exact point on Zelenskyy’s approach at the moment his plane had been due to cross it, and the Irish naval vessel they circled afterward could not touch them. Deliberate interest in his flights is documented, not theoretical.

That is precisely why the loose version costs something. Every unverified near-miss makes the verified ones easier to dismiss, and it hands Moscow a cheap win it did not have to fly for. Ukraine’s own press office understood that well enough to push back on a friendly government within a day, which tells you how it reads from Kyiv.

The part worth the attention is sitting in plain sight. FREYJA’s coalition runs Ukraine, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Moldova is not on that list. The country a Shahed just crossed unopposed on its way into NATO airspace, the country whose capital held civilian traffic in the air while it waited, is outside the program being built to solve that exact problem. Watch whether the first practical results Zelenskyy said he expects from FREYJA include anything Moldova can actually operate, or whether the gap between the coalition and the border it flies over gets wider.

Source: Al Jazeera, NRK, CBS News, Kyiv Independent, The Journal, Ukrinform, Moldovan Ministry of Defense

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

St. Paul Votes on Police Drones Two Days After Pond Rescue

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:04:00 GMT

The St. Paul City Council votes Wednesday afternoon on whether the police department can apply for a $200,000 Department of Justice grant to buy more drones. The vote was supposed to happen a week ago. Members laid it over on September 2 after residents filled the chamber with protest signs, and at least two of the seven signaled they were already opposed.

Then, on Monday afternoon, one of the three Skydio X10 aircraft DroneXL identified on St. Paul rooftops in June found a child with autism struggling in a pond.

The drone reached the pond before the officers did

St. Paul police received a 911 call Monday afternoon about a child struggling in a pond. A docked drone arrived roughly two minutes ahead of the first officers, pinpointed the child and reported their condition. An officer went into the water and brought the child out.

The family told police the child had wandered off unnoticed, according to FOX 9. The department credited its docked program by name, two days before Wednesday’s vote.

The program is barely three months old. Three Skydio X10s went live May 30, one per patrol district, and flew 472 missions in four weeks, beating the department’s 436 patrol flights for all of 2025.

Two council members committed to voting no before the item came back

Ward 4 councilmember Molly Coleman told the September 2 meeting she would vote against the grant regardless of when it came up. Ward 5’s Hwa Jeong Kim signaled the same. Council President Rebecca Noecker did not say how she would vote but pressed the department on data control.

Coleman was blunt about the timing, as Harry Colbert Jr. reported for Power 104.7. “Whether we vote today or vote next week, I will be voting no,” she said, citing months of council argument over surveillance and civil rights. Noecker relayed the resident question she hears most: “Is there a drone outside my window? Is it following me?” Deputy Chief Kurt Hallstrom said the aircraft launch only on calls for service, the department shares no drone data, and every flight is posted to the city’s public safety technology page within 12 hours.

The council is not in a permissive mood on surveillance. The city ended its use of Flock license plate readers in late August.

Minneapolis rejected the same vendor in July

Across the river, the Minneapolis City Council deadlocked 6-6 on July 16 and killed a free 75-day Skydio trial. Opponents cited the company’s sales to the Israeli military and its Homeland Security work on immigration enforcement. St. Paul already flies Skydio hardware under an existing contract.

That proposal died on vendor politics rather than drone politics, and the coalition behind it moved to St. Paul in August. Every public Drone as First Responder rollout in Minnesota has gone to one manufacturer, from Minnetonka’s fire station launch to Brooklyn Park’s $4.6 million approval. A vote against Skydio here is a vote against DFR.

DroneXL’s Take

St. Paul will win this vote or lose it on a number the department has never published. DroneXL flagged the gap in June: the city released flight counts, arrests, and rescues, but no program cost. Three months later, that silence is the strongest argument against the grant.

The activists in the chamber have a real complaint underneath the vendor politics. St. Paul grew an existing contract into a dock-based DFR program without a new public hearing. Minnesota law requires a comment period to start a police drone program, not to expand one. The department stayed inside the rules and still handed its critics the argument.

I want this program to survive, and Monday afternoon is why. A drone over a pond two minutes before the first officer is the case for the technology, and nobody has to spin it. Two minutes of footage does not answer who pays, how much, or who audits the flight log. My read is that publishing the contract and an annual operating figure would have retired most of the opposition.

The council meets at 3:30 p.m. Five members decide it.

Sources: CBS Minnesota, FOX 9, Power 104.7, Saint Paul Police Department

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Amazon Wants 500 Drone Cities. Washington Cleared the Runway

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:16:00 GMT

Amazon says its delivery drones will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of this year. Drone delivery spent six years inching through federal review one market at a time, and the obvious question is how it suddenly cleared a continent.

Two things changed, and neither one is a drone. The FAA approved Amazon’s hubs at a pace it had never worked at before, signing off 34 of the 40 hubs in the company’s filings during a five-month run this spring. Then, on July 28, the agency removed the environmental review step for most future hubs altogether, and with it the public comment period that was a town’s only formal say in the matter.

Behind both sits an act of Congress passed in 2024 and an executive order signed in June 2025 that names environmental reviews as something to be streamlined. One deadline is left on the July decision. It falls on September 26.

The old process gave your town a 30-day window

An operator that wanted to fly deliveries in a new metro used to trigger its own environmental assessment. The FAA published a draft, opened a comment period of roughly 30 days, and printed what the public sent in, with its own responses, in the final document. It did that more than 20 times between 2021 and 2025, and every one of those filings sits on the agency’s public NEPA page.

That window is how a resident of Matteson, Illinois or Papillion, Nebraska could put an objection into a federal record with their name on it. It is also why DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker can list 40 Amazon hubs by street address: the addresses sit in those filings, because the filings existed. Every one of those assessments ended in a Finding of No Significant Impact.

The comment window was never a veto. The FAA controls the airspace and the operator’s certificate, and no volume of local objection has ever stopped a drone delivery approval. What it did was force a document into existence, on a schedule, with the hub’s address in it, and give a town a dated place to go on the record.

One national document now covers the whole country

The new document is a Programmatic Environmental Assessment, or PEA. The idea is ordinary enough in federal practice: rather than analyze 500 nearly identical proposals one at a time, an agency analyzes the category once and then checks later proposals against it. Congress specifically told the FAA to do this in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024.

The FAA signed the national finding on July 28 and published notice in the Federal Register on July 30. Photo credit: FAA

The FAA published the draft on December 9, 2025, and gave the public 30 days, over the holidays. New York and Washington asked for 45. They got 15 more, closing January 23. A total of 241 written submissions came in. The final version and the decision were signed on July 28 and published in the Federal Register on July 30.

Here is the mechanism that matters. When an operator now applies to serve a new area, the FAA compares the application against the national document. If it fits, the approval is covered and no new environmental review is prepared. If it does not fit, the FAA writes a narrower review that “tiers” off the national one, covering only what the national document missed.

Neither path includes a public comment period. The comparison is an internal FAA review of an operator’s application. That is the whole change, and its fingerprints are already on the tracker: four Amazon metros are announced with no FAA filing to be found for any of them.

Fitting inside the document mostly means staying under a noise number

The test an application has to pass is largely a noise calculation. The FAA set a ceiling of 1,150 deliveries a day from one hub, averaged over a year. An application that stays under it, with the hub far enough from homes, is covered by the national document and needs no further review.

That number is not arbitrary. Because a drone flies out and back, 1,150 deliveries counts as 2,300 overflights, and the FAA calculated the point at which that many passes stop being quiet enough. To get there the agency used the loudest delivery aircraft it has measured, roughly 78 decibels sound exposure level in cruise, out of every Part 135 delivery drone flying today.

The other conditions are similarly concrete. A hub running the full 1,150 deliveries has to sit at least 600 feet from noise-sensitive land, a category that includes homes. A hub cannot go within half a mile of certain historic properties where quiet or an open sky is part of what makes them historic. Operators have to submit their aircraft’s noise data and show it does not exceed what the FAA already modeled.

An operator that wants more than 1,150 deliveries a day, or a hub closer than the setback allows, needs a more detailed analysis. Even there, the FAA writes that in most cases the operator’s own noise measurements will be enough to satisfy it.

Some things did survive. The FAA says it will keep doing site-specific analysis for historic and cultural resources and for wildlife until it finishes standing agreements with state preservation officers and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Tribal consultation continues regardless. But those are consultations between agencies, not comment periods for the public.

Congress ordered the streamlining and an executive order set the clock

The speed is not an accident and it is not a mystery. Two documents explain it, and only one of them belongs to the current administration. One is an act of Congress passed with bipartisan majorities in 2024. The other is an executive order signed in June 2025 that names environmental review as something to streamline.

The first is the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, passed with bipartisan majorities and signed in May 2024. Section 909(c) directs the FAA to examine and integrate programmatic approaches to NEPA for large-scale distributed drone operations. The national document names that section as the requirement it is fulfilling. Congress ordered this, before the current administration took office.

The second is Executive Order 14307, Unleashing American Drone Dominance, signed June 6, 2025. Most coverage focused on its DJI and supply-chain provisions. The relevant part here is Section 3(b), which makes it US policy to advance drone commercialization by “reducing regulatory uncertainty, and streamlining approvals and certification processes, including for consumer goods delivery and environmental reviews.”

Environmental reviews, named, for consumer goods delivery. The draft of the national document appeared six months later.

The same order told the FAA to publish a proposed BVLOS rule in 30 days and a final rule in 240. That is the Part 108 rule that will eventually replace Part 135 for delivery. And on September 29, 2025, when two people asked for more time to comment on it, the FAA refused and said why: meeting the executive order’s deadline “will require extraordinary measures that do not make it practicable to extend the comment period.”

That is the agency stating on the record that a White House deadline is the reason a comment period cannot be extended. Three months later the FAA gave the public 30 days over the holidays on the national environmental document and, when two attorneys general asked for 45 more, granted 15.

Line the dates up and the pace explains itself. June 2025, the executive order. August 2025, the proposed BVLOS rule. December 2025, the draft national environmental document. January 2026, seventeen states object. July 2026, the FAA finalizes it. August 2026, Amazon announces nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year. Years of nothing, then fourteen months of everything.

Amazon’s own approvals sit inside that window, and this is the part worth being precise about. The national document did not hand Amazon its 500 towns. Nearly all of those hubs were approved the old way, with their own environmental assessments and their own comment periods, just at a speed the FAA had never managed before. Tolleson, Arizona cleared in November 2024. Then 22 Texas hubs were signed on a single day, February 5, 2026. Four Detroit hubs and two in Kansas City followed on May 1. Six Florida hubs on June 1. That is 34 approvals in five months, against a process the agency itself describes as taking six to eight months apiece.

Which leaves five hubs still in FAA review, in Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha, and four metros Amazon has announced with no filing found anywhere: Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise. Those are the ones the national document now covers. The 500 came from the sprint. What comes after the 500 comes from the rule change.

To be precise about cause: the FAA does not cite the executive order in the national environmental document. It cites the 2024 statute. What the record shows is a congressional mandate to streamline, an executive order making streamlined environmental review for delivery an explicit national policy, and an agency that has said in writing it is working to that order’s clock.

The attorneys general made specific objections, not general ones

The January filing is worth reading if you want to know what a government lawyer thinks is missing. Illinois, New York, Washington, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Harris County signed it.

Their central complaint was one of scale. The FAA analyzed a nationwide program without knowing where any hub would go, then concluded the impacts would not be significant. The states called that a paper exercise and argued you cannot find no significant impact for a place you have not identified.

They also listed gaps. The document does not analyze the fire risk of lithium-ion batteries on aircraft nobody is watching, and the letter points to the Tolleson crane crash of October 2025, where it says a battery ejected and burned. It measures drone noise against airport noise but not against the traffic and rail noise most neighborhoods actually hear. It considers a single overflight rather than the same house being overflown day after day.

The FAA published the 241 comments and its responses in Appendix E of the final document, and issued the finding.

One federal window is still open, and it closes September 26

The decision document ends with a right of appeal. Any party with a substantial interest can ask a United States Court of Appeals to review it, and the filing has to happen within 60 days of the order. The order was issued July 28. That puts the deadline at September 26, 2026.

This is not a public comment form. It is a petition for judicial review, the kind of filing a state attorney general or a city attorney makes, not a resident with a complaint about noise. But it is the only remaining federal window on this particular decision, seventeen states are already on record objecting to it, and in eighteen days it shuts.

What a town still controls is the ground, when there is a decision to make. The FAA regulates the airspace and the certificate; it has no authority over private property, a point the attorneys general made when they noted the agency cannot enforce its own hub setbacks. A hub is a building or a parking lot in somebody’s jurisdiction, and site plans, permits and conditional use approvals are local. The catch is that these hubs are designed for existing parking lots and rooftops, and one that needs no construction may trigger no municipal review at all. DroneXL has published a plain-language guide to the approval process on the tracker, setting out which levers are real, which are conditional, and which do not work.

DroneXL’s Take

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this story that is dishonest and it is the easy one to write. The FAA did not sneak this through. It published in the Federal Register twice, posted an explainer video, notified state and federal officials and tribes, extended the comment period when asked, took 241 comments and printed its answers to them. If nobody in your town knew, that is not because the notice was hidden. It is because federal environmental notices are not how normal people find out anything.

I also think streamlining was the right instinct, and Congress ordered it in a bipartisan bill before this administration existed. Twenty-plus separate assessments, six to twelve months each, every one ending in the same finding, is not a process protecting anyone. It is a queue. If the answer is always going to be yes, the honest move is to say so once rather than pretend to deliberate twenty times. DroneXL is pro-drone and pro-delivery. I want this industry to work.

The problem is what got streamlined away, and the pace at which it went. An executive order that names environmental reviews as a thing to streamline is a policy choice a President is entitled to make. An agency telling the public it cannot extend a comment period because of that order’s deadline is where a policy choice starts eating a procedure. Neither is illegal. Both are worth a citizen knowing about. The FAA replaced a process that produced a public document naming a specific address on a schedule with a process that produces an internal determination. Those are not the same thing even if the outcome is identical, because the first one told your town something and the second one does not. The agency has effectively decided drone delivery is a solved category at the exact moment the fleet is scaling. Since October, Amazon aircraft have struck a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, a residential internet cable in Waco, Texas and an apartment building in Richardson, Texas. Last week a Zipline aircraft came down under its parachute in a traffic lane on Houston’s Highway 6. Nobody has been hurt in any of them.

Seventeen attorneys general saying the analysis is too thin to support the conclusion is not the drone-panic crowd. Those are lawyers who read the document. When the people whose job is reading federal filings say the filing does not add up, and the agency finalizes it unchanged five months later, the reasonable response is not alarm. It is attention.

So watch September 26 for whether any of those seventeen states converts a comment letter into a petition for review. If none does, this decision is settled federal policy and the argument moves entirely to city halls, which is where DroneXL will be reporting it. If one does, the Ninth or the Second Circuit ends up deciding how much analysis a nationwide finding of no significant impact actually requires, and that ruling would reach a lot further than drones.

Sources: FAA Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment, Finding of No Significant Impact and Record of Decision for Drone Package Delivery Operations in the United States (July 28, 2026); Federal Register, 91 FR 48208 (July 30, 2026); Executive Order 14307, Unleashing American Drone Dominance, 90 FR 24727 (June 6, 2025); Normalizing UAS Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations, proposed rule, 90 FR 38212 (Aug. 7, 2025); Comments of the Attorneys General of Illinois, New York, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Harris County, Texas (January 23, 2026); FAA: Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations; FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, Section 909(c).

Correction, September 9, 2026: An earlier version of this article said the delivery fleet had hit “a crane, an apartment building, an internet cable and a Houston highway” this summer. Three of those four incidents happened between October 2025 and February 2026, not this summer, and the Houston incident involved a Zipline aircraft rather than an Amazon one. The passage has been rewritten with the correct dates and operators. The article also previously attributed a description of a battery fire at Tolleson to an NTSB preliminary report; that description appears in the state attorneys general comment letter, and the text now says so.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DroneXL Asked All Three Delivery Drone Giants the Same 15 Questions

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:04:00 GMT

DroneXL today launched the Drone Delivery Tracker, a public record of every drone delivery company flying over American homes under an FAA authorization: Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline to start, 40 Amazon hubs with street addresses, 368 Wing nests, five Zipline authorizations, eight incidents, and the questions each company has and has not answered.

The page is built from the FAA’s own environmental filings, the operators’ statements and DroneXL’s reporting. Every row links to its source. It updates the day a story publishes and gets a full sweep every Monday.

This morning all three companies received the same fifteen questions, on the same terms, due Monday, September 15. Wing and Zipline each got fifteen more specific to their aircraft. Amazon also still owes answers to the eight it received on September 3 and let lapse on September 5. Every operator’s page now reads “Pending” until they reply.

The tracker lists every hub, market and incident on the record

The Drone Delivery Tracker covers Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline. It maps 40 Amazon hubs from FAA decisions, Wing’s five authorized metros and 368 nests, and Zipline’s five FAA actions from North Carolina to Seattle, plus eight incidents: six Amazon incidents and two Zipline parachute landings in Texas.

Amazon’s page is the most detailed because Amazon’s filings are. The FAA decisions for Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City and Tolleson name each hub by street address, so the tracker maps all 40 with a 7.5-mile operating circle around each, the radius Amazon’s own filings define. Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha sit in FAA review. Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise are announced with no filing found. That is the geography behind Amazon’s promise of nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026: the 500 is not a list Amazon published, it is every municipality inside those circles.

Wing's Hummingbird lowers each package on a tether from a 23-foot hover. Its FAA filings authorize 368 nests across five metros. Photo credit: Wing

Wing and Zipline pins are metro-level, because their filings authorize a nest count inside a metro rather than addresses. Wing’s DFW, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte authorizations add up to 368 nests at up to 400 flights a day each. Zipline is authorized for up to 75 sites in Dallas-Fort Worth and has a 75-site Seattle proposal in review.

The incident table is the part I expect towns to read first. Amazon’s six entries run from the two Pendleton crashes in December 2024 through the Tolleson crane strikes, the Waco cable, the Richardson apartment building and the package released into a Richmond swimming pool. Zipline’s two are the parachute landings in Greenville on July 26 and on Highway 6 in Cypress on September 4. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s record. That is the absence of a record, not a safety statistic, and the page says so; a sweep of FAA and NTSB files is under way.

The aircraft page puts weight, payload and noise side by side

A separate aircraft comparison page compares the four delivery aircraft on the same rows: takeoff weight, payload, how the package reaches the ground, hover height over the home, recovery system, redundancy and measured noise. Every figure comes from an FAA filing. Where a filing is silent, the table says so.

The numbers that matter most are the simplest. Amazon’s MK30 is an 83.2-pound aircraft carrying five pounds, or 15.6 pounds of drone per pound of cargo, with no parachute, dropping the package from about 13 feet. Zipline’s P2 is 63 pounds carrying eight, hovers at about 330 feet while a tethered droid sets the package down, and carries a parachute that has now deployed twice. Wing’s 7000W-B is 14 pounds carrying about 2.5, lowering the package on a tether from 23 feet; its 8000-A is 24.3 pounds carrying up to 6.6.

Zipline's Platform 2 hovers at about 330 feet while a tethered droid sets the package down. The aircraft carries a parachute, which has deployed twice over Texas this summer. Photo credit: Zipline

Noise is where the record is thinnest. Amazon’s numbers are public because the FAA’s consultant put microphones under the MK30 in Pendleton: 63.7 dBA SEL for a cruise pass at 200 feet, about 82 dBA at 20 feet in hover. Wing’s and Zipline’s figures sit in appendices of their DFW and Florida filings and have not yet been extracted into the tracker. That is the first item on next Monday’s update, and it is also question nine on every operator’s list.

Amazon has answered none of its questions and now has fifteen more

Amazon received eight MK30 questions on September 3, due September 5. Its communications team replied twice about email delivery and never about the aircraft. Today Amazon received the fifteen questions every operator gets; Wing and Zipline received those plus fifteen specific to their aircraft. All are due September 15.

The eight questions I sent from the Commercial UAV Expo floor were not exotic. Why does the MK30 weigh 78 pounds empty when Zipline carries more with 55? Does it have a parachute, and if not, why not? What does it do after it hits a crane, a cable or a building, all of which it has done? None got an answer. Amazon’s tracker page shows all eight marked “No answer” and will keep showing that until Amazon changes it.

Wreckage of an Amazon MK30 after two of the drones struck a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025. Photo credit: 12News

The fifteen generic questions are the ones a town council should be asking before the first flight: weight and payload, recovery system, collision behavior, single points of failure, delivery method, drop-zone checks, incident record, who gets the call when an aircraft comes down, sound level, pitch, overflight frequency, cameras and data, liability, weather limits, and whether the operator will send an engineer rather than a spokesperson to a public meeting. They are published on the tracker as a handout, operator-neutral, for any town to use.

Wing’s specific set asks, among other things, how many of the 368 nests sit within 120 feet of a home, school or church, the setback the FAA allows. Zipline’s asks what caused the two parachute deployments and whether they share a failure mode. Nobody has replied yet, which is expected on the first morning; all three pages carry a “Pending” marker and the date the questions went out. Every answer publishes in full on the operator’s page the day it arrives. So does every silence.

Readers can search their town, send tips and follow the weekly sweep

The tracker has a town search covering every Amazon hub city, the FAA jurisdiction lists for Kansas City and Chicago, and every Wing and Zipline market in DroneXL’s record. A corrections and tips form, with an anonymous option, reaches the editor directly. Tips are leads until confirmed.

The town search will grow. Amazon’s other 35 hubs each come with an FAA list of the municipalities inside their operating area, and extracting those lists is the job that turns the search into a yes-or-no answer for roughly 500 towns. Amazon hub coordinates are placed from the street addresses in the FAA decisions and are approximate pending geocoding, which the page says next to the map.

Operators are added when they meet one of two tests: an FAA authorization for package delivery in the United States on the agency’s public list, or confirmed US commercial delivery flights documented by DroneXL or a public record. Announced but unfiled operators wait. Every operator that qualifies gets the same template and the same fifteen questions on the same deadline.

DroneXL’s Take

I built this because the FAA approves the airspace and the certificate, the operator announces the metro, and the town finds out when one comes down on a residential street. There is no public place where a resident of Matteson, Illinois or Pea Ridge, Arkansas can see who is authorized to fly over their street, what the aircraft weighs and whether it has a parachute. The filings exist. They are 300-page PDFs on an FAA index page. Nobody reads them, so nobody asks.

The operators will say, fairly, that the record is good. Zipline’s fleet has flown more than 140 million autonomous miles without a serious injury, and both Texas parachute landings ended with an intact aircraft and nobody hurt. Wing has no US incident I can find. Even Amazon’s six entries include no injury. I accept all of that, and the tracker prints it. A record that includes the operator’s strongest facts is the only kind a town will trust.

But a good record is not the same as a public one, and the difference is what Amazon’s silence exposes. Eight plain engineering questions, five days, two replies about email formatting. A company that plans to fly an 83-pound aircraft over 500 towns and cannot say in writing why it left out a parachute has not earned the benefit of the doubt, whatever the incident count says. I don’t think Amazon’s engineers lack the answers. My read is that the communications team has decided the answers are worse than the silence, and the tracker is built to make silence expensive: a dated, permanent “No answer” on the page every reporter and council staffer will find first.

September 15 is the date to watch. If Wing and Zipline answer, and I expect both will answer at least the generic set, the page will show for the first time how the three aircraft compare on the questions that matter to the people under them, in the operators’ own words. If Amazon lets a second deadline pass, that is a story on its own, and it will run.

The tracker is a standing product, not a story. Next Monday’s sweep adds Wing’s and Zipline’s noise figures, the first batch of FAA jurisdiction lists for the Texas hubs, and whatever the three companies have said by then. If you live under one of these routes, the tips form is the fastest way to reach me.

Sources: FAA Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations, Amazon Prime Air FAA FONSI/RODs (Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City, Arizona), Wing Aviation FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta), Zipline FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Pea Ridge, Salt Lake City, Kannapolis), FAA Part 135 National Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (December 2025).

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Infinite Electronics: Counter-Drone Demand Now Outpaces Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:58:00 GMT

At Commercial UAV Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, I sat down with Gabriel Guglielmi, Vice President of Global Product Management at Infinite Electronics. The company is a privately held US firm that owns 19 different companies, and the common thread between them is that they all provide high-performance connectivity components for many industries, including drones and counter-drones.

19 Companies Across the US and Europe

Part of the group is in Europe and part is in the United States. Of the 19 companies, 11 are originally US companies and eight are European, but most of them sell globally.

When I asked what brought Infinite Electronics to Commercial UAV Expo, Guglielmi pointed to the obvious: unmanned systems, drones, and counter-drones are a fast-growing market, with a lot of money being injected by government, by private individuals, and by commercial companies. “We are here to support that market,” he said.

At the same time, the US is building a supply chain around drones and counter-drones, and Infinite Electronics wants to be one of its key partners, helping drone makers and counter-drone makers build their systems.

NDAA-Compliant Components From Antenna to Payload

In recent years there has been a big push to bring production back to the United States, and a lot of drones now have to be NDAA compliant in order to be used by the government. I asked Guglielmi how the company’s products fit into that.

All of the products Infinite Electronics makes are NDAA compliant, he told me. The company is also bringing some production domestically. That has its challenges, but the direction is clear: the US having its own domestic supply chain, Europe having its own, and China and Asia having theirs.

To show how the parts fit together, the booth had a drone on display. Infinite Electronics doesn’t make drones, but it makes the connectivity products around them. It starts with the antenna receiving the RF signals. There are different types of antennas depending on form factor and frequency range, and the company’s latest one comes in different variants, one of which resists jamming so that the drone keeps its GPS signal.

That matters because losing GPS has become one of the problems the industry faces. When a drone loses GPS, people don’t know where it is, and it could hit a power line or crash into a critical facility.

From the antenna, the signal goes through cable assemblies, with different types of cable and different connectors depending on the application. And because a drone typically carries a payload, whether that’s a camera, a lidar unit, or something else, Infinite Electronics also provides the RF connectivity that goes to the payload, along with USB connections.

Hardware That Lets Radios Hop Frequencies

In conflict zones around the world, jamming drones and trying to get through jamming systems has become a cat-and-mouse game. Some drones I’ve seen use AI to lock onto targets, while others use fiber-optic wires. So I asked what Infinite Electronics does to make the radio signal as resistant to jamming as possible.

The company doesn’t do any software, Guglielmi explained. Everything it does is hardware. What it provides, for example, are antennas with a large band. To resist spoofing, the radio or the board inside the drone hops frequencies very quickly so that the jamming system cannot follow. Infinite Electronics’ job is to provide components that manage a larger band of RF signals, so that the drone maker can change frequency very quickly, depending on the environment and depending on the jamming.

Counter-Drone Demand Now Outpaces Drones

When I asked what I should have asked but hadn’t, Guglielmi steered the conversation to counter-drone technology and walked me through a second mock-up on the booth.

Again, Infinite Electronics doesn’t build counter-drone systems, but the mock-up showed where its parts go. At the top sit the antennas that take in all the RF signals. Here you have to think about direction and frequency range, because you need to detect where the drone is around you. Cables then run down into the boxes, and those can be RF cables or fiber optic, with different types of connectors depending on the use case. On the side, the mock-up carried different protocols, including USB and Ethernet.

Everything feeds into a box with a backplate, power, and a fan. Customers put in whatever they need, such as a computer that processes all the information coming in from the antennas. From there it goes to command and control, which decides what to do with the drone: Is it a threat or not? Should it be countered, or should you just wait?

Guglielmi brought up the FIFA World Cup, where an FBI-led task force took down 700 drones. I added that recently in Leipzig, drones were coming into airports, and that it has been a hot topic in Europe and in the US as well.

Counter-drone also comes up in border control, he said. It’s easier to deploy this type of equipment than to build a wall or station people along it. From Infinite Electronics’ perspective, counter-drone is seeing even higher demand than drones.

One Supplier, Same-Day Shipping, Fast Scale

I asked whether the 19 companies under the umbrella are all mostly focused on the hardware required for connectivity. Guglielmi confirmed that Infinite Electronics is a hardware company. It does a bit of low-level firmware, but it is mostly hardware.

The mock-ups on the booth are there to show customers what’s possible, to get the reaction of “Oh, we can do all this?” One advantage he highlighted is that customers can buy from Infinite Electronics products they would otherwise have to source from multiple different suppliers. The goal is to make it easy: one point to buy all the components.

Most of those components are available for same-day or next-day shipment, or in less than a week. The company can also scale up production quickly through internal facility partners. In this market, a design is turned on and a few months later it’s in production, so time to market is critical. People are now counting in days and weeks, where before they counted in years.

Regional Supply Chains Replace the Global One

The urgency and the frequency have gone up a lot with all the conflicts, so I asked how the US NDAA requirements compare to the requirements some European countries have, and how the company deals with matching different requirements around the world.

Guglielmi had also been at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf, and he said what’s happening is clear: the supply chain is becoming regional. There’s a supply chain for the US or North America. There has to be a supply chain for Europe, eventually including North Africa. Then China is its own supply chain, and Asia is its own supply chain. What used to be a global supply chain is now getting sliced into regional supply chains, and to be a player you have to cope with the different requirements.

Having companies in both Europe and the United States helps. In Europe, Infinite Electronics appears as a European company, and in the US the same. The company also plays in China, in the more commercial market.

This article is based on my interview with Gabriel Guglielmi at Commercial UAV Expo 2026. Watch the full video on the DroneXL YouTube channel, and find more of my work on my DroneXL author page.

DJI Mini 3 Drops To $315 For Labor Day. Skip The Other Two Bundles

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:06:00 GMT

Amazon has cut the DJI Mini 3 with the RC-N1 controller to $315 for Labor Day, $104 under the $419 list price. The listing carries Amazon’s Overall Pick badge, shows more than 1,000 units sold in the past month, and delivers free to Prime members tomorrow.

The same listing offers two other configurations, and neither is worth your money today. The DJI Mini 3 with the screen-equipped DJI RC is $492, down from $549. The Fly More Combo with the DJI RC is $625, down from $719. Both sat far lower in June, and DroneXL logged those prices at the time.

For a first-time pilot, $315 buys a 249-gram aircraft with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, 4K HDR video, and a camera that rotates to shoot vertical natively. It also buys a drone with no obstacle sensors.

Get the DJI Mini 3 for $315 at Amazon

The DJI Mini 3 with the RC-N1 controller. Photo credit: DJI

The $315 Package Is The Only One Of The Three Worth Buying

The base Mini 3 at $315 is $20 under the $335 DroneXL called the lowest price ever last Black Friday. The DJI RC bundle and the Fly More Combo sit $153 and $176 above the floors they hit in June, so their strikethrough prices measure against list, not this summer.

The price history on the base package runs like this. DJI launched the Mini 3 in December 2022 at $469 with the RC-N1, per Billy Kyle’s review of the drone. List settled at $419. Amazon sold it for $369 in June 2025, then $335 for last year’s Black Friday. In March it dropped to $299 during the Spring Sale. In June, Prime Day took it to $269.

So $315 is not the floor. It is $46 above it, and the lowest price since Prime Day ended on June 26. A fair price on a two-and-a-half-year-old aircraft, not a record.

The other two bundles are where a Labor Day shopper gets fooled. DroneXL’s Prime Day 2026 roundup recorded the DJI Mini 3 with DJI RC at $339. Today it is $492, with Amazon showing 20 units left. The Fly More Combo with DJI RC fell to $449 on June 30. Today it is $625, and a strikethrough from $719 makes that look like a gift. It is $176 more than the same box cost ten weeks ago. If you want the screen or the three-battery kit, wait. If you want the drone, the $315 package is the one.

A 1/1.3-Inch Sensor And Native Vertical Video For Under $320

The Mini 3 shares its airframe and sensor size with the Mini 3 Pro. Its 1/1.3-inch CMOS shoots 4K HDR video at 30 frames per second behind an f/1.7 lens. Stills are 12 megapixels, or 48 in high-resolution mode, and the gimbal rotates 90 degrees for full-sensor portrait video.

That vertical mode is the reason the Mini 3 still sells in 2026. A 9:16 clip comes off the card using the whole sensor, not a crop out of a horizontal frame. The DJI Mini 4K, DJI’s cheaper mini at a $299 list price, has a smaller 1/2.3-inch sensor and no vertical shooting. At $315, the Mini 3 costs $16 more than the Mini 4K’s list price. For anyone who posts to Reels or Shorts, that $16 settles it.

The battery is rated at 38 minutes and O2 transmission at 10 km (6.2 miles). DJI rates wind resistance at Level 5, or 38 kph (24 mph), and top speed at 58 km/h (36 mph). Rafael Suárez flew a Mini 3 as his main work drone for two years and wrote in February that he never felt limited by it.

Coastline shot straight out of a DJI Mini 3, no obstacle sensors required. Photo credit: Rafael Suárez

What the $315 box does not contain is any obstacle sensor. There is no ActiveTrack and no APAS, and the only vision sensors on the aircraft point down, for hover and landing. Billy Kyle put it plainly in 2022: “it would likely crash almost immediately because it can’t see.” The pilot is the collision-avoidance system, and that is the same at $315 as it was at $469.

The RC-N1 in this package has no screen. Your phone clips in on top and runs DJI Fly, and that is the reason this bundle is $177 cheaper than the DJI RC version today.

The Mini 3 Sits Outside Every Open FCC Front

At 249 grams the Mini 3 stays under the FAA’s 250-gram registration threshold for recreational flying, which also exempts it from Remote ID. Part 107 pilots register any aircraft they fly for work regardless of weight, and the Mini 3 broadcasts Remote ID once registered. The caveat is the battery.

DJI’s Intelligent Flight Battery Plus stretches flight time to 51 minutes and pushes the aircraft past 249 grams. Fit one and the recreational exemption is gone: the drone must be registered and Remote ID applies. Amazon’s listing flags the weight change in its own bullet points, and the FAA rule does the rest. The US Fly More Combo ships with three standard batteries, so this only bites if you buy the Plus separately.

On the federal side, this is one of the few DJI aircraft with nothing hanging over it. The Mini 3 received its FCC equipment authorization in 2022, three years before the Commission added all foreign-made drones to the Covered List on December 22, 2025, which is why it can still be imported and sold. The open proceeding, PS Docket 26-189, targets previously authorized drones in seven capability categories, among them LiDAR and thermal imaging. The Mini 3 has none of the seven. Comments closed September 2, and DJI filed asking the FCC to rescind the notice outright. The DJI Mini 5 Pro carries forward-facing LiDAR and is inside that docket. The Mini 3 is not.

DroneXL’s Take

Buy the $315 Mini 3 if you want a first camera drone this month, and do not touch the other two configurations until they come back down. That is the whole recommendation, and the price history makes it for me.

Every retailer will call today’s $315 a Labor Day deal, and it is one. But I logged this drone at $335 last November and called it the lowest ever, and Amazon has gone under that figure at least three times since. DJI has not been able to bring a new consumer drone into the US since December, so the aircraft it already has authorized are what it can sell, and they have been discounted in waves since the Spring Sale in March. Whether Black Friday matches June’s $269 is worth watching. Last year’s stopped at $335, so I would not count on it, and I would not wait three months for a possible $46.

A beginner on a $315 drone with no obstacle avoidance will fly it into a tree at some point, and DJI stripped the sensors out for exactly this price point. I still recommend it, because the tree is the lesson. A Mini 3 that cannot see forces the habit every pilot needs and that ActiveTrack lets you skip: keep the aircraft in sight and bring it home yourself. I would rather a new pilot learn that on a $315 airframe than on a Mini 5 Pro that costs more than twice as much.

The bundle pricing is the part that irritates me. Amazon’s strikethrough shows $719 on a Fly More Combo that sold for $449 ten weeks ago, and a Labor Day shopper who did not read DroneXL in June has no way to know that. The badge is accurate against list and misleading against history, which is why the base package gets the recommendation and the other two do not.

Source: Amazon.com DJI Mini 3 listing, September 7, 2026.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Army's $3-a-Shot Laser Cuts Cartel Drone Flights 75%, Military Says

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:21:00 GMT

Cartel drone activity over the Rio Grande Valley has dropped roughly 75% since the US Army started burning drones out of the sky with a high-energy laser on August 25, military officials told CBS News. The laser has destroyed eleven drones in ten days, and the officers running it say the point is to stop the same drones from coming back night after night.

The claim arrives ten days after DroneXL reported the laser’s first three kills, when neither Joint Task Force-Southern Border nor US Northern Command would say whose airspace the shots crossed. That question is still open. So is a new one: 75% of what. Army Col. Robert Felicio, who commands the 130th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade on the border, declined to give CBS News the daily count his unit sees before or after the laser arrived.

The Laser Killed Eleven Drones And Border Traffic Fell By Three Quarters

Joint Task Force-Southern Border has stopped about 300 cartel-linked drones since January 1, most by jamming them back across the river. The Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser destroyed eleven of them between August 25 and early September, and officials say drone traffic thinned sharply after the first three fell.

Felicio told CBS News the change since the laser arrived has been marked. His distinction between jamming and destroying is the whole argument for the weapon: a jammed drone flies home and returns the next night, while a lased one is a pile of parts. “If it’s an immediate threat, I’m getting rid of it,” Felicio said, adding that sending the same drone back only lets the cartel keep using it.

Soldiers tracked one drone passing the same Rio Grande overlook three times before CBS News arrived there Friday. It is the behavior DroneXL described when cartels started fielding FPV drones and their own counter-drone gear last year: cheap quadcopters flown as spotters, over and over, to map where agents are so smugglers can be where they aren’t.

Army Lt. Col. Ray Richards of the Massachusetts National Guard’s 211th Military Police Battalion put the effect in cartel accounting terms. Every drone that does not come home is money spent for nothing. Richards said “disruption to the cartels, that is a huge part of that story.”

Soldiers Aim The Laser With An Xbox Controller For $3 A Shot

The border laser is an Army version of AeroVironment’s LOCUST, vehicle-mounted and aimed from inside. Operators track the target on a tablet-style display with an Xbox controller, then fire. AeroVironment puts each shot at $3, against interceptor missiles that run into the millions per round.

In a demonstration CBS News watched Friday, soldiers launched a small quadcopter over an empty field near the border wall and dropped it from the vehicle. The beam was invisible; the only sign of it was a brief flash where it hit. The recovered drone had a damaged propeller and no battery but was otherwise identifiable.

The $3 figure is real but it is the wrong denominator. Per Laser Wars, a Substack tracking military directed-energy programs and citing budget documents, a single unit costs between $17.4 million and $25 million. The Army just committed to dozens: on September 2 it awarded AeroVironment a $464.8 million production contract for the 30-kilowatt LOCUST X3, the first production contract for a laser weapon in US military history. That deal follows the $96 million Army interceptor award DroneXL covered last October, and it makes AeroVironment the company most exposed to whether the border numbers hold up.

The laser also has a weather problem. Rain and vapor scatter the beam and cut its power. Navy Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, in a Washington Post op-ed published the same day as the Army contract, made the case for lasers as an additional layer with known limits, not a replacement for missiles.

The 75% Drop Is Measured Against A Number Nobody Has Published

Felicio did not disclose how many drones his brigade detected before August 25 or after it, and officials told CBS News the drop could reflect cartels rerouting around the Rio Grande Valley rather than grounding their fleets. The 75% figure is a military estimate with no published baseline.

The last public figure is old. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, then commanding US Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2024 that border incursions probably ran over 1,000 a month, while conceding that nobody knew the actual number. The Rio Grande Valley sector alone logged more than 10,000 incursions in one year, per Border Patrol testimony from 2023. A 75% drop from a thousand a month is a very different story than a 75% drop from a few dozen a night in one sector, and the military has not said which one it is measuring.

Felicio also declined to say which side of the border the eleven drones came down on, offering only that the US government is coordinating with Mexican authorities on tracking threats. That is the formula USNORTHCOM used after the first three kills, and Mexico’s president has already called unilateral US action on Mexican soil a breach of sovereignty.

The FAA Fight From February Is Now Called Coordination

Military officials told CBS News they coordinate regularly with the Federal Aviation Administration, checking its requirements before and after each laser shot so civilian aircraft are never put at risk. Seven months ago that coordination did not exist, and the same program shut an airport and destroyed another agency’s aircraft.

In February the FAA closed El Paso International Airport’s airspace after a laser at Fort Bliss fired at what turned out to be metallic balloons, and two weeks later the same system shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone near Fort Hancock because CBP had not told the Pentagon it was flying. The FAA’s objection then, as CBS News reported at the time, was blunt: a misfire into an airliner would be an instant disaster.

The path from there to eleven operational kills ran through a joint safety test at White Sands in March and the FAA’s April clearance for the military to run anti-drone lasers in US airspace under a signed agreement. What checking the FAA’s requirements means in practice, which airspace gets restricted and for how long before a shot, has not been published.

The threat the laser answers has a body count, though not yet on this side of the river. A report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, documented 221 cartel drone attacks inside Mexico between 2021 and 2025 that killed 77 people. Roughly 8,000 US service members are posted along the border, and officers took CBS News to an overlook to show how little ground separates their positions from the drones’ launch points.

DroneXL’s Take

Ten days ago I wrote that there would be a next engagement announcement, and that what mattered was whether it got more specific about where the drones fell. It did not. It got a percentage instead, and a percentage with no denominator is harder to check than a location.

I want to be fair to the soldiers here. Destroying a spotter drone instead of chasing it home is sound logic, Richards is right that every lost airframe is money out of a cartel’s pocket, and a $3 shot against a consumer quadcopter is the first time in this fight that the defender pays less per engagement than the attacker. If traffic really fell by three quarters in two weeks, that is the most consequential counter-drone result along the US border this year.

But 75% is doing a lot of work for a number with no denominator. The military would not give CBS News a before count or an after count, and it volunteered that the cartels may simply have moved. A drop the Army cannot show a baseline for is a press line, not a finding. My suspicion is that the real number sits in JTF-SB’s detection logs and is perfectly releasable. Northern Command’s commander at the time told the Senate in 2024 that nobody knew how many drones crossed the border, and its deputy commander said last month that the command lacks the sensors to see a drone swarm forming. A command that says it cannot count the threat should not get credit for a precise reduction in it.

The airspace question is also still sitting there, unanswered for the second time. Eleven drones have been destroyed and neither government will say on which bank they fell. Watch two things. Whether the FAA publishes what its pre- and post-shot requirements are, now that the Army is buying dozens of these systems for domestic use. And whether Mexico’s government says anything once the count of destroyed drones climbs past the point where “coordination with all partners” can carry it.

For commercial pilots working anywhere near the southern border, the practical note from August stands, with more force. A weapon that fired at balloons in February has destroyed eleven drones in ten days, and the Army is about to have a lot more of them.

Sources: CBS News, U.S. Army, AeroVironment, Breaking Defense, The Washington Post

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DJI Neo 2 After One Year: The Drone I Fly More Than Any Other

Shawn Air Photography — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:43:00 GMT

Good day folks, Shawn here from Air Photography. The DJI Neo 2 has been out for almost a year now. It launched in mid-November of last year, and I like to do these follow-up reviews sharing my user experience after using a product for the past year. This is a user experience review, not a technical one. If you want to know everything about the Neo 2, my original review covers all of it.

Over the past year I’ve made several videos about the Neo 2: tutorials, demonstrations, and of course a full review. In those videos I talked a lot about how this has become one of my all-time favorite drones from DJI. It is not the most technical drone. There are better, higher-performance drones when it comes to capabilities and video quality. But the Neo 2 is very flexible in how you use it, and it is so convenient to bring along with you. For me that matters, and it is probably why I’ve flown this drone more than any other drone I own.

The Neo 2 Fits Where Bigger Drones Never Get Packed

Traditional drones are big and bulky. They need a proper bag, a controller, spare batteries, and a plan for using them. The Neo 2 is different: because it flies autonomously without a controller, the drone itself is all you need to bring along on a hike or a day trip.

The Neo 2 fits in a hand and in a small bag, which is why it comes along on trips a bigger drone would miss. Photo credit: Air Photography

If you’re out exploring or on vacation, you pull the Neo 2 out of a small bag, capture a quick orbit, do a quick dronie, or use your smartphone for a more traditional shot. Whether you use it or not, it’s easily at hand.

A bigger drone you have to plan for. You need the right kind of backpack, and it isn’t something you bring along if you don’t intend to use it. When you’re out exploring, you don’t want to lug equipment you won’t touch. The Neo 2 is quite different in that respect, and that’s the whole reason it gets so much airtime with me.

Tracking Works Autonomously, by App, or With a Full Controller

The Neo 2 tracks in a few different ways, and all of them work well. Set the mode selector to tracking, launch it from your hand, and it locks on instantly. Connect a remote and you unlock full ActiveTrack for vehicles, longer distances, and different angles.

One of the nice upgrades over the original Neo is the ability to adjust the tracking parameters with the buttons on the side, and this generation gives you a visual preview so you know exactly what those parameters are set to. That makes it very convenient for tracking on a bike or on a hike. I compared both drones side by side in my Neo 2 vs Neo 1 video when the new one launched.

Autonomous tracking on a mountain bike trail, no controller involved. Photo credit: Air Photography

The small, sturdy build makes it extremely durable. Even if it does come into contact with an obstacle, the chance of damage is minimal. It also has obstacle avoidance: LiDAR at the front and basic sensors on the bottom and top, so it does a pretty good job of staying clear of things, and that’s not usually something you have to worry about.

When you have it connected to the app during autonomous tracking, you can change the direction it tracks you from on the fly. Have it tracking you from the rear, then select on the dial to track from the front or side, and it keeps recording while it moves to the new position. That produces some really dynamic footage. You can also use hand gestures to push it off to the side, bring it in closer, or move it back, which I demonstrated in my gesture and voice control guide.

Vehicle tracking needs a controller connected; then the Neo 2 gets the full ActiveTrack toolset. Photo credit: Air Photography

For a more traditional tracking experience, connect it to a remote and you get the full ActiveTrack, which lets you track vehicles as well as track from higher and from different angles. I think this is one of the best drones for tracking, period. The build and the size give you worry-free tracking shots.

One Drone Covers Palm Launch, Controller Flights, and FPV

Flexibility is the big reason I call this an incredible drone. It takes off from your palm and lands back in it when the task is done. Connect a remote and you get a traditional flight with more precision, more range, and cinematic footage. Add goggles and you have FPV.

Paired with a controller, the Neo 2 flies like a traditional camera drone with more range and precision. Photo credit: Air Photography

So you get the best of both worlds: quick, easy shots autonomously, or more cinematic shots when it’s connected to a controller. On top of that, you can connect the Neo 2 to FPV goggles and an FPV controller for a more immersive flight.

It is not a high-performance FPV aircraft by any means. If FPV is the main thing you want to do, this is not the drone to choose. But it’s fun, and you can still capture some beautiful FPV-style shots. That range of ways to fly it and use it is why it has become one of my favorites and the drone I’ve probably flown the most out of everything I own. What I fly changes with what I’m doing on a given day, but the Neo 2 keeps winning that decision.

Firmware Updates Added Apple Watch Control and New Shot Modes

DJI kept adding to the Neo 2 over the past year. A December firmware update brought Apple Watch control, and in June two new automated shots arrived, Highlight Slow-Mo and Helix Close-Up, alongside the usual fine-tuning. The drone I own today does more than the one I unboxed last November.

The DJI Fly app connection is where the new shot modes and Apple Watch control live. Photo credit: Air Photography

I covered the Apple Watch update when it landed, and it fits the way I actually use this drone: hands-free, phone in the pocket, on a bike or on a trail. The two new modes came with firmware v01.00.0700, and DJI fine-tuned a few other things along the way as well.

Battery Life, Sensor Size, and Storage Leave Room for a Neo 3

No product is perfect and the Neo 2 is no exception. Four things could improve on the next generation: flight time, especially in FPV; the half-inch sensor; the lack of a memory card slot; and compatibility with the RC 2 Pro, which DJI still has not added.

Flight time first. I know there’s only so much you can do with an aircraft this small. The battery can only be a certain size before the drone gets too big and heavy. But flight time can be limiting, especially in FPV. Flying FPV takes a lot of power. You get up and flying in sport mode, and the next thing you know it’s warning you the battery is low and you need to come home. When you’re using it autonomously and grabbing little shots here and there, it’s not so much of an issue. Hopefully the next generation squeezes in an extra few minutes.

The built-in prop guards are part of why the Neo 2 shrugs off contact with branches. Photo credit: Air Photography

The sensor could use an upgrade. The footage isn’t bad and I don’t have many complaints, but it is only a half-inch sensor, so video quality is limited. You’re not going to get Mini 5 Pro quality from a sensor that small. A larger sensor next time around would lift the video quality noticeably.

The Neo 2 also has no memory card slot, only internal storage. To be honest, that has not limited me the way I use it. I have never been out flying and filled the memory, and the files from the Neo 2 don’t tend to be large, so you can capture quite a bit on the internal storage. If you’re flying all day, it might be an issue, and the option to expand with a card would be a nice upgrade.

And then the RC 2 Pro. It’s overkill for a drone like this, but if I’m out with a couple of different drones and bring this one too, I’d like to connect them all to one remote instead of carrying several. I was hoping DJI would add it. They haven’t yet.

The Neo 2 Earns Its Place at $229

Price is the bonus. The drone-only kit, for anyone flying it autonomously, runs about $229, which is pretty incredible for the technology and capability you are getting. A full kit with extra batteries and a controller comes in around $399. That puts a capable, reliable drone within reach of beginners.

B-roll like this, shot on the Neo 2, shows up in many of my reviews without anyone noticing. Photo credit: Air Photography

I’ve had a lot of fun with this drone over the year, for personal flying and for work. If you’re a regular on my channel, you’ve probably seen the Neo 2 at work in the background without realizing it. A lot of the B-roll in my e-bike reviews comes from it. I’ve even used it in Spotlight mode with the camera just floating there to grab B-roll. It has become a genuinely valuable tool, which is what I said after 30 days and again when I named it my all-time favorite drone at the end of last year. A year in, that still holds.

For beginners who don’t want to spend a lot to get into the hobby but still want a fully capable and reliable drone, this is it. Those are my thoughts after flying the DJI Neo 2 for the past year. I’d love to hear about your experience: if you picked up a Neo 2, let me know in the comments. Hopefully you enjoyed this video and found it had value. Thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.

This article is based on a video from Air Photography’s YouTube channel. You can find more of Shawn’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.

Germany Plans To Let Utilities Fight Off Drones After Leipzig Bomb

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:14:00 GMT

Germany plans to station rapidly deployable counter-drone units in nine cities and to change the law so that power utilities and defense manufacturers can actively fend off drones themselves, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. The package, which the interior ministry confirmed to Reuters the same day, is Berlin’s first structural answer to the explosive quadcopter that struck a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4.

Dobrindt called Russia’s hybrid attacks a daily reality and said they will grow. The plan also includes a national cyber-defense sensor network the ministry calls a Cyberdome, and wider use of facial recognition and video surveillance at transport hubs.

DroneXL has covered the Leipzig case since August 6, when the first report of a dud bomb on the apron came in. Five weeks on, the physical evidence stands at three drones and two explosives, Germany has formally blamed Russia, and the Bonn consulate closes September 18. The shield is what comes after the attribution.

Federal Police Counter-Drone Units Would Cover Nine Cities

New mobile counter-drone units of the German federal police would be stationed in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Hanover and Cologne, according to interior ministry information cited by Bild am Sonntag. They would guard the airspace over airports and rail stations, plus Berlin’s government district.

The units get vehicles and helicopters so they can move fast, Deutsche Welle reports from the Bild account, and the same report says the shield is meant to defuse drone-borne explosives as well as intercept the aircraft carrying them. Reuters, which confirmed the outline with a ministry spokesperson, describes them as rapidly deployable units for critical transport hubs and government districts. “These attacks will increase, but we can defend and protect ourselves,” Dobrindt told the paper.

This is the third growth announcement for the same force in nine months. Germany stood up its federal police counter-drone unit in Blumberg in December with about 60 officers and a plan to pass 130. On August 18, at the opening of the DLR drone security center in Cochstedt, Dobrindt said the force would double. Sunday’s plan spreads it across nine cities without saying how many officers the finished force will have.

The gap the units are meant to close is the one Leipzig exposed. The airport had a counter-drone system installed on August 4, and the armed quadcopter crossed the fence without it raising an alarm. The charge lay on the apron for roughly four hours before an airport bus driver spotted it.

Critical Infrastructure Operators Would Fend Off Drones Themselves

Under the planned law change, infrastructure operators such as water works and power suppliers would gain legal authority to actively counter drones instead of detecting them alone. That authority now rests with the federal police and other agencies. Tagesspiegel’s account of the Bild report uses the phrase actively fend off.

Neither Bild’s account nor the ministry’s confirmation to Reuters says what fending off means in hardware: jamming, net capture, interceptor drones or kinetic means. Neither includes a bill text or a budget line, and neither gives a date for a cabinet decision. A power plant’s security chief with a jammer is a different proposition from a federal police officer with one, and the plan as reported does not draw that line.

For an American reader the comparison is the Safer Skies Act, Sections 8601 to 8607 of the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. After years of lobbying, it let trained state and local police detect and mitigate drones at covered venues, under federal training and oversight requirements. The stadium owner still cannot touch a drone. Germany’s plan, as Bild describes it, would hand the equivalent of that authority to the venue.

The Cyberdome sits alongside the drone measures: a dense network of digital sensors meant to detect and intercept hacking attempts against government and company networks. The surveillance expansion, with AI-supported video and biometric facial recognition, targets railway stations and other hubs, to pick out suspected saboteurs before they act.

The Leipzig Case Now Runs To Three Drones And A Formal Attribution

On the evening of August 4, a quadcopter carrying a charge struck the wing of a parked Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle and dropped it there. A DHL freighter hit a second drone during a go-around and diverted to Hanover. A third surfaced at Kabelsketal ten days later, near suspected hexogen.

DroneXL’s reporting on the case runs from the first drone beside the An-124 to the three-drone, two-explosive picture that emerged in late August. On September 1, Germany formally blamed Russia, summoned the ambassador and ordered the Bonn consulate general and the Russian House in Berlin closed, NPR reports. Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the attribution clear and legally sound at a party event near Hanover on Saturday.

Moscow’s answer came Sunday. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Vesti channel that the German accusations were “the start of a real war” and that Merz’s push to make Germany Europe’s leading military power amounts to a declaration of war on Russia, per the Tass account Reuters cites. Russia denies any role in Leipzig.

Leipzig/Halle was hit before. On July 20, 2024, a parcel with an incendiary device ignited at the airport’s DHL hub before it could be loaded onto a flight to Britain, part of the Lithuanian-mailed parcel plot now at trial in Vilnius. In August, investigators reported a DNA trace on the Leipzig drone matching evidence from that 2024 case.

The wider count is the ministry’s own. Federal Criminal Police Office president Holger Münch told Bild in December that more than 1,000 suspicious drone flights were logged in Germany in 2025, most of them over military sites and airports. The airport association ADV put the airport share above 140. Asked whether the drones were always Russian, Münch said “we don’t know that with one hundred percent certainty” (translated from the German).

DroneXL’s Take

Leipzig earned Germany this shield. A bomb-carrying drone crossed an airport fence, beat the installed defense system and lay on the apron for four hours, and the plot behind it ran to at least three aircraft. A government that did not answer with helicopters and nine-city units would be failing at its job. I have no quarrel with the mobile police force.

The part I do have a quarrel with is one sentence long in Bild’s account. Water works and power suppliers would get the legal authority to actively counter drones. The way I read it, that is a broader grant of counter-drone authority to private operators than any Western government I can name has proposed, and it arrived in a Sunday newspaper interview without a definition of the word counter.

Consider what the same step took in the United States. The Safer Skies Act took years of lobbying by sports leagues and venue operators, and when it finally passed inside the FY 2026 NDAA it stopped at trained police using approved systems under federal oversight. The venue still has to call someone. That line exists because a jammer does not know whose drone it is jamming, and a stadium operator with one is a hazard to the police helicopter overhead and to every GPS receiver in range. Germany’s plan, as reported, would hand the jammer to the venue.

Set that against Münch’s own number. More than 1,000 suspicious flights in 2025, and the BKA president cannot say they were all Russian. In December he described their purpose as intimidation and information gathering. Some of them were not even that. During the Munich airport closures last October, a drone spotted 700 meters (0.4 miles) from Frankfurt Airport turned out to be a man testing a new hobby drone, Frankfurt police said at the time. He went into the count too. Under the plan as described, the substation operator gets to decide what happens to the next one.

I wrote on Tuesday that rules written in the week after an attack tend to land on the pilots who didn’t carry it out. This one arrived in week five, which is at least a slower reflex. Whether the bill, when a text exists, requires the same training and equipment approval Germany already imposes on its own federal police is the point to read first. If it does, this is a serious plan. If it hands a private operator a jammer and a phrase, Leipzig will have been used to write a law that the Leipzig drone would have ignored.

Sources: Bild am Sonntag, Reuters, Tagesspiegel, Deutsche Welle, NPR

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Amazon Had Two Days To Answer 8 MK30 Safety Questions. It Didn't

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:48:00 GMT

Amazon Prime Air did not answer eight written questions about its MK30 delivery drone by the deadline DroneXL set for Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern. The questions went to three Amazon addresses on Thursday afternoon, the day after the company declined to put an engineer on the record at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Among other things, they asked why a drone carrying a 5-pound box weighs 78 pounds, and why it has no parachute.

Amazon’s communications team replied twice on Friday. Neither reply addressed the questions.

The deadline has passed, and the offer has not. Amazon can still answer, and DroneXL will publish its responses in full. The questions are printed below so that Amazon, and the nearly 500 cities and towns it plans to fly over by the end of the year, can see exactly what was asked.

Amazon's MK30 delivery drone on display at the company's Commercial UAV Expo booth in Las Vegas, September 2026. Photo credit: DroneXL

Amazon Has Not Answered These Eight Questions

DroneXL asked Amazon Prime Air to attribute its answers to a named spokesperson or engineer, and offered a 15-minute recorded video call with an engineer as an alternative. The questions cover the aircraft’s mass, its missing recovery system, its collision record and the fleet Amazon plans to fly.

FAA filings list the MK30 at 77.9 pounds empty and 83.2 pounds at maximum takeoff weight, carrying a 5-pound payload. Zipline’s P2 carries 8 pounds at 55 pounds empty; Wing’s production aircraft carries 2.6 pounds at about 12 pounds. What drives the MK30’s mass, and did Amazon evaluate a lighter airframe for the same 5-pound, 7.5-mile mission?
Does the MK30 carry a parachute or any ballistic recovery system? If not, was one evaluated, and why was it excluded?
After a mid-air collision with a fixed object, such as the crane in Tolleson, the cable in Waco or the building in Richardson, what is the MK30’s designed descent behavior, and which systems remain functional?
What is the status of the FAA and NTSB investigation into the October 1, 2025 Tolleson crane strikes, and what changes did Amazon make to Detect-and-Avoid or operating procedures after Tolleson, Waco and Richardson?
Amazon’s propeller redesign cut perceived noise by roughly half. Did Amazon test whether a smaller, lighter airframe with the same propeller design would be quieter still? What were the results?
Packages are released from about 13 feet. What does Amazon do to verify the drop zone is clear of water, people and pets, and what changed after the August 17 pool delivery in Richmond, Texas?
How many MK30 aircraft are in service today, and how many does Amazon expect to operate to serve nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026?
Who is the on-the-record contact for DroneXL’s future Prime Air coverage?

Amazon Answered The Email About The Email

Amazon’s two Friday replies concerned whether DroneXL had told the company in writing that Wednesday was its last day at the Expo. The first asked DroneXL to resend that message. The second acknowledged it: “I’m not sure why we did not receive.” Neither mentioned the eight questions.

DroneXL had supplied the original message with its full headers on Friday afternoon. The exchange followed the publication of DroneXL’s opinion piece on the MK30 on Thursday, which described Amazon’s decision not to make an engineer available while I was at the show. Amazon disputed that description by phone, off the record. DroneXL corrected one point, on which Amazon was right, and expanded the account of Amazon’s interview offers. The corrected article carries a dated note. Amazon’s communications lead acknowledged those updates in writing on Friday evening, and still did not answer a question about the drone.

The Aircraft Is Why The Questions Matter

An MK30 weighs 78 pounds (35.5 kilograms) empty and carries a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) box, per FAA filings. It has six motors, redundant flight controllers and no parachute. Amazon says no single failure can cause loss of control. That is a claim about motors, not crane booms.

The record is the reason the questions are not academic. Two MK30s struck the same crane in Tolleson within minutes of each other last October. One clipped an internet cable in Waco 13 days after service launched there. One hit an apartment building in Richardson in February and landed on the sidewalk with its propellers turning. No one was seriously hurt in any of them. Each one ended with the airframe on the ground, because an aircraft that has struck a fixed object does not fly home on five motors.

An MK30 on a Tolleson sidewalk after an emergency landing in October 2025, days after Amazon resumed flights following the crane strikes. Photo credit: Austyn C. / ABC15

Amazon’s competitors made different choices with the same problem in front of them. Zipline’s P2 carries a heavier box, 8 pounds, in a lighter aircraft, 55 pounds, and carries a parachute; when one came down in a Greenville, Texas street in July, it arrived under canopy. Wing’s production aircraft weighs about 12 pounds. Whether Zipline’s approach is safer in every case is a fair debate. That Amazon will not join the debate is the finding here.

Five Hundred Cities Multiply Every Open Question

Amazon said on August 19 that Prime Air flies thousands of deliveries a day from 11 sites and will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end, a sixfold footprint. Every flight is an MK30 over someone’s street. Amazon has not said how many aircraft that takes.

That number was question seven. Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, by its own count. It matters because incidents are a rate, and the rate gets multiplied by the fleet. Amazon called the second pool delivery in a year uncommon, which is a claim about frequency that nobody outside Amazon can check without knowing how many flights there are. As DroneXL noted when the expansion was announced, the 500 figure counts every municipality inside each hub’s 7.5-mile radius, so the fleet is smaller than the headline. How much smaller is the answer Amazon has.

Every one of those towns has a council, and every council can ask the eight questions above. DroneXL will publish a guide for them, operator-neutral, with the same questions put to Zipline, Wing and Wingcopter.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL is not against drone delivery. I went to Düsseldorf and Las Vegas to look at this aircraft because I want it to work. Prescriptions flown to people who cannot drive are the drones-for-good story this publication exists to tell, and Zipline is doing it with a parachute on board.

Amazon deserves two things said in its favor. Its redundancy is real engineering, and in every MK30 incident on record, no one on the ground was seriously hurt. Those facts are in the article because they are true, and they are not answers to the questions.

What I cannot explain is the silence. A company confident in its design answers the parachute question in one paragraph, because the engineers who made that decision have the paragraph ready. Amazon has had the question since Thursday, had an engineer available for a Thursday it knew I would miss, and spent Friday on the delivery status of an email. The explanation that fits that record is a company that would rather not have this conversation in public, and I would like to be wrong about that.

The MK30 at Amazon's Prime Air booth in Dusseldorf in March 2026, backed by the company's "Gravity Shmavity" banner. Photo credit: DroneXL

The fix is not complicated. If the MK30 hits a power line or a crane over a neighborhood in Boise or suburban Cook County, an 83-pound aircraft is coming down. Obstacle avoidance and six motors are the layers meant to keep that from happening. A parachute is the layer for when they don’t, Zipline flies with one, and Wing’s aircraft weighs a fraction as much. Amazon should build the safest drone it can, which likely means a recovery system, and it should be able to say so on the record.

The offer stands. Eight questions, answers published in full, whenever Amazon is ready. Between now and December, the councils of nearly 500 towns will have the chance to ask them too.

Sources: Amazon, FAA, DroneXL correspondence with Amazon Prime Air

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

Zipline Drone Ends Flight On Houston Highway The Way Amazon's Can't

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:08:00 GMT

A Zipline delivery drone came down under its emergency parachute onto the southbound lanes of Highway 6 near Timber Creek Place Lane in Cypress, northwest of Houston, on Friday morning, September 4. Nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, Zipline says, and law enforcement agencies told KPRC 2 News they never got a single call about an aircraft sitting in a traffic lane.

A photo shot through a windshield shows the white Platform 2 Zip lying across the lane, wing and rotor booms still attached, with its orange canopy stretched toward the curb and cars a few lengths ahead. A second photo shows the aircraft on the grass verge with the parachute folded beside it. Zipline says the Zip was on its way to pick up an order when it hit what the company calls a midflight issue and deployed the parachute as designed. The cause has not been determined.

Two days ago I published a piece from Commercial UAV Expo on Amazon Prime Air’s 83-pound MK30, which flies over US neighborhoods without a parachute. Zipline’s aircraft is 20 pounds lighter and carries one.

Zipline Says A Midflight Issue Triggered The Parachute

Zipline told KPRC 2 News the aircraft encountered a midflight issue on its way to a pickup, deployed its parachute and landed without injuring anyone or damaging property. A spokesperson said such landings, which the company calls paralands, are rare and part of the redundant safety system.

The descent followed Zipline’s published protocol. Its safety fact sheet says a Zip that cannot resolve an in-flight problem deploys its parachute and sounds an audible alert on the way down, while a team member is dispatched to retrieve it. The same document puts the fleet’s record at more than 135 million autonomous miles without injury. The statement Zipline gave KPRC on Friday rounds that up to 140 million miles and more than 2.5 million deliveries, and lists the layers under it: redundant propellers, redundant communications equipment, a parachute, and 500 safety checks a second. “Safety is Zipline’s top priority,” the statement opens.

The Zipline Zip after being moved to the grass beside Highway 6 in Cypress, Texas, wing and rotor booms intact, with its deployed parachute bundled beside the fuselage. Photo credit: Diana Acosta via KPRC 2 News

Storms moved through the Houston area on Friday. A company spokesperson said weather is not believed to have played a role. Zipline has not said what did, and KPRC has asked the FAA for comment.

Diana Acosta, a Zipline customer who saw the aircraft on the ground, told KPRC it didn’t hit a car and didn’t fall on anybody. “It made me kind of nervous,” she said, before adding that somebody didn’t get their food on time.

The Zip Weighs 20 Pounds Less Than Amazon’s MK30 And Carries A Parachute

Zipline’s P2 Zip weighs 55 pounds (25 kilograms) empty and under 63 pounds (28.6 kilograms) at maximum takeoff weight, per the FAA’s February 2026 re-evaluation of Zipline’s Arkansas operation. Amazon’s MK30 weighs 83 pounds (37.8 kilograms) at takeoff, per FAA filings. It has no parachute.

I put those figures side by side on Thursday, after Amazon spent two days at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas declining to put an engineer on the record about the MK30 while I was in the same hall. Amazon’s argument is that six motors and redundant flight controllers mean no single point of failure can cause loss of control. The MK30’s actual failures were collisions: two into a crane in Tolleson, one into an apartment wall in Richardson, Texas. Redundancy does nothing for an aircraft that has already hit something, and those MK30s came down at whatever speed gravity chose.

Friday’s Zip came down at parachute speed. Whatever went wrong on board, the aircraft ended its flight slowly enough for the driver who stopped behind it to photograph it through her windshield, canopy on her hood, and the wing was still on the fuselage when it reached the grass. That is the case for carrying a canopy’s weight on a delivery drone, and it is the case Amazon has not answered.

Houston Is Zipline’s Second Texas Paraland In Six Weeks

Zipline launched Houston service in Cypress on April 29, 2026, with a First Flight early-access program for 5,000 residents and partners including Chipotle and Walmart. Friday’s landing is the first Zipline incident DroneXL has recorded in Houston, the second in Texas since July, and the first on a highway.

On July 26, a Zipline Zip flying for Walmart parachuted onto a residential street in Greenville, northeast of Dallas, and settled about three feet (0.9 meters) from a parked pickup. A resident heard the alert, walked out of her garage and watched it land. Nobody was hurt there either, and a Walmart employee arrived quickly to cover the aircraft with a tarp.

The Texas network has grown fast enough that these events were always going to happen over somebody’s street. Zipline spread to more than 20 municipalities across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in under a year, then opened Houston in April and added Austin in June. Zipline says its Zips fly at up to about 300 feet (91 meters), so the canopy had time to open and the aircraft had time to drift. Where it drifted was into the southbound lanes of Highway 6, with traffic visible ahead of it in the photo.

DroneXL’s Take

Two Zipline paralands in Texas in six weeks, both under canopy and nobody hurt, is the safety record working in public. I said the Greenville landing was good news for Zipline, and I’ll say it again about Cypress. The last-resort layer worked after everything upstream of it failed.

The concession is the road. A parachute does not pick its landing spot, and a 60-pound aircraft drifting onto a highway on a Friday morning is a worse place to end a flight than a quiet street in Greenville. Had a car been under it, Zipline’s “no injuries” line would read very differently, and no amount of canopy changes the fact that the Zip was over traffic when it quit. The position survives anyway, because the alternative on offer in this industry is not a delivery drone that never fails. It is Amazon’s, which fails in an aircraft 20 pounds heavier and arrives at terminal velocity. Given a choice between a parachute over Highway 6 and no parachute over Highway 6, every driver on that road on Friday would pick the parachute.

What I keep coming back to is the detail KPRC put in its second paragraph: nobody called the police. A drone landed in a traffic lane with an orange canopy across the asphalt, and nobody thought it warranted a call. Part of that is a soft landing that left nothing on fire. Part of it is that Cypress has had these aircraft overhead since April and has stopped treating them as an event. That familiarity is the most valuable thing Zipline has built in Texas, and it is fragile.

Which is why the silence on the cause matters. Zipline told KPRC the midflight issue has not been determined and that weather is not believed to be a factor, and it has said nothing more specific than those two words. I made the same request after Greenville and I’ll repeat it: publish what happened to this aircraft, in plain language, the way Zipline publishes its mileage numbers. A company that runs 500 safety checks a second has the telemetry to say what tripped on Friday. A parachute landing you explain is a demonstration. One you leave at “midflight issue” becomes whatever the neighborhood decides it was.

The regulatory backdrop makes this worth getting right now. The Transportation Department’s BVLOS rule is delayed, and Amazon intends to fly the MK30 over nearly 500 cities and towns by December. Every paraland that ends with a photo and no injuries is evidence for the version of Part 108 that lets delivery drones fly over neighborhoods. Every unexplained one is evidence for the version that keeps them over fields.

Sources: KPRC 2 Click2Houston, Zipline safety fact sheet, FAA environmental re-evaluations (Zipline Pea Ridge, Amazon Pendleton), Houston Chronicle, Community Impact

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DJI Mavic 4 Pro Shot Down in Alabama, GoPro Sells 90% of Itself, UAS Sentry Launches Nexus Observer: This Week in Drone News

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:54:54 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week: a DJI Mavic 4 Pro gets shot out of the sky in Alabama, GoPro sells 90% ownership, and UAS Sentry launches a new portable Remote ID detection tool. Let’s get to it.

A DJI Mavic 4 Pro Gets Shot Out of the Sky in Alabama

Up first, a real estate photographer in Athens, Alabama, had his drone shot down mid-job. Michael Gardner was flying his DJI Mavic 4 Pro off Lindsay Lane on Saturday, August 29, when he heard a gunshot. His video feed went haywire and the drone dropped out of the sky. He got it back two days later, after someone else found it.

No shooter has been identified yet, and Gardner is filing a police report and reaching out to the FAA.

Now, remember, shooting at a drone is a federal felony. It falls under the same laws that protect airliners, and it carries up to 20 years in prison. Courts have already sent people to prison for this exact thing. If someone shoots at your drone, land safely if able, document everything, and call the police and the FAA.

GoPro Sells 90% of Itself to Starman Optical

Next up, GoPro is selling 90% of, well, itself. The company announced a merger with Starman Optical, a private US optics company, paying GoPro shareholders $285 million and wiping out $92 million in debt. GoPro keeps about 10% of the combined company and stays on the Nasdaq.

The rescue comes after a rough stretch. GoPro stock is down 96% since its 2014 debut, and in June, the company warned it might not survive another 12 months. In July, founder Nick Woodman put in $20 million of his own money just to keep the lights on.

The new plan points GoPro’s optics at defense, government, and AI data centers. GoPro says it will keep supporting existing cameras, but makes no promises about future models.

UAS Sentry Unveils the Nexus Observer Portable Remote ID Detector

UAS Sentry unveiled a new portable Remote ID detection unit at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. It’s called the Nexus Observer, and it costs $1,595.

It uses two antennas and two separate processors to scan both the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz bands that drones use to broadcast Remote ID. It has a built-in touchscreen, so no phone or app is required to see a drone’s location and its pilot’s location in real time. The unit runs over 12 hours on battery and comes in a water-resistant case. Buyers get two years of cloud access included, with alerts, geofencing, and flight replay.

Drone detection tech is getting cheaper and easier to deploy, which means Remote ID compliance matters more than ever if you’re flying.

No Post Flight this week since Jason, Ben, and I are out, and no Monday Live for Labor Day weekend. Have a great weekend and we will see you for the News Update next week.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full video on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Wing Claims Largest US Drone Network As Amazon Promises 500 Cities

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:06:00 GMT

Wing told its followers on X on September 3 that it is making “thousands of deliveries to homes each day” and building the largest residential drone delivery network in the United States, five weeks after opening Greater Orlando with Walmart as its first Florida market. The post named no new store or date. It did put a daily rate, however rounded, on a program mostly described in lifetime totals and store counts.

The timing is the story. Two weeks earlier, Amazon promised Prime Air in nearly 500 US cities and towns by December 31, the loudest counterclaim yet to Wing’s “largest” language, and one that lands in Texas and Georgia metros Wing already serves.

Walmart’s Own Quarter Backs The Thousands-A-Day Figure

Walmart said on May 29 that it had passed one million drone deliveries, with just over 40 percent completed in the fiscal quarter ending April 30. That is more than 400,000 flights in 89 days, roughly 4,500 a day across Wing and Zipline, from 66 stores in four states.

So Wing’s “thousands” is arithmetic rather than marketing, as long as Wing carried most of that volume. Walmart does not break the million out by partner. Zipline flies Dallas-area and Arkansas stores; Wing flies Dallas-Fort Worth, metro Atlanta, Greater Houston, Charlotte, and since July, Central Florida. Wing’s own lifetime count, per its June newsroom post, is more than one million commercial deliveries, a global figure that includes Australia.

Walmart U.S. chief David Guggina gave the same count on the May 21 earnings call. Florida now makes five.

Amazon’s 500-City Map Is The Claim Wing Is Answering

Amazon announced on August 19 that Prime Air will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, up from 11 sites in seven states. Each site covers a circle of about 175 square miles (453 square kilometers), and every municipality inside it counts toward the total.

Wing counts differently. Its unit is the Walmart store: 66 flying across both of Walmart’s drone partners as of May, Orlando’s two since July, and a contract for more than 270 locations by 2027. Each hub holds up to 18 aircraft and serves a radius of about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers). Amazon’s volume figure, from Prime Air vice president David Carbon, is “hundreds of thousands” of packages this year. As DroneXL noted when the 500-city plan landed, a municipality count and a delivery count measure different things. A circle is also easier to draw than a hub is to permit.

Orlando Still Runs From Two Stores On A 2.5-Pound Payload

Wing’s Florida service launched July 29 from Walmart Supercenters in Apopka and Clermont, covering what the companies put at more than 50,000 homes, businesses, and apartment buildings. The aircraft flying there carries up to 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms) per trip, half the ceiling Wing says its larger drone will reach.

Three more stores were due “in the coming weeks”: Ocoee, a second Clermont location on US Highway 27, and Haines City. Wing’s Orlando service page still lists Apopka and Clermont as the only communities served, and neither company has announced the other three as live. DroneXL’s July 29 report has the launch details.

The next market is already meeting resistance. Spectrum News reported on August 19 that Wing was finalizing its initial Walmart sites around St. Louis after presentations to the City of Maplewood and the City of St. Charles, over objections from some Maplewood residents. It is the same fight DroneXL covered in North Carolina in June, one parking lot at a time.

DroneXL’s Take

“Largest” is the wrong contest. The number worth having is the one Wing dropped in as an afterthought: a rate. Amazon’s 500 cities is a map. Wing’s thousands a day is throughput, and the cost of throughput is what killed Walmart’s last Florida partner. DroneUp was spending about $30 to fly a package against a $7 target when it shut 18 hubs in 2024. Neither Wing nor Amazon publishes cost per delivery, so a daily rate is the closest thing to an economics number either has offered.

Amazon’s claim is not empty. Prime Air keeps opening sites. But I have watched Amazon reveal launch sites in Tracy, California and Richmond, Virginia that were missing from the list it published with the 500-city promise. The map is still being drawn. My read is that Wing posted when it did because Amazon’s number was getting repeated without arithmetic behind it, and Walmart’s quarter hands Wing some.

The tell will be Walmart’s November earnings call. The last verified figures came in May: 66 stores in four states and 400,000 flights in a quarter. A store count north of 100 and another quarter of growth would make “thousands a day” look conservative. Flat numbers, with Orlando’s expansion stores still dark and St. Louis still in hearings, would mean the largest network in America stopped growing while its competitor drew circles. Amazon’s own deadline, December 31, comes six weeks later.

Sources: Wing on X (September 3 post), Wing newsroom, Walmart, Walmart Q1 FY27 earnings call, Spectrum News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DJI Power 2000 Now Plugs Into Your Wall Socket. Not in America

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:52:00 GMT

DJI opened IFA 2026 in Berlin on Friday by putting its Power 2000 power station on stage as a grid-tied home battery, bundled for the first time with DJI-branded solar panels and a microinverter, and closed the presentation with a black slide reading “Beyond Batteries. The next generation of power is coming.” The kit rolls out in Germany first. The grid-tied mode behind it works in a handful of European countries and nowhere in the United States.

The 2,048 Wh station itself is not new. DJI launched it in July 2025 at $1,299 as a portable pack for drone crews and blackout backup. What changed on Friday is the pitch. A wall-mounted diagram at DJI’s booth in Hall 20-129 runs a line from a PV module through a microinverter into a Schuko wall socket, then into the Power 2000, then out to a refrigerator and a TV, with the grid and a smart meter hanging off the top. DJI’s slide puts the payoff at €680 a year in electricity savings, on DJI’s own math, with a paragraph of disclaimers underneath.

DroneXL has covered DJI Power since the first Power 1000 leak in December 2023, and the framing has moved a long way from faster Mavic battery charging. The world’s largest drone maker spent this stage slot on a home appliance.

DJI Power Builds a Balcony Solar Kit Around the Power 2000

DJI’s first balcony solar system pairs its own solar panels and a grid-tied microinverter with the DJI Power 2000, sold in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. The panels feed the flat through a standard Schuko socket, and the station stores whatever the household is not using at the time.

The IFA announcement DJI published on August 27 listed a new balcony solar system alongside the Power 1000 Mini, Power 1000 V2, Power 2000 and Power Expansion Battery 2000 as the products visitors could handle at the booth from September 4 to 8. pv magazine Deutschland reported on August 28 that DJI would start the rollout in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. DJI had published no price and no ship date for the kit as of Friday morning, and the stage presentation, posted as video by the DJI Power account on X, added neither.

The grid-tied storage function is the older half of the story. DJI added it to the Power 2000 by firmware in 2025, first for Germany, France and Spain, and its IFA 2025 release described the same loop: charge from panels by day, feed the surplus to the grid once the pack is full. What Berlin adds is DJI selling the panels and the inverter under its own name, so a renter can buy the whole plug-in system from one box. DroneXL covered the Power 2000’s launch in July 2025, when the balcony use case was a footnote.

The German market DJI is walking into has rules that make the pitch work. Since Solarpaket I took effect in May 2024, a plug-in solar system can feed up to 800 W into a household circuit through an ordinary wall socket, with a simplified online registration. The Power 2000’s 3,000 W continuous output and 22,528 Wh expansion ceiling with add-on batteries sit far above what a balcony rig needs, which is the sales argument: the same box that runs a film set can sit in a Berlin flat soaking up midday solar.

DJI Claims €680 a Year in Savings, on Its Own Arithmetic

DJI’s headline slide shows 2,160 kWh of annual solar generation, a 90 percent self-consumption rate and €680 in estimated annual electricity bill savings for a household running its balcony kit with a Power 2000, and every one of those figures is footnoted as a DJI Power internal calculation.

The footnotes deserve as much attention as the numbers. In DJI’s own words, solar generation varies with location, weather, installation and shading, and the savings figure excludes the purchase price of the equipment, installation, maintenance, taxes, fees and incentives. The €680 is a best-case model of the electricity bill alone, before you subtract what the kit cost.

The 90 percent self-consumption figure is the one worth understanding, because it is the whole reason to put a battery behind a balcony system. A bare plug-in setup exports most of its midday output to the grid for nothing, since nobody is home to use it. A battery holds that output for the evening. Whether a household gets to 90 percent depends on how much it consumes and when, which is exactly what DJI’s footnote says.

DJI has not published the panel wattage or the electricity tariff behind the 2,160 kWh and €680 figures. Without those inputs the savings claim cannot be checked.

DJI Power Also Built a Cable for Drone Ground Stations

One slide was aimed at drone operators. It introduced a DJI Power SDC to PoE Power Cable. The cable lets a DJI power station feed the DJI O4 Ground Station directly over Power over Ethernet, so a remote relay site can run with no grid connection at all.

The slide paired the cable with what it called DJI Power’s next-generation power station, the same unannounced product the closing teaser pointed at. The O4 Ground Station launched on June 16 as a PoE-powered relay and gateway for Dock 3 and Matrice 400 fleets, and its published specs put typical gateway-mode draw at 17.1 W, a 7 W low-power mode, and 65 W maximum with cold-weather heating on. Its built-in backup battery lasts about 45 minutes in gateway mode.

Those numbers are why a power station makes sense in front of it. Divide the Power 2000’s 2,048 Wh by the 17.1 W typical draw and you get roughly 120 hours, about five days, before conversion losses and heating eat into it. Add a solar panel and a ground station on a ridgeline stops needing a trench to the nearest outlet. It is the first DJI Power accessory built for ground infrastructure rather than for topping up aircraft batteries.

DJI Says Its Battery Business Rests on 15 Years of Drone Batteries

DJI presented the Power line as an extension of its drone battery engineering and put three numbers behind it: more than 15 years of battery expertise, more than 700 battery patents and applications, and more than 10 million users worldwide. The footnotes attribute all three to DJI internal records.

The 10 million figure is the one to read carefully. The footnote says DJI has served more than 10 million users across its product portfolio, which means drones and cameras, not power stations. It is a statement about DJI’s installed base. DJI has never published Power unit sales, and Friday did not change that.

The engineering lineage is real enough. The Power 2000’s 10 ms UPS switchover and the 1-ton static load rating on the case date from the July 2025 launch, and DJI Power’s Tongxi Lu told T3 in May that the division shares its battery management and fast-charging engineering with the drone side. She also said most Power buyers still come from DJI’s drone and camera base, and that reaching people who have never owned a DJI product is the division’s biggest problem. A balcony kit sold to renters in Germany is the clearest answer to that problem DJI has shown so far.

Americans Can Buy the Battery, Not the Home Energy Part

The Power 2000 stays legal to buy in the United States because its FCC authorization predates the December 22, 2025 Covered List action, but grid-tied mode is not enabled on US units, DJI has announced no US balcony kit, and Friday’s teased hardware needs a grant DJI cannot get.

The station on a US retailer’s shelf is the same hardware as the one on stage in Berlin, minus the firmware feature that makes the whole IFA pitch work. DJI’s grid-tied function shipped for Germany, France and Spain first and has spread to other European markets since. A grid-interactive inverter sold in the US would also need UL 1741 listing and utility interconnection approval, a separate process from anything the FCC does.

The newer Power products show where the wall sits. DJI launched the Power 1000 Mini globally in April, and DJI spokesperson Daisy Kong told The Verge at the time that US authorization was pending, as DroneXL reported on April 20. That piece told readers to watch the status for 90 days. The window closed in late July, and DJI has announced no US launch for the Power 1000 Mini since. Whatever the next generation of power turns out to be, if it has an app it has a radio, and it faces the same gate.

The US plug-in solar market DJI is skipping is starting to exist. Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar systems in March 2025, Virginia signed its own law in April 2026, and several more states have followed this year. A Chinese company selling a balcony battery into American apartments would land in the middle of the same security fight that already covers its drones and its robot vacuums. DJI knows that, which is the likeliest reason Berlin got the announcement and America got nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

DJI is spending its IFA stage on home batteries because the drone business has a ceiling and this one, so far, does not. Aircraft answer to airspace rules and, in the United States, to a Covered List blocking every new model. A balcony battery answers to none of that.

Look at what the company has shipped outside of aircraft in the last 18 months. The Avinox M2S and M2 drive units pushed its e-bike motor business to 1,500 W and 150 Nm. The ROMO robot vacuum became a real product line, with a second generation debuting in Berlin this week. The Osmo 360 II launched on August 13 at 8K60. And now a company that sells drones is selling solar panels to tenants in Berlin. Every one of those products is DJI’s battery or motor engineering wrapped in a new case.

The pitch on Friday’s stage is the one I find most convincing of the lot. DJI’s drone battery experience is real, and a home battery is a product where the boring engineering is the entire product. The balcony market in Germany is large, regulated in DJI’s favor since 2024, and already contested by Anker Solix and EcoFlow, the same names DJI went up against when it entered portable power stations in 2024. This is the shortest line DJI could draw from what it already knows how to build to a market that is growing.

Yes, the €680 slide is a best-case number wrapped in disclaimers, and DJI has not shown a price. Every company in this category does the same. The question for a buyer is whether the hardware is good, and DJI’s power stations have been.

The problem is the same one that has followed every DJI announcement since December: none of this reaches American buyers, and the gap is widening from drones into things that are not drones at all. I do not think the Covered List was written with balcony batteries in mind. My read is that it does not need to be. As long as DJI cannot get a new FCC grant, every product with a Wi-Fi chip is blocked by default, and a home energy system that talks to a smart meter is more radio, not less. Americans will watch DJI’s power business grow up in Europe the way they watched the Osmo Pocket 4P and the Mic Mini 2S.

The teaser gives us something to watch. DJI said the next generation of power is coming. Whether that station ever gets a US listing is the test. If it does, DJI found a path through the authorization gate for products without a drone attached. If it lands in Germany and stays there, what this article describes is the pattern for everything DJI builds from now on.

Sources: DJI (IFA 2026 announcement, Power 2000 press release), DJI Power on X, DJI Enterprise (O4 Ground Station specifications), pv magazine Deutschland, T3

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

TSA Plans Closed-Door Part 108 Security Talks After the Rule Lands

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:42:00 GMT

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is recruiting drone operators for a series of closed-door technical roundtables on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) security, and the meetings will not happen until after the Part 108 final rule publishes. The notice appeared in the Federal Register on September 4. Requests to participate are due October 19.

TSA wants the sessions to shape model language for the TSA-approved security programs that Part 108 operators will need. In plain terms, the security half of the rule does not yet come with instructions for complying with it, and TSA plans to write those instructions after the rule is final, in rooms it fills and closes itself.

DroneXL has covered the TSA piece of Part 108 since the joint proposal dropped in August 2025, and this is the first public signal of how TSA intends to turn its proposed security program requirement into something an operator can actually submit. Vic Moss of the Drone Service Providers Alliance posted the notice to LinkedIn on Thursday evening with one line: “expect another Part 108 delay.” The document supports a narrower reading, and a more useful one.

TSA Picks the Participants and Closes the Door

TSA will validate every participant as a representative of a BVLOS operator or an industry association, cap attendance at two people per organization, and require a non-disclosure agreement before anyone enters. Each roundtable is closed to the public under Sensitive Security Information rules, and TSA may trim the list further.

The notice, signed September 1 by Scott C. Gorton, TSA’s acting assistant administrator for strategy, policy, and engagement, says TSA will invite “relevant associations and corporate representatives known to TSA through its regular stakeholder engagements.” Operators flying BVLOS today under FAA waivers or exemptions, and those planning to seek a Part 108 permit or certificate, may also ask in. Kristine Adams at BVLOS@tsa.dhs.gov is the contact, and TSA may hold the sessions in person with a virtual option or virtually only.

TSA closes the meetings under 49 U.S.C. 114(r) and 49 CFR part 1520, the statute and regulation that protect Sensitive Security Information. Participants must qualify as covered persons under 49 CFR 1520.7 or be designated as such by TSA for the event, and their duty to protect what they hear survives the meetings. The sessions are not a deliberative body: TSA wants individual views rather than group recommendations, and the notice draws an explicit line between this format and a federal advisory committee. There is no public comment period attached.

The Security Program Language Does Not Exist Yet

TSA proposed two security requirements in the August 2025 joint notice with the FAA: vetting of certain covered personnel and a TSA-approved security program for certain operators. TSA is still finalizing both, and the model approaches for meeting them will be built from what participants bring to the roundtables.

That sequencing is the news. The roundtables are meant to surface the organizational, structural, technological, and physical methods operators already use to secure BVLOS flights, so TSA can turn them into model approaches other operators can copy. TSA says outright that some procedures operators already follow under FAA waivers may adequately satisfy parts of its security program requirements. An operator reading that sentence in October 2025 would have found it hard to believe.

The proposal that sentence softens was the most contested security text in the rulemaking. As DroneXL reported when the comment period closed, the TSA provisions drew formal opposition from Amazon, Walmart, DoorDash, Wing, and Zipline, with Wing warning that every package handler in a drone delivery chain could face TSA enrollment, and two leaders of the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus asking TSA to withdraw and start over. Whether the final text narrows that scope is unknown until it publishes. What the roundtable notice shows is that even a narrowed version will arrive without a compliance template.

The FAA Rule Sits at OIRA With Meetings Booked Through September 16

The FAA’s final Part 108 rule has been under White House review since July 10, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs still listed it as pending on September 4. OIRA’s calendar shows stakeholder meetings on the rule booked through September 16, which makes publication before mid-month unlikely.

OIRA’s entry for the rule flags a statutory legal deadline the FAA has already missed, on top of the 240-day clock in Executive Order 14307 that expired February 1. The meeting log for the rulemaking runs to 51 sessions across both stages, with final-rule meetings held August 28, September 1 and September 3, and more booked for September 8, 14, 15 and 16. OIRA cancels pending meetings if a review wraps up first, so the calendar can shorten, but as booked it points to no clearance before mid-September. Day 90 of the standard review window falls on October 8. TSA’s October 19 deadline for roundtable requests lands 11 days after that, and TSA says it may adjust the registration period once its own final rule publishes.

The slip has a documented history. The FAA reopened the comment file for two weeks in January on electronic conspicuity and right-of-way, blew through its February deadline over the same right-of-way fight, and in August the Department of Transportation’s chief of staff told the Commercial Drone Alliance the delay was deliberate, to avoid hard-coding today’s technology into the rule. Roughly 3,100 comments were filed against the original proposal, which DroneXL broke down section by section when it published.

One gap in the record matters here. TSA’s companion rule, RIN 1652-AA80, does not appear as a separate entry on OIRA’s pending-review list as of September 4, and TSA’s notice describes its own final rule only as forthcoming, with no date. Whether the TSA text travels inside the FAA package or has not been submitted at all, TSA has not said.

DroneXL’s Take

Moss is right that this notice is bad news for anyone waiting to fly BVLOS at scale, and he is pointing at the wrong calendar. The FAA rule can publish in October and still leave operators unable to comply with its security half, because the model program does not exist.

It will be drafted after publication, from a room TSA picks, under NDA. The delay is real. It moves from the Federal Register to TSA’s approval queue, where nobody can see it.

I will give TSA the statute. Security-vulnerability discussions belong under SSI, and 49 U.S.C. 114(r) does not leave the agency much choice about closing the room. What the statute does not require is an invitation list built from the regulator’s existing contacts, or a two-seat cap that a national retailer fills as easily as a two-person mapping shop and benefits from far more. Pete Meachum stood in front of the Commercial Drone Alliance five weeks ago and said Secretary Duffy wants no lock-in protection for incumbents. A closed roundtable seeded from TSA’s own contact list is how lock-in gets written without anyone deciding to write it.

The most useful sentence in the notice is TSA’s own concession that what waiver holders already do may satisfy parts of the security program. That is what Wing and Zipline argued last fall, and it is the door small operators should walk through: the operators with years of waiver-based BVLOS logs hold exactly the evidence TSA says it is looking for. Request a seat before October 19, bring the procedures you already fly by, and make TSA say on the record why they fall short.

Three dates now govern the security half of Part 108. September 16 is the last OIRA meeting on the books. October 8 is day 90. October 19 is TSA’s cutoff. If the FAA rule clears OIRA before October 8, the roundtables can convene this fall; if it does not, the FAA rule slips into a 30-day extension and TSA’s process slips with it. My read is that the second outcome is the one this notice is quietly built for.

Sources: Federal Register, Reginfo.gov, Federal Register (NPRM, 90 FR 38212), Vic Moss via LinkedIn.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DJI Fixes Pocket 4P FrameTap And Mic Conflict, Users Find It First

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:26:00 GMT

DJI has shipped Osmo Pocket 4P firmware that lets the Osmo FrameTap remote and a DJI Mic 3 or Mic Mini 2S transmitter connect to the camera at the same time, and the change appears in none of DJI’s published changelogs. Pocket 4P owners in Japan found it this week and posted the screenshots. Until now the remote and DJI’s wireless microphones could only take turns on the camera, which made the Vlog Combo that bundles both a kit you could not fully use in one shot.

The find surfaced on September 3 from Adobe Community Evangelist Yoshihiko Ichii, a Japanese video producer who runs the country’s Premiere Pro user group, who posted a photo of his Pocket 4P with a Mic 3 transmitter linked while the FrameTap showed a live 4K/60 feed. His message, translated from Japanese: “DJI, I think you should announce it more loudly.” The post had 15,000 views by Friday morning.

Japanese Pocket 4P Owners Confirmed The Change Before DJI Mentioned It

Three Pocket 4P owners in Japan posted the same finding this week. Ichii’s photo shows one Mic 3 transmitter and the FrameTap connected together. A second owner, posting as @fridaysbeer, went further: two Mic 3 transmitters linked at 100% while the FrameTap streamed the camera view.

That second post puts the firmware at V01.01.71.31 and adds the limit that still stands: the FrameTap and the DJI Mimo phone app cannot hold a connection to the camera simultaneously. A third owner, @yuu_u001 of Photo Journal PRESS, replied to Ichii that the FrameTap ran alongside either a Mic Mini 2S or a Mic 3 for him too. His device-info screen reads firmware 01.01.71.20, the August build, so the two version screens together place the change in August and carry it into the September point release. DJI has not said which build added it.

Firmware screens on a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P and its FrameTap remote, shown in Japanese, list the camera and RC versions users pointed to after finding the pairing behavior DJI left out of its changelog. Photo credit: Yuu (@yuu_u001) via X

The Osmo FrameTap is a 29 g (1 oz) viewfinder remote that shows the Pocket 4P’s live feed, controls recording and the gimbal, and picks a tracking subject with a double tap. DJI sells it only bundled, in the Pocket 4P Vlog Combo or with the Osmo Mobile 8P.

That combo lists at £605 / €689, as DroneXL reported when the Pocket 4P launched worldwide on July 30. A Japanese user guide published July 28 laid out the catch: under the shipping firmware the FrameTap and a DJI Mic transmitter could not connect to the Pocket 4P at the same time, so the two headline accessories in the box worked in separate takes. DroneXL covered the remote’s FCC filing last December, and Shawn from Air Photography called it a game changer in his Osmo Mobile 8P review here in June. On the Pocket 4P, this conflict held that verdict back.

DJI’s Notes For The August Update Say Nothing About Microphones

DJI’s changelog for the 4P’s August firmware, as CineD reported on August 19 from DJI’s release notes, lists the Camera Cloud Service, 10-bit D-Log for slow motion, version 2.0 LUTs, and 45-degree diagonal joystick control. No line mentions the FrameTap or the wireless microphone menu.

The newest Pocket 4P release-notes PDF DroneXL could retrieve from DJI is still the June 29 launch document, and the only FrameTap note in it points the other way. The June 29 launch release notes state that the remote does not support simultaneous connections to a mobile device and the Pocket 4P, the restriction @fridaysbeer says still applies. DroneXL found no DJI statement or support article describing the mic change as of Friday morning.

None of it reaches American buyers through official channels. The Pocket 4P remains off the US availability map under the FCC Covered List, and the guide’s author reports DJI has no plans to sell the FrameTap on its own.

DroneXL’s Take

The Vlog Combo’s pitch is a one-person film crew: remote in one hand, mic on your collar, camera on a tripod. For two months that box shipped with two accessories that could not work together, and the only documentation was a blogger telling buyers to test before anything important.

Then DJI fixed it and told nobody. Ichii had to find out by accident and ask the company, in public, to take credit for its own work.

To be fair, two months from launch to fix beats most camera makers, who would have left the limitation in the manual for good. The complaint is the silence. DJI is fighting a Covered List and a Ninth Circuit case, and the one fight entirely within its control, telling customers what its firmware does, is the one it keeps skipping. My read is that the fix landed in August under “fixed some known issues,” because a limitation DJI never listed is easy to fix without listing either.

Watch the Osmo Pocket 4P downloads page for release notes on 01.01.71.31. If a simultaneous-connection line appears, DJI heard Ichii. If it doesn’t, the feature stays folklore and the next Vlog Combo buyer learns about it the way he did. American creators can skip the vigil. The fix is for a camera the Covered List will not let them buy.

Sources: Yoshihiko Ichii (@ittsui) on X, @fridaysbeer on X, @yuu_u001 on X, CineD, HAL gadget guide (note.com), DJI Osmo Pocket 4P release notes.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

DJI Takes Pocket 4P to Venice Film Festival, US Still Shut Out

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:21:00 GMT

DJI will put the Osmo Pocket 4P on stage at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Monday, September 7, at 9:00 AM GMT, the company said Friday morning on X. The session is billed as a DJI Filmmakers and Visionaries Session at the Venice Production Bridge, the festival’s industry market on the Lido, and it comes with a slogan aimed at a specific audience: “written by a younger generation.”

It is the fourth European stage in four months for a camera that launched worldwide on July 30 without a US price or a US mention. Cannes in May, China in June, Berlin this week, Venice on Monday. The country that wrote the rule keeping the Pocket 4P off its shelves is the one country DJI has not scheduled a stop in.

The 9:00 AM GMT start is 11:00 AM in Venice and 5:00 AM on the East Coast.

DJI Puts Three Cinematographers and Four Shorts on the Lido

The Venice session is a panel called “New Generation, New Cinematic Language,” running 11:00 to 12:30 local time at the Biennale Match Point Arena on the Lido. Entry is free with a reservation, and four young cinematographers will present short films shot on the Pocket 4P.

DJI teases the Osmo Pocket 4P ahead of a Filmmakers & Visionaries session at the Venice Production Bridge during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 7, 2026. Photo credit: DJI

DJI’s event notice, published by Italian outlets ahead of the festival, names three established cinematographers for the panel, followed by a two-hour networking reception at the Hotel Excelsior. Michele D’Attanasio holds two David di Donatello awards for cinematography, for Veloce come il vento and Freaks Out. Cristiano Di Nicola shot Piove and La valle dei sorrisi and has a film at this year’s festival, L’Estranea by Paolo Strippoli. Valentin Vignet is a French documentary and narrative cinematographer and a grandson of Agnès Varda.

The four shorts are the new part. According to the same notice, DJI commissioned four young cinematographers to each make a short film on the Pocket 4P, on themes the notice lists as childhood and a father-son relationship, the body moving through a city, the perception of time, and nature and memory. The program gets its first showing at the panel. The notice does not say whether or when the films will be released to the public, and DJI’s post on X does not mention them at all.

The Venice Production Bridge runs September 3 through 9 inside a festival that opened Wednesday and closes September 12. DJI is running a second European booth at the same time: the Osmo 360 II launch release puts the company at IFA Berlin from September 4 through 8, with the Pocket 4P on the table there too.

The Pocket 4P Has Toured Europe Since May Without Touching America

DJI unveiled the Pocket 4P at Cannes on May 14. It went on sale in China on June 15 and across the UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia on July 30 at £529 and €599. The United States was absent from every announcement because the Covered List blocks new DJI authorizations.

When DroneXL covered the Cannes reveal, I wrote that the venue was the headline, since DJI had never picked a more loaded cinema setting for a Pocket announcement. The press release that day held back every spec and named no market. Venice is the same play with the specs filled in. The camera pairs a 1-inch, 20mm-equivalent f/2.0 wide sensor with a 60mm-equivalent f/1.8 telephoto, records 4K at 240 frames per second, and weighs 230 g (8.1 oz). CineD’s lab measured 16 stops of dynamic range at the industry-standard threshold on launch day, the best result in its history and ahead of the ARRI Alexa 35.

DJI has been on the FCC Covered List since December 22, 2025, and the Pocket 4P’s certification landed on the wrong side of that date. Asked about the US on launch day, DJI told DPReview that “the application for authorization is still pending.” Nothing has moved since. American buyers who want one are paying importers: DroneXL found the 4P listed on Amazon at $980 the day before the global launch, $276 above DJI’s own conversion of the European price.

The one dual-lens pocket gimbal Americans can buy at retail is the Insta360 Luna Ultra, which went on sale in the US on June 10. DJI sued Insta360 over it in Texas the same week, then dropped those suits on June 28 with no settlement announced. Insta360 owns the American dual-lens segment by default.

The Younger Generation DJI Wants Includes Students It Cannot Sell To

DJI’s Venice slogan and its newest American marketing program target the same people: the X post promises cinema written by a younger generation, and eleven days earlier DJI opened a Campus Creators program offering US students cash, free gear, and early access to products it cannot sell in America.

DroneXL covered that program on August 24. Its application template used “US Campus Creator” as the example subject line, and its reward card listed early access to new DJI releases. For an American student, that early access means hardware like the Pocket 4P, which no classmate can buy in the country. The Venice panel and the campus pitch are two halves of one strategy: build a generation of creators on DJI cameras, in Europe through festivals, in America through campus social feeds, and let the FCC docket run on its own clock.

DroneXL’s Take

Cannes, China, Berlin, Venice. That is a product tour for a camera that cannot legally be sold in the United States, and DJI is spending festival money on it anyway. My read is that DJI has stopped treating the US as a launch market for the 2026 handheld lineup and started treating it as a future one. You do not commission four short films and book a Venice Production Bridge panel for a camera you plan to discount in a year. You do it for a brand you expect to be selling in 2028, to buyers who are 22 today.

The Covered List’s defenders have a fair point I will grant them: a national security designation that carves out exceptions by product category is not a designation, and DJI’s data practices are the subject of a live federal proceeding, not a settled question. The Pocket 4P got caught in a net Congress and the FCC cast at drones. Fine. But the net has now been in the water for eight and a half months, and what it has caught in the camera aisle is a 230-gram device with no rotors and a dynamic range measurement that embarrassed ARRI, sold at a European price American creators pay a $276 premium to import. The security case for keeping a handheld gimbal camera off US shelves has not been made by anyone, because nobody has tried to make it. It is a side effect, and the beneficiary is another Shenzhen company.

What bothers me about Venice specifically is the audience DJI picked. “A younger generation” is not a slogan for the people who bought a Pocket 3. It is a slogan for people who have not bought anything yet, and DJI is courting them in two places at once: on the Lido with a two-time David di Donatello winner, and on American campuses with an email address and a promise of early access to gear they cannot buy. One of those pitches is clear about where the camera can be bought. The other never says, and it is the one aimed at Americans.

Monday’s session is worth watching for one thing: whether DJI puts the four shorts online. A festival showing that never leaves the Lido is a press event. A festival showing that ships to YouTube the same afternoon is a marketing campaign with a clear target, and the target is not in Italy. September 15, when the Osmo 360 II reaches European shelves with the US store still showing one Osmo 360, is the next date after that. If both pass with no American movement, the question DroneXL has asked since May stops being whether DJI has a US plan for these cameras and becomes when it decided it did not need one.

Sources: DJI (@DJIGlobal on X, September 4, 2026), The Way Magazine (DJI event notice), La Biennale di Venezia, Venice Production Bridge, DPReview

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.

GoPro CEO Promises 'More Cameras' After Merger, Names None

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:49:00 GMT

GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman published an open letter Thursday telling customers the company will keep building cameras after its merger with Starman Optical. The letter, posted to GoPro’s news blog and addressed to “our GoPro community, fans and customers,” says GoPro plans to deliver “more innovative cameras, smarter accessories, and more powerful software and services” once the deal closes. It names no camera and no date.

The letter arrives two days after GoPro agreed to sell 90% of itself to Starman for $285 million, a deal that points the 24-year-old camera maker at AI data center, government, defense, and aerospace markets. Woodman opens by acknowledging “some concern” about GoPro’s post-merger commitment to camera development. He then spends five paragraphs saying that commitment is intact.

On Tuesday, I wrote that the word to watch in GoPro’s merger announcement was “existing,” because supporting existing products is a different promise than shipping new ones. Woodman’s letter answers that directly. The answer is a promise of more cameras, with nothing attached to it.

Woodman’s Letter Promises Cameras And Names None

The September 3 letter commits GoPro to “more innovative cameras” without identifying a model or a date. It attributes the future to Starman’s balance sheet, says Starman shares GoPro’s passion for the brand, and closes with the “Be a HERO” slogan. Each camera sentence is a plan or an expectation.

“Making amazing cameras for all of you is our core DNA,” Woodman writes, adding that this “will never change.” He credits the merger’s “improved financial strength” for putting GoPro in a better position to invent, and points to 2,500-plus patents over 24 years as proof it has been busy. The goal he describes, “a more diversified company” that is stronger financially, is the framing GoPro’s merger announcement used on September 1.

What the letter leaves out is anything a buyer could hold GoPro to. There is no mention of a HERO14 or a Mission 2, and nothing about a successor to the 197-gram MISSION 1 PRO ILS that GoPro declared available on September 2, one day after signing the merger. There is no statement about the size of the camera engineering team after closing, or what share of Starman’s capital goes to consumer hardware. The letter ends with a securities-law disclaimer, the same “No Offer or Solicitation” and forward-looking-statements language GoPro attaches to its SEC solicitation filings. That marks the reassurance as merger solicitation material, and every camera promise in it as a forward-looking statement that “could differ materially.”

GoPro Told Employees Specifics Wait Until The Deal Closes

The letter’s silence on products matches what GoPro told its own staff. In a September 1 email disclosed in a Schedule 14A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Woodman wrote that GoPro would not share more specifics on its go-forward strategy until after closing, expected before year-end.

The same filing shows who GoPro is merging with. Starman Optical, Inc. is a Delaware company wholly owned by Action Acquisitions LLC, and TechCrunch reported that Starman Optical was incorporated on August 31, one day before the announcement, while the transceiver business, Starman New Photonics, dates to 2025 and is still building its New Jersey factory. The employee email calls Starman an “up and coming” US transceiver maker whose high-margin revenue is expected to fund GoPro’s move into new markets. Expected, not booked.

The customer email in the same filing is the closest GoPro has come to a hardware commitment: “The current product lineup stays in production and remains available for purchase.” That sentence covers cameras that already exist. Woodman’s public letter adds the word “more” and stops there.

GoPro Has Spent A Year Promising A Product Pipeline

GoPro’s forward-looking language about cameras predates the merger by ten months, and the year in between was the worst in the company’s history. Read against that record, a promise with no product attached lands differently with this audience than it would with a general reader.

In November 2025, Woodman bought $2 million of GoPro stock and said the purchase reflected his excitement for GoPro’s “diversified product pipeline in 2026 and beyond,” according to the company’s announcement. In April 2026, GoPro laid off about a quarter of its workforce and introduced the Mission 1 lineup. On May 11, the board announced a review of strategic alternatives with Houlihan Lokey. In June, GoPro told investors there was substantial doubt it could continue as a going concern. In July, Woodman lent the company roughly $20 million through senior secured notes; GoPro’s own prospectus supplement says that even with that money it did not expect to have enough liquidity to meet its financing obligations.

The company has also cut a product this community bought before. The Karma drone was recalled weeks after its 2016 launch and shut down for good in January 2018. And GoPro has been selling off imaging patents from the pile Woodman now cites as proof of innovation: Skydio bought 114 of them in November 2024 for its own government-focused business.

DroneXL’s Take

Give Woodman this: the letter is more than the press release offered. Tuesday’s announcement promised to “fully support” existing consumer products. Thursday’s letter promises more cameras. That is a real change in wording, and it came because customers made noise, which is the only pressure this audience can still apply.

Wording is where it stops. A promise of “more innovative cameras” with no model and no date is what a CEO writes when the people about to own 90% of his company have not told him what he is allowed to build. The employee email says as much: no specifics until closing. The letter cannot be a roadmap because the roadmap does not yet belong to GoPro. It belongs to a holding company whose operating subsidiary was incorporated the day before the deal, and it gets written after the stockholders vote.

The disclaimer tells you the rest. A letter that opens with “our collective stoke” and closes with several hundred words of forward-looking-statements boilerplate knows which audience it is really for. The fans get the stoke. The SEC gets the caveats.

FPV pilots need to know whether the ILS gets firmware in 2027, whether a second body follows, and whether GoPro’s camera engineers survive the year. None of that is in this letter. My read is that it is missing because nobody at GoPro is currently permitted to know it, and a CEO who cannot say what the plan is falls back on saying who he is. That is the job “core DNA” is doing in this document.

The proxy statement GoPro must file before the stockholder vote is where the real answer lives. It will lay out the merger agreement and the board’s reasons for taking $1.14 a share, including what Starman told the board about its plans for the business. If a camera commitment exists anywhere in this deal, that document is where it lives. Until it shows up there, treat “more cameras” the way you treat any spec GoPro has not shipped: as marketing.

Source: GoPro (Letter from Nick), GoPro merger announcement, SEC Schedule 14A, TechCrunch.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.