FAA Adds Two New UAS Test Sites, NOAA Deploys Weather Drones, and SiFly Partners with Taranis for Crop Intelligence

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. The FAA is adding two new UAS test sites. NOAA is officially using drones for daily weather forecasting. And SiFly and Taranis are teaming up to scale up aerial crop intelligence. Very cool stuff. Let’s get to it.

FAA Expands UAS Test Site Program for the First Time in 10 Years

First up this week, the FAA has announced that it’s adding two new UAS test sites, which is kind of a big deal because it’s the first time that they’ve expanded the program in almost 10 years. It’s kind of hard to believe actually that it’s been 10 years since these test sites started popping up.

The new test sites are in partnership with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. This brings the total number of federal test ranges up to nine, joining the existing sites in Alaska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Texas, and Virginia.

If you’re not familiar, the whole point of these test sites is to create a space for collecting real-world testing data to make sure that drones are safely integrated into the national airspace.

According to the FAA, this is all about advancing beyond visual line of sight operations as well as things like cargo delivery and managing multiple operations at once. The Choctaw Nation site is going to focus on practical applications like delivery services, infrastructure inspections, and emergency response missions. Meanwhile, the one in Indiana is going to concentrate more on industrial and commercial uses like cargo logistics, energy infrastructure, and agriculture monitoring.

This expansion is going to allow the FAA to gather more data that it needs to build the safety cases and the regulations for advancing these operations.

Weather Drones Move from Testing to Operational Use

Next up, weather drones are officially moving from testing into operational use for US weather forecasting. For decades now, forecasters have had quite a bit of a blind spot in the lower atmosphere, which is where a lot of the disruptive weather forms.

Now, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is partnering with a company called Meteomatics that is going to hopefully fill that data gap. Meteomatics’ autonomous Meteodrone will be flying vertical profiles through the atmosphere in order to measure temperature, humidity, and wind. The data will then be fed directly into the National Weather Service forecasting operations.

This is a big step up from the research program that actually started all of this back in 2024 in North Dakota. Now, it’s not just research at this point—it’s actually part of the daily toolkit for forecasters.

An initial pilot program is already running in Oklahoma through April of 2026, with drones being managed from what they call a remote Meteodrome. Better data in these crucial altitudes means that we’re going to get more accurate forecasts, which is awesome. Also more timely warnings, which is also awesome. A big benefit for everyone involved here, including ourselves, the general public.

SiFly and Taranis Partner to Scale Aerial Crop Intelligence

In the final story this week, two companies are partnering up to tackle one of the biggest challenges in agricultural drone use: scale.

SiFly, a US-based manufacturer that provides long-endurance VTOL aircraft, and Taranis, a leader in AI-powered crop intelligence, are launching a joint program called a Field Validation Program. The goal here is to prove out a new operational model for collecting crop data over massive areas.

The star of the show is SiFly’s Q12 drone, which boasts a 3-hour flight time—which is kind of a big deal. This kind of endurance completely changes the game because instead of flying for 30-45 minutes and then swapping batteries, a single drone can now cover very big agricultural regions with fewer flights. This improves the efficiency of data collection and makes the data itself more consistent.

The flight time introduces another problem, which is data management, and that’s where Taranis comes in, processing the data in real time.

The program is going to run during the 2026 growing season to validate how this combination of long flights and AI analysis can make aerial intelligence more scalable and more affordable for farmers and agronomists, which is kind of the goal here. It’s going to be interesting to see the results, so I’m sure we’ll have more information when that comes out.

And that’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week.

I’m Greg Reverdiau, co-founder of Pilot Institute. You can read more of my articles on my DroneXL author page.