Orlando approves $6.83M Skydio drone program after trial drone beat officers to the scene one-third of the time

The Orlando City Council voted Monday to approve a $6.83 million Drone as First Responder program built on Axon’s Skydio platform. The decision comes after a seven-week pilot at OPD headquarters produced a striking result: a single drone arrived before patrol officers on 33% of calls and delivered useful information on 97% of them.

Here is what you need to know:

• The deal: Orlando is amending its existing Axon contract to add 11 Skydio drones across 9 rooftop docking stations covering downtown Orlando to Lake Nona.
• The cost: $6.83 million over eight years, or $759,322 annually. Drones get replaced every 2.5 years. Docking stations get replaced every five.
• The capability: Drone pilots listen to 911 calls in real time via Axon Prepared and can launch a drone before the first patrol car moves.
• The context: Orlando joins a growing list of U.S. cities formalizing DFR programs. DroneXL first reported on the planned vote last week.

Orlando’s pilot program produced hard numbers that sealed the deal

The Orlando Police Department’s Drone as First Responder program will deploy 11 Skydio drones from nine automated rooftop docking stations across the city, operated by federally licensed sworn officers inside OPD’s crime center in response to 911 calls involving life-threatening situations, major property damage, or other time-sensitive incidents.

The vote, first confirmed by WFTV, caps a process DroneXL has been tracking since the contract amendment appeared in city documents last week. What made this vote straightforward was the data from OPD’s own trial run. During a seven-week test operating just one drone from police headquarters, that single aircraft beat ground units to the scene on a third of all calls. On 97% of deployments, the drone fed back information officers could actually use before they arrived, according to FOX 35 Orlando.

OPD’s target response time for the full program is under three minutes.

District 1 Commissioner Tom Keen framed the investment in practical terms. “We live in a very safe city, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t crime, and we want to respond to that and be proactive,” Keen told FOX 35. “The opportunity to use a drone gets us there quicker.”

Keen also pointed to the operational efficiency gains beyond crime scenes. “They can see it in real time and decide if they need to dispatch a fire truck or a tow truck and get that traffic moving,” he said.

The Axon ecosystem gives OPD a single-vendor stack

The Orlando Police Department’s DFR program is an expansion of an existing multimillion-dollar relationship with Axon Enterprise, the company that already supplies OPD’s body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, and Taser devices. Adding Skydio drones into that same ecosystem means drone footage, body camera video, and 911 audio all flow through one platform.

In a February 3 memo to the city’s chief procurement officer, OPD Chief Eric Smith explained why the department chose Axon over competitors. Axon’s drones “can respond directly to our body cameras and 911 calls as they come in,” Smith wrote, noting that rival vendor Brinc could not match that integration. OPD also contacted Flock Safety but reported that Flock “failed to provide us with a product to evaluate,” according to Orlando Weekly, which first obtained the city documents.

The Axon-Skydio partnership launched in June 2024 and has since been adopted by over 1,000 law enforcement agencies. The bundle pairs Skydio’s autonomous drones and docking stations with Axon’s evidence management, fleet software (Axon Air, powered by DroneSense), and Dedrone’s airspace awareness technology for BVLOS operations.

Officers in the field can request a drone with the push of a button on their Axon body camera. The aircraft launches from the nearest rooftop dock and streams live video to both the requesting officer and the crime center.

Orlando is the second Central Florida DFR program in three months

The Orlando Police Department is the second agency in the Central Florida region to formalize a Drone as First Responder program. In late 2025, the St. Cloud Police Department became the first, deploying Skydio X10 drones from two automated docks at a projected cost of $890,000 over five years.

Orlando’s program is significantly larger. Eleven drones across nine docking stations, covering a corridor from downtown to Lake Nona. The $6.83 million price tag includes a tech-refresh clause that replaces drones every 2.5 years and docking stations every five, keeping the hardware current throughout the contract.

The nearby Orange County Sheriff’s Office already uses Skydio drones as well, though its program structure differs from the automated DFR model Orlando is adopting.

Nationally, DFR programs have exploded. The FAA streamlined its BVLOS waiver process in May 2025 and approved 410 waivers in the first two months alone, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 2025 year-in-review. DroneXL has tracked DFR launches across the country this year, from Brooklyn Park’s $4.6 million program to Concord’s $531,000 expansion to Washington County’s launch just today.

The cost question Florida agencies cannot escape

Orlando’s DFR investment carries an unavoidable context. Florida law bans Chinese-made drones for government use, which means agencies must buy American-made alternatives like Skydio. That mandate comes with a price premium.

A Skydio X10 costs between $16,000 and $25,000 per unit. The DJI Matrice 30T, a thermal-equipped workhorse that dominated public safety fleets before the bans, sold for roughly $11,500 to $13,500. Florida agencies can no longer buy it.

The irony is that OPD knows firsthand what it lost. As DroneXL documented in our investigation of Florida’s DJI ban, Orlando Police Sergeant David Cruz told state lawmakers that OPD experienced “no losses, no issues, no failures” with DJI in five years of operation. In contrast, the department saw five Blue sUAS failures in just 18 months after switching platforms.

Still, within the constraints Florida agencies now operate under, OPD’s approach is pragmatic. The Axon contract bundles hardware, software, maintenance, and tech refreshes into a single annual cost. That predictability matters for a police department that cannot go back to DJI even if it wanted to.

Civil liberties groups are watching closely

Not everyone is celebrating. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that DFR programs risk collecting data on anyone within a drone’s flight path, particularly in neighborhoods with high concentrations of 911 calls. The ACLU released a critical report on DFR programs in 2023, cautioning communities against accepting aerial surveillance without clear guardrails.

In Syracuse, New York, a proposed Skydio DFR program triggered a year-long public debate. Orlando Weekly reported that watchdog groups have raised concerns about DFR technology being used to surveil vulnerable populations, including immigrants and people seeking abortion care in states like Florida where access is restricted.

OPD maintains the drones will only be dispatched for specific 911 call types and will not be used for random patrols or mass surveillance. The department says operations will be governed by Florida state law.

DroneXL’s Take

The 33/97 stat from Orlando’s trial is the kind of operational data that makes DFR programs very hard to argue against. One drone, one location, seven weeks. It beat officers to the scene a third of the time and provided actionable intelligence on nearly every deployment. Scale that to 11 drones across nine docks and the math gets compelling fast.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. OPD’s own testimony to Florida legislators documented zero DJI failures in five years. Now the department is paying a significant premium for Skydio equipment because state law leaves them no alternative. The tech-refresh clause in this contract tells you something about confidence levels: the city wants the ability to swap hardware every 2.5 years. That’s not a vote of long-term confidence in the current platform. It’s an insurance policy.

The real story is what happens over the next 12 months. As we’ve been tracking on DroneXL, veteran DFR operators are proving that existing equipment works regardless of the political noise around it. Orlando’s program will be the largest DFR deployment in Central Florida. If the full rollout matches the pilot’s numbers, expect every mid-size Florida city to follow. If reliability issues surface at scale, as they have in other Blue sUAS transitions, Orlando will become a cautionary tale instead.

Either way, the sky over Orlando just got a lot busier.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.