DJI Clears an Independent U.S. Cybersecurity Audit, a Custom FPV Drone Hits 730 km/h, and SkyeBrowse Drops Another Major Update

Welcome to your weekly UAS News Update. I have three stories for you this week: DJI was audited by a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, a custom FPV drone hit 730 kilometers per hour, and SkyeBrowse rolled out yet another major product update. So let’s get to it.

DJI Passes a U.S. Cybersecurity Audit With Zero Critical Findings

First up this week, DJI released the findings of an independent security assessment conducted by a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm called OnDefend. This came out on May 28, 2026, so it’s fresh, fresh, fresh off the press.

The assessment evaluated the DJI Air 3S with the RC 2 controller and the Matrice 4E with the RC Plus 2 Enterprise controller. The test units were procured from retail outlets and dealer stock without pre-notification to DJI. The assessment ran from October 2025 through March 2026 and produced zero critical, high, or medium-risk findings.

Specifically, OnDefend reported no evidence of data transmission outside of the United States, no backdoors or unauthorized remote access mechanisms, no unexplained radio frequency emissions, and no supply chain tampering or unauthorized hardware modifications. The controllers also resisted jailbreak and firmware modification attempts. Ten low-risk findings and thirteen observations were identified, and you can see them all in the full executive report.

Those items were primarily related to application security configurations, session handling, and wireless hardening. DJI said it is working on addressing the remaining items in subsequent software releases, which are now allowed again, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

The testing covered three different areas: data sovereignty, hardware vulnerability, and drone manipulation risks. On the software side, OnDefend performed static and dynamic analysis of the DJI Fly and Pilot 2 applications, network traffic analysis, and adversary simulations including man-in-the-middle attacks, certificate bypass, privilege escalation, and jailbreak attempts. Hardware testing included full-spectrum RF scanning from 1 MHz to 6 GHz, PCB-level teardown, component analysis, and RF exploitation testing such as replay, jamming, and injection attacks.

DJI cited the findings in connection with its ongoing appeal of its December 2025 inclusion on the FCC Covered List, which was not accompanied by a documented security vulnerability. The release noted that more than 80% of the 1,800-plus state and local law enforcement agencies operating drones use DJI platforms, and that 43% of drone business users surveyed indicated that DJI restrictions would have an extremely negative or business-ending impact on their operations. This, of course, comes just a few weeks after the FCC’s request for comment closed on reconsidering DJI’s addition to the entity list, which would prohibit the company from introducing new models in the United States.

We’re watching this one carefully, and we’ll keep you updated if there’s anything new.

A Custom FPV Drone Just Hit 730 km/h

Next up, Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs just pushed his custom Blackbird drone to an absolutely blistering 730 kilometers per hour. That’s 454 miles per hour on a downwind run. Flying back into the wind, the drone hit a mere 640 kilometers per hour, giving it a two-direction average of 685 kilometers per hour, or 426 miles per hour, which is insane.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know this is a design challenge to claim the fastest speed with an FPV drone, and it’s been going on for over a year now. Lately it feels like it’s just back-to-back-to-back, and quite frankly the creativity is pretty impressive. The team replaced their off-the-shelf blades with custom, handmade carbon fiber propellers that feature a sawtooth leading edge, a design meant to keep the airflow moving straight across the blade. During the fastest pass, the drone pulled 400 amps for about 10 seconds, and the batteries actually hit 80 degrees Celsius, that’s 176 degrees Fahrenheit, which was hot enough to melt the heat shrink right off the packs.

Unfortunately, this incredible speed run is not going to count in the record books. They didn’t have accredited observers on site, the winds were gusting up to 60 kilometers per hour, and the drone didn’t actually land on a clean battery. They also lost one of their two drones at 630 kilometers per hour when the video feed completely dropped out. The team reportedly believes this was caused by the Doppler effect messing with the digital video link as the drone screamed past the pilot. You can read more about it over on DroneXL.

Super cool innovation, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about this again in two or three months when the record is broken yet again.

SkyeBrowse Rolls Out Another Major Videogrammetry Update

Last up, SkyeBrowse rolled out yet another major update to their core videogrammetry engine. If you use their software for 3D modeling, you’ll want to pay attention to this one, because every plan on their platform now has upgraded accuracy, better texture rendering, and faster tooling at no additional charge.

According to their internal benchmarks, there’s a 3X improvement in matching accuracy when you combine multiple different video sources. They also upgraded their AI Floor Plans, which are now twice as accurate and can be exported from any interior model in about 20 seconds, which is really impressive. On top of that, their Image Walkthroughs feature, which lets you navigate through structured spaces using high-quality photos, is now available to everyone for free. You can see the full rundown in SkyeBrowse’s update post.

As a fun bonus, we actually teamed up with SkyeBrowse to create a tutorial on how to map interior and exterior spaces using the DJI Avata. We have one in the office, and it’s a great workflow for capturing those tight, complex spaces, so definitely check it out if you fly the Avata. It’s also great to see a software company that delivers more value and a better product for its pilots, adding a lot of these changes for free most of the time.

And that’s it for this week. I’ll see you next week for Post Flight, where we talk about all of these stories uncensored, plus our live Q&A on Monday and the news update on Friday as always. See you then.

This article is based on the latest weekly UAS News Update from Greg Reverdiau. You can watch the full episode and subscribe on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.