DJI’s 2026 drone pipeline keeps moving, and American buyers keep watching from the sidelines. The Air 4 turned up inside a Chinese flight-reporting app back in May. A model nobody can identify, the N610BS, just cleared Chinese radio certification.
The Avata 360 already shipped worldwide in March. Every one of those launches hits the same barrier: a new DJI drone with no prior FCC authorization can’t be legally imported or sold in the United States, no matter how far ahead of the competition it flies.
The Air 4 Fits the FAA Rules and Still Can’t Get In
The DJI Air 4 is the expected successor to the Air 3S, and the leaks point to a body under 250 grams that would slip beneath the FAA registration threshold, the weight class that normally frees a drone from paperwork. That weight solves the wrong problem. The rule blocking it in the U.S. has nothing to do with grams.
The Air 4 first showed up on May 11 inside a Chinese drone flight-reporting app, listed in a dropdown of selectable aircraft next to the Insta360 Antigravity A1. That’s a registry-level sighting, not a marketing render.
The leaked specs point to the Air line’s usual dual-camera setup, a 1-inch main sensor paired with a smaller telephoto, plus DJI’s O4+ link and 38 to 40 minutes of flight time. All of it rides in a frame under 250 grams (0.55 pounds) instead of the 724 grams (1.6 pounds) the Air 3S carries. One less-corroborated leak floats two 1-inch sensors, though that reading stays low-confidence.
Here’s where the coverage gets it backwards. A sub-250-gram drone skips FAA registration and Remote ID for recreational flyers, and the tech press has framed that as the Air 4’s big regulatory win. It isn’t, and the wall that matters sits somewhere the scale can’t reach.
The sub-250-gram angle means less every month, too. The UK already dropped its registration line to 100 grams this past January, and EASA wants Europe to do the same. Regulators are closing the 249-gram gap on purpose, because people fly those featherweight DJI drones for real commercial work.
The lock that actually stops the Air 4 is the FCC. And the FCC doesn’t care what your drone weighs.
The Avata 360 Already Ran This Exact Playbook
The Avata 360 is the clearest preview of what an Air 4 launch looks like for U.S. buyers, because DJI shipped it worldwide on March 26 and then pushed the American on-sale date back to March 30. Global availability and U.S. availability are now two different calendars.
The Avata 360 is DJI’s first drone to pair a native 360-degree camera with full FPV flight, recording 8K spherical video over DJI’s O4+ link. It landed at $499 for the aircraft, undercutting the Insta360 Antigravity A1 by more than a thousand dollars. On specs and price, it’s the kind of release that used to sell out on day one in the States.
If you’ve been waiting for a DJI Avata 3, this is the closest you get. The prototype shots that circulated for months as the Avata 3 turned out to be this 360 model.
There’s still no confirmed traditional Avata 3 successor. What DJI shipped was the 360, and it went to almost everyone except the U.S. on the original date.
The N610BS Is the One Nobody Can Explain
The N610BS is the wild card in DJI’s 2026 filings, a model code that surfaced in Chinese CMIIT radio certification without matching any current DJI naming pattern. It isn’t an Air, an Avata, a Mini, or a Neo. Nobody outside DJI knows what it is yet.
Two variants appeared in the paperwork, the N610BS and an N610BS-BD, with the BD version carrying its own certificate number, 2026-7820. DJI has published no specs and no positioning for it. The people who track these filings think it points to a new tier, something prosumer sitting above the Air line, though that read is educated guessing.
What’s certain is narrower and more useful. DJI is still registering brand-new hardware in the middle of a U.S. import freeze on new models. The company is building for a market it might not be allowed to sell into.
Three Locks Stand Between DJI and American Buyers
Three separate U.S. actions now stack on top of each other, and a new drone like the Air 4 has to clear every one of them before it reaches an American buyer. None of them cares about the drone’s weight or its price. They target the company and its country of origin.
The first lock is the FCC Covered List. On December 22, 2025, after a Congressionally mandated security review of DJI blew past its deadline unfinished, the FCC added all foreign-made drones and their critical components to the list.
Existing, already-authorized DJI models stay legal to buy and fly. Any new model without prior FCC authorization can’t be legally imported or sold, and the Air 4 and the N610BS are, by definition, new models.
The second lock is the Defense Department’s Section 1260H designation, which labels DJI a Chinese military company. A federal court upheld that label in September 2025 while rejecting the claim that the Communist Party owns or controls DJI. DJI appealed, and the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments on February 6, 2026. There’s no ruling yet, and the Pentagon reaffirmed the listing on June 8, 2026.
The third lock is at the border. Since October 2024, Customs and Border Protection has held DJI shipments under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which presumes goods tied to Xinjiang are made with forced labor. DJI says it sources nothing from the region and isn’t on the formal UFLPA entity list. The detentions have continued anyway.
DroneXL’s Take
Let’s be straight, none of this is a DJI problem. It’s an American-buyer problem. DJI is shipping the Avata 360 worldwide and lining up the Air 4 behind a mystery model called the N610BS, while the U.S. market argues with itself at the FCC, the Pentagon, and the border.
The Avata 360 launch in March was the tell. Same drone, same date, everywhere but here. American shoppers got a four-day wait that stands in for a much bigger one.
Some days I think DJI is turning into Apple faster than my bank account can handle. They keep pulling further ahead of the field, and the American pilot is the one who pays for it.
Prices on the gray market climb hard for anyone in the States chasing this drone. And even then, buying it abroad doesn’t mean you can legally fly it at home.
Two things are worth watching, and both are real, not guesses. The D.C. Circuit still hasn’t ruled on the appeal argued back in February, and that docket, 25-5367, will shape whether the Chinese military company label sticks. The FCC also opened a conditional-approval path in March 2026, the only visible door through which a new DJI model could, in theory, reach U.S. shelves.
Whether any consumer DJI drone ever walks through it is an open question, not a promise. Until one does, the Air 4 stays a drone the whole world flies and Americans just read about.
Photo credit: Gemini, The New Camera, Rafael Suarez and Reddit.
