Donecle, the Toulouse-based maker of autonomous aircraft inspection drones, closed a €10 million (approximately $11 million) funding round on April 15. Eleven days later, the Wall Street Journal published a feature on America’s aviation mechanic shortage that explains why that…
DJI and SkyPixel announced the winners of the 11th Annual SkyPixel Photo and Video Contest on April 27, naming “Africa Unseen” by ellisvanjason as the Annual Best Video in the Aerial Category. Slovak photographer Filip Hrebenda won the Annual Best…
Joby Aviation completed New York City’s first point-to-point electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi demonstration flights this past weekend, the company announced this morning. The aircraft, tail number N545JX, departed John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and landed…
Beijing’s near-total ban on consumer drone sales and storage takes effect this Friday, May 1, with the deadline for existing drone owners to register their equipment with police falling on Wednesday, April 30. That gives Beijing residents three days to…
Security researcher Konrad Iturbe has identified the VooMax Breeze 8K drone selling on Amazon as a rebrand of a drone already tied to Fikaxo Technology Inc., one of the suspected DJI shell companies DroneXL reported on in September 2025. Iturbe,…
A new drone brand called VooMax has appeared on Amazon with a $649 sub-250-gram drone whose spec sheet reads like a photocopy of the DJI Lito X1 that launched globally this morning. The listing, for the VooMax Breeze Standard Kit,…
CEO Adam Bry dropped a detail about Skydio’s origin story on Thursday that has been reported before but rarely in Bry’s own words with this much texture. DJI tried to acquire Skydio in 2014. The three co-founders flew to Shenzhen,…
Skydio closed a $110 million Series F on Thursday at a $4.4 billion post-money valuation, with CEO Adam Bry framing the modest raise as the real headline. The San Mateo drone maker was oversubscribed. Existing investors wanted to put in…
Fifteen agricultural spray drones were stolen from a New Jersey location last month in what the FBI is treating as a sophisticated, possibly coordinated theft, according to reporting by national security journalists Jack Murphy and Sean D. Naylor at The…
DJI launched two new sub-249-gram camera drones today, the Lito X1 and Lito 1, aimed squarely at first-time pilots and entry-level creators at a price point that would have moved serious volume at Best Buy. Orders opened April 23, 2026…
Editor’s note (April 23, 2026): An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the chronology of Joanna Steidle’s SkyPixel prize. Steidle’s original prize was a DJI Mavic 3 Pro that was shipped to her in the United States and seized in…
DJI filed a sharply worded brief on April 15, 2026 in its Ninth Circuit fight with the FCC, putting specific numbers on the damage for the first time: 14