Haye Kesteloo is the Editor in Chief and Founder of DroneXL.co, where he covers all drone-related news, DJI rumors and writes drone reviews, and of EVXL.co, for all electric vehicle news. Haye can be reached at haye @ dronexl.co or @hayekesteloo. Also on LinkedIn, Muck Rack, Instagram and YouTube.
A FOIA release names 1,000+ agencies the FAA cleared for drone first responder flights in 10 months, more than in the previous seven years combined.
Cleveland Clinic and Zipline completed their first prescription drone deliveries in Beachwood, Ohio, as Zipline says U.S. flights now top 70% of its daily volume.
Investigators confirm Semtex and PETN in the Leipzig drone bomb, which slipped past airport defenses and sat unseen beside a Ukrainian An-124 for four hours.
Satellites that spot a classroom-sized fire and pilotless water bombers like Marcos Aerospace's Quencher point one way: the first 30 minutes of a wildfire belong to unmanned aircraft.
A Russian FPV drone chased 52-year-old vegetable seller Yurii around his van in Kherson, then detonated. The UN called this campaign a crime against humanity in 2025.
DJI Enterprise published a Drone as First Responder scaling guide on August 4, one day after the FCC's proposal to prohibit imports and sales of foreign-made drone docking stations hit the Federal Register. The playbook's flagship American case study, El Paso, is already applying for federal money to replace its DJI fleet.
DJI's first Mini-tier mic with 32-bit float internal recording went global on August 4, 2026, with product pages for Canada, the UK and the EU. The United States got none of them. DJI's own comparison chart also shows the 2S trading battery life for that storage chip.
More than 90 teams are flying the DARPA Lift Challenge at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force through August 9, chasing a 4:1 payload-to-weight ratio for a share of $6.5 million. DARPA's own prize rules cut the top three awards in half if nobody clears 4:1, and the agency still has not resolved what the FCC Covered List means for the parts these American teams built with.
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