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.
Every Geran drone that Russia fires at a Ukrainian city carries between eight and 12 transistors made in Germany. That detail, confirmed by Ukraine’s military intelligence service HUR to Deutsche Welle, is not a rounding error or a quirk of pre-war stockpiles. It is a structural dependency — one that dummy companies inside Germany are…
An Iranian drone struck the runway at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus around midnight local time on Sunday, March 2, 2026. The strike caused limited damage and no casualties. Hours earlier, an RAF Typhoon operating out of Qatar had shot down an Iranian drone in what the Ministry of Defence called a “defensive air patrol,” marking…
There is a specific sound a drone makes at 690 km/h. It is not the low hum you hear at a park. It is a high-pitched scream — brief, startling, and then gone. Most people watching laugh. They cannot process what just happened. Benjamin Biggs, the Melbourne aerospace engineer behind the Blackbird speed drone, has…
The buzzing sound is unmistakable. Anyone who has watched footage of a Shahed-136 inbound over a city knows it — that flat, nasal drone of a small piston engine, audible seconds before impact. That sound hit Manama, Kuwait City, and Dubai this weekend. If you’ve been following the Shahed’s trajectory from Ukrainian skies to the…
The policy change is narrow on paper. The implications are not. On January 21, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published an interim final rule that removes licensing requirements for certain commercial UAVs exported to most Wassenaar Arrangement member states and expands the License Exception STA pathway for select MT-controlled drone…
The numbers coming out of Ukraine’s Drone Line program in early 2026 are striking. In January and February, more than 1,000 specialized drone crews accounted for one in every three Russian soldiers killed on the front. Now Ukraine wants to make that ratio permanent, and the Netherlands is helping fund it. Here’s what you need…
Three years of absorbing more than 57,000 Shahed-type drone strikes has turned Ukraine into the world’s most battle-tested authority on shooting Iranian-designed weapons out of the sky. Now, as Iran’s drone and missile salvos spread across the Gulf and into Europe’s military footprint, that expertise has a new market. Here’s what’s happening: 57,000 Shaheds: Ukraine’s…
At a secret training range north of Kyiv, a neurologist and a graphic designer are learning to shoot down drones. That’s not a quirky detail. It’s the clearest signal yet of how seriously Ukraine is taking the interceptor drone mission, and how fast the battlefield logic has shifted from expensive air defense systems to cheap,…
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