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.
Seven months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held up a reverse-engineered Iranian drone at a Pentagon event and called it America’s answer to the Shahed-136, that drone flew in combat. In the early hours of February 28, 2026, the U.S. military confirmed the first combat use of the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS)…
A U.S. military high-energy laser destroyed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) surveillance drone near Fort Hancock, Texas on Thursday, February 26. The reason: CBP never told the Pentagon it was flying one. The military saw an unidentified aircraft in military airspace, identified it as a threat, and fired. Cost to taxpayers: an estimated…
The Shahed-136’s most dangerous feature was never its warhead. It was the mesh network quietly stitching dozens of drones together mid-flight, turning each surviving drone into a signal repeater for every other. Ukrainian signals intelligence just severed that network at its root — by destroying the relay stations Russia had been running off Belarusian soil.…
I’ve been covering drone industry investment cycles for years, and every few months a new Wall Street note lands with a number big enough to make you do a double take. This one cleared that bar. Oppenheimer just put a $400 billion price tag on the global drone market within a decade, and the thesis…
A Chinese military drone has been flying regular surveillance missions over the South China Sea since August while broadcasting false transponder codes that made it appear to be other aircraft entirely — including a sanctioned Belarusian cargo plane and a Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jet. At least 23 flights have now been logged. Analysts…
The V-BAT has flown more than 60 miles into Russian-controlled airspace through layered GPS jamming, spotted a Buk-M1 surface-to-air missile system, and handed targeting data to HIMARS crews who destroyed it. That mission — pure intelligence, zero ordnance on the drone itself — is exactly the point Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng wants people to understand. The…
A soldier in a trench, wearing a $300 pair of FPV goggles and holding a hobbyist controller, can guide a commercial drone carrying a $500 payload into a $5 million tank. The math is brutal and it only moves in one direction.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has published its latest official list of drones approved for operation in the EU, covering 66 systems across the Open and Specific categories. The list is a practical reference, not a press release. If you’re buying a drone for commercial work in Europe, or advising someone who is, this…
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