Rafael Suárez is a drone journalist and content creator with more than 20 years behind the lens. He began in film photography in 1998, moved to digital in 2005, and has been flying and filming with drones since 2016. As a commercial videographer he has produced work for premium brands including BMW, Porsche, and MINI, and his documentary work champions a #flysafe mentality across the industry. Based in Quito, Ecuador, he covers drone news, hardware, and the policy and business shaping the industry for DroneXL, and shares reviews and cinematic flight on his YouTube channel. A dad and a lifelong aviation nerd, he's happiest when something is in the air.
A Minneapolis police drone's thermal camera located 82-year-old veteran Bob Stewart in a creek ravine in nine minutes, after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search came up empty — footage the department released as the City Council weighs a 75-day Skydio Drones as First Responders trial.
AulGo, a pocket camera from Hong Kong startup TriLife, hit Kickstarter this week promising 4K video from a Sony sensor, six-axis electronic stabilization, and five recording modes for about $200. The campaign cleared its modest goal within hours and kept climbing. The pitch is easy to like: a 4K camera light enough to actually carry,…
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stood beside a recovered Iranian Shahed drone at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables on July 8 and warned that roughly 300 of them now sit in Cuba, within range of South Florida. U.S. Representative Carlos Gimenez, a Republican from Florida, stood with him. The drone behind them, a Shahed-136,…
A cargo drone lifted a stranded truck driver off the top of a fuel tanker and flew him over raging floodwater to dry ground in southern China. The rescue happened on July 6 in Yunbiao, a town in Guangxi that Typhoon Maysak had put underwater. A rescue worker strapped the man into a harness, and…
Montgomery County, Maryland, is pulling the human spotter off the rooftop. The county police department said on July 6 that it is rebuilding its Drone as First Responder program around docked Skydio X10 aircraft at six sites, and flying them beyond visual line of sight without the observer the old setup required. This was the…
A University of Houston engineer says she has built a real-time monitor that keeps a quadrotor from crashing when a gust shoves it off course. Marzia Cescon calls it a “safety supervisor,” a software module that rides onboard the drone and watches its tilt and position while it flies. When the math predicts the aircraft…
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…
Lucid Bots wants transitioning veterans flying its cleaning drones, and it’s working through a veteran nonprofit to get them there. On July 7, the Charlotte-based manufacturer announced an official sponsorship of Vets to Drones, a nonprofit that trains former service members to fly commercially. The pitch is a path from military service to small-business ownership…
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