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.
Sky Elements Drone Shows put more than 700 drones over Lake Carolyn on Friday night, July 3, headlining Sparks & Stripes, the City of Irving’s two-day celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The drones opened the night at Levy Event Plaza in Las Colinas, and a traditional fireworks finale closed it. Eighteen months after DroneXL reported…
A Ukrainian studio has trained more than 7,000 military drone operators on a simulator built to behave almost exactly like a real FPV strike drone, and it hands the software to the armed forces for free. The Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator, or UFDS, comes from Simtech Solutions, a roughly 30-person team whose founders pulled their…
Several San Diego County cities are putting police drones in the air this Fourth of July weekend to enforce a fireworks ban and catch the people who ignore it. Oceanside, Escondido, and Carlsbad updated their ordinances this year to pair steep fines with drone-and-ground patrols, following California cities like Chino and San Bernardino that tried…
China has shown a launch system that turns a line of flatbed trucks into an electromagnetic catapult for fixed-wing drones, with no runway required. Beijing Institute of Technology posted video on June 30 of three eight-wheeled trucks linked end to end into a single launch rail, accelerating a fixed-wing UAV off the back and into…
Javeayah Harris, a 4-year-old girl, has been missing from Aiken County, South Carolina since the night of June 30, and the search for her now covers more than 3,000 acres. She was last seen around 8:15 p.m. near Hillsboro Street and Ridgecrest Road, wearing Minnie Mouse pajamas with pink beads in her braided hair. Drones…
DJI launched the Mic Mini 2S on July 2, and the headline change is simple. The tiny clip-on wireless mic now records inside itself. It carries 14.5GB of built-in storage, captures 32-bit floating-point audio, and pairs up to four transmitters to a single receiver. DJI shipped it in China first, with global pricing and dates…
Redmond, Oregon, is replacing its DJI police drones with six Skydio aircraft, and paying for them the way a city buys a fleet of patrol cars: on a five-year financed contract. The city council approved the $410,762 deal with Axon on June 23. The department calls its old fleet obsolete, but the bigger force behind…
Amazon has confirmed that its next drone-delivery market is the Omaha area, with Prime Air aircraft set to fly out of the company’s warehouse in Papillion, Nebraska. The service will carry items under five pounds (2.3 kg) that fit in a shoebox, to homes within a 7 to 8 mile (11 to 13 km) radius…
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