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.
Seven hundred drones rose over Barcelona on June 10 and slowly assembled the face of a man who died exactly one hundred years earlier. Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Sagrada Família, looked down on his unfinished masterpiece in points of light while crowds watched from the streets below. Hours earlier, Pope Leo XIV had…
Vancouver just became the first city in Canada to put police drones on rooftops, ready to launch the second a 911 call lands. The Vancouver Police Department is rolling out six Skydio X10 aircraft in docked Drone as First Responder stations across the city, approved by Transport Canada and timed to arrive before the 2026…
A shoplifting run at a Buena Park Kohl’s ended with two people in custody on June 9, and the deciding factor never touched the ground. When one suspect bolted on foot and folded himself into a stranger’s backyard shed, he figured the dark and the fences would hide him. A police drone overhead, reading his…
Phoenix is on the list. Wing and Walmart named seven new metropolitan areas this week for the largest drone delivery network in the country, and Arizona’s capital sits among them. The rollout is phased, with operations across the new markets targeted by 2027. For Phoenix shoppers, it points toward a near future where a tube…
A dog got spooked on a hike at Ecola State Park, bolted, and vanished for nearly two hours. When searchers finally spotted it, the animal was stranded about 100 feet down a steep Oregon cliff, in a spot no person could safely reach on foot. The thing that found it wasn’t a search dog or…
Picture a wheat field in Anhui Province at midnight, lit up like a stadium. The light isn’t coming from towers on the ground. It’s hanging in the air, bolted to a drone that hasn’t landed in hours and doesn’t plan to. Chinese state media posted footage in June of combines harvesting wheat after dark while…
A Memphis police drone tracked a suspect into a black Audi and logged the license plate before officers ever reached the scene. That arrest is the headline. The detail that caught my eye sits in the background of the footage. The department isn’t flying one drone brand. It’s flying three. A Skydio X10, a DJI…
Europe just chose a helicopter drone to help hunt submarines, and it isn’t the small one Schiebel is famous for. The Austrian company’s heavy-lift Camcopter S-300 has been selected as the airborne platform for SWORD, a European Defence Fund project building a new way to find and kill submerged threats from a safe distance. It’s…
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