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.
Colombia just acquired 3,744 grenades built to fall from drones, and the aircraft doing the dropping are off-the-shelf DJI Matrice 300 RTK quadcopters. The grenades are homemade by the state arms maker Indumil, and they’re already in service with the Army’s drone battalion. It’s the clearest sign yet of where Colombia’s long fight against armed…
Congress wants the Army to put robot boats in the water to protect its manned ones. A new defense bill directs the Army to study using unmanned surface vessels as escorts for its watercraft, the boats that haul troops and cargo into a fight. The timing isn’t subtle. Ukraine has spent two years proving that…
Amazon wants to turn 176 square miles of upstate New York into a drone delivery zone. The company is asking the town of Clay, near Syracuse, for permission to fly Prime Air deliveries out of an existing warehouse. If it clears the FAA and the local planning board, anyone within 7.5 miles could get a…
Walmart wants to park a drone launchpad in a North Carolina lot. More than 200 neighbors signed a petition to stop it. On Monday night, Lincoln County commissioners weighed whether the future of 23-minute delivery is worth the noise over Denver, North Carolina. It’s a small zoning vote, but it’s the exact fight that will…
Five Georgia high schools will soon keep drones waiting on charging pads, ready to fly at an attacker before police can reach the building. The state set aside $550,000 to test the idea this fall. The drones are piloted by people at a company in Texas, and they carry pepper spray, sirens, and strobes, not…
Getting a beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver from the FAA has long meant waiting years and hiring lawyers. North Dakota just made it take 23 business days. The state’s Vantis network, the first statewide BVLOS system in the country, has turned the biggest bottleneck in commercial drone work into something close to routine. If you fly drones for…
A Chinese research team of the Northwestern Polytechnical University says it has built a drone swarm that keeps hunting even after you jam its radios and blind its cameras. Their paper, published in China’s top aeronautics journal, claims a 100% kill rate in simulation. That number deserves heavy skepticism. But the method behind it, an…
Vivid Sydney just pulled the plug on every drone show left in its lineup. The trigger came Monday night, when roughly 89 drones dropped out of the sky during the festival’s Star-Bound performance at Cockle Bay. Eighty-three of them hit the water of Darling Harbour, six more came down on the boardwalk, and nobody was…
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.
