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.
The U.S. Navy is running an exercise called Arctic Sentry 2026 off the coast of northern Norway through May 24, putting unmanned surface vessels and underwater drones through their paces in cold-climate maritime operations. The two surface platforms identified in the exercise are the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft, known as GARC, built by BlackSea Technologies…
Estrella Resources has deployed a DJI FlyCart 30 heavy-lift quadcopter in Timor-Leste to fly a drone-mounted geophysical survey that can image manganese mineralization down to 800 meters (2,625 feet) below the surface, the kind of depth that until recently required a helicopter to access. The Australian explorer is using the FlyCart 30 to carry the…
The Corman Park Police Service in Saskatchewan has deployed its DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise drone 37 times since receiving it in April 2025, and one of those deployments involved finding an intoxicated man who had crawled into a dumpster on Highway 41 in -20°C (-4°F) temperatures. The thermal camera on the aircraft picked him up.…
The Fulshear Police Department launched a Drone as First Responder program on April 6, 2026, and the platform doing the work is the DJI Matrice 350 RTK rather than the U.S.-built Skydio X10 that has become the default for many other municipal DFR programs. The choice matters because it cuts against the broader U.S. public…
The UK Ministry of Defense announced on May 15 that BAE Systems, Anduril Industries, Tekever, and Thales UK have been shortlisted to develop autonomous drones that will fly alongside the British Army’s AH-64E Apache attack helicopters. The four firms will share $13 million (£10 million) in investment as the program enters its next assessment phase,…
Flytrex unveiled its new Sky2 delivery drone on Thursday, and the headline number is the payload: 8.8 pounds (4 kg), enough to carry two large pizzas, bread bites, and sodas in a single trip. That is roughly enough food for a family, which is the line Flytrex has been chasing for years. The previous Sky…
The City of Bloomington, Minnesota, will spend the next two weeks running a Drone as First Responder pilot using Skydio X10 aircraft and the Skydio Dock, the city announced on May 15. The testing period begins the week of May 18 and is intended to give city staff a working view of what DFR technology…
A U.S. drone company just landed its first international defense contract, and it came from a customer that has been thinking hard about how to keep ships supplied across the Pacific. PteroDynamics, a Colorado-based developer of autonomous VTOL aircraft, announced this week that it won a competitive Royal Australian Navy contract to supply P4 Transwing…
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