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.
HYFIX Spatial Intelligence is rolling out its H1P Positioning, Navigation, and Open-Compute Module for small unmanned systems, with samples and evaluation kits available immediately. The Santa Clara, California company is showcasing the H1P at AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit this week, booth 34005. It’s the first product built on the company’s H1 Autonomous Systems Chip,…
The aircraft that once made aviation history by circumnavigating the globe on sunlight alone is now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Solar Impulse 2, the record-setting solar plane built by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, crashed during an autonomous test flight on May 4 after losing power. No one was on board,…
China just moved a hydrogen fuel cell system for drones from the lab to the field. Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, completed a successful demonstration flight and passed a national scientific appraisal that puts the technology on the path to commercial deployment, as reported by…
Oklahoma City police handled a potentially deadly standoff last month without a single injury using two tools that are becoming standard equipment in modern patrol operations: a drone and a tactical robot, as reported by Officer. The April 8 incident on SW 96th Street is another data point in a pattern that’s accelerating across American…
The U.S. Army has a new answer to the drone threat, and it involves sending a drone to take care of it. Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division recently trained with the Bumblebee V1 counter-drone system at Fort Drum, New York, in a session organized by Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Department of War’s…
The inclusion of a commercial heavy-lift drone in a MEDEVAC demonstration during this exercise signals something specific: the Army is actively testing
Another defense tech company has made the call on California. Knightwerx, a tactical drone developer that built its name making compact military UAS, has moved its headquarters from Camarillo to Scottsdale, and it’s already hiring, as Hoodline reported. The move drops the company squarely into the Phoenix metro’s expanding defense manufacturing corridor just as it…
DJI just announced the winners of the 11th Annual SkyPixel Photo and Video Contest, and if you were feeling reasonably good about your drone footage, I’d recommend not scrolling too far. The competition drew nearly 95,000 submissions from 96 countries, with a prize pool worth over $200,000. The results are, frankly, humbling. The Gate: The…
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