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.
DJI pushed the Mic Mini 2 live on its Hong Kong product page one week before the teased April 28 global reveal, confirming that the “More Than Sound” campaign is a second-generation wireless microphone, not an accessory refresh or a Mic 3 successor. The DJI listing is live with full specs, five configurations, and ten…
France’s 27th Mountain Infantry Brigade is using the ORION 26 exercise to break its platoons into small drone-armed combat cells, a doctrinal shift pulled directly from the lessons of the war in Ukraine, as Defence Blog reported. The brigade announced the experiment on April 18, 2026. The goal is blunt. Make infantry harder to find,…
More than a half dozen drones flew into restricted airspace around Coors Field during the Colorado Rockies’ opening homestand against the Philadelphia Phillies from April 3 through 5, as ESPN reported. Nobody was arrested. The FAA and the FBI issued a joint warning on Thursday, April 16, trying to keep drones out of the stadium…
Operation Epic Fury has cost the US Air Force 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones since late February. At roughly $30 million per airframe, the losses add up to around $720 million in hardware alone, as National Interest reports. Iranian surface-to-air missiles are doing most of the shooting, and the clusters of lost drones map almost perfectly…
NOAA announced a new uncrewed surface vehicle for its research fleet, and the pitch is simple. It’s solar-powered, self-propelled, small enough to trailer behind a truck, and built to loiter at sea for months. Engineers at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle think it can do almost everything a weather buoy does, plus a…
The UK Ministry of Defence announced on April 15 that Britain will deliver at least 120,000 drones to Ukraine by the end of 2026. Defence Secretary John Healey made the announcement ahead of the 34th Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting in Berlin. Deliveries of the new package began this month, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda.…
DJI Lito X1 launches on April 23. That’s in four days. Somebody apparently forgot to tell Speedy Drone in Toronto, because their product page for the Lito X1 has been live for a while now, complete with a full spec sheet, a comparison chart, an FAQ section, and sample photos allegedly shot on the drone…
A Danish startup called Sapient Perception raised €2 million in pre-seed funding this week, pitching a sensor that lets drones see a much wider area without losing detail. The round was co-led by Balnord and FORWARD.one, as Resilience Media reported. The money will go toward engineering hires, product development, and early customer deployments in defense,…
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