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.
If you unwrapped a shiny new drone in the UK this Christmas, congratulations. Now put the batteries down and grab a laptop, because from January 1st, the Civil Aviation Authority wants you to pass a theory test before you so much as scare a pigeon outdoors, as the BBC reports. Starting this week, anyone flying…
The US Army’s 10th Mountain Division has quietly crossed an important line, moving from simply using drones as flying eyes to treating them as frontline weapons, with the formal activation of a brand new unit dedicated entirely to offensive drone operations, as the Army press release states. On December 16, the division stood up Fox…
A late night search in southern Ohio ended safely thanks to a police drone and a program that has been in place longer than many people realize. As the Scioto Post reports, on December 28, just before 11 p.m., Chillicothe Police were dispatched to assist the Ross County Sheriff’s Office near Belleview Avenue and Plyleys…
It is like The Fast and the Furious, only not so fast and just a little less furious. Add a freight train, a drone quietly minding its own business in the morning sky, and three men who seemed unaware that railroads no longer rely on luck and binoculars. Chicago’s South Side delivered a modern crime…
The FBI has quietly flipped the switch on a new national hub designed to deal with one of aviation’s fastest growing gray zones, illegal and hostile drone activity over US airspace. Called the National Counter UAS Training Center, or NCUTC, the program is meant to train state and local law enforcement to detect, identify, track,…
Instead of bullets, nets, missiles, or expensive interceptor drones chasing other drones in an awkward aerial ballet, STRATUS fires short
China has quietly crossed another unmanned aviation threshold, this time with something that looks less like a drone and more like a small aircraft that forgot to hire a pilot. On December 28, 2025, the Lanying R6000 completed its maiden flight at the Deyang Shifang test site in Sichuan Province, becoming the first known six…
Ukraine did not defeat Russia’s Black Sea fleet with destroyers or submarines, it did it with remote controls, fiber optics, and engineers who learned faster than their enemy expected. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine effectively lost its navy, and when the full scale invasion began in 2022, the imbalance at sea looked permanent.…
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