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Lodi NJ Drone Ban Is Preempted, Judge Rules, But Pilot Gets No Order

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:56:00 GMT

A federal judge in Newark held on September 24 that the Borough of Lodi, New Jersey cannot enforce its 2025 drone ordinance, which bans drones below 400 feet across the whole town, because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) already occupies that airspace. Judge Susan D. Wigenton denied Lodi’s motion to dismiss a suit brought by resident Paul Palange, who was written up three times in July 2025 for flying a drone with no camera on it from his own yard.

Palange represented himself. He had no lawyer, and he still got a ruling that the ordinance fails under both field preemption and conflict preemption, one of them the theory that killed Newton, Massachusetts’ drone law in 2017.

He did not get the restraining order he asked for. Lodi told the court he is not in violation of the ordinance. He was served with summonses under it on July 18, 22 and 30, 2025.

Lodi Wrote a 400-Foot Floor Under the FAA’s 400-Foot Ceiling

Lodi adopted Chapter 217, Drones and Unmanned Aircraft, on June 17, 2025 as Ordinance 2025-08. It bans any drone with a camera or sensor below 400 feet anywhere in the borough, and bans sensor-free aircraft below 400 feet over residential and commercial zones, roads, public buildings and parks.

FAA rules cap small drones at 400 feet above ground level. The court put the two side by side: “Read together, those restrictions leave no meaningful altitude band in which a UAS may lawfully operate.” Lodi is 2.27 square miles (5.9 square kilometers) of houses, roads and shops. The carve-out for sensor-free aircraft covers, in practice, nothing.

The ordinance carries fines of up to $500 for a first offense, $1,000 for a second, and $2,000 plus up to 90 days in jail for a third. Its stated purpose is privacy and public safety. Section 217-4D says lawful operation under FAA rules “shall be permitted,” which is the clause Lodi leaned on in court.

The timing is not a coincidence. Lodi sits in Bergen County, one of the counties at the center of the December 2024 drone panic that DroneXL covered in “Debunking the New Jersey drone rumors,” and the borough council passed its ban six months after the sightings that federal agencies later attributed to manned aircraft and hobby drones. Westwood, in the same county, tried the same below-400-foot rule in 2020, and DroneXL reported then that only the FAA regulates that airspace. Lodi did it anyway.

Judge Wigenton Rejected the Privacy Defense and the FAA Savings Clause

The court held the ordinance field preempted because it “in substance dictates where UAS may fly and at what altitude,” core questions of airspace management and aviation safety. Lodi’s privacy rationale failed on the ordinance’s own definitions: Palange’s aircraft has no sensor, so no privacy interest is in play.

Lodi’s fallback was Section 217-4D, the clause permitting FAA-compliant flight. The court rejected it in one sentence: “where Congress occupies a field, even complementary or parallel state regulation is impermissible.” A local law that copies federal law is still a local law regulating federal airspace.

On conflict preemption, the opinion tracks Singer v. City of Newton, the 2017 Massachusetts decision that struck a privacy-framed 400-foot ban as a de facto prohibition. DroneXL’s May 2026 piece on the Olathe, Kansas ordinance walked through the same precedent; Olathe pulled its rule before a judge had to. Lodi did not, and now has a written opinion against it. The ordinance, Wigenton wrote, “stands as an obstacle to the FAA and Congress’s objectives to integrate UAS into the national airspace.”

The opinion is eight pages, marked not for publication, and it is a letter opinion on a motion to dismiss. Palange has shown his claims are plausible and likely to succeed, not won a final judgment. Lodi’s answer and any appeal are still ahead.

The Borough Won the TRO Fight by Saying Its Own Tickets Don’t Count

Palange asked for a temporary restraining order to halt enforcement during the case. Judge Wigenton found he is likely to win on the merits, then denied it for lack of irreparable harm: recreational flying is not protected speech, hobby time can be priced, and Lodi says it is not enforcing.

The First Amendment argument failed because Palange called his flights recreational and never claimed they carry a message. “At most, enforcement of the Ordinance would temporarily limit Plaintiff’s recreational enjoyment,” the court wrote, and that is not expressive conduct. He also did not allege his livelihood depends on the drone.

Then came the borough’s own representation. Lodi told the court that Palange’s FAA-authorized flights are already permitted under the savings clause and that he is not violating the ordinance. The court took Lodi at its word: the record “does not show that Plaintiff faces imminent enforcement,” so any injury is “speculative rather than immediate.” The opinion records that Lodi police visited Palange’s property repeatedly from February through July 2025, served him with the ordinance in court on July 16, and issued three summonses in the two weeks after. What became of those summonses is not in the complaint.

DroneXL’s Take

Lodi told a federal judge that a hobbyist its own police ticketed three times is not in violation of its ordinance, and that concession is why Palange goes home without an injunction. I read that as a borough that knows its ordinance is dead and would rather it die quietly than under a court order. New Jersey’s legislature already settled this in 2018: N.J.S.A. 2C:40-29 preempts any municipal drone ordinance inconsistent with state law, and the state act contains no altitude rules for a town to be consistent with. Lodi’s council passed Chapter 217 seven years after that statute, six months after a drone panic that turned out to be manned aircraft and hobby drones, and it took a resident with no lawyer and no camera on his drone to get the first written finding that the thing is unenforceable. The consequence for every other New Jersey pilot is the useful part. Wigenton’s opinion is not precedent, but it is a federal judge applying Singer v. Newton to a New Jersey town, and the next council that reaches for a 400-foot ban will have to explain why its version survives when Lodi’s did not. Bergen County has 70 municipalities. Check yours.

Sources: Palange v. Borough of Lodi, D.N.J. No. 2:26-cv-02375, Letter Opinion (Sept. 24, 2026), Lodi Code Chapter 217, P.L.2017, c.315

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FAA Sued by 15 States Over Drone Delivery Clearance Amazon Runs On

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:52:00 GMT

Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas sued the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday, September 28, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to throw out the agency’s nationwide environmental clearance for drone package delivery. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the petition on behalf of the coalition, which includes California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin. The target is the July 28 finding of no significant impact that lets the FAA approve new Part 135 delivery markets against one national study instead of a fresh environmental assessment for each one.

DroneXL covered that finding on July 31 under the headline “FAA Clears Drone Delivery’s Environmental Path Nationwide, Overriding 17 State Attorneys General.” Those seventeen had demanded a full environmental impact statement in January and lost.

The FAA’s decision document gave challengers 60 days from July 28. That window ran out on Saturday, September 26. The petition is dated Monday.

Zipline's second-generation Platform 2 aircraft at its docking tower, one of the Part 135 fleets covered by the finding the states want set aside. Photo credit: Zipline

The Petition Names 16 Plaintiffs and Makes No Argument Yet

Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas petitioned the Second Circuit on September 28 to set aside the FAA’s July 28 nationwide environmental finding for drone package delivery. New York Attorney General Letitia James is counsel for all petitioners. The petition states jurisdiction and venue and makes no argument.

The petition, signed by Assistant Solicitor General Blair Greenwald under Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, names the FAA, Administrator Bryan Bedford, the Department of Transportation and Secretary Sean Duffy as respondents. The full list of petitioners: New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin and Harris County. One early report named Travis County as the Texas plaintiff. The document says Harris.

A petition for review under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 15 is a notice, not a brief. The arguments arrive once the FAA files the administrative record and the court sets a schedule, and neither has happened. The substance so far comes from California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s press release, which says the assessment covers deliveries that will happen at unnamed future places and times with no information about the communities underneath and does not address the safety risks of a much larger rollout. Bonta’s line: the assessment “falls far short of properly analyzing the environmental impacts.” The FAA did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Wing's delivery drone at a Walmart launch in Houston, inside Harris County, the one local government on the petition. Photo credit: Wing

The Filing Landed on Day 62 Because Day 60 Was a Saturday

The deadline was Saturday, September 26, and the petition is dated Monday because Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 26(a) moves a deadline that falls on a weekend to the next business day. The coalition used every day allowed, sixty days after the FAA signed the finding on July 28.

The petition cites that rule by name, alongside 49 U.S.C. § 46110, the statute that routes challenges to FAA orders straight to a circuit court and skips the district courts. It also quotes the FAA back to itself: page F-18 of the final assessment declares the document “a final agency action and a final order” reviewable only in the courts of appeals. The agency wrote the sentence that opened the courthouse door.

Matternet's M2, the first delivery drone to earn an FAA type certificate, flies under the same Part 135 approvals now tied to the nationwide finding. Photo credit: Matternet

Two January Signers Stayed Out and the Case Skipped the Ninth Circuit

Seventeen attorneys general signed the January 23 comment letter demanding a full environmental impact statement. Fifteen signed the petition. Connecticut and Vermont are the two that did not, and neither attorney general’s newsroom carried a word about the case on the night it was filed. The lead also moved: Illinois led the letter, New York leads the case.

The venue choice is the more interesting change. The January letter built its legal argument on Ninth Circuit precedent, the friendliest NEPA case law in the country, and four of the petitioners (California, Arizona, Oregon and Washington) could have filed there. They filed in New York’s home circuit instead. Nothing in the petition explains the choice.

Connecticut’s absence has a live edge. Amazon wants up to 1,000 delivery flights a day from North Haven, and the state’s own coastal review comment window on that hub closes October 1. Attorney General William Tong signed the January letter and skipped the suit.

Harris County’s signature changed hands too. The letter was signed for County Attorney Jonathan Fombonne. The petition lists Abbie Kamin.

DoorDash Air announced its own Part 135 certificate on July 29, one day after the FAA signed the finding. Photo credit: DoorDash

Every Approval Since July 28 Rides on the Document Under Review

Every Part 135 delivery approval the FAA has issued since July 28 tiers to the document the states want set aside. No stay was requested, so approvals continue. A vacatur would send the agency back to per-market reviews it says took six to eight months each.

The FAA completed 23 of those one-off assessments between 2019 and July 2025, plus a statewide one for North Carolina. Amazon Prime Air needed separate sign-offs for Detroit and Florida this spring while it was already lining up Omaha and Baton Rouge, and DroneXL reported on September 27 that Amazon still won’t say when its Tracy, California drones fly. Bonta’s release names Tracy. Wing’s 270-store Walmart expansion and Zipline’s Seattle application run through the same finding.

Part 108 is untouched by the case. Package delivery stays under Part 135 until the delayed BVLOS rule is final, and the FAA’s own finding estimates Part 108 delivery one to two years after that. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists which hubs were approved before the July finding and which came after it.

A Flytrex delivery drone on a rooftop dock. Flytrex aircraft fly under Causey Aviation's Part 135 certificate in North Carolina and Texas. Photo credit: Flytrex

The Battery Fire Gap Is the Claim the FAA Answered Least

The claim the FAA answered least is lithium-battery fire in an unmanned aircraft. The final assessment dismissed hazardous materials from detailed review on the expectation that operators follow transport and disposal rules, ten months after an Amazon MK30 battery ejected and burned near Tolleson, Arizona.

The January letter put the October 1, 2025 Tolleson collision at the center of its safety argument, along with the delivery drone that cut an internet cable in Waco. DroneXL added the February crash into a Richardson, Texas apartment building to that list. The letter’s other complaints, a noise baseline that counts only aviation noise and wildlife analysis built on hub locations the FAA admits it does not know, were argued at length and answered in the final document’s comment appendix. Battery fire was not analyzed at all. That distinction matters because of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2025 decision telling lower courts to defer to agencies on how much NEPA analysis is enough. A brief that says the FAA should have written more starts behind under that ruling. A brief that says the FAA wrote nothing on a documented hazard has a path.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA earned this lawsuit on one page. It had the NTSB’s preliminary report on Tolleson in hand, it had Amazon’s own account of a battery burning on the ground, and it wrote that hazardous materials did not need detailed analysis because operators would follow the rules. That is the sentence the states will hang the case on, and my read is they’re right to.

None of that makes a vacatur the right outcome. I said in July that a conditional no-impact finding is a privilege the industry keeps only as long as it behaves like one, and the 600-foot setback and 1,150-delivery cap are real conditions, not paper ones. Send the FAA back to six-month reviews for every market and the people who pay are the operators who never crashed anything and the residents in Omaha and Baton Rouge whose hubs each needed a separate federal review for a service Texas already has. The remedy that fits the flaw is a supplemental battery analysis with enforceable mitigation, which is what the states asked for in January before they asked for everything.

Watch two things now that the case exists. Whether the coalition files a stay motion, which would freeze new approvals while the court decides, and the briefing schedule once the FAA lodges the record. Until then every hub the FAA signs off on carries a footnote that says a court may yet decide the signature was worth nothing.

Sources: Petition for Review, New York et al. v. FAA, California Attorney General, Federal Aviation Administration, Reuters.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Matternet M3 Drone Lifts 11 Pounds, Has No FAA Certificate Yet

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:12:00 GMT

Matternet unveiled M3 on Monday, a delivery drone that carries up to 11 pounds (5 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) radius and flies from a rooftop dock with nobody on site. The Mountain View company named Dave’s Hot Chicken as its first U.S. launch partner and Apian, which runs a National Health Service drone network in central London, as its U.K. partner.

The system has three pieces: the aircraft, a dock that stores and charges it, and a drop-box called the Portal where a restaurant or hospital worker leaves packages and walks away. Matternet plans to build the aircraft in the United States.

Commercial service is targeted for the second half of 2027. The M3 has no FAA type certificate, and Matternet’s own release lists certifying it among the things that could move that date.

M3 Carries 2.5 Times the M2 Payload on a Shorter Leash

The M3 lifts 11 pounds (5 kg) against the Matternet M2’s 4.4 pounds (2 kg), but its 10-mile (16 km) service radius sits under the M2’s roughly 12.4-mile (20 km) range. The cargo bay takes ordinary food and retail bags and boxes, with separate configurations for healthcare and industrial loads.

The dock installs on a roof or at ground level. The Portal is the new idea: Matternet describes it as low-cost and off-grid, holding several packages at once for the aircraft to collect later, so a sender never times a handoff to a flight. Everything after the drop is automated, per Monday’s release.

The Matternet M3 delivery drone sits in its rooftop dock with the doors open, ready for an autonomous flight. Photo credit: Matternet

Both launch partners already fly M2s. Dave’s Hot Chicken launched an M2 pilot from its Northridge, Los Angeles store in October 2025, with orders placed through the chain’s app. Apian added Matternet to its London hospital network in June 2025. Matternet says more M3 partners follow in the coming months, all aimed at high-volume instant delivery.

Founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said “Drone delivery should be a utility: largely invisible, dependable and low-cost.”

Matternet's M3 delivery drone carries up to 11 pounds (5 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) radius, launching autonomously from a rooftop dock. Photo credit: Matternet

The M2 Took 22 Months From Proposed Criteria to Certificate

The M2 is the only delivery drone holding a standard FAA type certificate, issued in September 2022, plus a production certificate. The FAA published proposed airworthiness criteria for it in November 2020, 22 months before the certificate. A Federal Register search on Monday turns up criteria for the M2 and nothing for an M3.

That is the gap between the M3’s specs and its 2027 date. The release’s forward-looking statement names “the regulatory approvals required for M3” and the company’s ability to complete “development, testing and certification of M3” as risks. Testing and customer pilots are also still ahead. A drone with a bigger battery and a bigger cargo bay is a different aircraft in the FAA’s eyes, whatever the badge says.

The Matternet M3 delivery drone flies over rooftops near its rooftop dock, carrying packages up to 11 pounds within a 10-mile radius. Photo credit: Matternet

The timing fits a pattern DroneXL has tracked all year. Matternet went public in June through a $33 million reverse merger and began trading on the OTCQB as MTTN on September 21, one week before M3. It has named partners at a steady clip since April: SoftBank Robotics America, Amprius, Beeline UAS and, two weeks ago, AVI-SPL. None of those announcements carried flight volumes or revenue, and Monday’s carries no order count, no aircraft count and no price. The SoftBank deal is back in this release as the deployment engine for M3.

The Matternet M3 hovers above a residential area while lowering a package on a tether during a delivery flight. Photo credit: Matternet

DroneXL’s Take

The Portal is the smartest thing in this release, and it has nothing to do with flying. Matternet’s own pitch is that nobody has to be near the aircraft, which reads to me as an admission that the M2 stations, from the hospital routes to the Mountain View home deliveries, never got rid of that person. Remove the labor and the unit economics move more than any payload bump does. So I buy the product. I don’t buy the calendar. Matternet has already lived one certification, and it took 22 months for a 2 kg aircraft while the FAA wrote the rulebook alongside it. Nothing for the M3 has hit the Federal Register, and the company is targeting revenue service in roughly 12 months. Watch for M3 airworthiness criteria there, and watch the Q3 10-Q for whether the launch partners are paying anything. Until one of those shows up, the second half of 2027 is a date for shareholders, not for restaurants.

Source: Matternet via GlobeNewswire

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Told Pflugerville Drones Take No Images. Its Own Site Disagrees

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:47:00 GMT

Amazon told the Pflugerville City Council on September 22 that its MK30 delivery drones cannot take pictures. Amazon’s own Prime Air operations page, live on Amazon.com as of September 28, says people, pets and cars near a delivery point may be recorded and that Amazon uses those images to improve its services.

Sam Bailey, Amazon’s senior manager of economic policy, made the pitch in a preliminary presentation that Community Impact reported on September 24. Council member Kimberly Holiday told him the city would need proof. Four weeks earlier, on August 25, the same council had voted unanimously not to renew its license-plate-reader contract with Flock Safety after learning outside agencies had searched Pflugerville’s camera data nearly 1.6 million times in six months.

Pflugerville sits inside the FAA’s February environmental decision covering 22 Texas delivery centers, and the document lists two addresses in the city. Council member David Rogers has since named the site: the parking lot north of Amazon’s STX6 warehouse at 18625 Schultz Lane, south of Toll Road 45. Richardson’s council asked Bailey the same camera question in March. Pflugerville’s had just ended a contract with a camera vendor.

Amazon’s Operations Page Says Its Drones May Record People

Amazon’s Prime Air operations page says MK30 cameras may record “people, pets, cars, and objects near the delivery or landing location” and that Amazon uses them to improve “drone delivery and other Amazon services.” It offers an opt-out at your own address, none for a neighbor’s.

That is the page Amazon publishes for pilots, air traffic personnel and public safety agencies. It does not match what Bailey told Pflugerville. Community Impact quoted him as saying the drones “can’t scan faces, look at license plates, or take pictures or images” and that flight monitors cannot see live footage. The two statements can both be true only if “take pictures” means something narrower than “record,” and Bailey did not draw that line for the council.

He drew a different one in Richardson. At the March 9 Richardson council meeting, Community Impact reported Bailey saying there are no downward-facing cameras collecting data on individuals, cars or license plates, and that sensor data stays on the drone. The New York Times then quoted Amazon spokeswoman Lindsay Hamilton in September saying the images sit on encrypted drives that only authorized staff can access. Encrypted drives hold images that were kept, not images that were never taken.

Holiday’s response was the one a council gets to give once. “We’re going to need you to prove that for us,” she said, tying it directly to the Flock decision. Amazon has already been asked the same question in Westborough, where the answer was that the drones are coming regardless of the town’s view.

The FAA Cleared Two Pflugerville Sites in February

The FAA signed the Finding of No Significant Impact and Record of Decision for Amazon’s Texas expansion on February 5, 2026. The final environmental assessment lists 22 delivery centers statewide, each cleared for 1,000 flights a day between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Two are in Pflugerville.

The sites are STX6 at 18625 Schultz Lane and AUS2 at 2000 East Pecan Street. A third Austin-area site, STX9, sits at 9900 Decker Lane in Austin, and the same document covers the Waco hub, where the FAA opened a second probe in November after an MK30 clipped a cable. The assessment has the MK30 cruising between roughly 180 and 377 feet (55 to 115 meters) and descending to 13 feet (4 meters) to drop a package. Community Impact’s report says Amazon filed a request for administrative interpretation with the city on June 15 for “the addition of the Prime Air drone delivery center,” singular. Rogers, writing on his council Facebook page three days after the September 22 work session, said Amazon wants the center in the parking lot north of STX6 on Schultz Lane, and that he wanted “facts on the table” rather than rumors. The FAA’s Texas record does not rank the two Pflugerville sites by launch order, so his post is what puts Schultz Lane ahead of East Pecan Street for now. The aircraft in the photo on his post is a fixed-wing Wing drone, not Amazon’s MK30.

The federal decision settles the airspace question, which is why Richardson dropped its rezoning threat in April on legal advice. That leaves the city the land-use file Amazon opened in June and the noise record. The FAA’s Texas assessment puts an MK30 overflight at 50 feet at roughly 74.2 decibels, which the document compares to a leaf blower at the same distance. Amazon’s Pflugerville slide called the noise “soft to moderate.” Bailey gave the council altitudes of 225 to 280 feet outbound and 300 to 380 feet back. Amazon’s own operations page lists 205 to 250 feet out and 325 to 370 feet back, and the FAA assessment tops out at 377. Three documents, three sets of numbers.

Amazon told Pflugerville it would do more community outreach before council takes the matter up again. No date was set.

Pflugerville Ended Its Flock Contract Over Who Could See the Data

On August 25, 2026, the Pflugerville council voted unanimously not to renew an $87,500-a-year lease for Flock Safety license-plate readers. A resident’s open-records request had shown outside law enforcement agencies searched the city’s plate data nearly 1.6 million times between February and August through a security flaw in Flock’s system.

Police Chief Willie Richards told the council he lacked clarity on how community data was protected, and council member Rudy Metayer said the city needed to get Flock “the hell out of here.” That vote came 28 days before Amazon’s presentation (August 25 to September 22). Holiday’s demand for proof reads differently with that arithmetic in front of it: the council had just learned, from its own records, that a vendor’s description of its cameras and the vendor’s actual data flows were two different things.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon has three descriptions of the same camera system in circulation, and Pflugerville got the narrowest one. The council pitch says no pictures. The Richardson pitch said no downward cameras on people. The published operations page says people near the drop point may be recorded and the images are used to improve Amazon services, and the spokeswoman’s encrypted-drive line confirms they are kept. My read is that each version is written for its audience rather than for accuracy, and a council that just caught Flock doing the same thing is the wrong room to try it in.

The fix is not complicated. Amazon can put the operations-page language on the council slide, say how long delivery-point images are retained and who can pull them, and let Pflugerville judge the actual policy instead of a paraphrase. Zipline answered DroneXL’s safety questions on the record this month; its own draft assessment for Austin, El Paso and three other Texas metros is open for public comment through October 11. Amazon’s Texas decision is already signed. Pflugerville still holds the land-use file Amazon opened in June and the question Holiday asked on September 22, and that is enough to get the retention policy on the record before a single flight.

Residents inside the 7.5-mile circle around Schultz Lane can find what still works, and what doesn’t, in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do. Amazon takes drone-delivery complaints and opt-out requests at 1-888-280-4331, or through the customer-service chat on Amazon’s site under “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL tracks every Prime Air hub, filing and incident on the Amazon Prime Air operator page.

Sources: Pflugerville Councilman David Rogers (Facebook, September 25, 2026), Community Impact (Pflugerville, September 24, 2026), Community Impact (Richardson, March 10, 2026), Community Impact (Pflugerville Flock vote), Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery Operations page, FAA Final Environmental Assessment for Drone Package Delivery in Texas, FAA FONSI/ROD, Amazon Multi-Metro Texas, FAA drone environmental review index

DroneXL may earn a commission from purchases made through the Amazon link in this article, at no extra cost to you.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

North Haven Amazon Drones: How to File With CT DEEP Before Oct. 1

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:24:00 GMT

Residents of North Haven, Hamden, Wallingford and New Haven have until Thursday, October 1, to file a comment with Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection on Amazon’s plan to fly up to 1,000 MK30 delivery flights a day from its warehouse at 409 Washington Avenue. DEEP opened the 15-day window on September 16, when it published the Federal Aviation Administration’s request for a finding that the hub is consistent with the state’s Coastal Management Act, and it owes the FAA an answer by October 16.

It is the only public comment window DroneXL can find open on the project in Connecticut. North Haven’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved Amazon’s delivery building in May and has nothing further on its agenda, the Connecticut Airport Authority took a briefing whose minutes say “general update,” and the FAA has posted no environmental document for the site.

The review DEEP is running was built for docks and dredging, and the FAA’s own request says the warehouse sits outside the coastal boundary.

The 7.5-Mile Circle Reaches New Haven Harbor and the Edge of Tweed

The FAA document DEEP is reviewing sets a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius, about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), around 409 Washington Avenue. Measured from the warehouse, that circle takes in all of Hamden and North Haven, downtown New Haven and Yale at 5.6 miles, Wallingford’s center at 6.2 miles, and the centers of North Branford, East Haven and Branford between 5.8 and 6.9 miles.

Long Wharf on New Haven Harbor sits 6.3 miles out, inside the circle. Tweed New Haven Airport’s field sits at about 7.6 miles, on the line, and the FAA document does not mention it, as DroneXL reported when the comment window opened. Cheshire’s center is 9 miles out, so only its southern edge falls inside; Bethany, Woodbridge and West Haven each have a strip within reach. DroneXL measured those distances from the warehouse address. The FAA has not published the operating-area map, and Amazon’s actual delivery boundary can exclude any of them.

The circle’s coastal content is the Quinnipiac River, which runs tidal through North Haven and Hamden about a mile from the warehouse before it reaches the harbor. North Haven and Hamden are both named in the act’s definition of the coastal area, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 22a-94(a), as DEEP’s own coastal area map layer records, and the tidal marsh along the river is the coastal resource closest to the launch pad.

The aircraft is the same one Amazon flies everywhere: 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty, 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) payload, a cruise between 205 and 370 feet (62 to 113 meters), and a descent to about 13 feet (4 meters) to drop the package on the lawn. It carries no parachute in any FAA filing DroneXL has read. The FAA request gives operating hours of 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., seven days a week, with up to 100 of the 1,000 daily flights in the first hour and the last half hour.

North Haven Approved a Building in May, and the Next Date Is October 1

North Haven’s commissioners approved application P26-17, a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at the Washington Avenue warehouse, by a 5-0 vote on May 4, with three conditions: a revised site plan, replacing unusable parking spaces with lawn, and a $5,000 bond. The approved minutes record none of the flight details Amazon has given elsewhere.

The minutes list Amazon’s presenter, Sam Bailey, as “Project Manager, Amazon Services,” and have him describing 70-pound drones carrying packages of 5 pounds or less within seven miles. The Register Citizen’s account of the same meeting, carried by GovTech, identifies him as an economic development manager and adds the promise of a public information session, which the minutes do not record and which had not been announced when DroneXL searched for one on September 26.

Date	Action	Status
May 4, 2026	P&Z approves P26-17, 5-0, with conditions	Done
Aug. 3, 2026	P&Z accepts revised perimeter fence plans, 5-0	Done
Aug. 17, 2026	FAA sends DEEP its consistency request	Done
Sept. 16, 2026	DEEP publishes notice, opens 15-day comment window	Done
Sept. 23, 2026	CT Airport Authority board briefed; draft minutes say “general update”	Done
Oct. 1, 2026	DEEP comment window closes; North Haven Board of Selectmen regular meeting, 6:30 p.m., Town Hall	Open
Oct. 16, 2026	DEEP concurrence or objection due to FAA	Pending
No date	FAA site-specific environmental document	Not posted as of Sept. 28

The arithmetic is DEEP’s, as spokesperson Bill Flood gave it to the New Haven Register: 15 days from a September 16 publication runs to October 1, and 60 days from the FAA’s August 17 request runs to October 16. The Board of Selectmen meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at Memorial Town Hall, 18 Church Street, and October 1 is that Thursday. The town had not posted the October 1 agenda when DroneXL checked on September 28; the board’s regular meetings carry a public comment period, according to its minutes.

The FAA’s drone environmental review index listed no Connecticut, North Haven or New Haven document when DroneXL checked it on the morning of September 28. The page was last updated September 24. Whether the hub gets a site review of its own or is checked against the national finding the FAA signed on July 28, with no draft and no comment period, is the question no Connecticut document answers, and it is the question a comment to DEEP can raise.

DEEP Rules on Coastal Policy, Not on Noise or Hours

Under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act and the Connecticut Coastal Management Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. §§ 22a-90 through 22a-112, DEEP decides one thing: whether the FAA’s action is consistent with the state’s enforceable coastal policies. Its Land and Water Resources Division ends every review with a concurrence or an objection. It does not decide airspace, altitude, hours, noise limits, or whether Amazon may fly.

DEEP’s coastal consistency page lays out the process under 15 CFR part 930 and cites the statute. The FAA’s request already argues the answer: the site is inland, outside the coastal boundary, no construction takes place in the coastal zone, and drone overflights inside the radius are transitory, according to the document the Hartford Courant published on September 19. A comment that says “too loud” or “not over my house” gives DEEP nothing it can act on within that frame.

A comment lands when it ties to a coastal resource or to the record DEEP is being asked to sign. Flight paths over the Quinnipiac tidal wetlands and what an 83-pound aircraft does to waterfowl there. Where an MK30 puts down when it fails over the river or the marsh: Amazon told a Westborough, Massachusetts, forum that the aircraft picks the nearest open area that is not a road or a building, and that the company keeps no map of landing sites. The harbor inside the circle, which the document does not name. And the absence of any site-specific FAA environmental document for DEEP to review against, which means DEEP is being asked to concur with a national analysis that never looked at the Quinnipiac.

The noise numbers belong in the file too, because the FAA’s own figures for this Amazon aircraft come from another state. The FAA’s Baton Rouge filing, Appendix B, puts MK30 takeoff and landing at 90.5 and 91.8 decibels SEL measured 20 feet from the aircraft, the delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL measured 25 feet away, and a drone cruising overhead at 200 feet (61 meters) at 63.7 decibels SEL. Amazon’s Prime Air operations manager in Baton Rouge, Tyra Jones, told the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge on September 9 that the drones are quieter than an idling delivery truck, as DroneXL reported from The Advocate’s account. The FAA’s own reference point for the 92.1 figure is a diesel truck at 50 feet.

General noise objections go to the FAA’s noise inquiry page and to the town, not to DEEP. Amazon’s own channels are in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can still do.

Connecticut Law Bars Towns From Regulating Commercial Drones

Connecticut settled the local question in 2017. Public Act 17-52, codified at Conn. Gen. Stat. § 7-149b, says no municipality may enact or enforce an ordinance that regulates the ownership, possession, use, transportation or operation of a commercial unmanned aircraft. The one carve-out is for a municipality that is also a water company, over its public water supply and watershed land.

That closes the lever towns in other states still hold. A North Haven noise ordinance written for drones, or a Hamden flight-hours rule, would run into the state statute before it reached the federal preemption question, because the act’s language reaches “use” and “operation,” not only the aircraft itself.

Connecticut has no drone-specific trespass or privacy statute. The Judicial Branch’s law library page on drones lists Public Act 17-52, the 2025 weaponization ban, and the general statutes on privacy and nuisance; nothing there addresses low overflight of private property, and DroneXL found no such provision in the General Assembly’s public act index when it searched on September 28. The state has no aviation agency of its own with jurisdiction here: the Connecticut Airport Authority runs Bradley and five general aviation airports, Tweed is not among them, and airspace is federal.

Three Levers Remain: the DEEP File, the Ground, and the Records

The DEEP comment is the first and it closes Thursday. A comment filed before October 1 goes into the record the FAA receives with DEEP’s decision, whichever way DEEP rules, and DEEP sets no minimum length or format.

The second is the ground. Public Act 17-52 leaves the launch pad to the town: site plans, bonds, fencing, lighting, ground-operation hours at the pad, and the conditions the commission attached in May. P26-17’s $5,000 bond and revised-plan conditions are still the town’s to enforce, and the Board of Selectmen meets on the deadline day with a public-comment slot. In Westborough, Massachusetts, where Amazon told a packed room its drones were coming anyway, the Planning Board’s site-plan review of the pads is the one local vote left, and it resumes October 6.

The third is paper. Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 1-200 and following, reaches the town and the Connecticut Airport Authority alike. The records to ask for: the P26-17 application file and any correspondence between Amazon and the First Selectman’s office; whatever the Airport Authority’s executive director, Michael Shea, was shown before he told his board on September 23 that Amazon had “coordinated extensively with the FAA,” a briefing the draft minutes do not record; and DEEP’s own file, including the FAA’s August 17 request and every comment received.

DroneXL asked North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda’s office and Hamden Mayor Adam Sendroff’s office on the afternoon of September 28 whether their towns were notified of the DEEP review and whether they will comment; neither had answered at publication. Wallingford and New Haven had not been asked. This article will be updated with any reply.

Who to Contact Before October 1

The comment address circulating in North Haven, on a flyer posted to the Town of North Haven CT Community Forum on Facebook, is Karen.Michaels@ct.gov. DEEP’s own 2020 comment notice for its coastal program names Karen Michaels, Environmental Analyst, Planning Section, Land and Water Resources Division, CT DEEP, 79 Elm Street, Hartford, CT 06106-5127, at that email, and the division’s general permit inbox is DEEPLWRDPermitInfo@ct.gov. DroneXL asked DEEP on September 28 to confirm the address and the project name for this review and had no answer at publication; put “Amazon Prime Air, North Haven, federal consistency” in the subject line and copy the division inbox.

North Haven’s Board of Selectmen meets October 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Memorial Town Hall, 18 Church Street; the Town Clerk’s office at the same address, (203) 239-5321, takes records requests. State Senator Paul Cicarella’s 34th District covers all of North Haven and Wallingford and parts of East Haven and North Branford; State Representative Dave Yaccarino’s 87th District is North Haven alone. Hamden and New Haven residents can find their legislators through the General Assembly’s district lookup.

The FAA takes drone questions at UASHelp@faa.gov and 844-359-6982, and noise complaints through its inquiry page. Amazon takes drone-delivery calls at 1-888-280-4331; by chat, open the customer service page on Amazon, choose “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.”

For what Amazon’s neighbors have already learned elsewhere: Richardson, Texas, where one resident counted 52 overflights in a day and Amazon raised its altitude after complaints; Tolleson, Arizona, where two MK30s struck the same crane minutes apart; and every hub and incident on the record in DroneXL’s Amazon Prime Air tracker.

DroneXL’s Take

North Haven approved a building. Nobody in Connecticut has reviewed the flying, and the one office taking comment on it is being asked whether an inland warehouse harms the coast. My read is that the FAA sent the coastal request because the law requires it and for no other reason, and that if the North Haven hub is being checked against the July 28 national finding, DEEP’s file is the only public record Connecticut will ever have. That makes the file worth filling with the specific things DEEP can act on: the Quinnipiac marsh, the harbor, the missing site document. I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight, and Zipline’s P2 shows how to do it: 55 pounds empty, a tethered drop from about 300 feet, two parachutes. The MK30 weighs 83 pounds to carry 5, descends to 13 feet over the lawn and has no parachute, and both Tolleson collisions ended in uncontrolled descents. That judgment is mine. The deadline is DEEP’s, and it is Thursday.

Sources: Connecticut DEEP, Coastal Consistency, Town of North Haven Planning and Zoning Commission minutes, May 4, 2026, FAA NEPA and Drones, FAA Baton Rouge Draft EA Appendix B, Connecticut Public Act 17-52, Connecticut Judicial Branch Law Library, The Register Citizen via GovTech, New Haven Register, Hartford Courant.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Northglenn Drafts Colorado's First Drone Rules. Wing Can Fly In Anyway

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:31:00 GMT

Northglenn, Colorado, is on track to become the first city in the state with an ordinance written specifically for drone delivery, and it is writing the rules before anyone has filed to fly. The Planning Commission voted on September 15 to recommend a new land-use category, the Commercial Drone Delivery Hub, and city staff expect a first reading before City Council on October 12 and a public hearing and final vote on October 26. Walmart has approached the city about flying orders from its Neighborhood Market at 10755 N. Washington St. with Wing, Alphabet’s drone unit, according to The Denver Post.

The draft keeps launch pads 200 feet (61 meters) from homes, schools and childcare centers, caps ground noise at 65 decibels at the property line, limits operations to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and requires a special use permit reviewed every year. Every one of those numbers applies to the fenced patch of parking lot. The city’s own staff memorandum says drones launched from a hub in the next town over can legally deliver to every address in Northglenn.

Northglenn’s Ordinance Regulates The Pad, And Nothing Above It

The proposed rules cover the ground facility only. Northglenn’s September 21 staff memorandum states that the Federal Aviation Administration has exclusive jurisdiction over flight paths, altitude and schedules, and that the city has no legal authority over a drone once it is airborne. The ordinance text repeats that limit in its own words.

A hub could operate as an accessory use in Commercial General, Commercial Auto-Oriented and Industrial districts, and as a primary use only in Industrial zones. It may take up no more than 10% of the lot or 10,000 square feet (929 square meters), whichever is smaller, and it cannot eat into the parking the main business is already required to keep. The 200-foot buffer is measured from the hub’s screening to the nearest property line of any residentially zoned parcel, licensed childcare center, school, or police, fire or utility site. Chain-link fencing is barred outside industrial zones unless it hides in a side or rear setback with a dark vinyl coat.

Applicants would have to file an operational narrative listing hours, maximum flight altitude, anticipated noise, maximum aircraft count and expected flight frequency, plus an Incident and Emergency Response Plan for an unplanned landing or crash inside the city. A crash triggers a 911 call and a written notice to the planning director within 24 hours. The memo says the flight information is collected for disclosure and compatibility analysis and gives the city no authority over the flights themselves.

The surveillance clause is one sentence. It makes it unlawful to operate a UAS to intentionally engage in surveillance of another person in a private place. The ordinance defines neither term. Wing has said its drones give controllers no live video feed, per the Post.

Becky Smith, the city’s planning and development director, asked the council to look hard at the numbers, naming the setback and buffer distances, facility size limit, hours and noise levels as figures that could still move before adoption.

A Hub Next Door Can Serve Every Address In Northglenn

Northglenn’s memo says operators design delivery networks to serve locations within roughly four to seven miles of each nest, and that denying a permit to a launch site in Northglenn does not prevent drone delivery activity from occurring in the city. That sentence is the reason the city wrote an ordinance instead of a moratorium: its land-use powers reach the pad and stop there.

Wing’s FAA authorizations put its nests at about six miles of range. The city’s August survey of ten metro-area peers found Thornton actively drafting its own “Launchpad” ordinance after one pre-application, and Longmont holding two Walmart pre-applications with no hearing scheduled because it treats an undefined use as not allowed. Boulder, Broomfield, Commerce City, Erie, Federal Heights and Littleton reported no applicable code and no filings. Eight of the ten said they would join a regional discussion.

South of Denver, Castle Rock and Parker went the other way. Castle Rock’s council passed an emergency ordinance on July 20 freezing drone delivery hub applications for six months after a pre-application for an 18-drone port, and Parker followed on July 21 with a nine-month pause, Colorado Community Media reported. Parker Councilmember Anne Barrington put it as “We’re not saying no, we’re just saying no today.” A moratorium on the pad has the same reach as Northglenn’s ordinance: none over the airspace.

Colorado was not on either of Wing and Walmart’s 2026 market lists. January named Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami; June added seven more metros, none of them in Colorado. As in Tacoma, Washington, the site surfaced in a local land-use process before either company said a word about the market.

Wing Claims A Clean Record, And Won’t Put It On Paper For DroneXL

Wing spokesperson Josh Bucci told The Denver Post the company is not aware of any collisions or mishaps involving its own fleet. Wing’s Hummingbird weighs 14 to 24 pounds (6.4 to 11 kilograms) at takeoff depending on the model, carries up to about 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), and lowers the package on a tether from a hover of roughly 23 feet (7 meters). It carries no parachute; the safety case in Wing’s FAA filings rests on the light airframe.

That record contrasts with the operator Northglenn’s neighbors have also been hearing from. Thornton has fielded inquiries from both Walmart and Amazon, the Post reported, and Amazon’s 83-pound MK30 has hit an apartment building in Richardson, Texas and two drones into a crane in Tolleson, Arizona in the past year. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s file.

Wing has also declined to put that record on paper. DroneXL sent Wing 30 written safety questions on September 8, covering weight, descent behavior after a lost motor, the incident list, sound levels and cameras. Zipline answered its set in full. Wing has sent nothing. Northglenn’s operational narrative asks for the same altitude, noise and frequency figures, and its ordinance would make them a condition of the permit.

DroneXL’s Take

Northglenn got the law right and the reader should not mistake that for control. A city can decide whether a Walmart parking lot gets a fenced 10,000-square-foot nest. It cannot decide whether Hummingbirds cross its yards at 150 feet, because that authority sits with the FAA and the FAA’s national environmental finding this July settled the noise question for the whole country. Northglenn’s staff wrote that limit into the memo in plain words. A moratorium on the pad does not stop the flights; it moves the pad.

The part of this ordinance worth copying is the operational narrative. It forces the operator to state, in a public filing, its altitude, its noise figure, its aircraft count and its flight frequency before the first delivery. Wing has spent three weeks not answering those exact questions from this publication. A permit condition in a Colorado suburb of 40,000 may be what finally gets them on the record, and I’d tell every city on Thornton’s and Longmont’s list to lift that clause word for word.

Sources: City of Northglenn staff memorandum #29-2026, The Denver Post, Colorado Community Media

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Russia's Geran-4 Runs On A $25,000 Hobby Jet, Texas Instruments Chips

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:33:00 GMT

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative team Schemes took apart a Russian Geran-4 Seeker that came down almost intact in Ukraine and found a Chinese turbojet, a Chinese mesh modem, two cellular modems, a 16-channel anti-jamming antenna and Texas Instruments parts on the flight computer. The drone was assembled at the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan. Schemes published its report on September 19, 2026, and RFE/RL posted the four-minute English teardown video on September 25.

The specialists who opened the airframe study wreckage after Russian mass attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding region, and RFE/RL withheld their names for their safety. The report’s verdict on the drone’s national origin fits in one line: “What is Russian in this drone is the assembly.”

The stakes are in Kyiv’s own numbers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on September 26 that Russia launched more than 2,730 jet-powered Shaheds in September and Ukraine shot down or jammed just over 1,500 of them, a 55 percent rate. Against the propeller Shaheds the rate is above 90 percent.

The Geran-4 Climbs To 26,000 Feet On A Chinese Engine Sold For Model Aircraft

The turbojet takes the Geran-4 to 26,000 feet (8 km), twice the ceiling of the propeller Gerans, at 280 to 310 mph (450 to 500 km/h). Drones with the same engine have flown from occupied Crimea to Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, more than 435 miles (700 km), the specialists said.

The engine is a Chinese TJ-2000-class turbojet, and nothing about it is military. The specialists told Schemes it is the same class of engine sold for model aviation and sport flying, that the Chinese maker rates it for 30 hours of running, and that classified listings put it at $20,000 to $25,000 in China and about $65,000 in Ukraine. Anyone can order one. Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), which identified the Telefly TF-TJ2000A and LX-WP-160 in the Geran-4s it tore down in May, puts the price Russia pays at $35,000 to $40,000 per engine and says Russia has no domestic replacement.

One scrap of paper inside told the supply story better than the parts did. The engine’s components carried Chinese markings, but a slip left in a compartment recorded that it had been test-run at Alabuga and signed off as fit for use by a local technician. RFE/RL said it has investigated cases where these engines were put together in Russia from Chinese parts.

The 26,000-foot ceiling is 10,000 feet above the 16,400 feet (5,000 m) HUR published in its May assessment. The camera now sits in a molded bay instead of being bolted to the fuselage, offers day, night and infrared channels with 10x optical and 32x digital zoom, and its factory cover is stamped “Mini-buterbrod,” Russian for mini sandwich.

Two SIM Cards And A Mesh Modem Let An Operator In Bryansk Steer It To The Target

A Chinese mesh modem with a 186-mile (300 km) range sends live video back to an operator and can relay for other drones in the same wave, extending control beyond one link. Two GSM modems with different SIM cards report the drone’s position over cellular networks in flight.

Last year’s Gerans carried one modem; the Geran-4 has a built-in slot for two. The SIM cards recovered in recent months came from carriers in Ukraine, Russia and several EU countries, with the English video adding Belarus to that list and the Ukrainian-language report Kazakhstan. A 16-channel CRPA antenna shields the satellite navigation from jamming, up from the 12-element array HUR documented in the Geran-3 on its War & Sanctions portal. With a relay in the chain, the specialists said, an operator at a workstation in Bryansk, Oryol or Crimea guides the drone all the way in, and recent strikes have landed where they were aimed.

The flight computer’s boards carry Texas Instruments parts, which HUR lists on the portal’s Geran-4 page. The American presence is not new: half the 45 foreign parts in the Geran-3 came from US manufacturers, and a single Geran-5 recovered in January held six Texas Instruments chips.

The volume is. HUR told Militarnyi on August 12 that Russia builds about 3,000 Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones a month at Alabuga, has stopped making the Geran-3, and now turns out more jets than the roughly 2,800 propeller Geran-2s it builds monthly. On the night of September 18, Ukraine’s Air Force counted 93 attack drones, 46 of them jets. Ukraine’s Security Service released its first video of an interceptor killing a jet Shahed the following day.

DroneXL’s Take

The Texas Instruments chips will get the headlines, and they are the least important thing in this teardown. Western chips do keep arriving: the Geran-5 that came down in January carried oscillators built in 2024 and 2025, so the leak is live rather than a warehouse leftover. But a transceiver has a dozen substitutes. A 160-kilogram-force turbojet at model-airplane prices has one supplier, and it is in China. HUR’s own assessment is that Russia has no engine of its own and pays $35,000 to $40,000 for each Chinese one. At 3,000 airframes a month, that is $105 million to $120 million a month in engines alone, on HUR’s figures.

I think the sanctions effort is aimed at the wrong end of this drone. Western export controls can reach the Texas Instruments parts because they are Western, and the Geran keeps flying anyway. A Chinese civilian turbojet an aeromodeller can order is outside every one of those controls, and the one government that could shut that supply off has spent four years leaving it open. The 55 percent interception rate traces to a 30-hour hobby turbojet lifting a 198-pound (90 kg) warhead to 26,000 feet, and Beijing decides how many of those ship.

Sources: RFE/RL Schemes (Radio Svoboda), RFE/RL video, Militarnyi, United24 Media

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DSPA Breaks Charter to Take DHS Blue UAS Report to Congress

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:31:00 GMT

The Drone Service Providers Alliance has gone outside its own charter to ask every drone pilot and first responder in the country to call Congress about the Department of Homeland Security’s Blue UAS test report. Vic Moss, DSPA’s CEO and co-founder, published the appeal on September 27, two days after DroneXL reported that three of the five Blue UAS DHS brought to Manhattan could not hold position there. DSPA exists to advocate for commercial drone service providers, and Moss opens his post by saying this is one of the times the group has to stray from that.

The ask is a country-agnostic security standard. Congress should name a federal agency to test the security of every drone flying in U.S. airspace, and the results, not the country of manufacture, should decide what public safety agencies may buy. Congress wrote almost exactly that instruction into law in December 2024. The deadline passed nine months ago with no agency having done the work.

DSPA Says a Blue List Checkmark Proves Nothing About Doing the Job

DSPA’s case rests on one line DHS wrote itself: a Blue UAS designation tells an agency a drone meets federal sourcing and cybersecurity rules, and says nothing about whether it can do the mission. Moss cites the report’s 50-foot link losses and $13,964 to $56,195 prices as the evidence.

The DSPA post hosts its own copy of the 47-page DHS report and walks through the same findings DroneXL covered in DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores: the three aircraft that could not hold position at Hudson Yards, the Parrot flyaway, and the Teal 2 pairing failures that kept it on the ground for up to 15 minutes. Moss is careful not to overreach. He writes that some Blue UAS performed considerably better than others, names the Skydio X10D as the standout, and lands on a single sentence: “a cybersecurity or procurement designation is not a substitute for operational capability.”

The part of the report Moss calls its most important sentence is the one about the drones DHS did not score in public. The lab flew covered-nation aircraft, its term for Chinese-made drones, alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards because agencies still rely on them for reliability and performance. Its executive summary says evaluators found large capability differences between the two groups. The numbers appear nowhere in the document. “Results related to the covered nation platforms is available to public safety agencies upon request,” the report says, and gives NUSTL@hq.dhs.gov as the address. Moss allows that DHS may have a reason for holding the comparison back, notes that the report does not say what it is, and asks why first responders and the members of Congress voting on drone bans should not see it too.

Congress Ordered the Security Test DSPA Wants in 2024 and Nobody Ran It

Section 1709 of the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December 2024, gave an unnamed national security agency one year to audit DJI and Autel, with both added to the FCC Covered List automatically if no audit happened. The deadline was December 23, 2025. No agency ran it.

The Drone Service Providers Alliance wants that provision fixed rather than repeated. Its post asks Congress to name the agency, broaden the audit to every manufacturer selling into the National Airspace System, and hold that agency to the deadline. The standards that come out of it would apply to aircraft, control links, apps, cloud services and data storage, and a drone that fails them gets no pass for being built in the United States or an allied country.

DJI’s head of global policy, Adam Welsh, described the 2024 provision to DroneXL last December as a trap door: a ban that triggered on nobody doing anything. The FCC did not wait for the trap to spring. On December 22, 2025, one day before the Section 1709 deadline, it added every foreign-made drone and critical component to the Covered List on the strength of an interagency national security determination issued the day before. The audit Congress had ordered a year earlier had not happened. Moss made the same argument against the FCC’s follow-on proposal to ban foreign military-grade drones in a 35-minute video in August, when he told the Commission that its seven capability categories would sweep up the aircraft firefighters and search teams already fly. The DHS report has now handed him the federal government’s own test data to attach to the same point.

DroneXL’s Take

Vic Moss is asking Congress for the policy DroneXL has argued for throughout the DJI ban debate: a security standard every manufacturer has to pass, in place of a ban keyed to a passport. He now has a DHS lab report to attach to it and is asking pilots to carry it into their senators’ offices. Do it. Agencies can already request the covered-nation scores from NUSTL, so the people spending the money are not locked out. The people who wrote the ban are. The Hudson Yards comparison was flown in July 2025, seven months after Section 1709 became law, and the FCC cited none of it when it acted on December 22. My read is that the comparison was never meant to inform the ban. The ban was designed to happen without one, which is what Welsh told DroneXL in December and what then happened. DSPA’s post links the USAGov page that finds your senators and representative. When you call, ask one question: which agency will run the test Section 1709 already ordered, and when.

Sources: DSPA, DHS Tested Blue UAS for First Responders. Why The Results Should Worry Everyone, September 27, 2026; Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Faces 92% Opposition in Westborough Drone Survey, Calls Urged

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:17:43 GMT

An independent survey of residents around Amazon’s proposed Prime Air drone hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, had 853 responses at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, September 28, and 92% of them oppose the operation. The count is live and keeps moving. Another 3% would support it only with added restrictions, 3% support it outright, and 93% say they are unlikely to use drone delivery if it reaches their address. The survey is not a scientific poll, and its organizers say so on the page.

By Sunday night residents were circulating a phone script aimed at three state legislators, Governor Maura Healey, both U.S. senators and Representative Jim McGovern. Hours earlier, a second resident had posted that he rebuilt the survey site’s document library into a reference shelf of FAA environmental reviews, NTSB crash reports and Massachusetts landing-area law.

Amazon told a packed hotel ballroom in Westborough on September 23 that it hopes to start flying from its Otis Street parking lot possibly by the end of October. By its own account that night, it had none of the three approvals that would let it.

The Survey Counts 853 Responses and Calls Itself Unscientific

The Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey at dronefeedback.com is run by a Westborough resident, with no tie to Amazon or the town. It asks for a name, email, street name and town, no house number, and accepts one response per email address. At 8:30 a.m. on September 28 it counted 853 accepted responses: 477 from Westborough, 86 from Grafton, 82 from Northborough, 74 from Hopkinton and 32 from Marlborough. The site publishes opposition as one figure across all towns, not town by town.

The 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) circle reaches well past those five. Mass Blue Skies maps it as all of Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton and Northborough, large parts of Worcester, Hopkinton, Upton, Millbury, Boylston, Marlborough and Southborough, and small corners of Hudson, Berlin, Ashland and West Boylston, 15 cities and towns in all. Wafaie put it at parts of 13 on September 23. Amazon’s own August 18 map showed Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Only Westborough gets a vote, because the pad sits on its land. Worcester, Upton, Millbury and Boylston, each with a large share of its territory under the circle by Mass Blue Skies’ reading, are absent from the survey’s top-five counts.

The survey's live results card at 851 responses, shortly before this article's 853 count: 92% of respondents oppose Amazon Prime Air's proposed drone delivery operation from 64 Otis Street in Westborough. Image: dronefeedback.com

The site’s methodology note says residency is self-reported and the results are feedback from people who chose to answer, not a sample of the population. Amazon can say the same thing, and it would be right. The count does show speed. Amazon presented the plan to the Select Board on August 18. Six weeks later, 477 people in a town of 21,567 have put their name and street on the form, and across all towns 92% of those who did marked oppose.

Alessio Burgio, who maintains the site’s Documents & Sources section, posted in a Westborough Facebook group on Sunday afternoon that he had reorganized it into sections for local and state review, FAA documents, environmental and wildlife material, noise, documented safety incidents and other Prime Air communities, and asked residents to send him anything he had missed. The library links the NTSB reports on the MK30, from the two Pendleton test collisions in 2024 to the two drones that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, along with the FAA’s College Station and Texas environmental assessments and the Connecticut permit notice for North Haven’s 1,000-flights-a-day envelope.

Residents Have a Phone Script for Moore, Kane and Donaghue

Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik posted the script on Facebook on Sunday night, asking residents to call or email their representatives Monday morning and to use the same wording so the offices know the callers are organized. The script registers “strong opposition” to commercial drone delivery in Westborough and surrounding areas, cites noise, safety, privacy, the environment and property values across the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery zone, and asks officials to prohibit the service, slow the approvals, and back noise limits, altitude restrictions, no-fly zones near homes and privacy rules. It lists State Senator Michael O. Moore, State Representatives Hannah Kane and Kate Donaghue, Governor Healey, U.S. Representative Jim McGovern and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, with office numbers for each.

The post puts the survey at “93% of area respondents” with more than 800 responses. The site’s own figure for opposition is 92%; 93% is the share who say they are unlikely to use the service.

The three state legislators have already been in the room, in a sense. The survey site says that in correspondence shared with the project, Moore, Kane and Donaghue said they had met with Amazon, discussed constituent concerns and the limits of state authority with MassDOT, and raised the issue with other state and federal officials. That matches what Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told the September 23 forum: a virtual briefing for town managers and state legislators, with no public meeting before each town’s board.

The script points callers to Mass Blue Skies, the grassroots group behind that 15-town map. Its position page says most members are Amazon customers who want to keep the vans and skip the drones. Residents who want to tell Amazon directly can use the phone number and chat route in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do.

Amazon’s October Target Still Rests on Three Missing Approvals

Westborough’s Planning Board continued its September 15 hearing on site-plan application 26-02275 to October 6, MassLive reported, and that vote covers only the fenced launch pad and trailers on the parking lot. The October 6 agenda the town posted on September 11 does not list the item yet, and Boston.com gave the date as October 7. MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division has not issued the landing-area approval Massachusetts requires for a commercial pad, and Amazon was still waiting on it with no timeline as of September 24, Boston.com reported. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 28, five days after a member of Amazon’s airspace team told the forum the FAA was reviewing Westborough now. An empty page is not proof of no review: since July 28 the FAA can clear a new hub against its national environmental assessment without posting a site document.

The survey site keeps its own status board, and it is mostly blank. Operating hours, a flight-density map, emergency-response coordination, a Westborough-specific FAA determination and any wildlife review are each marked “not publicly identified,” which the site defines as no Westborough document found, not proof that none exists. The one number on the board is Amazon’s: up to 1,000 deliveries a day, the eventual goal Amazon gave the Planning Board on September 15, with existing sites averaging 500 to 600, per Boston.com.

Wafaie also told that room that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. Westborough is the other 20%. Southborough learned it was on Amazon’s map from a blogger and Shrewsbury from the police. By then a resident in Richardson, Texas, had already counted 52 drones over her yard in a day.

DroneXL’s Take

The 92% does not surprise me. Five days ago I watched a ballroom full of Amazon customers in Westborough raise their hands against Amazon’s drones. A self-selected survey measures who cares enough to answer. In a service area whose anchor town has 21,567 people, 853 answers is a lot of people who care. The number Amazon should worry about is 93%: the share who say they would not use the service even if it came. A hub that 93% of the people who answered say they won’t order from is a hub that flies over them for someone else’s benefit.

The document library is the sharper weapon. Amazon’s pitch in every town rests on the FAA having done the homework, and Westborough residents are now reading the homework: the NTSB reports, the Texas assessment, the College Station eagle buffer, the Connecticut permit that spells out 1,000 flights a day in writing. Amazon has given no written answer to the eight safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4. Leaving a Planning Board that holds NTSB report numbers unanswered on October 6 is a harder trick.

My read is that the end-of-October date is already gone. There was no MassDOT approval as of last week’s reporting, there is no FAA document and no site-plan vote, and the state legislators the residents are calling this morning have already been asking MassDOT where the state’s authority ends, according to the survey site. Amazon can still get its pad. It will not get it quietly.

Sources: Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey, MassLive, Documents & Sources, Mass Blue Skies, Boston.com, Town of Westborough Planning Board agendas, FAA environmental review page, Facebook posts by Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik and Alessio Burgio.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Won't Say When Tracy Drones Fly. It Said Within a Month

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:28:00 GMT

Amazon did not give Tracy, California a start date for Prime Air drone deliveries when a newspaper asked for one. The Stockton Record asked the company when flights from its East Grant Line Road fulfillment center would begin, and the answer the paper published on September 24 covered pricing, package limits, a 70% growth figure and the company’s excitement at coming back to California. It did not include a date or a timeline.

Amazon told the Los Angeles Times and ABC10 in late August that Tracy would be flying within a month. The Times story ran on August 29, and that month ends on Tuesday.

Amazon Gave Tracy Every Detail Except a Date

Amazon’s statement to the Record restated the terms it publishes for every MK30 site: packages up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, free Prime delivery on orders over $50, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 for non-members. A start date appeared nowhere in it.

The statement listed the metro areas where Prime Air already flies as Phoenix, Detroit, San Antonio, Dallas, Tampa, Waco, Kansas City, Baton Rouge, Omaha and Houston, the same ten on Amazon’s August 19 expansion page, with more metro areas promised before the end of the year. It added one figure that page does not carry: a 70% year-over-year increase in items delivered in under a day, which Amazon offered as the reason it wants Tracy. There is no separate sign-up, Amazon told the Record. Eligible items carry a label in the app, and the drone option shows at checkout for addresses inside the circle.

“We’re genuinely excited to bring Prime Air back to California,” the company said. Back, because Amazon left Lockeford, 35 miles (56 kilometers) up the road in the same county, in April 2024 without publicly saying why.

Cleveland Got Its Launch the Same Day Tracy Got a Statement

Amazon started flying from North Randall, Ohio on September 24, the day the Record ran its Tracy answer, using 21 drones. Cleveland was on Amazon’s August 19 list of metros coming next. Tracy never made that list, and on September 27 Amazon’s newsroom and locations page listed no California site.

The one-month timeline ran in the Times on August 29, built on an interview with Erik Robertson, Prime Air’s regional operations manager for the West, and DroneXL reported it the same morning. ABC10 carried the same timeline, attributed to the company. Tracy Press, working from Amazon’s own announcement, reported the start as “within the next few months.” Two timelines, both attributed to Amazon, in the same week.

Cleveland’s path ran the other way. It got a “soon” on Amazon’s own website, then a launch on September 24 with 21 aircraft, as DroneXL reported on September 25. Tracy got a drone on Front Street Plaza at a car show on August 29, and since then statements carrying prices, privacy assurances and a growth figure, and no date.

The federal record has not moved either. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, checked September 27, lists California once, for Lockeford in 2022, and nothing for Tracy. Since July 28 a site can be cleared against the FAA’s national assessment with no public document, as DroneXL laid out on September 14, so an empty page does not mean Tracy is stuck. Amazon says the Tracy operation is FAA-authorized, as it says of every Prime Air site. Whether Tracy was reviewed against that national assessment or is waiting on a document of its own is something neither Amazon nor the FAA had said as of September 27.

DroneXL’s Take

An Amazon drone date is worth exactly what Amazon publishes, and “within a month” was never published. The newsroom’s August 19 page said “soon” for Cleveland, and Cleveland flew five weeks later. Amazon said “a month” for Tracy to a newspaper and a TV station, its own site never repeated it, and four weeks later the same company did not produce a date when a reporter asked for one. I don’t think the Tracy timeline was ever a commitment. It was a conversation, and the difference is the whole story, because from where I sit Amazon is announcing sites through whoever happens to be holding a microphone, then letting its website decide which promises count. For anyone inside the 7.5-mile circle around East Grant Line Road, that leaves two reliable signals and neither is a press quote: a drone option appearing at checkout, or a Tracy ZIP code showing up on Amazon’s locations page. The company that put an MK30 on Front Street Plaza for a Saturday morning can put a date on its own website.

Sources: The Stockton Record, Los Angeles Times, ABC10, Amazon, Tracy Press, FAA

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Ukraine Air-Drops Kamikaze Robots 12 Miles Behind Russian Lines

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:48:00 GMT

Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps is flying explosive ground robots across the front line under heavy bomber drones and dropping them as far as 12 miles (19 kilometers) into Russian-held territory in northern Donetsk. The corps calls the offensive Operation Vivaldi, went public with it on September 15, and on September 20 put its results at 48 square miles (125 square kilometers) retaken and more than 3,000 Russian soldiers killed since it began.

The Telegraph published a frontline account of the tactic on September 26, from the corps’ 2nd Mechanised Battalion. Its commander, who goes by the call sign Darwin, told the paper no other army had air-dropped ground robots behind enemy lines until now, and that the robots had reached targets so deep that a Russian officer, in an intercepted exchange, refused to believe a Ukrainian machine had hit his men.

The kill figure and the 48 square miles come from the corps’ own Telegram channel. The Institute for the Study of War, which tracks the same stretch of front from geolocated footage, has confirmed that the three villages the corps names changed hands. It has confirmed nothing about the toll.

Ukraine Blinds Russian Drones Before Every Robot Drop

Each drop begins with jamming. The battalion blinds Russian reconnaissance drones over the sector, drives Russian infantry into cover with drones and artillery, then flies the carrier across at night. “The most difficult part is to reach the point where you should lift the drone,” Darwin told The Telegraph.

The sequence exists because the carrier is the weak point. A drone large enough to lift a robot is large enough for Russian troops to see, and Darwin said a machine gun is enough to bring one down. Three or four Russian drones sit over his positions at any moment and up to 100 pass over the battalion in a day, so the window for a drop has to be manufactured.

The corps has not named the carrier. Its commander, Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, described the aircraft as heavy bomber drones and said they deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) into the Russian rear, per the corps’ Telegram posts as carried by United24 Media. Darwin’s 12 miles is the deepest run the battalion described. The robots themselves range from flatbed carriers for ammunition and casualties to machine-gun mounts and one-way vehicles packed with explosives, and Ukrainian soldiers call the model used on this front Gryphon.

The tactic escalates what DroneXL reported in March, when the K2 Brigade stood up the first battalion built around armed ground robots, and in April, when Ukraine’s defense ministry said armed ground robots were running 9,000 frontline missions a month. Those robots drove to their targets. These are flown there.

The 3rd Army Corps’ Numbers Rest On Its Own Telegram Posts

Operation Vivaldi ran in two phases the corps calls seasons. The first, per Biletskyi, retook 29 square miles (75 square kilometers) and killed about 1,500 Russians. The second, announced September 20, added 19 square miles (50 square kilometers), 800 killed, and the villages of Shandryholove, Derylove and Drobysheve near Lyman.

The Institute for the Study of War’s September 20 assessment repeats those figures as the corps’ claims and credits the operation with a limited break out of positional warfare. It does not confirm the area or the casualties. Euromaidan Press, reading the same ISW mapping, reports that the operation broke up Russia’s planned pincer on Lyman. Newsweek asked the Russian defense ministry for comment on September 21 and printed none. Ukrainian outlet RBC Ukraine also narrowed Biletskyi’s world-first claim: air delivery of ground robots is not new, it reported, but doing it with kamikaze robots at this range is.

The other units under the corps for Vivaldi were the 60th Mechanized Brigade, the 21st Kraken regiment, the HUR special unit Artan and the Dozor border detachment, against Russia’s 20th Army, 25th Army and 1st Tank Army.

DroneXL’s Take

The 3,000 is the least important number in this story, and I’d treat it the way ISW does: as a claim by the unit that has every reason to make it. The part that is verified, by geolocated footage and by a Russian officer who wouldn’t believe his own intercept, is the delivery method. A heavy bomber quad is now a truck for ground robots, and the range of a tracked robot stopped mattering the moment someone else flies it to the target. What decides whether the tactic keeps working is not the robot, it’s the jamming that blinds the Russian drones long enough for the carrier to cross, and Darwin says as much. Watch the next Vivaldi update from the corps for the drop distance, not the body count: if the 10 kilometers becomes 20, the Russian rear on this front has no safe depth left.

Sources: The Telegraph, 3rd Army Corps via United24 Media, Institute for the Study of War, Newsweek

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Matrice 5TD Surfaces In China Filing, 750 g Heavier Than 4TD

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:32:00 GMT

The DJI Matrice 5TD now has a name in an official record. A registration entry on China’s civil drone platform lists the aircraft as “DJI Matrice 5TD,” model code M5TD, at 2.6 kg (5.7 lb) empty and 3.05 kg (6.7 lb) maximum takeoff weight, filed under the light category for power line and oil pipeline inspection.

Leaker Igor Bogdanov posted the screenshots on September 21 and followed on September 25 with a product render that prints “DJI Matrice 5TD” under a white airframe, then on September 26 with a new photo of the gray prototype, arms folded, on asphalt. The TD suffix is the one DJI uses for the thermal, dock-based version of an enterprise drone: the Matrice 4TD is the aircraft that lives in Dock 3.

The Matrice 4TD weighs 1,850 g with its battery and tops out at 2,090 g. The successor’s registered figures put 750 g on the airframe and 960 g on the takeoff limit.

Registration Entry Puts The Matrice 5TD In China’s Light Class

The listing sits on the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s UOM platform, the national drone registry. It names SZ DJI Technology Co. as manufacturer, M5TD as model, and power line patrol and oil pipeline inspection as intended use. The class field reads light, China’s 250 g to 4 kg band.

Bogdanov posted the entry on X alongside a matching one for the DJI Neo 3, whose 192.7 g weight and September 21 production date DroneXL had not seen before the Neo 3 box leak of September 15. The Matrice 5TD entry leaves the serial number and production date blank, so the aircraft it describes had not yet been built when the form was filled in, or the screenshot was taken before those fields were completed.

The weight gain has a plausible home. The Matrice 5 prototype photographed in July carried a dome on the top deck consistent with integrated LiDAR and a cylinder consistent with a built-in RTK antenna, both of which the Matrice 4 series sells as external add-ons. The Matrice 4D and 4TD launched with Dock 3 on February 27, 2025, at 54 minutes of forward flight, and a heavier airframe carrying the same battery class does not fly longer. Nothing in the registration entry lists flight time, so which way DJI went is not on the record.

DJI’s Own Support Bot And A Leaker Both Point To A Dock 4

DJI’s support chatbot now offers “Matrice 5” as an enterprise model. A screenshot Flyby Guys’ Stephen Sutton posted on September 25 shows the bot asking a customer to name their drone, “e.g., Matrice 4, Matrice 5, or other series.” The reply carries DJI’s “Generated by AI intelligence” label.

A language model filling in an example is weaker evidence than a product page. Bogdanov’s September 25 post went further than the render. He wrote that there will be a DJI Dock 4 and that it “will be used in stores soon.” He has given no source for the dock, and DJI has said nothing about either product. His track record on this platform is good: he put the Matrice 400A on the record before launch and fed accurate Matrice 4 specifications ahead of the January 2025 debut.

A Dock 4 is the part American operators should read twice. Dock 3 and the Matrice 4TD cleared the FCC before the December 22, 2025 Covered List action blocked new authorizations for DJI hardware. A Dock 4 and a Matrice 5TD have no such grant, and none can be issued while the designation stands.

DroneXL’s Take

Every police department and utility that bought into Dock 3 since February 2025 just found out where the ceiling is. The Matrice 4TD’s drone-as-first-responder pitch was a box on a roof that gets a better aircraft every couple of years without anyone climbing a ladder. That upgrade path now ends at the U.S. border: the agencies that standardized on Dock 3 will run a 2025 aircraft while European and Asian departments drop a heavier, better-sensed successor into a Dock 4. My read is that the 750 g is LiDAR and RTK moving into the airframe, which is the exact capability an inspection crew wants closest to a power line. The Covered List does not protect those crews from anything. It freezes them, and DJI’s Ninth Circuit case is the only thing on a calendar that can thaw them.

Sources: Igor Bogdanov on X (September 21, September 25, September 26), Stephen Sutton on X, DJI Enterprise Dock 3 specifications

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Redfin Just Handed Drone Pilots a Client Checklist. Use It

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:52:00 GMT

Redfin, one of the largest real estate brokerages in the United States, published a guide on September 22 telling home sellers how to get a property ready for a drone photo shoot. Not whether to hire a pilot. How to prepare for one: clear the roof, move the cars, roll the bins out of sight, leave the airspace to the pilot.

Redfin quoted me on the roof. From 150 feet up it is the biggest surface in the frame, so I told them to treat it like the lawn. The guide ends with a 12-point pre-shoot checklist written for the seller, and its last item tells the seller to confirm the pilot’s Part 107 certificate before the shoot.

Sellers reading a brokerage blog are now being told to check a pilot’s paperwork. Most pilots have never sent a seller a checklist of their own.

Redfin tells sellers the roof, the driveway and the paperwork are their job

Redfin’s guide, written by Carson Sperry, collects prep advice from Justin Phillips of American Guerilla Marketing, Karl Roskamp of Launchpad Home Group, Jeffrey R. Theisler of Imaging in the Sky, and DroneXL. It ends with the checklist the seller works through the evening before the shoot.

The framing is what changes. From the sidewalk a buyer sees the front door and the landscaping. From 150 or 200 feet up, Redfin writes, the roof becomes a continent and the recycling bin beside the garage becomes part of the listing photo. So the guide walks sellers through the surfaces a ground-level shoot never showed them: gutters, moss streaks, tarps and dead satellite dishes on the roof, then the top-down view of driveways, patios, pool decks and side yards, then the branches. On that last point it is blunt: do not go chopping the day before, because fresh cuts and piles of limbs photograph worse than the branches did.

Pilots get their own paragraph. Redfin tells sellers to confirm the operator holds an FAA Part 107 certificate, to ask whether they carry liability insurance, and to leave airspace authorization, weather and safety calls to the pilot. Then it tells them what to look at in a portfolio: “recent real estate listing work, not just scenic clips or social-media reels.”

The advice is not new to anyone who does this for a living. Billy Kyle put a near-identical list (cars out of the driveway, trash cans tucked away, cushions in place, umbrellas up, pool cleaner removed) into his aerial real estate video guide on DroneXL in December 2022. What is new is who is saying it. When the brokerage tells the seller, the pilot no longer has to.

Half of Realtors already use drones, so sellers are catching up to the market

The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Technology Survey, released September 18, 2025, found that 52 percent of Realtors use drone photography or video. Only e-signature (79 percent) and social media (75 percent) ranked higher, which puts aerials ahead of AI-generated listing text at 46 percent.

At that adoption rate the pilot’s sales problem has flipped. The question an agent asks is no longer whether to add aerials but which of the pilots in her phone to book, and Redfin has just told her clients what to check: a Part 107 certificate, insurance, and a portfolio of listings rather than sunsets. Pilots who cannot show all three will be asked for them by a seller who read a brokerage blog. Pilot Institute, a DroneXL partner, runs the Part 107 course for the first item.

The checklist to paste into your next booking confirmation

The version below rewrites Redfin’s seller list for a pilot to send 48 hours before every shoot, so there is a shared reference when a client asks why the trash cans are in the shot. Two items, pets and the weather line, are additions from the pilot’s side.

Getting your home ready for the drone shoot

Aerial photos show your property from above, so a few things that are invisible from the street become very visible. Please take care of the following before we arrive:

Roof and gutters

Clear leaves, pine needles and debris from the roof and gutters

Remove tarps, unused satellite dishes and anything stored on the roof

Driveway and street

Move all vehicles off the driveway and, if possible, out of the street in front of the house

Roll trash, recycling and yard-waste bins out of sight

Close the garage door and any gates

Yard, patio and pool

Mow and edge the lawn, sweep patios and walkways

Put away hoses, toys, lawn tools, ladders and pool equipment

Clean the pool, straighten outdoor furniture, and open umbrellas only if they are in good shape

The morning of

Turn off sprinklers so pavement and hardscaping are dry

Let your immediate neighbors know the approximate time

Keep pets indoors during the flight

I am an FAA Part 107 certified pilot and carry liability insurance. I handle airspace authorization, weather calls and all flight safety. If the weather does not cooperate, I will reschedule at no charge.

Billy Kyle and Ken Dono built businesses on the shoot Redfin describes

Two friends of DroneXL shoot exactly the homes Redfin’s guide is written for. Ken Dono, known online as OriginaldoBo, shoots listings across Tampa Bay and Orlando through Apex Imaging Media. Billy Kyle, a longtime DroneXL contributor, shoots Main Line estates and Jersey Shore properties through his commercial services business.

Both teach the Real Estate Photo and Video course at Pilot Institute, nine hours of video covering the shoot, the edit and the client work behind it.

Ask either of them which drone to buy for this work and the answer is not DJI’s most expensive one. Ken and Billy both told me the DJI Mavic 4 Pro is a poor fit for real estate: its main camera is a 28 mm equivalent, not the 24 mm on the rest of DJI’s lineup, and those 4 mm are the difference between getting a house and its lot in one frame and backing the drone off the property to do it. I hit the same wall in my Mavic 4 Pro review in May 2025. The drones they recommend are the ones with the 24 mm lens and the lower price: the Mini 4 Pro, the Mini 5 Pro and the Air 3S.

Ken’s photo below is the frame Redfin is telling sellers to prepare for: roof, driveway and the neighbors’ yards in one shot.

Aerial view of a listing at 104 Adriatic Avenue in the Tampa area, with the neighbors' roofs and driveways in the same frame. Photo: Ken Dono / Apex Imaging Media

DroneXL’s Take

Redfin’s guide is good news for professional pilots and bad news for the guy with a Mini 4 Pro and no certificate undercutting them on Facebook Marketplace. When the brokerage tells sellers to ask for Part 107 and insurance, the amateur end of the market gets squeezed, and it should.

The sharper signal is what Redfin left out. There is no section on whether aerials are worth the money. That argument is over: 52 percent of Realtors already fly, and the seller-facing question has moved to logistics. My read is that the pilot-facing question has moved with it, from price to process. The pilots who keep the agent’s business are the ones who show up with the prep list sent ahead, the reel of actual listings, and the certificate and insurance ready to show. Redfin just wrote the seller’s half of that process. Send them the other half.

Sources: Redfin, National Association of Realtors

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Manna Pitches Tulsa Fire Drone AEDs, an Idea Dublin Never Launched

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:48:45 GMT

The Tulsa Fire Department will get drone-delivered defibrillators and trauma kits from Manna Air Delivery under a pilot program the two presented on September 23 at Tulsa Tech’s Lemley Memorial Campus, and the city pays nothing for it. TFD Captain Conrad Collison and Manna head of operations Stuart O’Callaghan presented it at the Tulsa Tech Week event. The target, per KJRH’s report, is a start by early 2027, if not by the end of this year.

Manna has flown consumer deliveries in Tulsa since August 12 from a single hub on Cherry Street, what Manna calls its first full-scale US operation after smaller Texas flights, years in Dublin and roughly 380,000 deliveries worldwide. Manna community and stakeholder relations manager Vincent Murray told Fox23 the emergency work has always been part of the plan and pointed to trials Manna ran with Ireland’s National Ambulance Service. That ambulance service closed its talks with Manna last year, and the Dublin defibrillator service Manna proposed never launched.

Tulsa Fire Pays Nothing for a Pilot That Runs Through Its Own Dispatch

The pilot costs the City of Tulsa nothing, a TFD official told KJRH on September 23. A 911 call goes through dispatch as usual, Murray said, and the fire department then calls Manna when a truck cannot get there fast enough or a crew has run out of trauma kits.

Murray gave Fox23 the clock: 90 seconds of pre-flight checks, two to three minutes in the air, about four and a half minutes from the call to the drone landing. Collison, whose department already flies Skydio aircraft as first responders and put seven drones over a West Tulsa tank-farm fire in November 2024, told KJRH the appeal is speed: “They can be dropped into a situation where somebody needs it quick.” TFD announced the partnership on September 15, eight days before the presentation.

The aircraft stops flying in heavy rain and sits out winds above 20 knots (23 mph, 37 km/h), with a 33-knot (38 mph, 61 km/h) gust ceiling, per KJRH. Manna’s Tulsa page caps any item at 8.8 lb (4 kg).

Manna’s Tulsa Network Is One Hub Flying and Three on Paper

Manna’s one operating Tulsa base is the Cherry Street hub opened August 12. On August 25 it filed City of Tulsa permits for three more, at 21st and Sheridan, South Garnett Road and East 31st Street, each with a one-to-two-mile (1.6 to 3.2 km) radius, the Tulsa Flyer reported.

Murray said the drones travel two miles (3.2 km) from base today and that Manna hopes to open 10 to 20 bases across the metro so a fire department call can be served as a network. In August the Tulsa Flyer reported the ambition as 20 to 30 bases across Tulsa and Broken Arrow. The jobs figure has moved the same way: Manna’s July 8 announcement commits to more than 1,000 Tulsa jobs over three years, and two months earlier, on the XPONENTIAL stage in Detroit, CEO Bobby Healy told the room 2,000 to 3,000. On Tulsa, Manna’s numbers arrive large and settle later.

The Irish “Trials” Were One Simulated AED Drop From a Hub Manna Is Closing

Manna and the National Ambulance Service have one exercise on record. On December 6, 2024, a Manna drone flew a defibrillator from its Blanchardstown hub to a garden 10 minutes away by car in about two minutes, a simulation Dr. Glenn Curtin ran with the service, the Irish Times reported.

Manna’s newsroom and Irish press coverage through September 27 turn up no second one. Manna then proposed a Dublin 15 defibrillator service in November 2025. The National Ambulance Service told the Dublin Inquirer in December that it had held informal discussions with Manna and closed them out because the service did not progress. Manna said it would turn to Dublin Fire Brigade instead, which told the paper it had received no formal project details. Cardiologist Joseph Galvin of the HSE, who backed the proposal, put the potential at up to 900 lives a year if rolled out nationally. The March 2026 Rotunda-to-Connolly hospital flight DroneXL covered carried no blood; it was a second demonstration.

The hub the defibrillator flew from is closing with the rest of Manna’s Dublin 15 operation. Fingal County Council refused Manna’s Coolmine hub on May 19, 2026, over noise evidence, a refusal Manna answered with a Trinity College acoustic study in June, and by July 1 the company had announced it was ceasing operations across Dublin 15, Blanchardstown included, blaming Ireland’s planning process and the absence of a national drone delivery framework, Dublin People reported. Murray’s word for it in Tulsa was “trials.” “We’re not here to take anyone by surprise,” he told Fox23.

DroneXL’s Take

A defibrillator in a back garden in under five minutes is the drone delivery I’ll defend all day. Nobody needs a burrito by air. A cardiac arrest patient needs a shock before the engine arrives, and a fire department that already runs Skydio as a first responder is the right partner to put one on the other end of the dispatch line. What killed the idea in Dublin was planning and noise, never the medicine: Fingal’s planners did not find the drones too loud, only that Manna hadn’t proved they weren’t. Tulsa is about to run the same test: the three east Tulsa hubs need City of Tulsa permits like Coolmine needed Fingal’s, and until those clear, a free pilot covers whatever sits within two miles of Cherry Street.

My read is that the AED is doing double duty here. O’Callaghan said at the presentation that the emergency work could improve public acceptance of the drones, and that is the plainer version of Murray’s “always part of the plan.” Fine. Then earn it in Tulsa: the Irish trial produced one simulated drop and a hub Manna is walking away from, so the number that matters to Tulsans is the first response time on a real call, not Blanchardstown’s. Watch the three permits before you watch anything else.

Sources: Fox23, KJRH, KTUL, Manna Air Delivery, Tulsa Flyer, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Dublin People

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon's Connecticut Drone Briefing Left No Trace in the Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 03:33:00 GMT

Amazon’s North Haven drone hub was described to the board of the Connecticut Airport Authority by its executive director, Michael Shea, who told members the aircraft weigh about 80 pounds (36 kilograms), carry packages up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), drop them from about 13 feet (4 meters) and fly about seven miles (11 kilometers) from Amazon’s warehouse at 409 Washington Avenue. NBC Connecticut, by its own account the only news organization in the room, reported the briefing on September 24 without dating the meeting.

Shea told the board that Amazon “coordinated extensively with the FAA to control the airspace,” and that CAA staff have been in touch with the company about its plans. The only meeting on the authority’s public calendar between DEEP’s September 16 notice and NBC’s report was the September 23 board meeting. The draft minutes, posted on ctairports.org, record the executive director’s report in one sentence, “Mr. Shea provided a general update to the board,” and note under the economic development report that he described “several business development initiatives,” none of them named. Amazon, North Haven, drones and the FAA appear nowhere in them.

Connecticut’s Airport Authority Runs Six Airports and No Airspace

The Connecticut Airport Authority is the quasi-public agency created in 2011 to run Bradley International and five general aviation airports: Hartford-Brainard, Waterbury-Oxford, Groton-New London, Danielson and Windham. NBC Connecticut said the authority has a stake because drone deliveries use Connecticut airspace. Airspace is federal.

Tweed New Haven, the airport nearest the North Haven site, is not on the CAA’s list. What the authority got was a briefing its own draft minutes do not record, and Shea’s account of it names no document. The one federal paper Connecticut has published on the hub, the coastal consistency request, is not an approval of anything. The FAA’s own drone environmental review page listed no Connecticut filing when DroneXL checked it again on September 26, six days after the first check, and the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is still taking comment on the FAA’s coastal consistency request through October 1, with a decision due by October 16. Whether the North Haven hub gets a site review of its own or rides the national finding the FAA signed on July 28 is the question that request does not answer, and “all necessary approvals” does not either.

The numbers Shea gave the board are close to the FAA’s. The document DEEP is reviewing puts the MK30 at 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty and 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, with a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius and up to 1,000 flights a day. The 13-foot drop matches.

North Haven Approved the Ground in May, Not This Month

North Haven’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved Amazon’s drone delivery building at the Washington Avenue warehouse, application P26-17, by a 5-0 vote on May 4, according to the town’s minutes. NBC Connecticut’s September 24 report says officials approved part of the proposal, and dates nothing.

The perimeter fence and guardhouses passed the same night. The only action since was a 5-0 vote on August 3 accepting revised fence plans, and the commission’s September 14 agenda carries no Prime Air item. Amazon’s Sam Bailey told the commission in May that the FAA has sole jurisdiction over altitude and flight patterns, described the aircraft as 70-pound drones, and promised a public information session; none had been announced when DroneXL searched for one on September 26. Amazon’s stated goal is nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, and its August list of next markets named Syracuse, not New Haven.

DroneXL’s Take

The only public record of Connecticut’s airport agency being told what Amazon wants to fly over Hamden and Wallingford is a TV reporter’s notes from a meeting whose own minutes say “general update.” Shea’s assurance that Amazon has worked with the FAA on every approval it needs is the kind of sentence that closes a question for a board and opens one for everyone else: which approvals, under which review, on what document. My read is that the CAA was briefed because it is the aviation body the state has, not because it approves anything in this, and the airport nearest the hub is not even one of its own. The people who do have standing are the residents with five days left. A comment filed with DEEP before October 1 goes on the federal record, and here is how to file one. A briefing that leaves no trace in the minutes does not.

Sources: NBC Connecticut, Connecticut Airport Authority draft minutes, September 23, 2026, The Register Citizen via GovTech, FAA NEPA and Drones, Amazon.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Fedorov Wants A Humanoid Robot Killing Russians Within Six Months

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:57:01 GMT

Mykhailo Fedorov, the man who built Ukraine’s Army of Drones and was fired as its defense minister ten weeks ago, launched an “Army of Robots” on Saturday, September 26, 2026. He announced it on X and in a presentation at the IT Arena conference in Lviv, with a one-minute video and a website that opens with the line “We are here to replace people with robots on the battlefield and save lives.”

The first target is specific: a humanoid robot kills a Russian soldier within six months of launch. The second is an assault on a Russian position within 12 months with no infantry involved, robots and drones talking to each other over shared protocols. The site is recruiting robotics companies, engineers and a chief technology officer, plus funds, angels and corporations willing to co-invest.

Fedorov says the Army of Robots is not a single company. On September 1 he announced a defense-tech company of his own, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as first lead investor. Saturday’s announcement named no company at all.

Operators watch drone and thermal feeds in a frame from the Army of Robots launch video. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

The Robots In The Video Do Not Exist Yet

Every machine in the launch video is an AI-generated render, the Kyiv Independent reported. The humanoid numbered 0427, the crab-legged walkers, the tracked snake and the six-wheeled gun cart are concept art, not product shots, and Fedorov’s own post makes no hardware claim beyond the goals.

An AI-rendered humanoid combat robot, numbered 0427, walks through a trench in this concept art video, not real hardware. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

The pitch rests on the record instead. In his X post, Fedorov says drones now account for over 95% of battlefield strikes and that Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers, both figures from him and neither independently published. The robotization case does not need those numbers to stand up. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense reported more than 9,000 armed ground-robot missions in a single month this spring, up from 2,900 in November 2025, and the K2 Brigade has been running the first dedicated UGV battalion, as DroneXL reported in March. Wheeled and tracked robots already fight. What Ukraine does not have is a walking one that shoots.

An AI-rendered acoustic sensor array marks the detection step in Fedorov's battlefield sequence. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

Fedorov’s stated job for humanoids is narrower than the video suggests. Per dev.ua’s account of the Lviv presentation, the first tasks are mechanical: reloading machine guns, swapping batteries, placing sensors. “Robots should take on the most dangerous missions,” he wrote, listing casualty evacuation, ammunition runs, mining and demining, reconnaissance and holding positions.

Fedorov Is Building Outside The Government That Fired Him

President Volodymyr Zelensky removed Fedorov on July 15, 2026, after six months as defense minister. Street protests followed. Six days later Zelensky dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, the man Fedorov had been fighting, a sequence DroneXL covered in Fedorov Ousted: Ukraine Removes The Architect Of Its Drone War After Six Months.

Since then Fedorov has courted U.S. money. He spent late August in the United States meeting donors and tech executives, and on September 1 said Karp would be the first major investor in his new company. CNBC reported the investment is Karp’s personally, not Palantir’s, with no size disclosed and no product named. The Financial Times reported he is also seeking U.S. backing for a separate fund covering battlefield robotics, interceptors and AI-enabled missiles.

Which of those vehicles owns the Army of Robots is the gap in Saturday’s announcement. Ukrainska Pravda reported the project will be run by a “large private technology company” whose name comes later. Fedorov’s post says only that the team will invest in defense-tech companies, launch its own projects, test with the military and scale what works. The Army of Drones, launched in 2022, was a government program with United24 fundraising behind it. This one has a recruiting form and a promise.

An AI-rendered column of humanoids, quadrupeds and armed UGVs from the launch video. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

DroneXL’s Take

I’d bet on Fedorov before I’d bet on the video. The renders are a recruiting poster, and I doubt anyone at IT Arena mistook the crab-walkers for a roadmap. The record underneath is what makes this worth taking seriously: the Army of Drones started in 2022 as a fundraising slogan and produced the 9,000-missions-a-month ground-robot war I saw the makers of in the Brave1 pavilion in Düsseldorf this March. Fedorov has done the not-a-single-company trick once, from inside the government, with a budget.

Doing it from outside is a different problem. His procurement reforms made enemies in the ministry and the contractor base, and those people still run the ministry. A private venture that tests with the military needs the military to say yes, and the six-month humanoid target is the number to hold him to: it lands in late March 2027. If a walking robot has killed a Russian by then, Fedorov will have rebuilt his machine without a government. If it hasn’t, the first thing to check is whether anyone let him near a trench.

Sources: Mykhailo Fedorov on X, thearmyofrobots.com, Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, dev.ua, CNBC

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

British Army Bought 10,000 Drones In A Year, Most Are For Training

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:33:00 GMT

The British Army bought more than 10,000 drones in the past year through Project Rapstone, its fast-track procurement program, and most of them will never see a battlefield. Lt. Col. Matt Keogh, a commander involved in the program, gave the figure at a UK defense industry exhibition earlier in September and told Business Insider the drones are for training.

The training itself is the story. Rapstone soldiers learn to fly first-person-view drones by hand, with no flight aids and no GPS, before they get anywhere near the automated systems that most of the fleet runs on. Keogh calls it “the hardest way to fly,” and the Army does it on purpose.

An army that spends on 10,000 aircraft usually plans to fight with them. Rapstone plans to wear most of these out on training grounds.

Rapstone Spends On Pilots Because The Drones Go Obsolete In Weeks

Rapstone deliberately avoids buying large numbers of the newest drones, Keogh said, because drone tactics and hardware in Ukraine have turned over so fast that a product can be obsolete within weeks or months. The program spends on pilots instead, and buys cheap, fully manual FPV aircraft to train them on.

Britain launched Rapstone in September 2024 to get new gear to soldiers faster, a start date that comes from Business Insider’s reporting: the Ministry of Defence’s own Rapstone pages describe the program without dating it. The MoD now describes it as the program meant to move equipment from industry to the front line within 24 months and double the Army’s fighting power by 2027. The September 16 announcement of 245 sub-250 g FOXE-NATO drones, 110 Sonora training drones and a fleet of Skydio X10 aircraft under a £16 million ($21 million) deal sits inside it, and the £5 billion drone package announced in June put another £50 million ($67 million) into Rapstone over 12 months for FPV and interceptor drones. Britain also committed to 100,000 drones for Ukraine by April 2026, so this is the second ten-thousand-drone number out of London in 15 months.

Keogh said Britain was training pilots on surveillance-type drones “way before Ukraine,” and thousands of soldiers have come through Rapstone training. Most of them flew intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, the kind Western armies have used for years, rather than the FPV attack quadcopters Ukraine made famous. The manual-first rule reaches those ISR drones too: Keogh described stripping safeguards out of the smaller ISR platforms so pilots cannot lean on them.

FPV Training Takes 30 Simulator Hours Before A Two-Week Course

The entry requirement for the Army’s FPV course is experience flying ISR drones, Keogh said. Candidates then log 30 hours in a simulator before a two-week operator course, with an optional two-week commander course after that. Every soldier in the pipeline gets a kit of drones, a controller, goggles and batteries worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Keogh said the overlap between simulator and real aircraft is large enough that a pilot with 30 simulator hours picks up the real thing straight away. That matches what the US Army built into its Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, which loads simulator time in front of the first live flight, and what Bulgaria did last November when it ordered simulators into every land forces formation. The British version differs in what the simulator teaches. The Army wants the pilot to learn manual control the way a driver learns a stick shift before an automatic, or a map and compass before GPS, in Keogh’s comparison, so that whatever drone shows up at the front, the hard part is already trained.

GPS-Denied Training Means Reading A Map From The Video Feed

Britain trains FPV pilots for jammed airspace by sending them on long flights across training grounds, beyond visual line of sight, with no satellite positioning to fall back on. Pilot and commander navigate by matching what the camera feed shows to a paper map, Keogh said. Navigation, he added, is one of the biggest problems FPV pilots face.

The Ukrainian battlefield is the reason. Russian electronic warfare there jams and spoofs GPS across whole sectors, and NATO armies watching the war are building the same conditions into their own courses. Britain is one of them, and it has been public about treating Ukraine as the preview: the drone strategy it laid out at DSEI 2025 and the drone-warfare degree that starts its first cohort this month are built on the same reading of that war.

DroneXL’s Take

The consumer drone industry has spent a decade removing the need to fly, and the British Army is paying to put it back. Every DJI update since the Phantom has taken a skill away from the pilot: position hold, obstacle avoidance, return-to-home, a gimbal that levels itself. That is exactly right for a real estate shoot. It is exactly wrong for a soldier whose GPS is being jammed, because the day the assists fail is the day the pilot finds out whether he can fly. Rapstone’s answer, 30 simulator hours of pure manual stick time before anyone touches an aircraft, is the cheapest training a military can buy, and I’d argue it is also the cheapest training a Part 107 pilot can buy. If you have only ever flown with every assist on, you have never flown the drone. A $20 FPV simulator and a used radio will tell you within an hour how much of your skill was the software’s.

Source: Business Insider, UK Ministry of Defence

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Paris Study: AED Drones Reach 95% of Cardiac Arrests in Five Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:35:00 GMT

A computer simulation of 28,349 real cardiac arrests around Paris found that drones carrying automated external defibrillators (AEDs) could put a device on scene within five minutes in more than 95% of cases. Fetching an existing wall-mounted AED by road manages that in 30 to 40% of cases. Dr. Hillary Minka, an emergency physician at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, presented the study at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris on Saturday, September 26.

The team modeled seven departments of the Île-de-France region, leaving out central Paris, and measured how long an AED takes to reach the center of each census block under three strategies: more fixed AEDs, drones alone, or both. The hybrid version cut average AED access time by 3.76 minutes across every block, and by more than ten minutes in some outlying and congested ones.

Every one of those flights was a straight line drawn on a map. The researchers flew no drones.

Fixed AEDs Reach 30% of Paris-Region Cardiac Arrests Inside 500 Meters

Only 30% of the 28,349 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests recorded between 2011 and 2024 happened within 500 meters (1,640 feet) of one of the region’s 1,893 registered fixed AEDs, Minka told the congress. Closing that gap with cabinets alone would take 1,712 more devices, for 3,605 in total.

The shortages sit in the countryside and on the outskirts of Paris, according to the study team, and an extra 910 fixed AEDs would bring 84.5% of cases inside the 500-meter target. The 30% figure flatters the cabinets. Matthieu Heidet, a professor of emergency medicine at Henri-Mondor University Hospital in Créteil and a co-author, told The Guardian that in France only 8% of cardiac arrest patients get a public AED applied before emergency crews arrive, partly because so many devices sit inside private buildings that are not open around the clock.

Two Hundred Drone Bases Do the Work of 1,700 New AED Cabinets

A drone base covers a 3,900-meter (2.4-mile) radius against 500 meters for a fixed AED, so each base added cut the cabinets needed. With 100 bases and 26 new AEDs, coverage passed 97%. With 200 bases, 871 existing AED sites and four new ones, it reached 99.4%.

The candidate base locations were existing AED sites, mobile intensive care units and fire stations. Minka’s design puts a trained operator or an automated system in charge of each flight under emergency-service supervision, with a bystander collecting the AED on arrival and a dispatcher talking them through the shock. “Drones will never replace bystanders, resuscitation efforts or emergency medical teams,” she said. Dr. Felix Lorang, who heads the emergency department at Klinikum Lippe in Germany and sits on the congress abstract committee, put the same limit the other way: a bystander who cannot do CPR or work the device still waits for the ambulance, drone or no drone.

The Model Flew Nothing, but France Already Flies AED Drones

The study computed drone travel time as the crow flies, so weather, airspace rules and operational delays are absent from every number above. Minka said the findings need prospective trials and real-world tests before anyone acts on them. Abstract OA066 is not peer reviewed and received no funding.

Those real-world numbers exist, and some of them are French. Everdrone entered live dispatch service for SAMU 76 in Forges-les-Eaux, Normandy, on December 2, 2025, the first French deployment tied into the emergency dispatch chain, roughly an hour and a half by road from Paris. The same operator’s Swedish network beat the ambulance to a Borås cardiac arrest in July, and a bystander restarted the patient’s heart. Sweden’s 2023 Lancet Digital Health trial measured actual drone arrivals against actual ambulances over 11 months, which is the study design Minka is asking for. In the United States, Duke Health began flying AEDs to live 911 calls in July and James City County, Virginia followed on August 1.

DroneXL’s Take

The number I’d want a French health minister to remember from this study is not 99.4%, it’s 8%. Heidet’s figure says a region with 1,893 registered defibrillators gets one onto a chest before the ambulance in fewer than one case in twelve, and the Paris model explains why: the cabinets are in the wrong places, and a good share of them are behind a locked door at 2 a.m. A drone base doesn’t care which side of the door it’s on. That is the case for AED drones, and it’s the kind of delivery I’ve argued for since I first covered Everdrone’s Trollhättan save in January 2022: a flight that has to happen, not a toothpaste run.

Where I part ways with the study is the method. Straight-line simulations were the state of the art a decade ago. Sweden has flown real AED drones against real ambulances since 2020 and folded them into routine dispatch, and France has had a base flying live calls in Normandy since December. My read is that Île-de-France doesn’t need another model to find out whether drones beat the road network. It needs SAMU 76’s flight logs and one base on the outskirts of Paris.

Sources: European Society for Emergency Medicine, The Guardian, Everdrone

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Space Force Adds Lasers at Cape Canaveral After 500 Port Drone Flights

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:18:00 GMT

The U.S. Space Force is adding a directed-energy weapon to the counter-drone defenses at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, told Florida Today this month. The laser joins sensor-fusion software called Lattice and a radio-frequency jamming system the Eastern Range began installing last winter.

Next door, Port Canaveral says it recorded more than 500 drone incursions in 2025, over cruise terminals that serve up to 60,000 passengers a day and over military and aerospace cargo.

Flying a drone over the port without written permission is already a third-degree felony under Florida law.

Cape Canaveral Adds a Laser to the Jamming It Began Installing in 2025

Space Launch Delta 45 announced a multimillion-dollar radio-frequency counter-drone system in December 2025, built to jam drones without disrupting civilian air traffic. Chatman now says a directed-energy weapon that physically destroys drones will follow, alongside new equipment from the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401.

The December system was the first step. Chatman told Breaking Defense it would give him coverage over the whole Cape instead of the pockets he had. On September 18 he told Defense One that JIATF 401 would deliver new capability within weeks, because his radars track everything from a Cessna up but he needs to see “a 747 down to a quadcopter.” Neither Chatman nor the task force would say what hardware is coming.

Lattice is the software half. Chatman told Florida Today “we’re bringing on the Lattice system for tomorrow,” describing a platform that merges military radar and sensor feeds into one 3D picture to detect, track and respond to drones automatically.

The pressure behind all of this is launch tempo. The Cape flew 109 orbital launches in 2025, and Chatman has said the Eastern Range could handle upwards of 300 a year. Directed energy near that much civilian traffic has a short and rocky domestic record (a Pentagon laser shot down a CBP drone near El Paso in February, and the FAA only cleared military anti-drone lasers in U.S. airspace in April).

Port Canaveral’s 500-Flight Count Launched a Federal Seaport Drone Bill

Port Canaveral’s 500 figure appeared in the July 1 announcement of H.R. 9229, the Seaport Security Act of 2026, which Rep. Jimmy Patronis introduced June 9 with Rep. Mike Haridopolos. The announcement counts “incursions” without defining one or saying how many operators were identified.

Port Canaveral CEO Capt. John Murray has kept pressing the number. At a recent Port Canaveral Commission meeting he listed nuclear submarines, space components and national security missions moving through the port, then described drones filming rockets from overhead: “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” Murray said, according to Florida Today.

The bill is less about penalties than the Florida Today column that revived the number suggests. It would create controlled or restricted airspace below 400 feet (122 meters) over critical seaport areas and have the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security coordinate drone detection and mitigation at ports, with carve-outs for commercial, government and emergency flights, according to a statement from two Federal Maritime Commission commissioners backing it. It also sets civil and criminal penalties. Congress.gov shows it referred to the House Judiciary and Transportation and Infrastructure committees on June 9, with no action since.

Florida Already Makes Port Flights a Felony, and Local Police Can Now Mitigate

Florida’s felony statute for port drone flights, Section 330.41, punishes a pilot after the flight. Stopping a drone in the air takes federal authority, and since July 1 certified state and local police can hold it, jamming or downing drones under the SAFER SKIES Act rule.

The port’s drone page spells out the state side: Port Canaveral is designated critical infrastructure, and flying over its lands or waterways without written permission from the Canaveral Port Authority is a third-degree felony. On the federal side, about 1,500 US agencies are expected to certify at the detection tier of the new rule within two years. A port authority is not a police department, though. The American Association of Port Authorities told WorkBoat that the FAA’s proposed restricted-airspace framework, on its own, would give ports no new power to detect or disrupt drones.

The Space Coast Drone Cases in Court Were Tourists Flying DJI Mavics

Both Space Coast drone prosecutions the Florida Today column cites involved tourists with DJI drones. Xiao Guang Pan, a Chinese-born Canadian, got 12 months of probation and deportation in August 2025. Xiaodong He, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty September 18 to a misdemeanor national defense airspace charge and awaits sentencing.

Pan flew a DJI Mavic 3 Pro from a Port Canaveral parking lot on three days in January 2025, and 243 photos and 13 videos from those flights showed military infrastructure at the Space Force station, according to Florida Politics, citing his plea agreement. DroneXL covered his charges that February and his sentencing that August. He flew a DJI Mavic 4 Pro from the Playalinda Beach lot inside restricted zone R-2932 for 12 minutes and 24 seconds on July 25, passing within 1.56 miles (2.51 km) of Launch Complex 39B, as DroneXL reported after his plea. His wife told police they were on vacation and filming scenery.

The column sets those cases beside a May Vanity Fair profile in which an unnamed FBI counterintelligence agent says China will send amateurs to collect what they can in Florida. That is one anonymous source in a magazine. The court record so far holds a probation sentence and a misdemeanor plea.

DroneXL’s Take

A laser over the launch pads at a range that flew 109 launches last year is a defensible call. What I don’t buy is the spy story being sold around it. My read of the 500 incursions: until Port Canaveral publishes what it counted, the Space Coast drone cases that have reached a courtroom were tourists with Mavics, and they ended in probation and a misdemeanor plea. The number is now doing work in Congress, where H.R. 9229 would draw new restricted airspace over every critical seaport in the country, and a count nobody has defined is a thin basis for that. The cruise-ship photographer is a different problem from a foreign intelligence service, and Florida already wrote a felony for him. So if you’re thinking about launching a Mavic from a Port Canaveral parking lot for the ship-and-rocket shot, don’t be that guy: Xiao Guang Pan did exactly that, and it ended with his deportation.

Sources: Florida Today, The Palm Beach Post / Florida Today column by John A. Torres, Defense One, Breaking Defense, Federal Maritime Commission, Congress.gov, Port Canaveral

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Charlotte Drone Pilot Pleads Guilty to Flying Between Live Runways

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:06:00 GMT

A Charlotte drone pilot has pleaded guilty to a federal charge for flying inside a runway exclusion zone at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT). Marco Antonio Ochoa, 50, entered the plea on September 22 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark T. Odulio to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. He faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Ochoa launched the drone in March from the Airport Overlook, a public park the airport built so visitors can watch planes land and take off. It sits between two active runways. According to a search warrant reported by WSOC-TV in April, he was shooting video for a social media post for one of his clients.

The airport’s page for the Overlook lists its hours, its playgrounds, its food truck area and its pet relief areas. It says nothing about drones.

Airport Detection Flagged The Seven-Minute Flight Immediately

The airport’s drone-detection system flagged Ochoa’s flight as soon as it started, according to WSOC-TV’s reporting on the warrant. Federal marshals tracked the drone for the seven minutes it was airborne, at 32 to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters), while the runways were in use.

Officials said he had no permission to fly in the restricted airspace and had not properly registered the drone. Agents seized it. Neither the warrant coverage nor the federal announcement names the make or model.

The FBI and the Federal Air Marshal Service investigated, and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kelly is prosecuting, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina. U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson’s warning to other pilots: “Flying in restricted areas can land you in hot water with federal authorities.” No sentencing date has been set.

Federal Law Turns The Overlook Into A No-Drone Zone

The count carries the name of 18 U.S.C. § 39B, “Unsafe operation of unmanned aircraft,” which Congress added in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. That law makes knowingly flying a drone without authorization inside a runway exclusion zone a federal crime, even if no aircraft is put at risk.

The statute defines that zone as a rectangle centered on an active runway at a Class B, C or D airport. It runs 1 statute mile past each end of the runway and is half a mile wide. CLT is Class B airspace, and the Overlook faces Runways 1L-19R and 1R-19L. Pilots who have a real reason to fly near an airport request FAA authorization, most often through LAANC. Ochoa had none.

The squeeze is about to get tighter. CLT is building a fourth parallel runway, 1C-19C, and says on its Overlook page that aircraft operations will move even closer to the park when it opens in fall 2027.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL spent the summer covering drone cases where the line was thin. The Houston church videographer flew for two minutes near a World Cup fan zone while NRG Stadium sat empty, and our coverage argued that intent has to count for something in a case like that. The same pattern ran through the 300-plus drones federal agents seized in the tournament’s first ten days, a population we found was almost entirely people the enforcement system was never built to stop.

Ochoa’s case is different. Seven minutes, as low as 32 feet, from a lawn wedged between two runways while they were in use, for a client, on a drone that wasn’t properly registered. This is the flight § 39B was written for, and it is exactly the kind of flight that gets cited every time someone argues for tighter rules on the rest of us. Don’t be that guy. If a client wants the plane-spotter shot at CLT, bring a long lens to the fence and leave the drone in the car.

Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of North Carolina, WSOC-TV, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, 18 U.S.C. § 39B

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Drones Reach Cleveland Suburbs, 3 Miles From a Drone Pharmacy

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:13:00 GMT

Amazon started Prime Air drone deliveries in Northeast Ohio on Thursday, September 24, flying MK30 drones from its CLE2 fulfillment center in North Randall to customers within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers). Amazon says it is the company’s first drone delivery site in Ohio, and it is the Cleveland launch Amazon promised in August. Amazon has 21 drones at the site, and it says the first Ohio delivery was an electric bike charger.

The service covers a circle around the former Randall Park Mall site, southeast of downtown Cleveland, not the city as a whole. The aircraft is the same six-rotor, 83-pound MK30 I photographed at XPONENTIAL in Detroit this spring.

About 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Amazon’s launch pad, Cleveland Clinic has been flying prescriptions to patients’ lawns with Zipline since early August. It does that with four aircraft.

Amazon’s North Randall Hub Flies 21 Drones in Daylight Only

Amazon’s North Randall site launched with 21 drones, and Amazon expects it to add 55 jobs. Flights run in daylight, for items under 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) that fit a large shoebox and are stocked in the building. Prime members fly free on orders of $50 or more.

Smaller Prime orders cost $2.99 and everyone else pays $4.99, the national pricing in Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, which named Cleveland among five metros coming next on the way to nearly 500 cities and towns. Shoppers pick items carrying a “Drone delivery” label and confirm a drop spot at home on their first order, Amazon told Cleveland.com. Axios Cleveland reported in July that the circle takes in most of Cleveland’s southeast side and suburbs including Cleveland Heights, Solon and Chagrin Falls.

Amazon says every Prime Air operation is authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no document for Ohio when DroneXL checked it on September 25. Since July 28, a site document is no longer required: a hub that fits the FAA’s national finding can be cleared in an internal review with no public comment period, as DroneXL laid out this month. Northeast Ohio residents who want to reach Amazon about the flights will find the phone line and chat route in our guide for residents.

Zipline’s Prescription Drones Already Fly Inside Amazon’s Circle

Cleveland Clinic’s Zipline service flies from its Beachwood administrative campus, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) northeast of the North Randall warehouse, inside Amazon’s 7.5-mile circle. At the end of August, four Platform 2 aircraft were flying about 20 prescription deliveries a week to patients within 5 miles (8 kilometers).

The two aircraft deliver differently. Zipline’s P2 holds at up to 300 feet (91 meters) and lowers the package on a tether without landing, as DroneXL reported when the program went live. FAA paperwork puts it at 55 pounds empty with up to 8 pounds of payload, figures DroneXL pulled together in August. The MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds at takeoff, carries 5, descends over the yard and releases the package from about 13 feet (4 meters), according to FAA filings summarized on DroneXL’s aircraft comparison page. Zipline’s aircraft carries a parachute, which brought one down onto a Houston-area highway on September 4. The MK30 has none, a choice Amazon has not explained.

The fleets run the other way. Beachwood has charging hardware for 12 aircraft and flies four. Amazon opened North Randall with 21.

DroneXL’s Take

Northeast Ohio now has both versions of drone delivery over the same east-side streets, and I know which one I’d want over my house. Zipline’s Cleveland Clinic flights carry medication to patients who used to wait hours for a courier. Amazon’s first Ohio flight carried an e-bike charger, in a heavier aircraft with no parachute. I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight, and a prescription does. A charger can ride in a van. That won’t stop Amazon, which says the FAA has authorized its flights. My case is for Amazon to build an aircraft closer to what Zipline flies. In the last two weeks MK30s have set down unplanned beside a Baton Rouge road and on a Waco lawn, and the Drone Delivery Tracker now has 21 more of them to watch over Cuyahoga County.

Sources: Cleveland.com, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Axios Cleveland, Amazon, FAA

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Targets December for Jacksonville Drones, Pilot Says

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:13:00 GMT

Amazon Prime Air plans to start drone deliveries on Jacksonville’s west side in early December, according to a local pilot who photographed Amazon’s airspace map at a public meeting at Jacksonville International Airport this week. Amazon has not announced Jacksonville, and the December timing comes from that pilot’s account of the meeting.

Meredith Holladay posted the slide to the Craig Airport Pilots Association’s Facebook group. She wrote that most of the room was military and police, that the red zones on the map are no-fly areas up to 400 feet (122 meters), and that the drones will fly seven days a week, in daytime visual weather only.

Amazon says its Prime Air systems continuously take in the ADS-B position signals that crewed aircraft broadcast. Holladay wrote that the drones have no ADS-B Out of their own, so pilots won’t see them in ForeFlight.

Amazon’s SJA1 Map Puts the Launch Pad Beside Herlong Airport

The slide is headed SJA1, the code Amazon uses for its same-day delivery center at 1700 Imeson Road in west Jacksonville, which opened in October 2025. Holladay placed the launch site just northeast of Herlong Recreational Airport (HEG), with Whitehouse Navy Outlying Field printed on the sectional to the northwest.

Holladay shared the photo in the Craig Airport Pilots Association group, where pilots traded questions about range and altitude. The Jax Daily Record tied the SJA1 code to the Imeson Road building through city permits, and Action News Jax reported its October opening. Herlong is the Jacksonville Aviation Authority’s recreational field, home to light sport aircraft, skydiving and gliders. The biggest red block on Amazon’s slide covers the Whitehouse runways, and more red and orange shapes crowd the Herlong side of the map. Amazon’s operations page says its no-fly zones cover runways, heliports, glider ports and RC flying clubs, plus areas of increased aviation activity.

Holladay put the service radius at about 6.5 miles (10.5 kilometers), with the black ring on the slide as its edge. That is a mile short of the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) range in every FAA review of the MK30. Her daytime-only limit is tighter than the FAA’s approval elsewhere in Florida, too: 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. The slide’s footer calls it Amazon proprietary and confidential trade secret information, an odd label for page 24 of a deck shown to a room of pilots, military and police.

The FAA Has Published No Environmental Review for Jacksonville

The FAA’s Florida environmental assessment, signed June 1, 2026, covers six Amazon hubs: Ruskin, Tampa, Orlando, Tamarac, Riviera Beach and Miami. Jacksonville is not one of them, and the agency’s drone review page, last updated September 24, lists no Jacksonville document.

That is the same gap DroneXL found two days ago when Amazon started preparing a Tallahassee hub. Since July 28 the FAA can check a new site against its national programmatic assessment with no site document and no comment period, the change behind Washington clearing the runway for 500 cities. Jacksonville is also missing from the sites and next launches in Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement. Florida Statute 330.41 keeps the city out of flight paths and altitudes.

Amazon’s MK30 Reads Pilots’ ADS-B, and FAA Rules Keep It From Transmitting

Amazon’s systems take in ADS-B from crewed aircraft and feed it to automated conflict detection, backed by onboard detect-and-avoid the FAA approved. Sending is another matter: 14 CFR 91.225(h)(2) bars drones from ADS-B Out unless they fly a flight plan in contact with ATC or the FAA authorizes it.

An Amazon Prime Air MK30 on display at Amazon's booth at XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit in May. The MK30 has an 83.2-pound maximum takeoff weight and carries packages up to 5 pounds. Photo credit: DroneXL

Amazon’s operations page describes ADS-B going in, never out. If that holds at SJA1, Amazon’s system knows where an ADS-B-equipped Cessna is, and the Cessna’s pilot gets no traffic target for the MK30.

Neither Amazon’s numbers nor the FAA’s keep the drones under the 200-foot ceiling one commenter asked about. Amazon’s operations page lists 205 to 250 feet above ground on the way out and 325 to 370 feet on the way back. The FAA’s Florida review, written for the six other hubs, uses 180 to 279 feet outbound and 279 to 377 feet inbound for an aircraft with an 83.2-pound (37.7-kilogram) maximum takeoff weight. Neither document sets Jacksonville’s numbers.

Amazon does share its traffic with some operators. Its operations page says Prime Air joins UAS traffic management networks with other drone operators and gives local first responders running beyond-visual-line-of-sight programs its planned routes and near-real-time drone positions. As of September 25, the page describes nothing similar for the pilot of a crewed aircraft. Holladay wrote that Amazon is apparently working with ForeFlight to connect the drones’ Bluetooth broadcast. Neither the operations page nor Amazon’s August 19 announcement mentions ForeFlight.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon has published how its system receives pilots’ ADS-B. It has published nothing on what electronic traffic information Jacksonville’s pilots will get about its drones, and Holladay’s account says the answer, for now, is none. That gap opens right next to Herlong, whose gliders and skydivers need more than a slide at a meeting.

The FAA banned ADS-B Out on drones for a real reason. Its Remote ID rule warned that the projected number of drones could saturate ADS-B frequencies and hurt the system crewed aircraft rely on. Nobody wants thousands of delivery drones cluttering a Cessna’s traffic screen.

That rule doesn’t stop Amazon from doing the rest. It already gives first responders who fly drones a live picture of its fleet. It can publish the SJA1 route lines and altitude blocks for pilots in a form they can load. And if the ForeFlight work Holladay heard about is real, Amazon should say so in public and have it running before the first delivery, not after. An 83-pound aircraft working between 180 and 377 feet should show up somewhere a pilot looks. If you fly out of Herlong or Craig, ask Amazon for that route map now, while December is still ahead of you.

Sources: Craig Airport Pilots Association on Facebook, Amazon Prime Air, FAA Florida Environmental Assessment, FAA NEPA and Drones, 14 CFR 91.225, Jax Daily Record, Action News Jax, Federal Register.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Drones Head for Nearly 500 Towns. What Residents Can Still Do

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:48:00 GMT

If Amazon picks a warehouse near you for Prime Air, your town gets no vote on whether its MK30 drones fly over your house. The Federal Aviation Administration controls the airspace, and on July 28 it signed a national environmental finding that lets most new drone delivery hubs skip the local comment period towns used to get. Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026.

Residents are finding that out one town at a time. In Richardson, Texas, one woman counted 52 Amazon drones over her home on what she called a slow day. In Westborough, Massachusetts, hundreds of people filled a hotel ballroom on September 23, and I was in that room when Amazon told them it plans to launch anyway. The only local vote left in Westborough is on the launch pad, and under Massachusetts law the Planning Board may not be able to say no to that either.

That leaves a short list of things a concerned resident can do. None of them stops a drone. Several of them change how Amazon flies.

The FAA Controls the Sky, and a Federal Court Has Kept Towns Out of It

Cities cannot ban drone flights or regulate aircraft noise, because the FAA controls the airspace and the operator’s certificate. In 2017 a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down Newton’s attempt to regulate drones over private property as preempted by federal law.

That case, Singer v. City of Newton, is why city attorneys advise caution. The court threw out Newton’s local registration requirement and its ban on flights below 400 feet (122 meters) over private property without permission. Madison Heights, Michigan now tells residents on its drone delivery page that it is federally prohibited from banning flights or regulating aircraft noise. Richardson’s FAQ says the same about altitude, and its council dropped a rezoning threat in April on legal advice, as DroneXL reported when the New York Times visited the city.

The federal comment window is mostly gone too. Until this summer, each new market triggered its own environmental assessment with a public comment period of about 30 days. The FAA’s national programmatic assessment, signed July 28, lets a hub that stays under 1,150 deliveries a day, and sits at least 600 feet (183 meters) from homes, be approved in an internal FAA check with no public comment at all. A coalition of state attorneys general objected to the draft. The deadline for anyone with standing to challenge the finding in a federal appeals court is September 26, tomorrow, and that is a job for a state or city attorney, not a resident.

Towns Control the Launch Pad, and Often Not Even That

A town’s real authority starts at the ground: site plans, building permits and zoning for the hub itself. Amazon’s pads typically sit in existing warehouse parking lots, which can trigger little local review. Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told Westborough that about 80% of its proposed hubs were approved administratively.

Westborough is the test case. Its Planning Board resumes site-plan review of Amazon’s pads and trailers at 64 Otis Street on October 6, and residents on local Facebook groups are urging it to reject them. If Westborough’s zoning allows the use by right, Massachusetts case law limits that option. In Prudential Insurance Co. v. Board of Appeals of Westwood (1986), the Appeals Court held that when a use is allowed by right and the bylaw’s criteria are met, a board cannot deny site-plan approval and is limited to imposing reasonable conditions. Those conditions can still matter: hours for ground operations, lighting, screening and noise at the site itself.

Some states have already settled the question in the operators’ favor. Florida Statute 330.41(3)(c) bars cities and counties from withholding a permit or passing an ordinance that stops a drone delivery service because of where its drone port sits. Local governments there may still enforce the setback and landscaping rules that apply to other uses in the same zone. Massachusetts goes the other way on one point: Wafaie said Amazon still needs a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the Westborough landing area, a state approval it does not have yet.

The strongest local move so far is a pause. Castle Rock and Parker, Colorado adopted emergency moratoriums on July 21 on new drone delivery hubs, six months in Castle Rock and nine in Parker. A moratorium buys a town time to write zoning rules for hubs before an application arrives, which DroneXL’s guide to how drone delivery approval works calls the most effective thing a town can do.

Decibels Don’t Measure What Neighbors Actually Hear

Amazon spokesperson Jack Stelzner told KWTX the MK30 sounds like a window fan on low at altitude. The FAA’s own Baton Rouge filing puts the delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL from 25 feet, and no decibel figure captures pitch, which is what residents keep describing.

The distinction is measurable. NASA Langley researchers Andrew Christian and Randolph Cabell played recordings of small drones and road vehicles to 38 listeners in a 2017 study and found the drones more annoying at the same loudness. PetaPixel reported the extra annoyance as roughly equivalent to a car driving twice as close. The FAA’s national finding measures noise the way it measures airports, as an annual day-night average, which counts energy and not annoyance. A house under a departure corridor can sit below the federal threshold and still hear a drone every few minutes.

Pitch comes from the propellers, and other companies have designed around it. Zipline’s early aircraft used unevenly spaced propeller blades that spread the blade-passage tone across more frequencies, and Zipline says a software update this month cut 19 seconds of peak noise from each P2 flight. NASA measured Joby Aviation’s air taxi at 45.2 dBA from 1,640 feet (500 meters) in 2022. Amazon has not stated the MK30’s dominant frequency. Pitch is one of the 15 questions DroneXL sent every delivery operator this month, and Amazon has not answered it.

The MK30’s Record Includes a Crane, a Cable and a Building

The MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds (37.7 kilograms) at takeoff, cruises at up to 73 mph (117 km/h) and carries no parachute. Amazon relies on six propellers, redundant systems and an automatic contingent landing. Nobody has been hurt in any MK30 incident on the record.

Two MK30s struck the same construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, minutes apart on October 1, 2025. Wafaie told Westborough the drones missed that crane type and detect it now. Another hit a residential internet cable in Waco in November, and in February one struck an apartment building in Richardson. This month, MK30s made precautionary landings beside a Baton Rouge boulevard and on a Waco lawn.

What a Concerned Resident Can Still Do

Start with the pad, before it is approved: check whether your town’s zoning already covers a drone hub, go to the planning board hearing, and ask for conditions a board can legally impose, like ground-operation hours, lighting and where on the lot the pads sit.

A town that writes hub rules before an application arrives has far more room than one reacting to it.

File complaints with dates and times, and keep filing. Complaints have moved Amazon before: after Richardson residents complained in January, Amazon raised average outbound altitude to 225 feet (69 meters) and moved some routes over commercial land. Amazon told the Times it has adjusted operations in response to feedback, TechSpot noted, without saying how many routes it changed. Every channel is in the box below.

Tell Amazon about its drones

Call: 1-888-280-4331, and say it's about drone delivery
Chat: open Amazon's customer service page, click "Something Else," then "Amazon Drone Delivery"
Online: Prime Air · About Amazon Drone Delivery · Drone Delivery FAQs · Consent for Drone Delivery
FAA: noise complaints · safety hotline

Keep a log. Stephanie Puri’s count of 52 overflights in Richardson reached the New York Times because she wrote it down. A Garland, Texas group, Quiet Skies TX, publishes incident-log templates and asks residents to record date, time, altitude and duration.

Call your state legislators. State law shapes what a town can do with the ground, as Florida’s statute and Massachusetts’ landing-area registration show, and the two are pulling in opposite directions.

Declining drone delivery at checkout is a personal choice, not a shield. Wafaie told Westborough plainly that there is no opting out of drones flying over your property. Amazon’s own terms for customers are on its Consent for Drone Delivery page.

And when one comes down, report it. DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker logs every hub and incident on the public record, and the Waco landing reached it because a resident posted photos.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m pro drone delivery, and residents deserve it straight: the fight over the sky was lost before Amazon arrived, because the airspace was never a town’s to control. What’s left is the ground and the record, and residents should use both. Show up before the pad is approved, and make Amazon answer on the record.

What frustrates me is that Amazon holds most of the fixes, and from what I’ve seen it uses them only under pressure. It raised altitude in Richardson after residents complained. It could publish its routes and tell a town what pitch the MK30 makes before the first flight. It could fly a lighter aircraft: Zipline carries 8 pounds on a 55-pound P2 with a parachute and delivers from 300 feet. Amazon carries 5 on an 83-pound MK30 without one and descends to 13 feet over the yard.

My worry is what happens if Amazon keeps arriving the way it arrived in Westborough: no public meeting planned for the other towns in the service area and no commitment on hours. Castle Rock and Parker already froze hubs. A moratorium grounds a defibrillator drone as surely as a toothpaste run, and the operators doing it right will pay for Amazon’s approach.

Sources: FAA Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (July 28, 2026), Singer v. City of Newton via Holland & Knight, Prudential v. Board of Appeals of Westwood, Florida Statute 330.41, NASA Technical Reports Server, TechSpot, The New York Times, City of Madison Heights, City of Pleasant Ridge, City of Richardson

Update, September 25, 2026: An earlier version of this article listed amazondronefeedback@amazon.com, an address two Michigan cities publish for residents. An automated reply Amazon sent DroneXL says that inbox is no longer monitored. The box now lists the phone and chat channels Amazon gave in that reply.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon MK30 Sets Down on a Waco Lawn Days After Baton Rouge

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:15:00 GMT

An Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drone made a precautionary landing on a patch of dry grass at a workplace in Waco, Texas. Danny Bishop, who works there, posted three photos of it to Facebook on Monday, September 21, and wrote that Amazon sent a chase truck to rescue the aircraft, which he said is “expected to make a full recovery.” Nobody was reported hurt.

The drone, registration N328PA, is sitting in its landing attitude on the tail of its fuselage and its lower wing, with the two small wheels on metal arms extended onto the grass. It is the second MK30 in 10 days to set itself down in public view, after one landed beside a Baton Rouge boulevard on September 11, and it came down in the market where another MK30 cut an internet cable last November. Amazon has not said what made this one stop flying.

N328PA rests on its straight lower wing, with one of its landing wheels extended on a metal arm below it. Photo credit: Danny Bishop on Facebook

The FAA Registry Ties N328PA to Amazon’s MK30 Fleet

FAA registry records list N328PA as an MK30 owned by Amazon.com Services LLC, serial number 178650103U, with a registration certificate issued May 14, 2024, and the last five characters of that serial, 0103U, are printed on the fuselage beside the N-number in Bishop’s photos.

All six propellers look whole in the pictures, and nothing lies loose in the grass around the aircraft. The deployed wheels are the tell that this was a landing, not a fall: the MK30 that set down on a Goodyear, Arizona sidewalk in October 2025 had the same wheels out. Amazon describes this Safe Contingent Landing as a switch to vertical flight, a camera and radar scan for a clear spot, and a descent onto it. It lists sudden weather, cell outages, emergency air traffic and system failures as triggers.

A man stands beside N328PA for scale. The MK30 reaches roughly to his hip. Photo credit: Danny Bishop on Facebook

Waco Is Where an MK30 Cut an Internet Cable Last November

Amazon began Prime Air deliveries in Waco in November 2025, flying from beside its fulfillment center in the city. On November 18, less than two weeks after launch, an MK30 clipped a residential internet cable after a drop-off, came down on its own and drew an FAA investigation.

That drone, N139PA, shut down its motors after cutting the line, and Amazon paid for the repair. Waco is one of 11 cities where Prime Air currently flies, KWTX reported on September 22, in a story on residents’ reactions, including a noise complaint to the city and the FAA, that ran a day after Bishop’s post and did not mention the landing. A web search on Friday turned up no news coverage of N328PA and no Amazon statement about it. Bishop’s post had 84 reactions, 23 comments and six shares when DroneXL captured it.

DroneXL’s Take

Two days after Bishop posted his photos, I sat in a Westborough, Massachusetts ballroom while Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told residents the company has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages this year without incident. By Amazon’s framing, this landing probably doesn’t break that record. The drone found open grass, put its wheels down and waited for the truck, which is what a 78-pound aircraft with no parachute should do when something goes wrong. My problem is the word “incident.” Something made this drone abandon its flight, just as something did in Baton Rouge on September 11, and in both cases the public found out from a Facebook post, not from Amazon. If Amazon wants nearly 500 cities and towns to trust these landings, it should count them and publish the causes itself. Until it does, the Drone Delivery Tracker will keep the count.

Sources: Danny Bishop (Facebook), FAA Aircraft Registry, Amazon, KWTX

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:21:42 GMT

The Department of Homeland Security’s own test lab put six Blue UAS in front of 26 public safety pilots, and three of the five it brought to Manhattan could not be flown safely there. The Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, published this month by the National Urban Security Technology Laboratory (NUSTL) in New York, covers three rounds of testing between June 2024 and July 2025. The series started in rural Texas, moved to Miami that November, and ended at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. The Ascent AeroSystems Spirit, the Freefly Astro, and the Teal 2 were excluded from scoring at Hudson Yards because they could not hold position without drifting. Only the Parrot ANAFI USA GOV and the Skydio X10D were rated there.

DHS lists four takeaways at the top of the report: GPS cannot be relied on in dense cities, the link between controller and aircraft is inconsistent, deployment takes too long, and cost is a barrier for many departments. The systems as tested cost between $13,964 and $56,195.

DHS also flew drones from covered nations, the report’s term for Chinese-made aircraft, alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards. Those results are not in the report. Public safety agencies can get them by emailing the lab.

Three of Five Blue UAS Could Not Hold Position at Hudson Yards

A footnote in the DHS comparative assessment report records the Spirit, the Astro and the Teal 2 as unsafe to fly at Hudson Yards because none could hold position without drifting. The test team and safety pilots blamed RF interference and GNSS trouble from the buildings. None of the three was scored.

The Astro would not enter position mode at Hudson Yards and drifted constantly. A safety pilot from the test team took control and tried to switch it into position hold at a higher altitude, which did not work. The Spirit lacked enough satellite reception to hold position at all, and evaluators said its coaxial design gave the operator no physical indication of which way the aircraft was pointing.

The Freefly Astro, carrying the Sony LR1 EO/IR camera and laser rangefinder DHS tested, scored 3.5 in Miami but would not enter position mode at Hudson Yards and was excluded from the complex urban round. Photo credit: Freefly Systems

The Teal 2 could not be launched safely without a GPS lock, and evaluators hit that problem during familiarization flights at Fort Totten in Queens before they ever reached Hudson Yards. During the Fort Totten training, Remote ID failures kept the Teal 2 from taking off until about 10 minutes of troubleshooting cleared the error. Evaluators reported latency at short distances and a shaky, pixelated video feed.

DHS lists the Skydio X10D’s autonomous navigation modes as the reason it stayed stable in the same urban canyon, where it scored 3.7.

Links Dropped 50 Feet From Launch and Deployment Ran to 15 Minutes

The Parrot ANAFI USA GOV lost its connection as close as 50 feet from the launch point at Hudson Yards, and one loss of link ended in a flyaway. Its command and control link scored 1.8 out of 5 in the complex urban round, and its latency scored 1.7.

Evaluators there could not take off between two high-rise buildings. They reset the radio to clear connectivity errors and moved to other locations to launch.

The scale runs from 1, meaning the product met none of the evaluator’s expectations, to 5, meaning it exceeded them. A 3 means it met most of them.

In Miami, the Astro began losing video and control at about 750 feet from the controller during daytime flights at Bayfront Park. The Teal 2 had pairing and Remote ID problems in both Texas and Miami that delayed launch by up to 15 minutes, and its deployability score in Miami was 1.5. The Skydio X2D, tested only in Texas, took about two and a half minutes to recalibrate after every battery change, which evaluators called too long to get the aircraft back in the air.

In one X10D flight, an evaluator’s controller reset and hard rebooted mid-flight. The aircraft landed in place wherever it lost link, and the test team had to clear observers and obstacles while it used its own obstacle avoidance to find a flat spot.

“Deployment time was unacceptable for most first responders,” the report’s summary says. DHS adds that if a drone takes too long to deploy or costs too much, responders may go back to traditional methods instead.

Skydio X10D Scored Best, With Its Own Connection Problems

The Skydio X10D received the best rating of the six systems, 4.0 in Miami and 3.7 at Hudson Yards, which DHS attributes to fast deployment, intuitive controls and the NightSense infrared lighting kit. No other aircraft scored a 4 overall, the mark for meeting all expectations, in any round.

Half of the operators in Miami still saw discontinuities and pixelation in the X10D’s video feed when the aircraft was moving, and some evaluators at Hudson Yards lost connection below 100 feet and at short horizontal distances between high-rises. Adjusting the radio frequency by hand improved the signal, which evaluators counted as a disadvantage in an urban deployment. Redeployment took just under two minutes in Miami and up to three minutes at Hudson Yards, most of it spent waiting for the controller to reconnect after a battery swap.

The report also notes that as of October 2024, X10D systems were being delivered with one battery instead of three because of supply chain problems, with two more promised later. That is the same month China sanctioned Skydio and cut off its battery supplier.

DHS says cost was not a scored criterion but came up throughout the focus group and all three assessments. The X10D cost $28,382 as tested, the Spirit sat at the top of the range and the ANAFI USA GOV at the bottom. In 2021, an internal government memo obtained by the Financial Times put Blue sUAS at 8 to 14 times the price of the DJI drones they were meant to replace.

DHS Tested Chinese Drones Alongside and Left the Results Out

Covered nation platforms were flown alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards because, the report says, response agencies still rely on them for reliability and overall performance. The results for those aircraft are available to public safety agencies on request through NUSTL@hq.dhs.gov and appear nowhere in the 47-page public document.

The executive summary says evaluators found large differences in capability between the covered nation drones and the Blue UAS they tested. It does not say which way the differences ran, and the report never names DJI or Autel. DHS says the assessment examined operator experience only and did not evaluate national security risk under any statute. A Blue List designation, the report adds, says nothing about whether an aircraft can do the job public safety needs done.

The test data is between 14 and 27 months old. The Teal 2 is now the aircraft the Air Force is evaluating a successor for under a $2.49 million order to Red Cat, and the X10D replaced the X2D in the urban rounds after joining the Blue List in mid-2024.

The evaluators came from 13 states and included pilots from the NYPD, FDNY, Boston Fire, Los Angeles Police, Michigan State Police, Texas DPS, the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection. These are some of the largest public safety agencies in the country, and this is what their pilots said about the aircraft they are supposed to buy.

DroneXL’s Take

Volunteer fire departments and small police and rescue teams fly DJI and Autel for the reasons this report spells out: the aircraft power on and hold position, the link stays up, and the price is a fraction of the alternatives. An Arizona fire chief warned last December that lives would be lost if the DJI ban took his department’s air capability away, and Oregon’s aviation department counted 467 restricted drones across 25 states with up to $2 billion in national exposure. Now DHS’s own lab has written the technical half of that argument, with 26 of the most experienced public safety pilots in the country as the witnesses.

The report never says the Chinese drones flew better. DHS flew them at Hudson Yards because agencies still rely on them for reliability and performance, then declined to publish how they scored next to aircraft that could not hold a hover. My read is that the comparison stayed out of the report because it would have ended the argument. Any agency that requests the numbers should publish them.

The security case for Blue UAS was never a performance case, and the report concedes it in one line: a Blue designation says nothing about whether the aircraft can do the job. The supply chain case is thinner than it looks too: the report records the X10D shipping with one battery in October 2024, and Skydio’s own explanation to customers that month, covered in the story linked above, was a Chinese battery supplier Beijing had sanctioned. Blue UAS aircraft are not free of Chinese-made parts, the battery is the documented example, and motors and magnets are the components I would ask any Blue vendor about next. DroneXL’s position has been security standards any manufacturer must meet rather than bans by country of origin, and a Blue List that certifies cybersecurity while its aircraft drift over Manhattan makes that case in a single document.

The report ends by telling agencies to research the capabilities of available equipment before buying. Agencies did that research. The result is a DJI drone in the volunteer fire truck, and DHS just documented why.

Sources: Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026; DHS SAVER program, Blue UAS for First Responders

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Edison Buys a 60 MPH Flock Drone, Promises 45-Second Response

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:54:13 GMT

Edison, New Jersey, is buying a thermal-equipped police drone from Flock Safety, not from Skydio or BRINC. The Township Council voted 6 to 1 on Wednesday, September 23, to spend $589,000 over three years on the drone and 92 more Flock license plate reader cameras, and Mayor Sam Joshi signed off Thursday.

The money comes from asset forfeiture funds, not the township budget. Edison already runs 22 Flock cameras plus 62 plate readers mounted on police cars. The cameras go up within weeks. The drone follows in a few months, once 911 dispatchers are trained to launch it with a button press to the coordinates of a call.

Joshi says the drone will reach any address in Edison’s 32 square miles (83 square kilometers) in about 45 seconds. Flock publishes an 86-second average response for its drone program.

Edison’s Description Points To Flock’s Alpha Drone

The resolution Edison passed did not name the equipment, but Joshi told PIX11 the drone is a Flock unit that flies at 60 mph (97 km/h) with thermal imaging. That matches the Flock Alpha, the aircraft Flock’s drone as first responder product runs on.

Flock unveiled the Alpha in October 2025 as an NDAA-compliant quadcopter designed and assembled in Atlanta, a year after its $300 million-plus Aerodome acquisition. The Alpha spec sheet lists 60 mph as top speed, plate reads from 2,000 feet (610 meters), and a 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) operating radius per dock. Flock has been selling the Alpha on its camera since late May, and the pitch reached Edison intact: Joshi told PIX11 the drone “can actually lock a target.”

PIX11 reports it will be the first Flock drone in New Jersey with thermal.

Forfeiture Cash Pays For It, And One Councilman Wanted Officers

Councilman Richard Brescher cast the only vote against the purchase and said he would rather spend the money on two police officers, while supporters countered that officers cannot be everywhere at once in the township and that seized criminal proceeds, not local taxes, foot the bill.

Brescher told the meeting “I think they’re invasive,” according to NewsNation, while granting that the cameras work. Council President Joseph Coyle defended the buy in MyCentralJersey’s account of the meeting: “I never want to be part of the would have, could have, should have.”

Joshi said drone video will be stored for one or two days before deletion, and that neither camera nor drone data will go to Flock or to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement. A state Attorney General directive, 2022-12, governs the plate readers. Nothing comparable governs the drone: Dillon Reisman, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Jersey, told NewsNation the state has no statute restricting how police use drones.

Edison is not the first department to fund a drone this way. Conroe, Texas, approved two Skydio X10s and two docks bought with forfeiture money in December 2025.

Flock’s Own Average Is Nearly Double The Mayor’s 45 Seconds

At its 60 mph top speed, the Alpha covers three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in 45 seconds. That is before launch and climb. Flock’s own DFR page claims an 86-second average response and says the drone reaches the scene first on 78% of calls.

Those are Flock’s figures, not independent ones, and they are still roughly double the mayor’s. Normal, Illinois, which added a Flock DFR unit to a six-drone fleet in June, set its expectations lower: its chief predicted first-on-scene about 70% of the time.

Joshi’s 45 seconds could hold near a dock. Whether it holds at Edison’s edges depends on how many docks the township is buying and where they sit, and no official quoted in coverage of the vote has said.

DroneXL’s Take

Edison picked the right kind of tool and sold it with the wrong number. A drone that gets thermal eyes on a missing child or a burning house before a patrol car arrives is drones used for good, and an NDAA-compliant, American-assembled aircraft keeps Edison out of the DJI fight entirely. But a 45-second promise that the manufacturer itself doesn’t make is how DFR programs lose public trust the first time a resident times the drone. Oakland County’s council approved Flock drones over a privacy revolt in April, and Edison just handed its critics an easy fact-check. If you live in Edison, I’d ask the council two things before the drone flies: how many docks, and what response time, if any, Flock committed to in the contract.

Sources: PIX11, NewsNation, ABC7 New York, MyCentralJersey, Flock Safety

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FCC Targets DJI Chips as Amazon Drones Swarm a Texas Suburb

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:52:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. The FCC moves to block DJI and Autel chips on any drone. We have Amazon delivery drones that are overwhelming a Texas suburb. And then lastly, SkyeBrowse is rolling out new pricing. Let’s get to it.

The FCC Will Reject Drones With a Single DJI or Autel Circuit Board

First up, starting October 13th, the FCC will block a brand new type of application. If a drone contains a circuit board that is made by DJI or Autel, then it cannot get approval from the FCC.

And here’s a little bit of a twist. It doesn’t really matter where the drone is built. Even a drone that’s assembled entirely in the United States, one that qualifies as Buy America or has Blue UAS approval, is going to get rejected if one of its internal component chips is traced back to DJI.

Pending applications filed before October 13th are going to be grandfathered in, which is kind of mind-boggling if you think about it, because this is about security, right? But if you change even one part of that application, the grandfathering is going to go away.

So if you are a U.S. manufacturer right now with an application in the pipeline, now is the time to file, and to ask your supplier exactly who made every single board that is inside of your aircraft.

52 Amazon Drones in a Single Day Over Richardson, Texas

Next up, one resident in Richardson, Texas, tracked 52 Prime Air drones flying overhead in a single day. According to him, some of them flew as low as 150 feet. Amazon’s permit allows it to fly up to a thousand flights every single day from that hub.

Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drones lined up at a delivery site. Photo credit: Amazon

A local homeowners association leader told the Times that the FAA has failed the city. Part of the frustration here comes from the FAA’s own ruling. Back on July 28th, the agency decided that drone delivery noise does not count as a significant environmental impact nationwide. That decision also ended local comment periods for new hubs.

There’s also a bit of a mixed message here on cameras. Richardson’s city website told residents that the drones do not record any video. Amazon told the Times that its drones actually do record footage near the delivery area.

Amazon Wants 1,000 Daily Flights Out of North Haven, Connecticut

Speaking of Amazon, it is now asking the FAA for up to a thousand flights a day out of the new hub it’s trying to put in North Haven, Connecticut. That’s up to 365,000 flights a year, covering a 7.5-mile radius that reaches into New Haven, Hamden, and Wallingford, if you are familiar with the area. I’m not.

This is the first Prime Air hub in the Northeast that is going to get a public comment window. Connecticut’s environmental agency opened that window on September 16th, and it’s going to close on October 1st.

Interestingly, the thousand-flight number is not really the problem here. It’s actually the same ceiling that Amazon files in almost every city it goes into. The issue is how much scrutiny this specific hub is going to get, since the FAA’s new national noise ruling may let it skip a full local review altogether. If you live near New Haven, this is your window of time to speak up before it closes.

SkyeBrowse Overhauls Its Drone 3D Mapping Pricing

And the last story is that SkyeBrowse just overhauled its pricing for drone 3D mapping. If you’re not familiar, SkyeBrowse turns drone videos into 3D models and into different maps. It’s used for construction, inspections, insurance claims, and even crime scene documentation.

The Commercial tier now starts at $20 a model, which is actually a really good deal for basic capture and sharing. Pro adds exports and AI tools like automatic floor plans and site plans.

Then the Public Safety and Enterprise tier costs $199 per model, and it adds things like CJIS compliance and Axon Evidence integration for the law enforcement agencies that use it. Existing subscribers can also keep their old plans. And of course, the Freemium option that we’ve talked about before is still available for those who just want to try it out before they buy.

That conversation is going to continue on Post Flight, where we’re going to talk about all of these stories uncensored in the premium community. There’s a link in the description. And we’re also going to see you on Monday for the live Q&A. It was pretty lively this Monday. So, have a great weekend. We’ll see you then.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full weekly UAS news update on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Lowe's Now Flies Painter's Tape to Charlotte Yards in 20 Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:26:00 GMT

Lowe’s started delivering home improvement supplies by drone on Thursday, September 24, from its store in Matthews, North Carolina, a Charlotte suburb in the Mooresville-based chain’s home market. Customers within roughly 5 miles (8 km) of the store order through a “Lowe’s by Drone” storefront in the DoorDash app, and Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery company, flies the order to their yard in as little as 20 minutes.

The pilot covers more than 100 items: screwdrivers, caulk, painter’s tape, paint supplies, batteries, soap and all-purpose cleaner. Every order has to fit under Wing’s limit of about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) per flight. The lumber still goes home in a pickup.

Lowe’s calls itself the first home improvement retailer to offer drone delivery. Six years ago, a hardware store in Logan, Australia, was already one of Wing’s first delivery partners.

The Lowe's store in Matthews, N.C., where the drone delivery pilot is live. Photo credit: Lowe's

Lowe’s Is the First Chain to Fly Orders, Not the First Hardware Store

Lowe’s “first” holds for a national home improvement chain. It does not hold for hardware by drone. Wing’s Logan service drew requests from tradesmen who wanted screws and nails flown to job sites, and Browns Plains Hardware signed on as one of its earliest partners by 2020.

DroneXL covered that in November 2020, in Wing drones to deliver hardware supplies to tradesmen. The store’s Paul Charlton described the problem then: run out of the right screws on a job, and the round trip to the hardware store costs at least half an hour. Wing could do it in seven minutes, he said.

That is the same pitch Lowe’s makes today, down to the forgotten roll of tape stalling a paint job. Lowe’s announcement quotes chief information and AI officer Seemantini Godbole promising “next-generation fulfillment right when they need it.” What is new is the size of the network behind the pitch. Lowe’s runs more than 1,750 stores, and Rajiv Raghunathan, its vice president of technology for stores, told Supply Chain Dive the program could expand to more of them.

Lowe’s Plugged Into a Wing and DoorDash Network Running Since 2025

Lowe’s joined a drone operation rather than building one: DoorDash and Wing launched drone delivery in Charlotte in May 2025 from The Arboretum Shopping Center, starting with Panera Bread and local restaurants. Lowe’s says its Matthews pilot builds on those existing Charlotte operations.

A Kobalt mini pliers set goes into a DoorDash and Wing delivery box. Photo credit: Lowe's

DroneXL reported that launch in DoorDash and Wing Launch Drone Delivery in Charlotte, when the service reached customers within 4 miles of the hub. The Lowe’s radius is 5 miles around the Matthews store, according to CNBC, which reported the launch as an exclusive.

DoorDash now has its own aircraft too. It earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air on July 29, as DroneXL covered in DoorDash Just Became An Airline, while saying its Wing partnership continues. Lowe’s orders fly on Wing. DoorDash is selling Wing’s flights while building aircraft that could replace them.

Wing Has Answered None of DroneXL’s 30 Safety Questions

Wing, the company flying Lowe’s orders over Matthews, has not answered any of the 30 written safety questions DroneXL sent it on September 8, as of Thursday night. They were due September 15. Zipline answered in part the next day. Amazon Prime Air has left 25 questions unanswered.

The questions cover what anyone under the flight path would want to know: weight and payload, recovery systems, single points of failure, drop-zone checks, incident records, sound, cameras, liability and weather limits. DroneXL sent the same generic set to all three operators when it launched the Drone Delivery Tracker, and published where each one stood in Zipline Answers Safety Questions on the Record. Amazon and Wing Don’t.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight: a defibrillator to a cardiac arrest, a prescription to an island, blood to a trauma bay. Painter’s tape is a convenience run. A contractor who saves half an hour mid-job gets real value, so I won’t call it frivolous, but convenience runs are exactly the flights that have to be done right, because they will be the most common ones over people’s houses. Lowe’s just put its brand on a service whose operator has not answered DroneXL’s safety questions. I’d want those answers before putting my name on the box. If you live within 5 miles of the Matthews store, you now know the drone carries 2.5 pounds, and Wing hasn’t told DroneXL what it does when something fails.

Sources: Lowe’s via PR Newswire, CNBC, Supply Chain Dive

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FCC Says $5B Flowed Into US Drones. Its Own Filing Counts Pledges

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:13:00 GMT

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told the Small Business Administration’s Defense Industrial Base Drone Summit on Thursday that President Trump’s policies have put “billions of dollars now flowing into production plants here in America.” About an hour later, the FCC’s official account posted a clip of Carr under a headline claiming $5 billion in new U.S. drone investment.

The figure is the FCC’s scoreboard for its December 22, 2025 decision to put every foreign-made drone and drone component on the Covered List, which blocks new models from FCC authorization. It is also the economic argument behind the agency’s next move: a proposed sales ban on foreign drones carrying thermal cameras, LiDAR or docking stations.

On July 21, an FCC fact sheet put the total at over $4 billion. The itemized list the agency published with its July drone proposal counts a five-year pledge as its single largest entry.

Carr on stage beneath the Small Business Administration seal at the Defense Industrial Base Drone Summit, September 24, 2026. Photo credit: FCC

FCC Footnotes Mix Venture Rounds, A Valuation And Five-Year Pledges

The FCC’s own list of investments sits in two footnotes of FCC Public Notice DA 26-758. One covers money raised since December. The other covers money only committed, and its anchor is Skydio’s $3.5 billion plan, spread across five years and announced in April.

The raised column cites Zipline’s $600 million round alongside a Reuters story on Zipline’s $7.6 billion valuation (a valuation is what investors think a company is worth; it builds nothing). It also lists Swarm Aero’s Series A and Portuguese drone maker Tekever opening its first U.S. office. A third footnote adds Red Cat’s upsized equity offering and PDW’s $110 million Series B.

Some of it is steel and payroll. The footnotes point to BRINC’s new Seattle factory and an Anduril plant that started building high-speed combat drones in March. Motor startup Westmag, which DroneXL covered when it raised $11 million to build drone motors in South San Francisco, reported committed orders for hundreds of thousands of units, a component class the Covered List now bars from new foreign authorizations.

The committed column is softer. Skydio’s own announcement describes $3.5 billion to be invested over the next five years, with a new plant five times its current space and more than 2,000 jobs. It landed one day after the company closed a $110 million Series F at a $4.4 billion valuation. The same footnote counts a Denton, Texas city council vote on an $870,000 factory incentive and Quantum Cyber’s letter of intent to buy a 43,000-square-foot building.

The FCC repeated the $5 billion figure on X Thursday, but Carr has been saying it since at least August 4, when he used the figure on the TBPN podcast. That was two weeks after the FCC’s written fact sheet, quoted by Military.com, said over $4 billion.

The Investment Number Is The FCC’s Case For Banning Thermal Drones

In DA 26-758, the FCC’s bureaus tentatively conclude that banning sales of foreign thermal, LiDAR, docking and heavy-lift drones would “similarly generate substantial investment in domestic production.” That projected investment is weighed as a public benefit against the cost to operators, which the notice calls minor.

The operators disagreed. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 closed September 2, and Pilot Institute’s count of the record (Pilot Institute is a DroneXL partner) found 3,770 filings against the proposal and 16 for it, with 298 from public safety agencies. DJI’s own filing, signed by former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, argues the seven “military-grade” categories were invented inside the FCC and endorsed by no security agency. The proposal, which I covered on July 22, has not been adopted, and the FCC turned down requests to extend its comment window.

The squeeze is arriving from other directions anyway. Section 232 tariffs of 25% on imported drones up to 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and 100% on thermal-equipped and heavier aircraft, took effect September 3. On October 13, the FCC stops authorizing new U.S.-built drones that contain DJI or Autel logic-bearing chips. And Thursday’s host, the SBA, made drones a priority sector for 90% loan guarantees when it and the Department of War created the Smaller War Plants Commission on August 25.

DroneXL’s Take

I want American drone factories. Skydio’s plant, BRINC’s Seattle move and Westmag’s motor line are good news. What I don’t accept is the FCC grading its own ban with a number that blends a Zipline valuation, a city council vote and a five-year promise, then citing that grade as the reason to pull thermal drones off the shelf for fire departments and search teams. I filed DroneXL’s comment in Docket 26-189 on September 2, alongside thousands of pilots, agencies and service providers who made the same case. Investment pledges don’t find a missing hiker at 2 a.m. A thermal drone does. Until the FCC publishes the tally behind $5 billion and can point to American thermal aircraft a county sheriff can actually buy at a price the budget covers, that number is a talking point, and it should carry no weight in Docket 26-189.

Sources: FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, Brendan Carr on X, FCC on X, Skydio, Military.com, Benzinga, U.S. Small Business Administration

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Tells Packed Westborough Room Its Drones Are Coming Anyway

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:06:00 GMT

Amazon told hundreds of people packed into a Westborough, Massachusetts, hotel on Wednesday night, September 23, that it still plans to launch Prime Air drone deliveries from its Otis Street warehouse, and not one resident who took the microphone spoke in favor. The crowd filled the DoubleTree ballroom and an overflow room, and Amazon started ahead of the advertised 6 p.m. time because the room was already full.

I was in that room with a recorder. Right before Tareq Wafaie, who handles Amazon’s Prime Air projects in the Northeast for its economic development team, began his presentation, someone at the back shouted “Welcome to New England, Amazon.” Late in the evening a resident asked everyone who shops on Amazon to raise a hand, and nearly the whole room did. The next question was who thought drone delivery was a bad idea. More hands went up.

Wafaie told the room he had heard its opposition and would take it back to the company. He also said Amazon’s plan is to launch from Westborough, possibly by the end of October.

Westborough’s Only Local Vote Covers Amazon’s Launch Pad, Not the Flights

Westborough’s Planning Board, which resumes its site-plan review on October 6, can rule only on the pads and trailers Amazon wants in its Otis Street parking lot. The FAA controls the airspace, Wafaie said, and Amazon’s Part 135 certificate already covers the MK30 nationwide, though each new site still needs FAA sign-off.

Amazon's same-day facility at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts. Amazon wants to launch and land its Prime Air drones from this building's parking lot. Photo credit: DroneXL

Opting in to drone delivery decides only whether a drone delivers to your yard. When a resident asked how to keep the drones from crossing her property after she declined the service, Wafaie said: “There is no opting out of drones flying over your property.” Amazon will not publish its routes either. Rich, from Amazon’s airspace team, said the software builds each path around no-fly zones and flies as directly as it can from the pad to the customer.

The 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius covers about 175 square miles, Wafaie said, and parts of 13 cities and towns, Spectrum News reported. Wafaie said Amazon held a virtual briefing last week for town managers and state legislators from the area, but a public meeting before each town board is not part of its plan. That settles the question DroneXL raised before the forum, after Southborough found itself on Amazon’s service map through a local blogger rather than the company. Carlos Garcia of the Shrewsbury Select Board, who spoke last, called that answer “not satisfactory to me.”

The federal side is not finished. Wafaie first told a Northborough resident the FAA’s environmental assessment was done. Rich then said Amazon files a separate environmental review for every new site, and the FAA is reviewing Westborough’s now. Massachusetts also requires a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the landing area. Wafaie said Amazon has none of those approvals yet and hopes to have all of them by year-end. Asked about wildlife, he said Amazon ran no peer-reviewed study of its own and relies on the FAA’s review. A horse-farm owner who boards 12 horses asked what happens when a drone spooks them; Wafaie said Amazon has had no complaints of spooked animals.

Wafaie added that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. One resident cited two Denver-area towns that had paused drone hubs this summer. Castle Rock and Parker both adopted emergency moratoriums on July 21: six months on commercial drone-delivery hubs in Castle Rock, nine months on drone dispatch facilities in Parker. A town cannot touch the sky, but it can pause the pad.

Amazon Left the Door Open to 5 a.m. Flights and 1,000 Trips a Day

Amazon’s FAA approval lets the MK30 fly during civil twilight, from shortly before sunrise to shortly after sunset, and allows up to 1,000 flights a day from each site. In Westborough, Wafaie said, Amazon will start with about six drones and several hundred daily deliveries, with one to three airborne.

An Amazon Prime Air representative opens the September 23 community meeting in Westborough, Massachusetts. Photo credit: DroneXL

A resident had the numbers ready: sunrise on June 10 was 5:09 a.m. Asked whether drones could be flying that early, Wafaie said that if customers order at that hour and the drone is cleared to fly, it is a possibility. Later he floated working with Westborough on operating hours, without committing to anything. Amazon’s Richardson, Texas, hub flies from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to the New York Times account DroneXL covered this week.

Wafaie called the 1,000-flight ceiling aspirational for a single Westborough pad with six drones, and said more drones would likely mean another site-plan approval. He would not forecast anything beyond that. One man called the refusal disingenuous; Wafaie asked him to stay civil. Scale was the worry residents kept coming back to. A Hopkinton resident asked the room whether it wanted blue sky or “a highway of drones.” Mark, who lives on Fisher Street near the warehouse, made it personal: “I did not buy a house near an airport in a city.”

Noise drew the most technical pushback. Wafaie said the drone never exceeds 65 to 68 decibels during the 25 to 30 seconds it spends at a customer’s home, citing what he called an independent noise study. A resident who said he works with sound measurement cited what he said was Amazon’s published peak of 81 to 84 dBA at 20 feet (6 meters) and noted that many local towns bar lawn mowing before 7 a.m. Amazon’s FAA filing for Baton Rouge puts the MK30’s delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL, a metric that adds up a whole event’s sound energy and runs higher than a peak reading.

Amazon’s Answers on Drone Cameras Changed Over One Evening

The MK30’s cameras record for the whole flight. Rich said the footage is written over on the next flight unless an incident triggers a safety investigation, in which case it goes to a secure vault. Earlier, Wafaie had told a Westborough resident the cameras were not recording in flight.

Rich also gave the coverage: 350 degrees around the aircraft and 17 degrees vertically in forward flight, enough to see ahead and below. Police asking for footage two weeks after a routine flight would find nothing, he said: “that data doesn’t exist anymore.”

Asked why anyone should trust that the drones don’t surveil, Wafaie said spying would go against everything Amazon does, and the room laughed. A Hopkinton resident answered with the record: in 2023 Amazon paid more than $30 million to settle FTC charges that it kept children’s Alexa recordings after parents asked for deletion and let Ring employees view customer videos. The same mismatch showed up in Richardson, where the city’s FAQ says the drones don’t record video and Amazon’s own operations page says people near a delivery point may be recorded, the Times reported.

Amazon Explained the Tolleson Crane Crash and Skipped Richardson

Asked about the two MK30s that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, Wafaie said the crane should have been permitted with the FAA and was not. The drone was built to scan forward for aircraft and missed that crane type, he said. It detects them now.

That was my question. I also asked what caused an MK30 to strike an apartment building in Richardson in February 2026, and whether the drone carries a parachute. It does not. The MK30 weighs about 83 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff and cruises at 60 to 74 mph (97 to 119 km/h), and Wafaie said six propellers and a safe contingent landing are what the FAA cleared. He did not address Richardson, as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette also noted. He did bring up Richardson more than an hour later, as a city with organized opposition where Amazon now makes tens of thousands of deliveries. Amazon left all eight of the safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4 unanswered. At the meeting, Wafaie answered one of them in passing: Amazon checks each customer’s chosen drop spot against aerial LiDAR data, and in some cases sends someone to drive by before the first delivery.

The Amazon MK30 on display at the Prime Air community meeting in Westborough, Massachusetts, with close-ups of its propeller arms and motor assembly. The aircraft has six propellers and no parachute. Photo credit: DroneXL

Wafaie told the room several times that Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages this year without incident, while conceding, in answer to my question, that a couple of flights had not gone perfectly. DroneXL’s own 2026 file includes the Richardson strike and an MK30 that crashed into a garden in Darlington, England, on July 29, a crash the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch is investigating. On September 11 another MK30 made a precautionary landing beside a Baton Rouge boulevard, upright and with no visible damage.

A hinged hatch on top of the display MK30 opens onto an empty, green-primed bay. Photo credit: DroneXL

When an MK30 does fail, it chooses where to come down. Wafaie said the aircraft finds the nearest open area that isn’t a road or a building, and Amazon keeps no map of predetermined landing sites. Bob, a Westborough resident who said he spent more than 10 years on Air Force drone programs and helped develop the first FAA-approved detect-and-avoid system, asked to see one; there isn’t one. A youth sports volunteer asked Amazon to route around schools, playgrounds and ball fields. Wafaie said that would take out most of every delivery area. The Part 107-certified monitors in the trailer on the pad cannot steer a drone either. They can recall it or order a contingent landing, and Wafaie said they can put every drone down if Westborough police ask.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m pro drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight: an organ for transplant, medication for residents of a remote island, a defibrillator racing to someone in cardiac arrest. Urgency and value earn the right to fly over people’s homes. Toothpaste doesn’t. When a resident asked what problem Amazon was solving, Wafaie’s own example was diapers for a mother home with a sick child, and a same-day van already covers that.

If a company is going to fly consumer goods over backyards anyway, it has to do it right, and Zipline shows what right looks like. Its P2 weighs 55 pounds empty and 63 with a full 8-pound load, stays about 300 feet up and lowers the package on a tether, so the aircraft stays well above the people on the ground. It carries two parachutes, one on the aircraft and one on the delivery pod. The MK30 weighs about 20 pounds more than a fully loaded P2 to carry a 5-pound package, descends to 13 feet over a customer’s yard, and has no parachute. It is too big and too heavy for what it carries.

My read is that this gap is what the Westborough room was reacting to, and it puts the missions I care about at risk. A town has one move left against a company holding the FAA certificate, and Castle Rock and Parker already made it. A moratorium on delivery hubs grounds a medical drone as surely as a toothpaste run. Watch October 6: if the Planning Board approves the pad on the same answers this room rejected, Shrewsbury’s board, which has already talked about a bylaw, has every reason to write one, and Amazon will have taught another town to say no to all of us.

Sources: Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Spectrum News 1, DroneXL recording of the September 23 meeting, Federal Trade Commission, Citizen Portal (Castle Rock), Citizen Portal (Parker).

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.