Export controls, the Shenzhen supply chain, and the geopolitics of the world’s drone-manufacturing superpower.
I’ve spent months documenting DJI’s network of suspected shell companies, from Skyany to Spatial Hover to Jovistar. What started as investigative journalism became a front-row seat to watching a company outsmart itself into oblivion. Now that the dust has settled on the December 23 FCC ban, one uncomfortable truth has become impossible to ignore: DJI…
I’ve been reading a lot of optimistic press releases about American drone independence lately. The Pentagon wants a million drones. Executive orders promise to unleash domestic production. Politicians declare that we’re breaking free from Chinese supply chains. Then a defense-tech founder in Silicon Valley writes a Forbes column that quietly demolishes the entire narrative with…
DJI has posted a teaser in China, the internet has collectively squinted at it, and now we are all pretending to be product detectives with very strong opinions based on one single image. Classic DJI launch season energy. A poster shared on Weibo and reposted by Digital Camera World shows what appears to be a…
It was clear that Trump’s tariffs were never going to stop DJI. Now one of the most influential voices in US-China tech competition is making the same argument in the Financial Times. Chris Miller, author of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist book “Chip War” that shaped Washington’s semiconductor policy, published an opinion piece this weekend analyzing why…
The Avata 360 is FCC approved, under 250 grams, and brings true spherical 360 capture into an FPV platform. That alone puts it
China has quietly crossed another unmanned aviation threshold, this time with something that looks less like a drone and more like a small aircraft that forgot to hire a pilot. On December 28, 2025, the Lanying R6000 completed its maiden flight at the Deyang Shifang test site in Sichuan Province, becoming the first known six…
While the drone world panics over the FCC’s sweeping ban on foreign drones and components, FPV expert Joshua Bardwell is urging pilots to take a breath. His analysis raises a critical question that most coverage has missed: Does the FCC even have jurisdiction over half the components it listed? In a video published December 23, Bardwell…
Yesterday, I wrote about the FCC’s sweeping ban on all foreign-made drones and critical components. Today, the New York Times published an article that exposes a fundamental problem with the administration’s “American drone dominance” strategy: the batteries don’t exist. The FCC’s National Security Determination explicitly lists “batteries and battery management systems” as covered critical compon
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