DroneXL: The Independent Drone Authority — DJI, FAA, Reviews & Deals

Quantum Systems Says CIA-Backed Fund Opened Its US Doors

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:37:00 GMT

One of Europe’s biggest defense startups got its start in the American market with help from the CIA’s venture capital arm. Co-CEO Sven Kruck told Reuters that US investors including In-Q-Tel opened doors in Washington for Quantum Systems and helped the company win work with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kruck said the reconnaissance contract with US intelligence agencies was small in revenue terms but established the company’s credibility. Quantum Systems sells reconnaissance, attack, and interceptor drones to customers including Ukraine and Germany, and Reuters puts its valuation at roughly $8 billion.

I have been covering this company since 2024, back when it was a Bavarian VTOL specialist most American readers had never heard of. The part of Kruck’s account that will travel furthest is not the intelligence contract. It is the admission that one of Europe’s biggest defense startups found its footing in Washington before it found it in Berlin.

In-Q-Tel Sells Access More Than It Sells Capital

In-Q-Tel is the venture firm US intelligence officials created to find technology relevant to national security. Its checks are usually small, often under $3 million. The real value, one person familiar with its operations told Reuters, is the introduction to American defense buyers, the sector’s biggest spenders.

The name nods to James Bond’s gadget maker Q, and the portfolio history includes Palantir and Anduril. In-Q-Tel also holds a stake in Stark, the German strike-drone company founded by Quantum Systems co-founder Florian Seibel after investors blocked the parent company from arming its surveillance platforms. Jennifer Nelson, the fund’s executive vice president international, described Germany to Reuters as an important innovation partner and strategic ally, and said In-Q-Tel keeps expanding its investments in German dual-use companies.

Kruck was blunt about how that works in practice. “It made it easier to get started in the U.S.,” he said, naming the CIA and FBI as the clients. He also volunteered that In-Q-Tel has not sent him an unprompted email in two years, a fair reminder that this is a network story rather than a control story.

Quantum Systems Already Builds Inside the United States

The company is not a foreign vendor shipping boxes across the Atlantic. Quantum Systems runs a 135,000-square-foot (12,500-square-meter) integration and production site in Moorpark, California, opened in June 2025, and its Vector eVTOL reconnaissance aircraft joined the Pentagon’s Blue UAS Cleared List that August.

Kruck tied the physical presence directly to Washington’s rules for foreign defense suppliers, telling Reuters that the local-operations requirement is why the company runs factories and staffs them in the United States. The arrangement carries a cost European governments are only starting to price in. Like any defense supplier, Quantum Systems cannot sell technology developed on American soil to other countries without American approval.

For US drone buyers, this is the supply chain the FCC Covered List action left standing when it swept foreign drones out of the import market. Blue UAS listing is the pathway onto federal buying schedules, and Moorpark is a large part of why Quantum Systems qualifies for it.

European Lawmakers Are Watching the Investor, Not the Check

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament’s security and defense committee, argues that a fund tied to US intelligence should not be judged like an ordinary shareholder. She told Reuters that In-Q-Tel carries a mandate to secure technology for American intelligence services.

Strack-Zimmermann pointed to observation rights and access to government contracts as channels of influence that run past equity. Germany’s defense ministry said it takes investor influence in the sector seriously and that shareholders should not interfere with a company’s operations or research. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said earlier this year that the agency was refining how it works with the private sector. The CIA declined to comment.

The gap Reuters leaves open is the one that decides the argument. Kruck groups In-Q-Tel among “US investors,” but the story does not say how large the fund’s position in Quantum Systems is or what rights came attached to it, and Nelson’s statement addressed Europe broadly rather than this company. Those are the numbers a strategic-influence claim turns on. Quantum Systems is preparing an initial public offering as early as 2027, and a prospectus is where holdings and export-control constraints stop being optional disclosures.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the American drone-independence story running backwards, and it deserves a straight look.

Washington spent four years telling US operators to stop buying Chinese and built the Blue UAS list to tell them what to buy instead. One of the strongest non-Chinese platforms on that list belongs to a German company that says it got through the door partly because a CIA-funded venture arm made introductions. That is not a scandal. It is how the trusted-supplier system was designed to work. But nobody should pretend a trusted supply chain is a neutral engineering standard. It is a supply chain Washington can constrain, and the export-approval requirement Kruck described is that constraint written down.

The counterpoint is real and I will grant it. In-Q-Tel’s checks are tiny next to the $246 million German Army contract Quantum Systems booked in December, and a fund that has not emailed the co-CEO in two years is not steering anything. Strack-Zimmermann’s concern is about structure, not about a hand on the tiller.

Structure is the point, though. Europe has no In-Q-Tel. It has ministers who want sovereign capability and a capital market that keeps outsourcing the introduction problem to American funds. Until that changes, every European drone company that wants the US market walks the same path Quantum Systems walked, and signs the same approval clause on the way in. My read is that the interceptor work Quantum Systems is pushing with Ukrainian partners is where this gets tested first, because that is the one program where Europe cannot afford to wait on anyone’s sign-off.

Sources: Reuters (John O’Donnell and Maria Rugamer), Seeking Alpha, Quantum Systems

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

Skyrover S1 Drops to $236 as the FCC Moves to Halt Its Sales

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:07:00 GMT

The Skyrover S1 is selling for $236 at Amazon, 18% under the $289 list price on the listing and the lowest price DroneXL has logged on this aircraft. The Fly More Combo, with three batteries and a charging hub, is $318.99 against a $399 list. Both ship free with Prime, sold by Skyrover Direct and fulfilled by Amazon, with overnight delivery offered to my zip code in Croton-on-Hudson when I checked Sunday at 12:54 pm.

Two federal dates sit next to that price. On Monday, August 31, comments close in the Federal Communications Commission proceeding that would end the import and marketing of this drone under the exact FCC ID printed on its label. On September 3, a 25% Section 232 tariff on imported drones takes effect.

For $236 the box holds the aircraft, the controller and one battery.

Get the Skyrover S1 for $236 at Amazon

The Skyrover S1 (left) next to the X1. Photo credit: DroneXL

The $236 Price Sits Below Every Number DroneXL Has Logged for the S1

The Skyrover S1 arrived on Amazon in October 2025 with a $349 list price, sold for $269 in December, and reached $296.65 last November only by stacking an Amazon coupon on a DroneXL discount code. At $236 the standalone drone sits $33 below its previous floor and $113 below launch.

The combo history runs the same direction. The Fly More Combo listed at $499, dropped to $389 in December, and went for $399 during Skyrover’s Best Buy spring sale in March. At $318.99 it is $70 under the lowest combo price DroneXL had recorded.

Amazon’s “Limited time deal” badge carries no end date. Skyrover’s own store shows the S1 from $236 against a $349 regular price and is running its August promotions through August 31, and that calendar is the best signal I have for how long the Amazon price holds. The listing shows 4.4 stars from 294 ratings and more than 300 units bought in the past month.

One other configuration is worth a look. The two-battery bundle with a 256GB microSD card is $256, a $20 step up from the bare drone for a second battery and the card most buyers would order anyway.

Forty Minutes and Forward Sensing Separate the S1 From the DJI Mini 4K

The Skyrover S1 weighs 242 grams and carries a 1/2-inch Sony sensor behind a 3-axis gimbal, shooting 4K/60 video and 48-megapixel stills. Skyrover rates the battery at 40 minutes and the video link at 39,000 feet (12 km). Forward and downward sensors detect obstacles; the sides and rear are blind.

The 48-megapixel mode arrived by firmware. Version V01.0000.010, covered by DroneXL in December, added the high-resolution stills to a drone that shipped with 12-megapixel photos. The same release brought 1080p slow motion at 120fps and 2.7K vertical video. The “8K photo” line in Amazon’s listing is that same 48-megapixel file upscaled, the marketing stretch DroneXL called out on the X1 in May.

The comparison that matters at this price is the DJI Mini 4K, the drone DroneXL points first-time pilots to more than any other. It hit $209 in April and its Fly More Combo fell to $255 in June. For roughly $27 more, the S1 adds 4K at 60 frames instead of 30, a rated 40 minutes against 31, forward obstacle sensing where the Mini 4K senses only downward, and a slightly larger sensor. The Mini 4K keeps DJI’s transmission and DJI’s support network, and that second item is where this article is headed.

Flight time is Skyrover’s number, and DroneXL has not run the S1 through a timed battery test. The one field result on record is Marcus from Idaho Quadcopter landing with 47% remaining after a long session at 38°F (3°C) in December, which is a good sign for a 40-minute rating but not a measurement of it.

At 242 grams the S1 sits under the FAA’s 250-gram line, so recreational pilots skip registration and Remote ID. Fly it for money under Part 107 and registration applies at any weight. Every other drone under 250 grams DroneXL recommends carries the same footnote.

The FCC’s Proposed Sales Ban Lists the S1’s Own FCC ID

The FCC’s July 17 Public Notice in PS Docket 26-184 proposes to prohibit the continued importation and marketing of drones from nine companies, and it lists FCC ID 2BPFE-DD001 under WaveGo Tech LLC. That is the Skyrover S1’s aircraft authorization, granted July 2, 2025. Comments close August 31.

The Federal Register version of the notice also names the S1’s controller, 2BPFE-RC001, and the two SZ Knowact IDs behind the Skyrover X1. DroneXL covered the nine-company list when it dropped, and Russ from 51 Drones told S1 and X1 shoppers to buy now or not at all. What neither piece spelled out is that the S1’s ID is on the page by number.

A week earlier the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau had already proposed a $25,000 fine against WaveGo. The bureau’s July 10 notice describes WaveGo as a Delaware LLC formed on December 30, 2024, that markets the S1 and X1, and says the company ignored a May 8 letter of inquiry and a May 29 deficiency letter, both delivered by certified mail and by email to the addresses on its FCC filings. SZ Knowact, the X1’s grantee and the developer of the Skyrover app, received a matching $25,000 notice the same day. The FCC’s account of its own investigation opens with a DroneXL article from September 2025 that linked to Konrad Iturbe’s automated fingerprinting of DJI’s transmission protocol.

Buyers should read the scope carefully. The proposal reaches importation and marketing, and the notice says the continued use of equipment already purchased would remain permitted. If adopted as written, sellers would have to stop importing and marketing within 30 days of the final action appearing in the Federal Register. When the FCC ran the same procedure against legacy Huawei-era gear this year, it adopted the prohibition in June and it took effect July 16, a timeline DroneXL flagged as the template for everything that followed.

The FCC’s economic case rests on the claim that none of the nine companies “appear in major industry market analyses or rankings.” Amazon’s own counter says more than 300 people bought this one drone in the past month. Anyone who wants that number in the record has until Monday to put it there.

The tariff runs on a separate clock. Trump’s Section 232 proclamation puts a 25% duty on imported consumer drones from September 3, and the S1’s FCC filing labels the aircraft as made in Malaysia, so it is an import like everything else on the shelf. The duty applies to declared import value, and how much of it reaches a $236 sticker is the importer’s decision.

Skyrover’s answer to all of this so far is the “We’re Here to Stay” letter it posted in April, promising FCC compliance and a replacement-based support operation in the US. That letter did not name who makes the hardware. The FCC’s July notices did.

Filing a Comment Takes Ten Minutes, and the Docket Is 26-184, Not 26-189

Two FCC comment windows close this week and only one of them covers the S1. PS Docket 26-184, the nine-company notice that names the S1’s FCC ID, closes Monday, August 31. PS Docket 26-189, the thermal and LiDAR proposal closing September 2, does not reach a drone with neither sensor.

The mechanics are the same for both. Go to the FCC’s express filing page and enter the proceeding number, then select the docket title when it appears in the dropdown. Type the comment into the box and submit it with a name and address. Use standard filing instead if you want to attach a PDF, and pick “COMMENT” as the filing type. The address is required and is not published.

The Drone Advocacy Alliance’s step-by-step guide was written for 26-189 and walks through every screen; swap in 26-184 and the rest applies. Vic Moss at the Drone Service Providers Alliance published his own filing advice earlier this month, and his rule is the one to follow: specifics move a record, so say what you fly and what replacing it would cost. DroneXL has been a Drone Advocacy Alliance partner since June 2024, and DJI helps fund the Alliance.

The FCC asked, in its own words, whether the economic impact of this prohibition is minor and whether other equipment could fill the gap. An S1 owner who bought it because the Mini 4K could not sense a tree in front of it is the person qualified to answer that. If you own one, or you buy one this weekend, that is the comment worth filing before Monday ends.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL has been pricing this drone and reporting on the company behind it for ten months, and I have never seen those two jobs pull against each other as hard as they do this weekend. The aircraft at $236 is the best sub-250-gram value on Amazon by a clear margin: forward sensing and 4K/60 for Mini 4K money. The company selling it is a Delaware shell that would not answer certified mail from the FCC.

The commission’s suspicion is not a stretch, and I helped build it. The FCC’s fine notice against WaveGo cites the DroneXL story that opened this whole thread, and the FCC’s nine-company list reads like a subset of the repository Iturbe published a year ago. DroneXL opposes protectionism dressed as security, and the December Covered List sweep still reads that way to me. Laundering DJI hardware through a registered-agent address in Lewes, Delaware is a different thing, and it is the unfair competition this publication has argued against from the other side for years.

So here is my read for a buyer, and it comes in two halves. If you want a first drone, or a beater for the shots you would not risk a $700 aircraft on, buy this one at $236 and buy it now. The drone in your hand stays legal, and the FCC has said so in writing. Nothing at this price flies as long or sees as well. Buy the Fly More Combo if you buy at all, because the three batteries you get on Monday may be the only three you ever own.

If you need a drone that will still be supported in 2028, walk away. Everything after the sale is exposed: the replacement policy Skyrover advertised in April depends on a company that has, on the FCC’s account, gone silent, and the parts that keep a $236 drone flying for two years move through the same import channel the notice would close. A Mini 4K costs less and comes with a manufacturer that answers its mail. That is the whole trade, and I am not going to pretend the FCC half of it away to sell a drone.

Watch the docket after August 31. The Huawei precedent says a final notice can follow a comment deadline by weeks, and a 30-day sell-off after that is the whole runway. If WaveGo or SZ Knowact finally files something, that will be news. If neither does, the outcome is the one Russ warned about in July, and the S1 becomes the drone that was cheapest in the week before it disappeared.

Sources: Amazon, Federal Register, FCC PS Docket 26-184, FCC DA 26-700, Skyrover

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

FCC Wants To Ban The Lost-Pet Drone CBS News Just Celebrated

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:40:55 GMT

CBS Evening News aired a two-minute segment on August 29 about a thermal drone that finds lost pets for the city of Mission Viejo, California, and the same drone class sits in the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed ban on foreign-made “military-grade” aircraft. The Mission Viejo drone cost almost $17,000, paid for with private donations. On camera it tracked a terrier in the carpool lane of an Orange County freeway and guided ground units to it in minutes.

The FCC’s proposal, open for public comment until September 2, lists any drone carrying a thermal imaging sensor among seven categories it wants pulled from import and sale. Owners keep flying what they already have. Cities that want their own copy of the Mission Viejo program, and Kyle Werner told CBS other agencies are already calling him, would be shopping in a market the FCC intends to close.

I have covered Mission Viejo’s pet rescues since the first one in November, and I have watched pilots in New York run the same searches for years. This is the first time a network newscast has put the technique in front of a national audience, three days before the docket shuts.

CBS Put A Freeway Dog Rescue On The Evening News

Correspondent Carter Evans’ report for CBS News opens with a small terrier loose on an Orange County freeway. Mission Viejo Animal Services put its drone overhead, spotted the dog in the carpool lane, and talked officers to it over the radio. The whole rescue took minutes, according to Werner.

Werner is Mission Viejo’s Animal Services Manager and Chief of Field Services. He told CBS that lost-pet searches used to run days or weeks, and that the drone changed the department’s posture. “We went from a very passive search, just waiting for something to happen, to actively searching,” he said.

The drone uses lasers and thermal imaging to pick out animal heat signatures across large areas, per CBS. Senior animal control officer JR Stewart described a search for a dog named Lana in brush that rose above his head. He said there was no way he would have seen her with the naked eye. The drone found her and guided him in. That was the January canyon rescue DroneXL covered at the time, the department’s third find in about two months.

CBS also revisited Josie, the German Shepherd mix the drone tracked for close to a mile last November before Werner coached her owner into position. Werner told CBS the owner sat down, stayed calm, and let the dog come to her.

Private Donors Paid For The Drone And Other Agencies Want One

The Dedicated Animal Welfare Group, a nonprofit that funds veterinary care for sick and injured animals, donated the drone to Mission Viejo last fall. CBS put the price at almost $17,000. No city money bought it, and Werner told the network other agencies are already asking him about the technology.

Asked whether the drone is worth the money, Werner put it at 100 percent. He framed the return in family terms rather than budget terms, calling a reunited pet someone’s family member coming home.

The city has never named the drone’s manufacturer. Its November release called it a newly donated thermal imaging unmanned aerial system and left it there. That omission mattered little in November. It matters now, because the FCC’s proposal turns on where the aircraft was built.

New York Pet Searchers Have Run This Playbook For Years

Mission Viejo is the newest municipal example of a technique New York State pilots have refined since at least 2024. The search runs the same way in both places: launch, find the heat signature, then talk the owner into a spot where a scared dog walks to a familiar voice.

Chad Tavernia, a retired New York State Police investigator, runs North Country Drone Search & Recovery across a territory that stretches from Syracuse to the Vermont line and south to Albany. When DroneXL covered his operation in February 2025 he had located 42 dogs and 11 other animals in just over a year. He puts his overall success rate at 40 percent, rising to 90 percent when he can launch in the area where the pet went missing. One golden retriever turned up on Christmas Eve, 1,000 feet (305 meters) from home, trapped in eight inches of snow with 20 feet of leash still attached.

The Catskills search for Annie in April 2024: the circled dot in Justin Vickers' thermal feed was the dog. Photo courtesy of Justin Vickers / News 10

In the Catskills, Justin Vickers of Upstate Thermal Drone Services drove more than an hour in April 2024 to search for Annie, a dog stranded on a cliff after her owner slipped on ice during a 14-mile (22.5-kilometer) hike near Round Top. After a couple of hours in the air he spotted a small dark shape beside a stream. He warned the family it could be the dog or a black bear. It was Annie. Across the river in New Jersey, a volunteer known as the Drone Ranger passed 122 recovered pets in January.

The New York searches and the Mission Viejo searches share one more thing. Every one of them ran on a thermal camera.

The FCC Proposal Puts Thermal Drones In The Military-Grade Column

On July 21 the FCC released Public Notice DA 26-758, opening PS Docket 26-189. It proposes to prohibit continued importation and marketing of previously authorized foreign-made drones on the Covered List that the agency defines as military-grade. Any drone carrying a thermal imaging sensor is one of seven categories.

The other six are aircraft with LiDAR, docking stations, spray drones covered by the FAA’s economic-poison rules, aircraft at or above 25 kilograms (55 pounds), designs built to carry a defense article, and swarming systems. DroneXL broke down the full proposal the day after it dropped. Marketing in FCC usage covers advertising, sale, lease, and distribution, so the proposal reaches the shelf, not the hangar: drones already purchased keep flying, and the agency proposes a 180-day wind-down after any final order.

Blue UAS and Buy American aircraft are exempt, as are imports for federal government use. A city animal shelter buying with donated money is none of those. Federal Register publication on August 3 started the 30-day clock, and comments in Docket 26-189 close on September 2. A day later, the Section 232 tariff proclamation takes effect, with a 100 percent duty on any imported drone that carries a thermal imager.

DroneXL’s Take

Werner’s “100%” is the number the FCC should be reading this weekend. The agency’s notice tentatively concludes that pulling this hardware from the market would not have substantial economic or supply-chain impacts, then asks operators to send in fleet counts and replacement costs. A city that found three dogs with one donated aircraft, on national television, is exactly the kind of record that either lands in that docket by Tuesday or does not exist as far as the Commission is concerned.

The city has never said who built the drone. My read, and the city can correct me, is that a laser-plus-thermal package at that price is a DJI enterprise aircraft. If so, Mission Viejo can keep flying it under the proposal, and the department in the next county that called Werner after the broadcast cannot buy one. That is the shape of this rule: the people who already have the tool are fine, and the people CBS just inspired are the ones who lose.

The security questions behind the Covered List are real, and DJI’s data practices have earned the scrutiny they get. None of that reaches a thermal sensor pointed at a canyon for a lost Australian Shepherd. Calling that camera military-grade does not make it one. The label does the work an actual finding would otherwise have to do.

From where I sit in Westchester, I have watched New York pilots like Tavernia and Vickers turn this into a service people call on the worst day of their year. Mission Viejo made it a municipal function. Whether the record in Docket 26-189 reflects any of that by September 2 depends on whether animal services departments, most of which have never filed an FCC comment, understand that the deadline applies to them. Werner’s phone is already ringing. The FCC’s inbox should be too.

Sources: CBS News, FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, City of Mission Viejo

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

Nepal Asks Abroad For Cargo Drones As China Flies 47 Next Door

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:26:00 GMT

Nepal flew its first heavy-lift cargo drone test across the Trishuli River on Saturday, four days after a glacier collapse sent a wall of mud through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys. The same day, the country’s foreign minister asked other governments for cargo drones. Across the border in Tibet, China had 47 drones on the ground and a Wing Loong aircraft overhead serving as a flying cell tower by Thursday evening.

The gap between those two responses is the story. Nepal has some of the most experienced high-altitude cargo drone pilots anywhere, the crews that fly supplies and haul trash on Everest, and it still took until the weekend to stage a single 130-pound (59 kg) delivery flight in a schoolyard in Bidur. The vest on one of Saturday’s pilots carried the name of the company I have covered since its first Everest season in 2024.

The disaster killed at least 669 people in Nepal and seven in Tibet as of Saturday, with about 2,426 still missing in Nepal and 554 in Tibet’s Gyirong County, according to Reuters figures reported by CNBC. The United Nations counts roughly 10,000 affected households.

Nepal Tests A 220-Pound Cargo Drone Four Days After The Flood

On Saturday afternoon, about a dozen drone operators, army volunteers and police officers gathered in Devighat, in Bidur, to test whether a heavy-lift drone could carry supplies across the Trishuli River. The aircraft was rated for 220 pounds (100 kg). The first flight carried 130 pounds (59 kg).

That is how The New York Times described the scene from Bidur, where reporter Anupreeta Das and photographer Atul Loke watched the test. The packages held rice, instant noodles, clothing and sanitary pads, tied under the airframe with ropes and carabiners while light rain slowed the work. The drone crossed the river low, hovered while testers on the far bank unloaded the cargo, and came back. Round trip: about three minutes.

Some of the pilots had already dropped packages high in the Himalayas. One wore a vest reading “Airlift Drone Pilot,” the mark of Airlift Technology, the Nepali operator DroneXL has followed since it replaced Sherpa porters on the Khumbu Icefall with a DJI FlyCart 30 in 2024 and hauled trash off Everest this spring. The gray multirotor in Loke’s photographs, roughly the size of a dining table with its arms extended, carries Airlift branding and a DJI harness strap. The Times did not name the model.

The group ran the test several more times and now plans to take the results to the authorities, who will decide whether drone delivery gets folded into the official relief effort. Nepal’s Armed Police Force was already flying drone deliveries of food rations, drinking water, medicines and other supplies to stranded residents in the Devighat area on Saturday, according to a video posted on X by India TV correspondent Manish Prasad.

The country needed it faster. The flood destroyed more than 35 bridges and damaged around 25 miles (40 km) of road, including sections of the main highways, per the Times. On Aug. 26, the day of the disaster, the government publicly asked helicopter and drone operators, including the Nepal Drone Association, to coordinate with district offices, Nepal News reported. Nepal Police told reporters the next morning that its own contribution was modest. “Four drones have also been mobilized for search and rescue operations,” Deputy Inspector General Abhi Narayan Kapale said, per ANI.

By Saturday, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal was asking abroad. Nepal has requested heavy-lift cargo drones from international partners to reach cut-off mountain settlements, Khanal told a Kathmandu news conference, according to the Kathmandu Post. Steep gorges and unpredictable weather limit where large helicopters can go, he said.

China Puts 47 Drones And A Flying Cell Tower Over Gyirong

China’s National Fire and Rescue Administration had 681 firefighters, 13 rescue dogs, 113 vehicles and 47 drones in Gyirong County by Thursday evening, a day and a half after the mudslide buried the border port. A Wing Loong aircraft carrying cellular base stations was orbiting overhead by 2 a.m.

The numbers come from CCTV via CNN and from Xinhua. The Wing Loong, a civilian version of AVIC’s armed reconnaissance drone, took off from Sichuan and reached the disaster zone at 2 a.m. Thursday with cameras and cellular base stations aboard. AVIC told the Global Times the aircraft logged about 6,069 user connections and 661 calls in that first stretch, and that its anti-icing system kept it flying in the weather. A second Wing Loong joined it by Saturday, per Xinhua, and on Sunday the agency reported that signal had reached the core rescue site at the port.

The same ministry ran this playbook over flooded Guangxi in July, when two Wing Loongs restored mobile coverage more than 8,000 times while 300 volunteer pilots flew agricultural drones as an improvised cargo airline, Xinhua reported at the time. Seven weeks later it ran again in the Himalayas. That is what a rehearsed system looks like.

Nepal’s side of the border had no airborne base station. Nepal Telecom and Ncell lost 87 towers between them in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading, OnlineKhabar reported, and restored them the slow way, flying generators and technicians in by helicopter and carrying gear on porters’ backs where the roads were gone, according to Nepal Telecom’s updates.

Drones Carry Rescuers And Supplies Where The Roads Ended

At Gyirong Port, Chinese advance teams reached the buried border gate by three routes: rubber boats, on foot through the mountains, and heavy-lift drone transport. On Saturday, cargo drones launched from a supply zone 1.9 miles (3 km) away were resupplying the 21 rescuers already at the gate.

That account is Xinhua’s, from an Aug. 29 briefing by a Ministry of Emergency Management official, and it lists heavy-lift drone transport alongside land and water routes as a way advance personnel moved toward the core zone. CGTN reported eleven drone pilots with seven reconnaissance drones and two heavy-lift aircraft assigned to surveys and area searches by civil rescue groups. Xinhua’s own framing is worth keeping: drones remain a supplement to the 2,141 rescuers on the ground.

A video circulating under Nepal hashtags this weekend shows a person dangling from a heavy-lift drone over a flooded road. That footage is from Yunbiao in Guangxi on July 6, not Nepal, and the account that reposted it said so in its own caption. I covered that rescue when it happened: a firefighter crew hoisted a truck driver off the roof of a fuel tanker as the water rose around him. A second widely shared clip, a night flight in which a drone carries a figure past a rescuer in a China Fire and Rescue uniform, shows drone-borne transport of some kind. The post that spread it claims drones are ferrying people across rivers in Nepal; the uniform is Chinese, the clip carries a third-party watermark, and no news outlet has placed it in Nepal or tied it to this disaster. Treat it as unconfirmed.

The View From 23,600 Feet Shows Where The Flood Began

Drone footage shot at more than 23,600 feet (7,200 m) and shared on Chinese social media shows a slab of glacier breaking off at about 17,000 feet (5,200 m) and falling roughly 3,300 feet (1 km) into the valley below. A BBC analysis matched the location to the Trishuli watershed.

The collapse released the seismic energy of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake and sent a slurry of ice and rock down the Lende Khola at around 110 mph (180 km/h) for more than 12 miles (20 km), according to the reconstruction Ynetnews compiled from Chinese and Nepali sources. The Trishuli rose about 30 feet (9 m) in half an hour.

Lower down, drones have done the work cameras always do after a disaster and something more. CNN drone footage from Nuwakot showed half a bridge left standing in a mud-caked valley. Chinese teams flew reconnaissance drones ahead of every foot patrol into Gyirong Port so crews would know where the ground was too soft to stand on. Both countries are watching two new barrier lakes by satellite and drone; one was 99,000 square meters (24 acres) and draining on Saturday morning, the other still growing, per the Mappr summary of official figures. If either breaches, the drone crews in Bidur will be delivering supplies into a second flood.

DroneXL’s Take

Nepal’s problem this week was never hardware. Its private operators fly DJI FlyCart aircraft to 19,685 feet on Everest and flew a U.S.-built Freefly Alta X on Ama Dablam in June. Its government spent four days on helicopters, ran one schoolyard test, then asked abroad for aircraft its citizens fly.

I don’t think that is an accident. In April the Home Ministry refused Freefly a test permit on Everest and suspended Airlift’s FlyCart 100 permit in the same stroke, citing its UAV regulations and the need for “wider stakeholder consultation.” The DJI permit came back in five days and the aircraft went on to move 22,207 pounds (10,073 kg) of cargo on Everest this season. What never got written, as far as I can find, is the page that tells a district officer in Nuwakot how to call that aircraft in when a bridge is gone. The regulator that treated cargo drones as an expedition permit question in April is learning in August that they are disaster infrastructure.

China wrote that page after the Henan floods in 2021 and ran it in Guangxi in July and Gyirong this week. Its Wing Loong deployment is the single most useful thing any drone did in this disaster: 6,069 phone connections from a place where every tower was under mud. Nothing comparable flew over Rasuwa; the Nepali carriers rebuilt tower by tower. Airborne base stations need a state that owns long-endurance aircraft and carriers willing to hang their equipment underneath. That is a policy gap, and it is the strongest argument I have seen for Western governments to stop treating cargo and communications drones as someone else’s experiment.

Helicopters still did most of the saving here, and they should have. More than 3,200 people came out by air, and no 100-kilogram drone lifts a family off a roof. The Guangxi tanker rescue was a one-off that I called usually illegal for good reason. Where drones win is the last mile after the helicopter leaves: the three-minute round trip across a river that used to have a bridge, and the phone signal that lets a survivor tell someone she is alive.

Whether Nepal’s request for heavy-lift drones gets answered, and by whom, is the thing to watch this week. Volunteers on X are already offering Indian-built BonV Aero and Marut cargo aircraft. DJI sells the FlyCart 100 and the 200-kilogram FlyCart 200, and Nepal knows the paperwork for both. The country that grounded two cargo drones over a permit question in April has the chance to write its drone doctrine in mud, in real time, while the barrier lakes hold.

Sources: The New York Times, Xinhua, CNN, ANI, Kathmandu Post, Nepal News, OnlineKhabar, Global Times, CGTN, CNBC/Reuters, Ynetnews, Mappr

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

General Cherry Pitches $900 Drone Against Romania's $400,000 Missiles

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:14:00 GMT

Romanian F-16s have shot down four drones since July 24, and the first three each cost an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile priced at about $400,000. The Shahed-type drones they were chasing cost Russia somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 apiece. This week, General Cherry co-founder Stanislav Gryshyn put a number against that math: 39,900 hryvnias, around $900, for the company’s AIR interceptor.

Gryshyn’s pitch, posted after Romania’s three-day run of shootdowns, is not that a $900 FPV drone replaces a fighter jet. It is that most of what crosses a border does not deserve a missile. The AIR, he wrote, “handles the targets where firing a missile just isn’t worth it.”

The post landed six days after General Cherry signed a letter of intent with Finland’s Patria to build its drones inside NATO, with the presidents of Ukraine and Finland looking on. DroneXL has covered the AIR line since the AIR Pro launched in December 2025, and its record against Russian reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions is real. Whether that record transfers to the problem Romania actually has is the question the company’s own catalog answers, and the answer is less tidy than the post.

Romania Spent $1.2 Million in Missiles on Three Drones

Romania’s first shootdown of an intruding drone came on July 24, when an F-16 destroyed a Shahed-type aircraft over Buzău County. Two more followed on July 25 and 26. Romanian outlet Digi24 put the three-day missile bill at roughly $1.2 million, or €1.5 million with flight hours added.

The July 24 engagement was a NATO operation from the start. Two Italian Eurofighters under the alliance’s air policing mission scrambled first and fired, and missed. A Romanian F-16 then took the shot at 11:02 a.m. over farmland near Padina, according to the Romanian defense ministry’s account. The order to engage came from NATO’s combined air operations center in Torrejón, Spain. Romanian prosecutors later confirmed the wreckage was a Russian-operated Shahed.

Digi24’s cost figure, reported by the Kyiv Post, rests on an AIM-9X price of about $400,000. ABC News, citing procurement records, puts the range at $380,000 to $500,000 depending on the variant. The Kyiv Independent framed the exchange as a $400,000 solution to a $35,000 problem. That is the line Gryshyn’s post borrows.

The shootdowns did not come out of nowhere. On May 29, a Russian drone hit an apartment block in Galați and injured two people. Romanian jets were airborne and authorized to fire that day and did not, because the drone was over a city. Two months later Bucharest changed its posture, and the missiles started flying.

General Cherry’s AIR Interceptor Lists at 39,900 Hryvnias

The AIR is a 10-inch FPV interceptor with a digital video link and a day camera, listed at 39,900 hryvnias. General Cherry’s spec sheet gives it up to 40 minutes aloft, 106 mph (170 km/h), 3.7 miles (6 km) of range, and target visibility to 4,900 feet (1,500 meters).

Gryshyn’s post says 35 minutes of flight time rather than the 40 on the product page. The lower figure is probably the honest one for a loaded airframe in combat, but General Cherry has not said which conditions each number assumes. The night version with a 640-resolution thermal camera lists at 61,900 hryvnias. The faster AIR Speed, which we reported in March tops out at 236 km/h (147 mph), starts at 44,900 hryvnias in its day configuration.

Gryshyn says the AIR is deployed against targets worth anywhere from $10,000 to $420,000. That range maps onto what the AIR family has been credited with on the Ukrainian front: Orlan and ZALA reconnaissance aircraft, Lancet loitering munitions, and Mavic-class quadcopters. When we covered the AIR Pro’s launch, the company priced it at $1,141 and listed those same target types. The kills General Cherry has publicized for the AIR series are of those types. None of them is a Shahed.

The AIR Is Not General Cherry’s Shahed Interceptor

General Cherry sells a separate product for Shaheds, and its own catalog says so. The Bullet, labeled “Anti-Shahed” on the company’s site, is a fixed-wing VTOL interceptor listed from 31,600 to 44,800 hryvnias. The AIR sits in a different catalog category: aerial-target interceptors.

The distinction matters because a Shahed and an Orlan are different intercept problems. A Shahed-136 cruises at around 115 mph, flies for hours, and arrives at night in waves. A 10-inch quad with 40 minutes of endurance and a 4,900-foot spotting range has to be launched from very close to the flight path with a pilot and a spotter on site. The Bullet exists because General Cherry worked that out before Romania did.

Then there is the jet problem. Russia’s turbojet Geran-4 flies at up to 310 mph (500 km/h), against about 115 mph (185 km/h) for the propeller Geran-2, and we reported in May that Ukrainian intelligence says Russia built it specifically to outrun cheap interceptors. A jet Geran had been intercepted once in the public record as of that report. The AIR at 106 mph is not in that conversation. General Cherry’s answer to the jet Shahed is a Bullet with a chemical booster, not the drone in Gryshyn’s post.

So the honest version of the pitch is narrower than the post: the AIR is the cheap answer for the Orlans, Lancets and adapted Mavics that cross a border at low altitude, and the Bullet is the cheap answer for Shaheds. Both are cheaper than a Sidewinder by three orders of magnitude. Neither is a drop-in for an F-16 on a NATO air policing alert.

Patria Signed to Build General Cherry Drones in Finland

Six days before Gryshyn’s post, General Cherry signed a letter of intent with Patria, Finland’s state-controlled defense group, to start drone production in Finland. The signing took place in Kyiv on August 23, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Finnish President Alexander Stubb in the room.

Patria CEO Panu Routila (seated, left) and General Cherry co-founder Stanislav Gryshyn sign the letter of intent in Kyiv on August 23, 2026, as Finnish President Alexander Stubb (standing, left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky look on. Photo credit: Office of the President of Finland (TPKanslia), via Patria

Patria’s announcement is short on specifics. It names no model, no site, no volume and no start date. What it does say is that the drones are for “Western European defence needs,” and it singles out one product by name: General Cherry’s “battlefield-proven Bullet platform.” The AIR does not appear. Zelensky, speaking at the roundtable, described the Finnish deals as covering drones “for the needs of Ukraine and Europe.”

Patria is not a small partner. The Finnish state holds 50.1 percent, Norway’s Kongsberg holds the rest, and Patria in turn owns half of ammunition maker Nammo. Its own drone line is thin, a trio of quadcopters launched in 2025 after it bought a Finnish UAV outfit, which is the point: General Cherry brings a catalog with kill counts, Patria brings a factory inside NATO and a customer list that includes Finland’s own forces. General Cherry’s Croatian deal with Orqa, which we reported in April, was the first of these. Finland is the second.

Romania, meanwhile, is not waiting for either. Digi24 reported that the defense ministry is weighing cheaper intercept options, including helicopters with door guns, and expects two counter-drone systems next year, one Israeli and one developed jointly with Ukraine. Romania has also fielded the US-designed Merops system, which launches a roughly $15,000 interceptor and was first tested in the country in April, per the Kyiv Independent. It fits the pattern we described in July, when seven NATO countries signed drone deals with Ukraine in a single stretch.

None of Romania’s three July shootdowns involved an interceptor drone. All three were F-16 missiles, per the defense ministry’s own accounts. That is the gap Gryshyn is pointing at, and the gap Merops, Patria and a Romanian-Ukrainian program are all being paid to close.

DroneXL’s Take

Gryshyn is right about the math, and the math is not news. Ukraine spent two years learning that a $400,000 missile against a $35,000 drone bankrupts the defender first, and we laid that out in March when the same trade started hitting the Gulf.

Romania is running into the trap in slow motion, four drones since July, while Ukraine’s interceptor drones flew about 6,300 sorties and destroyed more than 1,500 Russian drones in February alone, per Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.

The concession first: the F-16 shot works. Romania had zero shootdowns in four years of incursions before July 24, then three in three days, and every one landed on empty ground. A pilot with a Sidewinder and NATO radar behind him is a known quantity. An FPV crew standing in a Danube delta field at 3 a.m. with a 40-minute quad is not, at least not yet in Romania.

But that is a doctrine and training problem, not a hardware problem, and Gryshyn’s post blurs it by putting the AIR next to a Shahed. The AIR is a very good reconnaissance-drone killer at a price a NATO air force would consider a rounding error. It is not what Romania needs on the nights a Geran crosses at Sulina. General Cherry knows this, which is why it sells a Bullet. My read is that the post is aimed less at Bucharest than at the procurement officers who read the €1.5 million headline and want a number to reply with, and $900 is a number that gets a meeting.

What I would watch is whether Patria’s letter of intent turns into a model and a date. Its own release already name-checks the Bullet and nothing else. If the Finnish line builds Bullets, that is a NATO member standing up Shahed interception on its own soil at Ukrainian prices, and the first time a Ukrainian interceptor gets a NATO-state owner on the factory. If the first product off the line is a fiber-optic strike drone instead, the Shahed math Gryshyn is quoting stays a Ukrainian solution to a NATO problem for another year. Romania’s two promised counter-drone systems arrive in 2027 by Digi24’s account, and the incursion count is already above 40 for the first half of this year. The cheap answer exists. Whether NATO buys enough of it, fast enough, is being decided now.

Sources: General Cherry, Patria, Romania Insider, Kyiv Post (citing Digi24), Kyiv Independent, ABC News.

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

Leipzig Drone Bomb Plot Ran Three Drones And A Second Explosive

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:42:00 GMT

The drone bomb that landed beside a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4 was one of at least three aircraft in the plot, and investigators have recovered a second, different explosive from a field beside the airfield. The third drone turned up in Kabelsketal, a municipality that borders the airport’s western edge, on the evening of August 14. The next day, forensic technicians from the Federal Criminal Police Office found roughly 50 grams (1.8 ounces) of a substance they assess as hexogen, the military explosive also known as RDX.

NDR, WDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the finds on August 25, citing security sources, eleven days after the drone was pulled out of the grass. The investigators’ report, as the outlets quote it, says the perpetrators may have had “a far larger attack in mind than previously known” to the public. The federal prosecutor general, who holds the case, declined to comment.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the same day that the government will name who it believes is responsible shortly. “They will pay for this,” he said. In the three weeks DroneXL has covered this case, the physical evidence has grown from one dud bomb on the apron to three drones and two explosives.

Investigators Found The Third Drone Ten Days After The Bomb

The third drone lay in a field in Kabelsketal, in Saxony-Anhalt’s Saalekreis district, until the early evening of August 14. Federal Criminal Police Office technicians arrived the same day and returned on August 15, when they recovered about 50 grams of a substance that initial assessments identified as hexogen.

That timeline comes from tagesschau.de’s account of the joint NDR, WDR, and SZ investigation, and ZDFheute’s summary of the same reporting matches it. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor general declined to answer questions on Monday. The report does not say what the third drone carried, where it launched from, or what its role was, and the outlets say those points remain under investigation.

The find changes the count. When the first drone was found beside the An-124 late on August 4, the working picture was a single armed quadcopter and a second object that a DHL freighter hit during its go-around. Investigators now treat the Kabelsketal drone as the third aircraft, and the German outlets say more drones were used than the public had been told. What was known to investigators on August 15 reached the public on August 25.

The Second Drone Probably Went Through The DHL Freighter’s Engines

The second drone has never been found. Inspection of the DHL freighter that aborted its landing on August 4 showed tail damage consistent with a collision. Bird strike was ruled out. Investigators believe the drone went into the engines and was shredded, per the NDR, WDR, and SZ reporting.

The pilots saw an object about 30 centimeters (12 inches) across seconds before impact, ZDFheute reports from the same investigation, and the strike came at roughly the height of the airport fence at several hundred kilometers per hour. The freighter had been inbound from Marseille and diverted to Hanover. The Guardian, which carried the story in English, initially wrote that the plane was diverted to Marseille and corrected it on August 26.

The mothership theory DroneXL reported on August 10, a second drone relaying control signals and video for the armed one, now has hardware behind it. In Kursdorf, north of the airport, investigators found an antenna fixed to a tree along with other electronic parts they think were used to control the drones. Near it, close to where witnesses reported a loud bang on the day of the attack, they found a burnt patch of ground and charred metal parts.

Hexogen Is Not The Explosive That Was On The Apron Drone

The apron drone carried Semtex and PETN, plastic explosives, in a charge the Leipziger Volkszeitung put at up to 800 grams (1.8 pounds), a figure DroneXL reported on August 7 that remains single-source. The Kabelsketal find is a different compound in a far smaller quantity.

The reporting does not say whether the hexogen was mounted on the third drone. RDX is the base of C-4 and of most military demolition charges, and 50 grams is a booster-scale quantity rather than a warhead. Whether it was a booster for a larger charge that was never assembled, residue from one that was, or a payload in its own right is the question the report leaves open.

The rest of the case has been converging on Moscow. A US intelligence source told ABC News that the construction and explosives of the apron device were typical of Russia’s GRU, as DroneXL reported on Wednesday, and DNA on it matched a trace from the July 2024 DHL parcel-fire plot at the same airport. Security sources cited by the three German outlets suspect Russian intelligence in the August attack too. Moscow denies it. Berlin has stopped short of a formal attribution, which is what Merz says is coming.

The airport is the reason any of this happened. Leipzig/Halle is the cargo field NATO, the US military, and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines use to move military supplies, and US officials told ABC News it has logged 18 drone incidents disrupting traffic since January. Days after the bomb, drones circled the Bundeswehr’s Patriot repair base at Mechernich in western Germany.

DroneXL’s Take

The detail I keep coming back to is not the hexogen. It is the third drone lying in a field beside a NATO cargo hub for ten days before anyone picked it up. My read of that is not that the attackers were sophisticated. It is that the airport’s outer perimeter, the farmland a few hundred meters past the fence, was nobody’s job on August 4, and it was still nobody’s job on August 13.

Investigators are owed the obvious point: the prosecutor general is running a live case against a state actor, and the ten-day gap between the find and the leak is probably deliberate. A second, different explosive is also the kind of detail you hold back to test what suspects say. None of that is a scandal.

The gap between August 4 and August 14 is a different matter. Everything Germany announced in the first week, the counter-drone radar on the old tower and the doubling of the federal counter-drone unit, looks inward from the fence. The third drone was outside it, in a field in another state, and it stayed there until someone walked across it. A radar on the tower would not have found it either. What finds a drone in a field is people on the ground with a search grid and a reason to look, and for ten days nobody had the reason.

That is the part American readers should sit with, because Leipzig is a US supply node as much as a German one. The Pentagon’s cargo moves through this field, the aircraft the first drone was meant for was Ukrainian, and the response so far is a German domestic policing story. Merz has promised findings and has not put a date on them. When they come, the number I’ll be watching for is not who did it, which the DNA and the US signature analysis have mostly answered, but how many launch sites the investigators can place, because that number is the difference between a plot that failed and a plot that stalled. I suspect it will be more than one.

Sources: tagesschau.de (NDR/WDR/SZ), ZDFheute, The Guardian

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

Turkey Armed the Arab World With Drones After the US Refused To

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:17:00 GMT

The Houthis shot down a Bayraktar Akinci operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force over northern Yemen on July 26, and in August satellite imagery put two more Akincis at Al-Khadim airbase in eastern Libya, on the side of the war Turkey was bombing six years ago. Those two events bookend a Forbes analysis by Paul Iddon, published Saturday, tallying where Turkish armed drones now fly across the Middle East and North Africa. The short answer is almost everywhere. Of the six Gulf Cooperation Council members, only Oman and Bahrain have not bought one. From Qatar on the Persian Gulf to Morocco on the Atlantic, the customer list now includes most of the Arab world.

The reason that market existed for Turkey to take is the part American readers should sit with. In the 2010s, Washington refused to sell armed drones to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies. They bought Chinese instead, then switched to Turkish. The United States never got back in.

Saudi Arabia Lost an Akinci Over Yemen Within a Year of Training Its Crews

The Houthis announced on July 26 that they had downed a Saudi-operated Akinci over Yemen’s Al Jawf governorate, according to Forbes. The first Saudi air force crews trained on the type graduated in Turkey in October 2025. The kingdom lost one of its most expensive drones nine months later.

The Akinci is Baykar’s heavy platform: twin-engine, larger payload, wider munitions selection and better sensors than the Bayraktar TB2, and priced accordingly. DroneXL covered its air-launched ballistic missile test in November 2024, when it hit a target 155 kilometers (96 miles) out. Riyadh ordered an unspecified number in 2023 under what Baykar called “the biggest defense and aviation export contract” in Turkish history, a deal that included technology transfer and joint production. DroneXL reported in February 2024 that Baykar planned to start production in Saudi Arabia within two years.

The war the Akinci went down in is the one that ended with a ceasefire in early 2022 and has been showing signs of reigniting since early July, per Forbes. The Houthis fire Iranian-designed one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles. Yemen’s internationally recognized government, backed by the Saudi-led coalition, announced drone strikes on Houthi positions on August 23 and has, per a late-July report in The New Arab cited by Forbes, concluded its own drone deal with Turkey. Nothing had been delivered as of late July. Ankara is already training Yemeni pilots, and which models they are training on has not been disclosed.

The Gulf Bought Chinese Drones First Because Washington Said No

Saudi Arabia and the UAE turned to China for armed drones in the 2010s because the United States would not sell them any, Forbes notes. The UAE flew Chinese-made Wing Loong IIs, some over Libya. Once ties with Ankara thawed, Abu Dhabi bought far more from Turkey than it ever had from Beijing.

Reports in 2022 put the Emirati TB2 order at 120 aircraft. The first video of an Emirati TB2 surfaced in late December 2025, and weeks later the UAE’s Edge Group confirmed it had integrated its Desert Sting 16 guided bomb onto the airframe. Abu Dhabi has also acquired the Akinci.

The Bayraktar TB2, Turkey's most widely exported armed drone, on display at Teknofest. Photo credit: Baykar

Qatar got there first. Doha bought TB2s in 2018, two years before the type made its name over Libya, Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, and while Turkey was deploying troops to Qatar during the 2017 blockade led by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Qatar bought only six. Kuwait ordered 18 TB2s in 2023 under a contract valued at $370 million, with deliveries starting in July 2025. That leaves Oman and Bahrain as the two GCC members without Turkish drones.

Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan Are the Holdouts Next Door

Turkey is not known to have sold armed drones to its immediate Arab neighbors. Iraq’s defense minister said in August 2021 that Baghdad had reached a consensus with Ankara on a possible TB2 purchase, plus attack helicopters and electronic warfare gear. Nothing has been reported since, per Forbes.

Iraq has more recently ordered Turkish-made Korkut anti-aircraft guns to deal with drone threats. Whether a Bayraktar order follows is open. Post-Assad Syria, with most of its air force destroyed, has not sought Turkish drones either, though Forbes argues a TB2 fleet would be a cheaper interim option than rebuilding a fighter force. Lebanon is looking at low-cost defensive options that could include Turkish drones, Turkish media reported in July. Jordan does not operate them. Israel, for obvious reasons, never will.

North Africa Went From Turkish Adversaries to Turkish Customers in Five Years

Egypt was estranged from Turkey through the 2010s. Relations improved sharply in the 2020s, and Ankara has resumed arms sales and signed co-production deals to assemble drones in Egypt, which Forbes reports has alarmed Israel. In early 2026, satellite images showed Akincis in southern Egypt striking Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.

The RSF claims to have shot down at least four of them. Turkey is also known to have supplied Sudan’s military with TB2s after the war began in April 2023. That is the same pattern DroneXL described in April in its Terrahaptix coverage: Sahelian and North African armies stocking Turkish strike platforms faster than anyone is building the counter-drone layer underneath them.

Tunisia bought six Anka-S medium-altitude, long-endurance drones from Turkish Aerospace Industries in 2020. Libya is the reversal case. Turkey’s TB2s broke Haftar’s siege of Tripoli in 2020 and handed the Tripoli government its survival. Six years on, satellite images in August confirmed at least two Akincis at Al-Khadim, inside Haftar’s territory, on top of the TB2s and at least one Akinci already supplied to Tripoli. Turkish drones now operate from both sides of Libya’s divide.

Algeria is the other reversal. When Turkey agreed to sell TB2s to Morocco in the early 2020s, Algiers objected loudly. Ankara’s response was to sell to Algeria too, and Algiers ordered the TAI Anka-S and the larger twin-engine Aksungur.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the country-by-country detail and the Forbes tally comes down to one sentence: Turkey built an armed-drone export business across the Arab world because the United States decided, for most of a decade, not to. Washington held the line on Missile Technology Control Regime rules. Gulf capitals shopped elsewhere.

China got the first orders. Turkey got the bigger ones, and the technology-transfer and co-production deals that come with them.

I will concede the case for the original restraint. The buyers on this list are not all governments Washington should be comfortable arming, and the Saudi-led coalition’s air war over Yemen is the reason that argument carried weight. The MTCR reinterpretation under the first Trump administration came late and reluctantly for reasons that were not stupid.

But restraint only works as policy if the customer goes without. Every state on this list found a seller. Saudi Arabia now has a co-production line coming. The UAE integrates its own munitions onto Turkish airframes. Egypt assembles them locally. None of that industrial base is American, and none of the operational data those air forces are generating over Yemen, Sudan and Libya flows back to a U.S. manufacturer. That is the same lesson I drew in February in Turkey’s Drone Industry Faces a NATO Reality Check: Baykar’s advantage was never the airframe, it was a permissive export policy paired with a product that was good enough and available now.

The combat record cuts both ways, and my read is that Baykar’s customers know it. The TB2 that looked untouchable over Ukraine in March 2022 was, by June 2024, the example France’s army chief reached for when describing a drone that Russian electronic warfare had made too easy to jam. The Akinci has since gone down over Mali, over Yemen and, if the RSF is right, over Sudan. What Turkey is selling to the Arab world is not survivability. It is a drone that arrives, with a factory attached, from a supplier who does not attach conditions.

Two things will show whether the map keeps filling in. The first Turkish deliveries to Yemen’s government, which Forbes says had not happened as of late July, would put Bayraktars on both sides of the Saudi-Houthi line by proxy. And Iraq, which has gone from a 2021 consensus on TB2s to a Korkut gun order with no drone deal in between, is the one neighbor whose next purchase decides whether the holdout column shrinks to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

Source: Forbes

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

Splash Typhoon Drone Boat Launches Kamikaze Drones, Won't Say How Many

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:13:00 GMT

Splash Industries has fitted its 11-foot Typhoon uncrewed surface vessel with a module that launches one-way attack drones from the deck at the press of a button. The Inglewood, California, company calls it the Airstrike Pack, and says it has already run the system in a force-on-force exercise.

That is the whole of what Splash has disclosed. The announcement does not say how many drones the pack holds, which drones they are, or how far they fly. Interesting Engineering’s headline calls it a swarm. Nothing Splash has published supports that word, and nothing rules it out.

The timing is the interesting part. Six weeks ago a boat of the same design drove itself into the flooded well deck of an amphibious assault ship during the Rim of the Pacific exercise. Now it has a weapon on its back, and a U.S. Navy whose own drone-boat tests produced a collision last year has one more small vendor to sort.

Splash Built a Push-Button Launcher Onto a Modular Deck

The Airstrike Pack is a payload module for the Typhoon’s configurable deck, the same mounting that carries cargo or sensors. Operators trigger the launch from Splash C2, the company’s own command-and-control software. Splash announced the module on Monday, August 24, and Defence Blog carried the statement two days later.

The company credits its in-house electronics and software for the module’s ruggedness and cost, and says the design gives it “a tenth of the price of our nearest competitor.” The announcement, as carried by Defence Blog and Interesting Engineering, attaches no dollar figure to that claim and names no competitor.

Splash says the module was tested during a force-on-force exercise. It has not said where, when, or with whom, and neither outlet reporting the announcement had those details.

The Typhoon Runs 600 Nautical Miles at 50 Knots on Splash’s Numbers

Splash rates the Typhoon at more than 600 nautical miles (690 miles, 1,111 kilometers) of range and a sustained speed above 50 knots (58 mph, 93 km/h), with runs past 70 knots (81 mph, 130 km/h) in testing. Those are company figures. The hull is 11 feet (3.4 meters) long.

Speed is the selling point for a drone launcher. A 50-knot boat carries its aircraft toward a target far faster than the aircraft would get there on their own battery, and it can leave before anyone shoots back. Small one-way attack drones typically trade range for cost, so a fast mothership widens the circle they can reach.

Splash also says the Typhoon assembles in eight hours and sells for about a tenth of the price of comparable systems, and that its vessels have logged more than 10,000 nautical miles (11,500 miles, 18,520 kilometers) of autonomous deployments on three continents. The company came out of stealth in July with a $4.2 million round led by Ubiquity Ventures. CEO Ivan Avanesov says a larger vessel, the Tempest, is being prepared for Navy testing with a 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) payload and 300 nautical miles (345 miles, 556 kilometers) of range.

RIMPAC Showed the Boat Can Find a Moving Warship on Its Own

In July a Typhoon delivered parts to the USS Essex (LHD 2) during RIMPAC near Hawaii, in what Splash described as the first fully autonomous underway resupply of a U.S. Navy warship. The boat crossed the ship’s wake and entered its flooded well deck with no radio or satellite command.

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education oversaw the demonstration. Within the same 24 hours, a Typhoon carried uncrewed aircraft components that Marines had manufactured aboard the Essex back to shore, according to the consortium’s statement as reported by Defence Blog. Naval News reported the well-deck landing on July 16 from video that Avanesov posted.

That demonstration matters more for the Airstrike Pack than the exercise it was tested in. A boat that can navigate a warship’s wake without a link can also carry a drone launcher into contested water where the link is jammed, which is where a one-way attack drone earns its keep. The Navy’s own drone-boat effort has had a rougher time: in August 2025 DroneXL covered collisions, software stalls and a paused L3Harris autonomy contract during Navy tests off California. Splash was not among the vendors named in that reporting.

Ukraine Put Drones on Drone Boats First

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has run uncrewed surface vessels as drone motherships since 2025. When DroneXL covered the Magura V7 in June 2025, the 24-foot boat was already launching explosive quadcopters for coastal strikes alongside its air-to-air missiles, and had shot down two Russian Su-30s.

That is the combat record the Airstrike Pack is chasing, on a hull less than half the length. The U.S. side is arriving with money rather than combat experience. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program, which DroneXL reported in December 2025, is buying toward an inventory of about 340,000 small one-way attack drones by early 2028. Every one of them needs a way to get to the target. A boat that carries them there for a tenth of the cost of the alternative, if the claim holds, is a bid for a slice of that program.

The larger American USV makers are already in the water. Saronic’s 24-foot Corsair has a $392 million Navy production contract, and in June a Task Force 59 Corsair pulled two Apache crew members out of the water near the Strait of Hormuz. Splash’s Typhoon is smaller, faster on paper, and, by its own account, much cheaper. Its combat record is a force-on-force exercise the company won’t describe.

DroneXL’s Take

I like this boat. An 11-foot hull that drives itself into a well deck and now launches kamikaze drones is the cheap, disposable mass the Navy’s drone-boat program was supposed to produce and mostly hasn’t. If Splash’s price claim is real, it is the bigger number here, not the drones.

But I’m not going to call it a swarm launcher, because Splash hasn’t. The announcement names no drone and no count. “A tenth of the price of our nearest competitor” is a sentence with two blanks in it. A company that just raised $4.2 million and is pitching the Navy has every reason to say more, and the fact that it hasn’t yet is the open question here: is the pack integrated with a specific one-way attack drone, or is it a launch rail waiting for a customer to pick one? The Drone Dominance Program is buying drones by the hundred thousand. Whichever drone the launcher is built around decides how useful it is.

Ukraine settled the concept more than a year ago. The Magura V7 was launching quadcopters from a drone boat while American programs were still colliding in test. So the question for Splash is not whether a robot boat can carry attack drones. It can. The question is whether an American startup can make one cheap enough to lose, and whether the Navy will buy it before it buys something bigger and slower. Watch for whether the Tempest’s Navy testing produces a dated contract announcement, and whether Splash ever names the drone that goes in the box.

Sources: Interesting Engineering, Defence Blog, Naval News

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

Amazon Pitches Richmond on Drone Delivery It Is Not Yet Cleared to Fly

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:08:00 GMT

Amazon put an MK30 in front of Richmond, Virginia residents on Thursday and told them Prime Air drone delivery is coming to Henrico County, Hanover County and the city, before it has the approvals to fly there. Carmen Simboli, an Amazon aerospace integration specialist, told a community meeting at Richmond Raceway that the company is still waiting on federal and landlord sign-off, and that Richmond joining Amazon’s year-end site count is possible rather than confirmed.

That makes Richmond the second Prime Air site in two days that was missing from Amazon’s own expansion list. This morning DroneXL reported on Tracy, California, which Amazon revealed to the Los Angeles Times. Neither Virginia nor California appeared on the list Amazon published on August 19, when it promised nearly 500 US cities and towns by December 31.

The Richmonder’s Rich Griset and Radio IQ’s Brad Kutner covered the event. Richmond’s existence as a Prime Air site so far rests on a community-meeting RSVP page, a statement to Richmond BizSense and what Simboli said in the room.

Amazon Ties Richmond Service to a 7.5-Mile Circle Around RIC4

Eligible addresses will sit within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) of Amazon’s RIC4 fulfillment center, just north of Richmond Raceway in Henrico County, The Richmonder reported. Properties near Richmond International Airport are excluded. Amazon is seeking federal and landlord approvals before it launches.

RIC4 is not a purpose-built drone pad. It is a 2.7 million square foot (251,000 square meter) robotics fulfillment center that opened in March 2024 with about 1,000 employees, developed by Hillwood with Amazon as tenant. That tenancy is presumably where the landlord approval comes in, though Simboli did not say so. Tracy follows the same pattern: Amazon’s California return flies from an existing distribution center too, not from a hand-built site like Lockeford was.

The terms match what Amazon publishes everywhere. Packages of 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) or less that fit in a large shoebox qualify, which Amazon says covers 60 percent of its most frequently purchased items. Prime members get free delivery on orders over $50 and pay $2.99 below that. Non-members pay $4.99. Amazon says most orders arrive within an hour, some in 30 minutes.

Simboli Puts the MK30 at 78 Pounds Empty and 205 to 250 Feet in Cruise

Simboli gave numbers Amazon rarely volunteers. The MK30 stands 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) tall, spans 5 feet (1.5 meters) and weighs 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty, per The Richmonder, with a triple-cell battery, six motors and six cameras. Simboli declined to say what one costs to build or run.

The empty weight lines up with the record. FAA documents put the MK30’s maximum takeoff weight at 83.2 pounds (37.7 kilograms), a figure DroneXL cited in its coverage of the 500-city plan, and 78 pounds plus a 5-pound package gets you there.

The altitude figures are less tidy. Simboli said the drones are cleared to 400 feet (122 meters) but generally cruise at 205 to 250 feet (62 to 76 meters) while delivering, per The Richmonder. Radio IQ’s account of the same evening has Simboli describing a 400-foot flight path. Amazon’s West regional manager told the Los Angeles Times this week that Tracy’s drones cruise at 250 to 400 feet. Same aircraft, one week, three bands. It is a briefing inconsistency, not a safety finding, but a homeowner under the flight path will ask.

On noise, Simboli compared takeoff and landing to an electric leaf blower. “When it flies overhead, it’s almost imperceptible,” he said, likening it to an electric toothbrush held at arm’s length. Amazon’s own line is that the MK30 makes half the perceived noise of its predecessor. The one I stood next to at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf this April was on a show stand, not in the air, so the leaf blower stays on Simboli’s word until Richmond residents report back.

Amazon Left Virginia Off Its Own 500-City List

Amazon’s August 19 announcement named 11 live sites in seven states and five metros coming next: Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise. Virginia was not on that page, and neither was California. Both surfaced within ten days through local reporting, so the list understates Amazon’s pipeline.

The Richmonder’s account does not say which federal approval is outstanding, and Simboli did not specify beyond regulations and approvals needing to be in place. Amazon already flies its other sites under a Part 135 air carrier certificate and BVLOS authorization, so the open item is presumably site-level, but Amazon has not said what it is waiting for or from whom. Radio IQ adds a local layer: Henrico County and the city of Richmond will have to approve the operation too. Until Amazon names the items, nobody in Henrico can judge whether a December launch is realistic.

Delegate Destiny LeVere Bolling, whose district includes RIC4, attended Thursday and told Radio IQ that Amazon assured her the drones would add jobs rather than replace them. She said she could only take the company at its word, and that people she knows lost jobs when RIC4 was automated. Simboli told the station that Prime Air adds about 10 jobs per site to run the fleet.

The arithmetic has not changed since August 19. Each MK30 site draws a circle of roughly 175 square miles (453 square kilometers), and Amazon counts every municipality inside it. Getting from 11 sites to nearly 500 cities and towns in four months means announcing a lot of circles quickly, and Richmond and Tracy are what that looks like on the ground: a raceway club room on a Thursday evening, a car show on a Saturday.

Simboli Answers the Pool Drop and the Privacy Question

Asked about videos of Amazon drones dropping packages into swimming pools, Simboli said the number of such incidents is very small and that Amazon has learned from them. He did not give a number. The best-known case is the August 17 MK30 pool drop in Richmond, Texas.

Different Richmond. That one is a Houston suburb. DroneXL’s analysis of that drop argued the MK30’s hover-and-release design is the reason it keeps missing.

On privacy, Simboli said Amazon does not live-monitor its drone cameras and does not share what they collect; the imagery exists for flight and delivery safety. The six cameras aboard are there to find a clear drop zone and avoid obstacles, which is what Amazon’s Detect-and-Avoid system does. That system is important enough to Amazon that it quit the Commercial Drone Alliance in March over whether such systems should be mandatory.

Simboli also fielded a question about collisions with public safety drones. Chesterfield County police started flying drones as first responders in July, per The Richmonder. Simboli said there is no common solution yet, that Amazon is reaching out to first responder agencies, and that a drone traffic management system exists which others need to join to get a common operating picture. That matches where UTM stands in most US metros: it exists, and participation is voluntary.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon is selling Richmond on a service it cannot yet legally start, and I think that is the right order. Put the aircraft on the carpet and take the pool question and the privacy question in public before the first flight, not after. Clay, New York got the harder version.

When Amazon asked Clay for a 176-square-mile zone in June, the town got a vote. Henrico residents got a Thursday evening and a Q&A, which is less, but it is more than the customer in Richmond, Texas got before an MK30 put a package in her pool.

What bothers me is the channel. Tracy came out through the Los Angeles Times on Saturday and Richmond through an RSVP page and a raceway club room on Thursday, and both are missing from the site list Amazon published ten days ago. My read is that Amazon does not announce a site until it is sure the site will fly, and it is not sure about Richmond. The Richmonder’s word for Simboli’s answer was possible. Every unannounced site is a site Amazon might not deliver by December, and the 500-city figure was built on delivering them.

The cruise altitude discrepancy is small, but it is the sort of detail that shows how fast this is moving. Amazon representatives briefed two communities in one week with three different numbers for where the drone flies over your roof. If Amazon is going to run this meeting in every metro it needs to reach 500 by December, it should hand the presenters the same sheet.

Watch Amazon’s Prime Air locations page, which the company says it updates as ZIP codes go live, for a Henrico entry before December 31. If it appears, Richmond counts toward the 500. If it does not, Richmond was one of the possibles that did not convert, and Simboli said as much on Thursday.

Sources: The Richmonder, Radio IQ, Richmond BizSense

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

DOJ Indicts Rocklin Felon From White House Drone Plot, Not For Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:54:00 GMT

A federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted Christopher M. Perry, 38, of Rocklin, California, on Thursday for possessing firearms as a convicted felon and for destroying records in a federal investigation. Perry came to the FBI’s attention through the investigation into the plot to fly explosive-laden drones at the UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn on June 14, and prosecutors say he took part in the Signal chat group where the attack was planned.

He is not charged with the plot. The two counts in Thursday’s indictment are a gun charge and an obstruction charge, and neither mentions a drone. Since the first arrests on June 16, I have tracked one question through every filing in this case: whether anyone involved ever built the explosive drones the plan depended on. Perry’s indictment adds a sixth federal district to the docket and leaves that question exactly where it was.

Perry is in federal custody and is scheduled for arraignment on August 31 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sean C. Riordan. The charges are allegations, and he is presumed innocent.

Prosecutors Charged Perry With Guns And Deleted Data, Not The Conspiracy

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California charged Perry with being a felon in possession of a firearm, up to 15 years, and destroying records in a federal investigation, up to 20 years. Neither count alleges he conspired to attack the White House event.

The Justice Department’s release says FBI agents contacted Perry at his home on June 12, two days before the UFC card, and asked about his Signal account. After they left, prosecutors allege, he removed himself from the chat group, deleted his Signal account, and wiped the app and its data from his phone. That sequence is the entire basis of the records-destruction count.

Search warrants that followed turned up multiple firearms Perry owned and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition. On one ammunition container someone had written “WWIII.” His phone held pictures and videos of guns, including Perry holding them. U.S. Attorney Eric Grant’s office says Perry had described himself in the chats as a career criminal and said he was armed. His prior felonies include attempting to bring drugs into a jail or prison and possessing or purchasing drugs for sale, which is what makes the gun possession a federal crime on its own.

Jail records reviewed by KCRA show Perry was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail on August 17 and is not eligible for bail. The criminal complaint that preceded the indictment was filed August 7.

The Signal Logs Put Perry Inside The Planning Chats

The criminal complaint, as reported by KCRA, alleges Perry joined a Signal group called “Lions den” under the username “Chrisp87.” The FBI found the account on the phone of one of the eight men already indicted for the plot. Perry allegedly voiced support for the attack and offered tactical advice.

According to the complaint, Perry told the group it “should have decoys and distractions.” He also allegedly wrote that he preferred nonviolence himself but was all in if the situation called for it. He is accused of communicating directly with Abraham H. Alvarez of Omaha, Nebraska, the alleged planner I described in June as the man who told the group he had one drone and was working on more.

When agents knocked on June 12, Perry denied knowing about or belonging to any online group planning an attack at the White House, according to the complaint. He admitted using Signal but would not say whether Chrisp87 was his. Within the hour, prosecutors say, the app was gone. That is the obstruction count in a sentence: a denial, then a deletion.

Perry’s Alleged Target List Ran To Data Centers And Satellite Ground Stations

The Justice Department says Perry also discussed attacks in California against AI data centers, satellite communication facilities, and a California-based technology company. Per KCRA, the complaint names a second chat, “Sauron Eye,” where members discussed data centers in Santa Clara, Sacramento, and outside San Francisco.

Alvarez allegedly added Perry to that chat. A further set of targets named in it, according to the complaint, included “Internet Exchange Points” and “Satellite Ground Stations.”

Perry allegedly expressed interest but wrote that he did not have anyone he trusted enough to do it with. The complaint describes discussion, not preparation, on the California targets. No filing I have seen describes a device, a date, or a reconnaissance trip for any of them.

The infrastructure angle is not new to this case. The eight-man indictment returned in Columbus on July 9 lists drones and explosives among the material support the defendants allegedly agreed to provide, and the criminal complaints I read in June already had members floating power grids as secondary targets. What Perry’s chats add is a California map: data centers and satellite ground stations rather than substations.

The Eight-Man Indictment Already Moved The Case Past Criminal Complaints

On July 9, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Ohio indicted eight men on two conspiracies: providing material support to terrorists, and murder on federal territory and of a federal official. That indictment replaced the June criminal complaints. Perry is not among the eight.

The eight are Alvarez, Daniel K. Eskridge, William L. S. Falkner, Tycen J. Proper, Jordan W. Rincker, Bryan O. Roa, Chandler D. Scaggs, and Michael A. Thomas. Scaggs, 21, of Chapmanville, West Virginia, was the last arrested, in early July; prosecutors say he was assigned as a sniper and kept trying to arrange a ride to Washington after Proper’s arrest cut the group’s original plan. The material support count carries up to 15 years, the murder conspiracy up to life.

He is charged separately, in a different district, for conduct the plot investigation happened to surface. The Justice Department’s own headline calls him “implicated” in the plot, a word that does the work of connecting him to it without alleging he was part of the conspiracy. FOX40 reported that other people found during the investigation, including an Elk Grove TikTok user, have also been charged with unrelated crimes. The dragnet keeps producing cases. The conspiracy roster has not grown since July.

DroneXL’s Take

I wrote in June, after reading the complaints, that the drone side of this plot existed mostly on paper: one aircraft, a $1,300 group buy, and a plan for fifteen operators the group never fielded. I said the load-bearing question for any drone-specific charge was whether the explosive drones were ever built, and that this was the detail to track as the case moved to indictment. Two indictments later, I am still tracking it. The July 9 indictment lists drones among the material support the eight allegedly agreed to provide. Perry’s indictment does not mention a drone at all. Neither Justice Department release describes a completed device, a test, or a payload.

So the pattern holds. The firearms in this case keep being real. Agents pulled rifles, handguns, and thousands of rounds from the homes of the original five, and now more than 2,000 rounds and multiple guns from a felon in Rocklin who had no legal right to any of them. The drones keep being a plan.

My read is that Perry’s charging decision tells you how prosecutors see him: a felon with guns who lied to the FBI and wiped his phone, sitting in a chat room where other men planned something worse. That is 35 years of exposure on paper. It is not the crime the headlines are about. If the government believed it could prove Perry agreed to the attack, the conspiracy count was available and it did not bring it.

The fair concession is that the conspiracy case against the eight explicitly names drones, and a jury may find that a group with one aircraft, a budget, and a stated intent to arm it had done enough. Material support does not require a working weapon. But the public argument since June has been that a weaponized-drone attack nearly happened on the South Lawn, and every filing so far describes guns that existed and drones that were going to. I covered the Nashville substation plot in 2024, where undercover FBI agents worked alongside the suspect for months and arrested him as he powered up the drone at the substation, and the Secret Service counter-drone deployment on the National Mall two weeks after these arrests. In both, and here, the thing that found the threat was a person: a tip, an informant, a seized phone with a Signal account on it. Not a sensor.

That matters because the FEMA counter-drone money and the new state and local takedown authority are being justified in part by this case. I don’t object to either on its merits. I object to a plot whose drones never flew being cited as if they had. The arraignment on August 31 will not settle the drone question; it is a gun case. Watch the Southern District of Ohio docket instead. If the government has a built explosive drone from any of these men, the trial is where it will have to show it, and I will report the day it does.

Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs; KCRA 3; FOX40.

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

Amazon Drone Delivery Returns to California After 2024 Lockeford Exit

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:35:00 GMT

Amazon is bringing drone delivery back to California. The company told the Los Angeles Times it will launch Prime Air from its distribution center in Tracy within a month, flying the MK30 to customers up to 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) away with packages of up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms).

Those will be Amazon’s first drone deliveries in California since it closed its Lockeford site in April 2024. DroneXL covered the Lockeford launch when Amazon first announced it in June 2022, and the shutdown less than two years later. Tracy sits about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of Lockeford, in the same San Joaquin County.

Erik Robertson, Prime Air’s regional operations manager for the West, gave the Tracy details in an interview with the Times. Residents get a first look at the aircraft Saturday at the Sweet Dreams Car Show in downtown Tracy.

Amazon Pulled Out of Lockeford in April 2024

Lockeford was Amazon’s first US drone delivery site. Amazon named the San Joaquin County town in June 2022 and began flying there that December. In April 2024 it announced the site would close. California has had no Prime Air service for the 28 months since, and Tracy ends that gap.

The Lockeford model was hand-built for a town of about 3,500 people. As DroneXL reported at the time, an Amazon employee visited each opted-in customer’s yard to scope out a landing spot, and the drone was the MK27-2, the hexagonal predecessor to the MK30. When Amazon moved the operation to Arizona in April 2024, Lockeford staff were offered jobs at other sites.

Tracy is a different kind of site. Instead of a purpose-built rural pad, the drones fly from an existing Amazon distribution center, and the service area is the same 175-square-mile (453-square-kilometer) circle Amazon draws around every MK30 location.

Tracy Gets the Same MK30 Terms as Amazon’s Other 11 Sites

Tracy gets the terms Amazon publishes elsewhere. The MK30 flies up to 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from the building with up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) aboard. Cruise altitude is 250 to 400 feet (76 to 122 meters). Delivery is free for Prime members on orders over $50.

Prime members pay $2.99 on orders under $50, and non-members pay $4.99, according to Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement. Amazon says most orders land around 60 minutes after checkout and some arrive in under 30. The Times reports some Phoenix-area deliveries have completed in under 15.

Robertson told the Times that millions of items in the Tracy building are eligible, including medications and phone chargers. Customers in the service area will see a drone option on the Amazon website when an order qualifies, and can pick a drop-off spot and time. The aircraft are not remotely piloted. On-site flight monitors watch the airspace and coordinate with local airports, Robertson said.

“Every flight that we take starts with safety,” Robertson told the Times.

Amazon would not tell the Times how many drones it is sending to Tracy, saying the number will scale with demand.

California Was Missing From Amazon’s Own 500-City List

Amazon’s newsroom has not announced Tracy. Its August 19 post naming the 500-city target listed 11 live sites and five metro areas coming next: Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise. California appeared nowhere on that page, and it still does not.

The Tracy launch surfaced through a newspaper interview instead. That gap matters for anyone trying to track where Prime Air is actually going. DroneXL’s coverage of the 500-city announcement worked from Amazon’s published site list, and Tracy was not on it ten days ago. Amazon’s own locations page, which the company says it updates as ZIP codes change, has no California entry as of this writing. Whether Tracy is the only unannounced site in the pipeline, or one of many, is something Amazon has not said.

Amazon’s math is easy to check. A 7.5-mile radius covers 176.7 square miles, which is the 175-square-mile figure Amazon uses. Reaching nearly 500 cities and towns by December 31 means drawing a lot of those circles in four months from a starting point of 11.

The Return Lands Twelve Days After the Texas Pool Drop

Prime Air’s California comeback arrives in the middle of a rough news cycle for the program. On August 17, an MK30 dropped a Richmond, Texas customer’s package into her swimming pool on camera, two days before Amazon’s 500-city announcement. The video spread nationally by August 19.

DroneXL’s analysis of the pool drop argued that Zipline’s tethered and parachute designs show why the 83-pound (38-kilogram) MK30 keeps missing. That followed the October 2025 crash of two MK30s into a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, the site Amazon opened when it left Lockeford, and a second FAA probe in November 2025 after a Waco drone clipped a cable.

Critics cited by the Times worry about hacking and about crowded airspace. Amazon’s answer, per the Times, is that the program improves as it grows. Prime Air holds an FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate, the same framework used for commercial air carriers, and Robertson said the Tracy flights are FAA-authorized.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon’s return to California tells me more about Amazon than about California. The Lockeford experiment was a 2022 idea: a small town, a hand-scouted yard for each customer, a dedicated pad and an aircraft Amazon retired by late 2024. Tracy is the 2026 model: an existing warehouse with a 175-square-mile circle drawn around it, run on the same terms as Omaha or Baton Rouge. The state did not change. Amazon’s answer to “where do drones make sense” did.

I will grant the critics their strongest point. The pool video is real, the Tolleson crane crash is real, and the FAA opened two probes into Prime Air within two months last fall. A company promising 500 cities has earned the scrutiny it is getting. My read is that none of those incidents is why Amazon left Lockeford or why it is coming back, though. Lockeford died because the rural, per-customer model could not scale, and Tracy exists because the warehouse-radius model can. That is progress on the problem that actually kept drone delivery small, whatever the incident reel looks like.

What I do not buy is the way Tracy surfaced. A company that put out a 500-city press release on August 19 with a state-by-state site list, and then let a California launch reach the public through a regional operations manager talking to a newspaper, is either announcing sites faster than its own comms can track or choosing which launches get the press-release treatment. Neither is reassuring for anyone trying to count.

The count is the thing to watch. Amazon has given itself a December 31 deadline and a starting line of 11 sites. Tracy would make 12, plus the five metros it has named. Whether the December number is anywhere near 500, or whether “nearly 500 cities and towns” turns out to mean a few dozen circles that each touch a dozen municipalities, is the question this launch does not answer. Amazon’s locations page will settle it, one ZIP code list at a time.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Amazon

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

DJI Osmo Nano vs Action 6 vs Osmo 360: My Buyer's Guide to DJI's Action Cameras

Jake Sloan — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:54:51 GMT

Whether you want the DJI Osmo Nano, the DJI Action 6, or the DJI Osmo 360 really comes down to how you plan to use it. So let’s break down the differences between these three cameras and figure out which one is right for you. I want to say thank you to DJI for sponsoring this video, and if you’re interested in picking any of these cameras up, there are affiliate links down in the description. They don’t cost you anything extra, but they do help my channel out. Let’s start with the DJI Osmo Nano.

DJI Osmo Nano Specs

This camera is the smallest by far, especially when you separate the two units. The camera module is waterproof up to 10 meters, but once you attach the screen unit, you’re only splash resistant, so you don’t want to submerge the whole thing. The module by itself is capable of 4K at 60 frames per second, or 4K at 120 frames per second in slow motion mode, and you can film horizontal or vertical video depending on how you orient the camera.

With the Nano, you can take up to 35 megapixel photos. A big difference here is that you can opt for a 64 GB or 128 GB version, which will change your pricing. To preview what you’re filming, you’ll need to use the Vision Dock or connect it to the Mimo app on your phone. Because this is a fixed internal battery, to charge it you’ll need to attach the screen unit as well, which will automatically start charging the battery. You can also put a microSD card into the module itself, and depending on which internal storage version you get, that’ll affect how much footage you can record before you need to offload it to the SD card, a computer, or your phone.

For battery life, because this is a fixed internal battery that charges every time you attach the screen, you’ll get about 90 minutes of run time on the module by itself, depending on frame rate and how you’re using it. But if you attach the screen, or you keep reattaching it, you should get up to about 200 minutes of run time, which is a fair amount.

Why Choose the DJI Osmo Nano?

There are a few different ways I love using a camera like this. One, it’s easy to attach to magnetic mounts like a lanyard, so you can magnetically attach it to yourself, or really to any ferrous metal surface, even a car or a shelf. That’s great for behind-the-scenes angles and for POV shots, which is my favorite way to use this camera. Getting POV shots when I’m out adventuring, or wherever I might be, is fantastic.

A compact DJI action camera sits on its magnetic quick-release mount atop a DJI Action selfie stick, framed against an out-of-focus mountain valley in late autumn. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Another way I like to use it is to stick it on top of my mirrorless camera to get POV shots when I’m out photographing wildlife or just exploring Alaska. The Nano is an excellent POV camera. I also like sticking it in weird, random places because it’s so small and mounts to so many different surfaces, so you can get some really odd and creative shots from unique perspectives. Maybe not quite as unique as the Osmo 360, but still very fun.

Another way to use it is for FPV, because the camera is so small and lightweight that you can get some really nice FPV shots if you’re trying to save weight on a smaller FPV drone. But one thing to be aware of with the Nano is that there are a lot of electronics packed into an incredibly small package, which is part of what makes it so great for POV shots, but it can also lead to overheating issues.

Overheating Issues With the Osmo Nano

I don’t generally deal with overheating issues because I live and work in Alaska, and it’s just not that hot up here. But if you live in a warmer climate, you’ll want to keep your recording times shorter rather than long-running, which will help eliminate overheating. That’s typically how I use this camera anyway: shorter clips, one to two, maybe three minutes at a time, just to capture POV shots of what I’m doing in that moment.

If you’re worried about the Nano and overheating, that’s where the Action 6 comes into play. The Action 6 is much more than just a bigger brother of the Nano. It has a lot of different features that really take it beyond.

DJI Osmo Action 6 Specs

Yes, it’s a little more expensive, but that comes with a lot of extras. One, you now have an interchangeable battery, so you can pop the door off and swap the battery if you need to, giving you a lot more run time. You have 50 GB of internal storage, and you can add a microSD card to get a bunch more. But the big thing that makes this camera different is the footage. It’ll record up to 8K at 30 frames per second, of course you can do 4K 60, and 4K 120 if you want. You also have a 1x1 mode that lets you get both vertical and horizontal framing out of the same shot.

This camera gives you a lot more options for how you want to film, including subject tracking at up to 2.7K, so if you want a bit of movement and motion in your shot, you can get it. The Action 6 also lets you go up to 20 meters underwater without a dive case, and there’s a dive case available if you want to go even deeper. Because it’s an all-in-one camera, you have a front touchscreen you can control features from, plus the rear screen. It’ll give you up to 240 minutes of run time on a single battery.

Why Choose the DJI Action 6?

So what do you use an Action 6 for? In my experience, if you want much longer record times, or a higher quality of footage because it gives you more dynamic range and up to 8K resolution, plus better low light performance, the Action 6 will do better for you. If you’re really going into low light, walking around streets at night for example, the Action 6 is the better choice.

You can use this on FPV drones too, and I have, and it does a great job giving you great FPV footage that you can then stabilize in post with Gyroflow if you want. But the Action 6 also has a trick up its sleeve.

A pilot fits a DJI action camera to a custom long-range FPV quadcopter before a winter flight in the mountains. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Using the Macro Lens With the Action 6

The cool thing about the Action 6 is that you can put on a wide or a macro lens, which makes the camera a lot more useful depending on what you’re trying to shoot. I have the macro lens, and it can give you some very cool shots. This glacier ice is so clear when you use it. So while the Action 6 might seem like just a bigger brother to the Osmo Nano, and it definitely is that, it brings a lot more features to the table, and a lot more durability as far as what it can handle, both heat and cold-wise, since I’ve used this in some ridiculously cold weather.

A DJI Osmo Action camera with a 110-750 macro lens attachment mounted to the front, held up against a fog-shrouded forest shoreline. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

So how do I like to use an Action 6? More like a vlogging camera, where I can just walk and talk to the camera. It gives you fantastic results, regardless of whether it’s day or night, and regardless of the conditions you’re in. In very, very cold temperatures here in Alaska, the Action 6 has been amazing at not freezing and dying on me. And if you use it in very warm temperatures, the Action 6 is going to be a big step up from the Osmo Nano. But then we come to the Osmo 360, and this camera is completely different from the Nano or the Action 6 because it’s a 360 camera.

Why Choose the DJI Osmo 360?

Really quickly, if you don’t know what 360 cameras are, they capture everything around the camera in a complete 360-degree sphere and allow you to reframe in post. The Osmo 360 will film in 8K up to 50 frames per second in that 360-degree sphere, and then let you reframe that into 4K or whatever format you need and export the footage out. So you need to understand that there’s a bit of a different workflow with a 360 camera.

It gives you options like selfie mode, which will automatically help frame the camera for you so you don’t have to reframe it in post, and you can use single-lens mode for either the front or rear lens to use it much more like a traditional action camera. The Osmo 360 does take photos up to 120 megapixels, but again, because it’s a 360-degree sphere photo, unless you’re posting VR content, you’re going to reframe it and end up with a much smaller photo than 120 megapixels.

DJI Osmo 360 Specs

It has removable batteries, 107 GB of internal storage, and of course, you can also add an SD card if you want. But one thing to be aware of is that footage from a 360 camera is never going to look exactly like footage from a standard action camera, because you’re recording that complete 360-degree sphere. So it begs the question: why would you want to get the Osmo 360 over something like the Action 6?

The Biggest Reasons to Choose a 360 Camera

The biggest reason to get a 360 camera over something like an Action 6 or an Osmo Nano is that you can capture shots while you’re doing things without thinking about where the camera is pointed, and then simply capture the action, capture the moment, and come in and reframe it in post exactly like you want.

Another reason you might want to use a 360 camera is to get angles and camera views that are impossible with any other camera, because you can put it just about anywhere and know you’re capturing everything in a 360-degree field of view, and the selfie stick is going to disappear. So if you want to capture shots that almost look like drone shots, or look like a follow camera, or even set the camera up somewhere on a selfie stick and have it track you later in post, you can do that with a 360 camera.

A 360-degree action camera set to 8K30 sits atop an invisible selfie stick on a rocky mountain slope, with just over an hour of recording time left on the card. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

360 cameras are really great for behind-the-scenes shots, and for really different, unusual, hard-to-get shots you can’t get with any other type of camera. Another reason you might consider a 360 camera is if you film for horizontal and vertical video at the same time. You film horizontal long-form video for YouTube, and you also want vertical content for Shorts or Reels, and you can frame both out of the same shot. You can frame multiple shots out of the same shot, one going forward, one going backward, and change it through the shot to get all of that.

There are a few things you need to know about these cameras that go across the board. One, they can all shoot in a great 10-bit normal color profile, which is excellent and probably what most people are going to use, and a lot of what you’ve seen in this video. But they also all have the ability to film in 10-bit D-Log M, which lets you color grade and match up to other cameras later in post. D-Log M gives you the most dynamic range you can get out of these cameras.

DJI’s Osmo Audio System

Another great thing about these cameras is that they all work with the Osmo audio system. If you want to direct-connect a pair of Mic 2s, Mic Minis, Mic 3s, or pretty much any of the DJI mics that have come out in the last couple of years, you can, and get really good clean audio between you and one other person. It’s super useful if you’re in noisy or windy environments and want to clean your audio up a bit.

Batteries and the Magnetic Mount System

While the Nano doesn’t have an interchangeable battery, both the Action 6 and the Osmo 360 use the same batteries. So if you have a 360 or an Action 6 and want to add the other camera to your kit, you can use the same batteries, which is fantastic. All three cameras also work with the same quick-connect magnetic mount system, so you can quick-connect any of these cameras to the magnetic mount without worrying about cross-compatibility.

So, whether you’re going to get the Nano, the Action 6, or the Osmo 360 really comes down to how you’re going to use the camera and what kind of footage you want to get out of it in the end. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

This article was written based on Jake Sloan’s DJI action camera buyer’s guide video, published on his YouTube channel. You can find more of Jake’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.

Jersey Shore Firefighters Buy $10,000 Rescue Robot as Lifeguards Leave

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:54:00 GMT

The High Point Volunteer Fire Company in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, is training on a remote-controlled rescue craft called the Dolphin 3, bought for roughly $10,000, so its volunteers can reach struggling swimmers once Long Beach Island’s lifeguards go back to school.

Labor Day falls on September 7 this year, and Harvey Cedars has already posted what comes after it: a skeleton crew of two beaches, one of them weekends only, running through September 30. Thirteen are guarded now. The ocean does not follow that schedule, and neither do the people who swim in it, which is how a volunteer fire company on a barrier island ends up owning a robot that swims faster than any of its members.

The Dolphin 3 Reaches a Swimmer at 15 MPH Without a Rescuer in the Water

The Dolphin 3 is a self-propelled lifebuoy steered from shore. It carries flotation to a swimmer, who holds on and gets towed back, so no rescuer fights the surf to make first contact. Top speed is 15 mph (24 km/h), with half a mile (800 meters) of control range.

OceanAlpha, the Hong Kong marine robotics company that builds it, rates the Dolphin 3 at 7 meters per second against 3.6 for its first-generation buoy, roughly double. It powers up the instant it touches water, with no startup sequence to wait through. It streams 1080p to a waterproof screen, and it turns for home on its own if the signal drops or the battery falls under 15 percent. Two-second self-righting after a capsize is not standard equipment: OceanAlpha lists it as an upgrade. Departments in Germany, Spain, and Chile are already running the craft.

Assistant Chief Nick Caricato walked NBC10 Philadelphia through the appeal. “It’s going to allow us to put a rescue device in the water quickly,” he said, adding that crews can put it exactly where they want it. A rescuer already in the water can take the controls. Caricato told the station the machine holds up to 1,000 pounds (454 kg), enough for several people in trouble at once to hang on and float until a jet ski gets there.

It is a surface cousin to the airborne rescue hardware DroneXL has tracked for years, including the JX-6A flying lifebuoy.

Harvey Cedars Runs Out of Lifeguards Before It Runs Out of Swimmers

Beach Patrol Chief Randy Townsend is watching his roster shrink in real time. He told NBC10 the patrol loses guards daily as they head back to school, and has already had to close beaches. Caricato put it plainly: come Labor Day, the job falls to the fire department.

The numbers show what that means. Harvey Cedars guards 13 beaches with a full crew through Labor Day. Its post-season schedule covers two: Middlesex Avenue daily and 80th Street on weekends, weather and staffing permitting, through September 30. Chief Paul Rice said the company is training now so it is proficient before that handoff rather than after it, which is the part of this story that separates a purchase from a plan.

Rice’s math on the $10,000 is blunt. “If it saves one life… three times as much would have been worth it,” he said.

Long Beach Island Already Flies the Other Half of This Rescue

The air half of the job is running on the same island. The Ocean County Sheriff’s Office stations drone operators at the north and south ends of Long Beach Island most summer evenings, flying aircraft rigged with Restube flotation packs that inflate on contact with the water.

On July 17, a call came in for two swimmers caught in a rip current off Division Avenue in Surf City. Water rescue trucks, a jet ski, and Harvey Cedars Beach Patrol’s after-hours unit responded, and an OCSO drone operator dropped a Restube that one swimmer grabbed and held until Surf City lifeguards completed the rescue. The sheriff’s office credited coordination between its drone unit and the beach patrol. The aircraft that carried that tube was a DJI Matrice 300 RTK the county cannot legally replace, which is a separate problem and a real one.

So the same stretch of sand now has an aircraft that can put flotation on a swimmer in seconds and, a few miles north, a boat that can bring that swimmer home. Different agencies, different radios.

New York Runs Both Missions Over Four City Beaches

Drone patrols over New York City beaches are split between the NYPD, the FDNY, and NYC Emergency Management. Aircraft fly about 100 yards (91 meters) offshore every day during lifeguard hours at four city beaches, Rockaway among them, watching for sharks and for swimmers in trouble.

The shark half gets the headlines. City Parks counted 16 sharks off Rockaway in the first five days of July, seven of them spotted by NYPD drones, and Rockaway logged 45 shark-related closures this season against 24 at the same point last year, as DroneXL reported in July.

The rescue half is the part Harvey Cedars should study. On June 2, Firefighter Michael Stothers was patrolling the shoreline by drone off Beach 85th Street when he spotted two swimmers struggling. He dropped a Restube within minutes, and both stayed up until rescuers reached them. Lifeguards had gone off duty 20 minutes earlier. That is the exact window Long Beach Island is about to enter, and the city has been dropping flotation at Rockaway since 2025.

Australia Proved This Worked Eight Years Ago

Australia ran the first one. On January 18, 2018, lifeguards at Lennox Head in New South Wales were mid-training on their new Westpac Little Ripper drone when a call came in: two teenagers caught in a 10-foot (3-meter) swell about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) north of the patrolled beach.

Supervisor Jai Sheridan, the 2017 NSW Lifeguard of the Year, flew out and dropped an inflatable rescue pod. The teenagers grabbed it and swam in, exhausted and unhurt. Sheridan put the whole sequence at one to two minutes, against the several minutes a swimmer would have needed. “The Little Ripper UAV certainly proved itself today,” he said. Deputy Premier John Barilaro called it a world first.

Those drones were bought to watch for sharks, under a AU$16 million state shark mitigation strategy run jointly by Surf Life Saving NSW and the state’s Department of Primary Industries. The surveillance mission kept growing from there, and DroneXL has followed it through Surf Life Saving Queensland’s fleet, a pilot’s great white warning at Mollymook, and Queensland’s four-year SharkSmart trial, which found drones detected more than twice as many sharks as nets and drum lines while killing nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

Eight years separate Jai Sheridan’s improvised pod drop from a volunteer fire company buying its own rescue robot off the shelf. That is the whole story. Uncrewed lifesaving stopped being a world-first headline and became a line item a volunteer fire company can put in its budget.

Give the skeptics their point: a Dolphin 3 is not a lifeguard. It cannot read a rip current from the sand, cannot decide who to reach first, and cannot start compressions when the swimmer comes in. Rice bought a tool, not a staffing solution, and every guard Harvey Cedars fails to hire next June is still a real loss. But the September gap on a barrier island was never going to be hired away. It gets closed with response time, and $10,000 buys a machine that beats a swimmer to the victim on the worst day of the year.

What I want to watch is whether anyone puts both halves in one set of hands. Long Beach Island has an aerial Restube dropper working evenings and a surface tow craft in a Harvey Cedars firehouse, run by two different agencies. The drone finds the swimmer and keeps them up, which is what Stothers did at Beach 85th Street. The boat brings them in. Nobody on that island has flown one while driving the other yet.

The test comes fast. On September 8 Harvey Cedars drops from thirteen guarded beaches to two, and the water stays warm well into October.

Sources: NBC10 Philadelphia, Borough of Harvey Cedars, Shore News Network, QNS, ABC7 New York, Surf Life Saving NSW, CBS News, OceanAlpha

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

Stop Color Grading Your DJI Pocket 4P Footage Wrong

Mihail Svilenov — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:39:34 GMT

If you have the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P and you’re looking for an easy way to color grade the footage you’ve captured with it, so you can create cinematic, beautiful looking footage, let me show you how you can achieve that. You’ve seen me do many of these videos, so you probably know most of my settings. Today, I’ll actually focus a little bit more on the editing side of things, but let’s quickly go through the main settings I use on the Pocket 4P first.

The Most Important Setting To Change First

I always start by setting my bit rate to high. This is the most important, crucial part if you want to get high quality footage out of this camera. From there, everything I shoot lives in two custom modes: one for D-Log and one for D-Log 2. That’s pretty much everything I use on the Pocket 4P.

My Two Custom Modes

In my custom mode one, I have my exposure set to manual, my ISO set to 400, and my shutter speed at 1/60th of a second. That’s because I’m shooting in 4K at 30 frames per second, and shutter speed is always double the frame rate — you guys are familiar with that.

White balance I usually set to auto. I know this might trigger some people, but it really depends on how much I’m moving around different areas and how long I stay at one location. If I stay for longer than five minutes, obviously I will lock my white balance, because I don’t want it to fluctuate between different values. But if I’m running and gunning and switching locations all the time, then I prefer to set it to auto, because every location has different lighting, and I prefer to let the camera do its thing.

Next is color. I have D-Log 2 selected with color recovery on, which helps me see what’s actually going on on the screen. For image adjustment, I go minus two for sharpness and minus two for noise reduction. Those are extremely handy, because they give you a little bit more flexibility in post. I don’t want the camera to decide for me — I want to add noise reduction or sharpness myself.

My second custom mode is pretty much exactly the same thing: manual exposure, ISO 400, 1/60th shutter speed, but with the D-Log color profile with color recovery on and the same image adjustment values.

Why You Need ND Filters

If I’m shooting outside with those manually selected values, I will have a very bright and overexposed image. To counter that, you need filters. I’m using the ND filters from Freewell, and they are working wonders for the Pocket 4P. They don’t have any tint, any color shift, or any problems with sharpness. They work great.

The Best Grades Start With The Best Footage

The rest of the magic happens on the computer when we color grade. When we talk about color grading, we usually focus on what happens inside the editing software — adjusting exposure, fixing colors, adding contrast, creating a cinematic look. But the truth is, the best grades start with the best footage. If your footage is underexposed or noisy because you didn’t have enough light, there’s only so much you can recover in post. That’s why small lighting accessories like the Zeniko ZN light can make such a big difference for creators.

It’s a really interesting accessory for DJI users because it combines two things into one compact device: a fill light and a power solution for the Osmo Nano. The built-in 1,270 mAh battery can provide up to two additional full charges for the Osmo Nano, and it even supports charging while recording. It features dual lighting modes, including LEDs for more natural color reproduction and a high brightness COB LED for stronger illumination when you need more reach, and with adjustable color temperature, you can match the light to your environment instead of fighting against it. Whether you’re using the Osmo Nano or DJI Action cameras like the Action 3, Action 4, Action 5 Pro, or Action 6, it’s designed to add flexibility without turning your small camera into a bulky rig — and with its price tag, it’s a no-brainer for creators.

D-Log Workflow #1: Ready-Made LUTs And Conversion LUTs

There are a couple of different ways of color grading Pocket 4P footage that has been shot in D-Log or D-Log 2, and I’ll show you all of them. The first is to drop a ready-to-use LUT, which is usually just a one-click LUT that you drop on top of your footage. Then you simply tweak the exposure and the white balance if needed, and you’re good to go. Those are the SupraGrade LUTs that I sell on my store — they are optimized for efficiency and speed.

If you want to dive a little bit deeper and have more control, you need to color grade manually. In DaVinci Resolve, there are two ways to grade a D-Log shot manually. The first is to just drop a conversion LUT — D-Log to Rec.709 — on your clip. That gives you a nice starting point for your grade. Many people will leave it as it is. Personally, I would never leave it as it is, but to each their own.

D-Log Workflow #2: The Color Space Transform Sandwich

The second way is to use a color space transform. This is a little bit of a sandwich that you make between the conversion of your flat color profile shot and your Rec.709 shot, using two different CST nodes — CST stands for color space transform.

For the CST in, I set the input to DJI D-Gamut and DJI D-Log, with the output going to DaVinci Wide Gamut and DaVinci Intermediate. The CST out is pretty much the reverse: DaVinci Wide Gamut and DaVinci Intermediate in, Rec.709 and Rec.709-A out. Some people set the gamma to 2.4, but if you’re running a Mac, you can use Rec.709-A, and that actually works a little bit better. Right away, it already looks great.

Between those two CST nodes is where all the work happens. I build out a string of nodes: exposure, white balance, color balance, contrast, HSV saturation, a LUT node, and then some effects like glow, grain, and sharpness. Those are all the nodes I use to color grade my footage.

Starting with exposure, I quickly balance the image by dragging the shadows down a little bit while checking my scopes. For white balance, I wanted to make this shot a little bit more dreamy and summery, so I introduced a little bit of yellow into the highlights — you can already see the difference it makes going from colder tones to a warmer feel.

The color balance I do in the curves. I change the hue of the blues to something a little bit more teal, and I change the hue of the yellows to something a little bit more orange. If you look at the leaves, for example, they were a little bit greener, and I like them just a tiny bit more orange. Those are very minor, quick corrections — we don’t want to go overboard, because that’s not a good look. Just a tiny bit is what looks fine in my opinion.

I always like to increase the contrast just a tiny bit — 1.05 is fine. Then the HSV saturation is a great way to saturate your image without making it look bad. If you just turn up the regular saturation, it looks horrible. Instead, change the node’s color space to HSV, go to channels, and disable channel one and channel three so you only have channel two. Then, if you increase the gain on the highlights, it actually saturates the image. A little bit goes a long way — it adds a very nice touch of saturation into the right areas without going overboard.

On this shot I skipped the LUT, because we already had a very nice looking image. But to make it a little bit more dreamy and summery, I added a bit of glow. You can adjust the threshold, which controls how much glow you want, and then play with the gain and the gamma — those little sliders are your friends. I just wanted a tiny bit of glow on the street, where we have a little puddle to emphasize. Film grain is something that I love adding on top of my footage to get that film look, and then I always add a little bit of sharpness — 0.48 is what I’m always going for.

Looking at the before and after, it makes a drastic difference, I would say. And once the grade is built, you can just copy all of it and paste it on top of other D-Log footage. I did exactly that with a 60 frames per second clip of waves, and the only fix it needed was a little bit of green tint in the white balance node to remove a slight magenta cast around the rocks. In a matter of seconds, we had a great looking shot.

The D-Log 2 Workflow Is Different

The final thing is D-Log 2 footage, which unfortunately does not work the same way, because DaVinci Resolve does not have this CST available for DJI D-Log 2 — it’s only for D-Log. So for D-Log 2, we need another way to grade our footage properly.

What we do instead is make all of our main corrections first, and then add a final node at the end where we apply a conversion LUT — either D-Log 2 to Rec.709 or D-Log 2 to Vivid to Rec.709. I actually believe the D-Log 2 to Vivid version works better, so that’s what I applied. And by the way, this is a free LUT that DJI offers on their website.

From there, it’s all about corrections. The grain I had copied over was way too much for this shot — zoomed in, it was just a lot, and removing it revealed such a clean image, so I deleted that node. I dialed in the exposure, kept the contrast and the HSV saturation — even increasing it a little bit — and kept the glow and sharpness. I also really liked the bluer tones in this shot, so I left the white balance alone.

Then I added one more node with a little bit of a mask. Using a gradient, dragged out so it’s nice and smooth, I added a purple tint to the sky to make it look like a really nice sunset. You have to play with the color and the saturation, because it’s easy to make it too much. If the look ends up too strong, you can simply adjust the key output of that node to something like 0.5, which essentially lowers the opacity of everything you did in it, so it’s a little bit more subtle.

As long as you have the time to adjust these things and play a little bit, you can do wonders with the footage from the Pocket 4P, because it’s that good. It looks crazy good from the before and after. And if you’re not a fan of this stylized look, you can just remove it and still end up with a shot that looks super nice — although in my opinion, it’s a little bit bland without it.

This is how you can easily adjust the look of your DJI Osmo Pocket 4P footage, whether it’s recorded in D-Log or D-Log 2. We have a couple of different variants on how to grade it, and I hope this helped you understand the basics and how easy it is to create a great looking shot with this camera.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Mihail at Mihail Svilenov. You can find more of Mihail’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.

Washington Jacks Up Commercial Drone Fees 10x, DJI Still Dominates at 97%, FCC Tightens Lab Screening, and SiFly Raises $20 Million

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:19:03 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have four stories for you this week. Washington state jacks up the commercial drone fees — not a good thing. We have an industry survey that shows DJI still dominates. We have the FCC that tells certification labs to tighten their screening — this is related to a story we did last week. And then finally, SiFly raises $20 million. So let’s get to it.

Washington State Jacks Up Commercial Drone Fees by 10x

Starting January 1st, 2027, commercial drone operators in Washington state are going to pay $150 a year per aircraft to register. Right now it’s $15. That’s a 10 times increase, if you’re good with math.

Here’s where it comes from. Unfortunately, Washington repealed a luxury tax on private jets before it took effect. And as a result, to make up the loss, lawmakers added a $120 excise tax on commercial drones, plus doubled the existing registration fee to $30. So millionaires that have a private jet don’t have to pay for that money, but now you do.

90% of that money is going to go to a sustainable aviation fuel account — not to the airports, not to drone programs, but to jet fuel research, basically. The drone fee got exactly one hearing that was buried inside of a bigger transportation bill, and no drone operators showed up to testify.

For comparison, Minnesota charges $25 per year, and Utah charges $5. So a DJI Mini that is flown for real estate photography in Washington will now cost the same to register as a Cessna 172. This takes effect in 2027, so if you fly commercially in Washington, start to budget today — or maybe even talk to your lawmakers.

Industry Survey Shows DJI Still Dominates at 97.1%

The Associated Builders and Contractors, which is a major construction trade group, asked its members what drones they currently fly. DJI came out on top with 97.1%. Autel took the rest, and Skydio, which was the only American brand that was on the list, got 0%.

This survey happens months after the FCC ban on new DJI models hit the market, and it shows that the ban has not really pushed contractors yet to go towards American alternatives, if they are available. It’s basically just frozen them on the hardware that they’re already on.

Almost 20% of these fleets use thermal cameras, and about the same use LiDAR as well. And as you know, both of these payload types are part of the new FCC proposal that could pull them from the shelves entirely — including existing models that have already been approved by the FCC. Now, the trade group is asking lawmakers to simplify compliance, and based on the results of the survey, it’s kind of easy to understand why.

FCC Tells Certification Labs to Tighten Their Screening

The FCC just told HOVERAir to stop selling its Versa flying camera immediately, calling it a violation of US laws. And here’s a bit of a twist — we talked about this last week, and I know some of you made comments saying that it was no longer approved by the FCC — but a certification lab had already approved that camera for sale. Now the FCC says that that approval was granted in error, and it’s now being pulled.

As a result, the FCC is sending new guidance to every certification body that it accredits. If you’re not familiar, there is a bunch of private companies that are paid by manufacturers that actually decide whether a device gets approved. And now the FCC wants them to screen harder for banned drone components — although that guidance has not really been published anywhere. No public notice, and no docket number.

So this matters because the whole system for enforcing the drone import ban is going to run through private labs. If one bad approval gets through, it takes a viral product launch like this one to catch it. And that actually raises a lot of questions about how many others have been sitting there right now that have been approved and that we don’t know about. This is obviously a developing story, and we’re going to keep you updated as we keep tracking it.

SiFly Raises $20 Million to Scale Production of the Q12

Last up, SiFly announced a $20 million Series A financing. According to the press release, the funds are going to be used to scale production and customer delivery of the SiFly Q12.

If you’re not familiar with the Q12, it currently holds the Guinness World Record for longest flight by an electric multirotor in its class at 3 hours and 11 minutes. We’ve talked about this in news update before. The aircraft carries a payload up to 10 lb and a maximum range of 90 miles on a single charge. 90 miles — that’s kind of really impressive.

The Q12 is primarily an enterprise drone and can carry payloads such as OGI sensors, cell phone locators, spectrometers, thermal cameras, LiDAR, AEDs, spotlights — anything, you name it, up to 10 lb. It’s built as an all-around enterprise aircraft. SiFly also makes the Q250, which is a heavy-lift drone with a maximum takeoff weight of 551 lb and 237 lb of payload. It’s going to be cool to see those starting to hit the hands of customers and then hear the feedback.

And the conversation continues on Postflight, where we talk about all of these stories uncensored in a premium community — the link is located in the description. Keep in mind, we’re not going to be here for the next two live Q&As on Monday, so we’ll see you in 3 weeks for that. But in the meantime, we will have news update next Friday as well. 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.

Amelia Dronehart Relaunches With Free Membership for Women in Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:16:00 GMT

Amelia Dronehart, the women’s drone collective founded by Rhianna Lakin in 2015, launched a new website this week and opened membership to women across the drone industry worldwide. Joining is currently free.

The relaunch comes under new leadership. Kara Murphy, a Part 107 pilot, drone photographer, and writer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has taken over as executive director of an organization that has spent most of its life as a closed Facebook group.

The timing is no accident. Amelia Dronehart will have a presence at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas next week, September 1 to 3, where three of its board members are on the conference program. DroneXL will be on the show floor Tuesday and Wednesday.

Kara Murphy Takes Over a Community Rhianna Lakin Built in 2015

Amelia Dronehart began in 2015 as a closed Facebook group, created as a safe space where women who fly drones could trade advice and encouragement. Under founder Rhianna Lakin, it grew into an international network offering mentorship to women pilots at every experience level.

The name is a play on Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, as BuzzFeed News noted in 2015 when it called the group the most influential women’s community in the hobby. Lakin herself used drones as a reporting and accountability tool, and trained Indigenous drone pilots during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, work rooted in her years witnessing the aftermath of illegal logging in Indonesia.

Murphy inherits that history along with a board and advisory group that pulls from established corners of the industry. Sharon Rossmark, CEO of Women and Drones, serves as an advisor. Aviation attorney Loretta Alkalay, a past guest on DroneXL’s PiXL Drone Show, and Renee Welch of WeRobotics sit on the advisory board and board of directors.

Murphy is direct about how the group positions itself alongside those organizations: “There is plenty of room for all of us.”

A collage of women drone pilots at work across the industry, from drone light show crews and film festival honorees to FPV flyers, construction surveyors and cinema rig operators. Photo credit: Amelia Dronehart.

Free Membership Moves the Community Off Facebook

Membership is open now at ameliadronehart.com and free for a limited time. Members can build a profile and connect with other members off Facebook, the platform that has hosted the community since Lakin started the group more than a decade ago, with event listings and educational resources to follow.

The announcement doesn’t say when the free window closes. (Smart, either way: the fastest route to rebuilding a decade-old member roster is to not charge for it.)

The site also carries a blog, an events calendar, a merchandise shop, and a submission form for women who want their work in the industry featured on the organization’s channels.

Board Members Take the Stage at Commercial UAV Expo

Commercial UAV Expo runs September 1 to 3 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, and Amelia Dronehart will be there. Three board members are on the conference program, with sessions covering drone applications, technology, and the future UAS workforce, according to the organization.

Attendees can find the group at the Women and Drones booth (#340) and in the Sundance Media Group area (#1852). Jennifer Pidgen, Renee Jones, Sharon Rossmark, La’Quata Sumter, and Desiree Ekstein will sign copies of their books at booth 340, per the organization.

The organization also points to the growing number of women among this year’s speakers and moderators, and Murphy says she’s excited to see more women represented throughout the conference.

DroneXL’s Take

The drone industry talks constantly about its workforce problem, then treats groups like this one as a nice-to-have. The numbers argue otherwise. The FAA counted 492,311 certificated remote pilots at the end of 2025, up 15.1 percent in a single year, and women hold about 9 percent of those certificates, per Women and Drones’ analysis of the agency’s year-end data. A field growing that fast can’t afford to keep recruiting from only half the population.

In the six-plus years DroneXL has covered this industry, the same lesson keeps landing. Oklahoma is building a drone workforce from the classroom up. An all-girls drone team from D.C. won a top award at the national drone championships. Put aircraft, training, and a welcoming room in front of people the industry has overlooked, and pilots show up, something we’ve seen in drone racing too.

Amelia Dronehart kept women in this industry connected for a decade from inside a Facebook group, through every hype cycle and every ban scare. Giving it a real home and free membership is the cheapest workforce program anyone will fund this year.

I’ll be at Commercial UAV Expo Tuesday and Wednesday, and booth 340 is on my list. If you’re a woman flying drones, or thinking about it, this one costs you nothing. That math is easy.

Source: Amelia Dronehart

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

Pentagon Downs 3 Cartel Drones With Laser, Won't Say Whose Airspace

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:11:00 GMT

The US military used a high-energy laser to destroy three drones it says were flying in direct support of Mexican drug cartels near the southern border. The engagements happened over two nights, late Tuesday, August 25, and into the early hours of Wednesday, August 26, in the airspace over or near the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. It is a striking turnaround for a laser program that spent February making headlines for shooting down the wrong drone and freezing a commercial airport’s airspace.

Soldiers of Joint Task Force-Southern Border, the roughly 8,000-strong unit operating under US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), fired the shots using the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL). What nobody in uniform will say is where, exactly, the drones came down: over US territory, or Mexico’s.

JTF-SB Credits The AMP-HEL With Three Kills Over Two Nights

Joint Task Force-Southern Border destroyed three drones with the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser during the nights of August 25 and 26, 2026. The task force declared the aircraft hostile because they directly supported activities that physically threatened US troops and Customs and Border Protection agents.

The task force announced the engagements Thursday evening in a release from Fort Bliss, which did not identify the location of the shootdowns, the cartels involved, or the drone types destroyed.

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the JTF-SB commander, said cartel networks increasingly use drones to support human smuggling and to spy on US personnel and law enforcement, adding that “we have made it clear that we will not tolerate hostile surveillance.” Taylor also thanked the Mexican Army for its cooperation against drone threats in the border region.

The task force has operated since March 2025 across 1,954 miles (3,145 kilometers) of border terrain, where it has laid wire obstacles, flown thousands of observation flights, and run tens of thousands of detection and monitoring patrols. Cartel drone activity is the documented backdrop: the Pentagon reported more than 1,000 drone sightings a month along the border earlier this year, according to Reuters reporting by David Jeans and Mike Stone, and DroneXL has covered how cartels now field FPV drones and counter-drone gear of their own.

USNORTHCOM Will Not Say Whose Airspace The Shots Crossed

USNORTHCOM declined to specify whether the three drones were destroyed over US or Mexican airspace. Asked directly, a spokesperson cited operational security and ongoing counter-cartel operations. The question matters because Mexico’s president has called any unilateral US action on Mexican soil a grave breach of sovereignty.

The command’s full answer, given to CBS News, was that “the shots were taken in coordination with all partners operating along the border.” That phrasing, combined with Taylor’s explicit nod to the Mexican Army, reads like a carefully lawyered sentence, and it leaves the central question open. A laser beam does not stop at a boundary fence, and a drone hit at the Rio Grande can fall on either bank.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has made that position explicit as the Trump administration widens its campaign against trafficking organizations, per Reuters. Neither government has publicly identified where the three drones came down. That is the one genuine unknown in this story, and it is the one both capitals have an incentive to keep vague.

The Laser Program Climbed Out Of A Rough February

This week’s announcement caps a recovery. In February, a US military laser accidentally shot down a CBP drone near Fort Hancock, Texas. The same month, a safety dispute between the FAA and the Pentagon shut down commercial airspace around El Paso for seven hours.

Those failures forced the two agencies to the table. They ran a joint AMP-HEL safety test at White Sands Missile Range in early March, and by April the FAA formally cleared the military to operate anti-drone lasers domestically under a signed safety agreement. Four months later, the same program is announcing operational kills instead of friendly-fire mishaps.

The military did not name the manufacturer of the laser used this week. AeroVironment delivered its first two 20-kilowatt LOCUST systems to the Army in September 2024 as part of the Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser prototyping effort, per Reuters’ February reporting, and a LOCUST was the system housed at Fort Bliss during the El Paso episode.

DroneXL’s Take

The flashy part of this story is the laser. The real story is the paperwork behind it. The February record shows what happens when directed-energy weapons operate near civilian aviation without coordination: a friendly drone destroyed and a commercial airport frozen for seven hours. The April FAA-Pentagon safety agreement is the unglamorous fix that made Thursday’s confident press release possible, and I’d argue the agencies earned the right to brag a little.

Yes, the threat is real. Cartel drones surveil agents and guide smuggling runs. In Mexico’s interior they have dropped explosives in deadly attacks, and the Pentagon’s own figure of more than a thousand border sightings a month is a documented pattern. Countering them with a laser shot that costs a fraction of an interceptor missile makes plain sense.

But the airspace silence deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. If these shots stayed on the US side, saying so costs nothing and USNORTHCOM says far less convenient things all the time. The lawyered non-answer suggests the geometry is complicated, and Sheinbaum’s sovereignty red line is exactly where a “coordination with all partners” formula gets stress-tested. Watch whether Mexico’s government reacts publicly in the coming days, and whether JTF-SB’s next engagement announcement, because there will be a next one, gets any more specific about location.

One practical note for pilots: directed-energy weapons are now operational, not experimental, in border airspace. If you fly commercially anywhere near the southern border, the FAA’s laser safety framework is the only thing between your Part 107 operation and a 20-kilowatt beam, and February proved the deconfliction is not foolproof. Know where the restricted areas are and stay well clear.

Sources: Joint Task Force-Southern Border / USNORTHCOM, CBS News, Reuters

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

Eric Trump Gets 6% Of Counter-Drone Firm Space-Eyes For His Rolodex

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:10:00 GMT

Eric Trump was given a 6% stake in Space-Eyes, a Miami defense software company moving from maritime surveillance into counter-drone work, in exchange for introductions from his network of contacts, according to a securities filing described by The Wall Street Journal.

The agreement dates to May, when Space-Eyes hired the president’s son as an adviser. It surfaced as the company prepares to go public on Nasdaq through a merger with a blank-check company that values the combined business at $638 million, against roughly $1 million in annual revenue.

It is the fourth drone deal involving the president’s sons that DroneXL has covered since Donald Trump Jr. joined Unusual Machines as an adviser in late 2024.

Space-Eyes Trades Equity For Trump’s Contacts

Space-Eyes founder and CEO Jatin Bains granted Eric Trump a 6% stake in May under an advisory agreement, The Wall Street Journal reports. The agreement asks Trump to facilitate conversations with potential customers, partners, suppliers and other third parties, using his personal and professional connections.

The Journal’s account of the filing has the stake coming from the founder and chief executive, with the agreement built around Trump’s “network of contacts.” That filing is the S-4 registration statement McKinley and Space-Eyes lodged with the SEC on August 12, which EDGAR’s full-text search confirms carries the agreement’s contacts language. The 6% figure is the Journal’s, drawn from that document.

Company executives told Reuters in August that Trump came aboard in the second quarter as Space-Eyes’ third-largest private investor and strategic adviser. He helped introduce potential board candidates but will not sit on the board himself.

The Journal frames the arrangement as part of a wider pattern: the president’s two eldest sons building stakes in small government contractors through investments and advisory work, positioned to benefit from spending and policy decisions made by their father’s administration.

The McKinley Merger Prices Space-Eyes At 370 Times Revenue

The SPAC deal with McKinley Acquisition Corporation values the combined company at $638 million including trust cash. The operating business alone carries a $370 million enterprise value. Space-Eyes generates roughly $1 million in annual revenue today, company executives told Reuters, with about $35 million in contracts under negotiation.

The July 30 business combination agreement pays Space-Eyes shareholders $275 million in stock at $10 per share, with up to 8 million additional earn-out shares tied to milestones. A PIPE financing of senior secured convertible notes is set to deliver $75 million in net proceeds, carrying 10% annual interest and maturing in 2031. The combined company plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker CUAS, the military acronym for counter-drone systems, with closing expected in the fourth quarter and an outside date of April 30, 2027.

The revenue side is thinner. Space-Eyes books $300,000 to $400,000 in existing annual awards, per Reuters, and the roughly $35 million pipeline it describes is spread over five years, with prospects that include government agencies and commercial operators such as cruise lines. Set against the $370 million enterprise value, the company is priced at roughly 370 times its current annual revenue.

The build-out since the announcement has been fast. Space-Eyes named four expected post-merger directors on August 21, among them Jim Reese, a retired Delta Force officer who founded the security firm TigerSwan, and Terry Meguid, who once ran worldwide investment banking at Morgan Stanley. On August 26, the company announced an exclusive option to acquire KMS Solutions, a U.S. Navy submarine engineering services firm, exercisable through December 31 and contingent on the McKinley merger closing. Bains said the combination would “create a stronger defense technology platform.”

The Trump Sons’ Drone Portfolio Keeps Growing

Space-Eyes is at least the fourth drone or counter-drone company tied to the president’s sons since late 2024, after Unusual Machines, Xtend, and Powerus. Bloomberg valued the family’s drone holdings, assembled largely through Texas-based American Ventures, at nearly $750 million in March.

Eric Trump backed XTEND’s $1.5 billion reverse merger with JFB Construction Holdings in February. The Israeli drone maker holds a Defense Department contract for attack systems and said in March it was mobilizing drone fabrication equipment at the request of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, per Bloomberg.

A month later the brothers backed Powerus, which is merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings. (Aureus operated two Florida golf courses before it became a drone company.) Trump Jr.’s Unusual Machines stake dates to late 2024, and the drone parts maker landed a Pentagon contract last October amid ethics concerns DroneXL reported at the time. By March, Bloomberg’s accounting put the family’s drone portfolio near $750 million, and it has only added positions since.

DroneXL’s Take

Access is becoming a line item in American drone-defense valuations. A company with $1 million in revenue does not command a $370 million enterprise value on engineering alone. The 6% Space-Eyes handed Eric Trump prices exactly what his agreement promises: conversations the rest of the industry cannot buy.

Hiring the connected is an old Washington sport, and nothing in the Journal’s reporting suggests this agreement breaks a rule. Space-Eyes may well have real technology; the Navy consortium work and the KMS option are not vapor. But I don’t believe the 370-times-revenue math is about Morpheus, the company’s counter-drone product.

I wrote two weeks ago that the tariff timeline changed my read on the Trump family’s drone investments, after years of treating the conflict-of-interest theory as overcooked. Space-Eyes fits the same shape: a company whose value turns on decisions, from Pentagon drone procurement to the DJI ban and the Section 232 tariffs, made by an administration run by the adviser’s father. The wire coverage treats each deal as a discrete transaction. Add them up and the market is pricing access.

DroneXL has argued for years against competition distorted by Chinese state subsidies. Competition distorted by family proximity to the White House is not an improvement. And the American drone operators paying higher hardware bills under the tariffs are the same people whose tax dollars fund the procurement these valuations are chasing.

The S-4 registration statement that unlocks the shareholder vote went on file August 12. That document, not the press releases, is where the advisory agreement and every insider stake sit on the record, and it is worth reading before the planned fourth-quarter close, with the April 30, 2027 outside date hanging over the deal. What Space-Eyes disclosed there is already saying more than any announcement has.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, SEC EDGAR, GlobeNewswire

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

FAA Doubles BEYOND Drone Program While the BVLOS Rule Sits Unfinished

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:50:00 GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration will double its BEYOND drone testing program, adding up to eight new lead participants to fly larger drones, longer distances, and altitudes above 400 feet (122 meters). The Transportation Department announced the Phase 2 expansion on Thursday.

Phase 1 tested small drones dropping food and light packages on doorsteps. Phase 2 goes after harder problems, an FAA official told Bloomberg: larger drones hauling cargo to remote and rural areas, and flights above the 400-foot ceiling that could collect weather data along the way.

DroneXL has covered BEYOND since October 2020, when the FAA built it on the remains of the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Six years and more than 70,000 flights later, the program is growing again. The rule it was created to inform still isn’t finished.

FAA Opens BEYOND Phase 2 to Larger Drones and Higher Flights

The FAA will select up to eight new state, local, tribal, and territorial lead participants for BEYOND Phase 2, doubling the program under Section 920 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. Applications run through SAM.gov, with selections to be made at a future date.

The Transportation Department’s announcement frames the expansion around beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, public safety missions, on-airport operations, and complex airspace environments. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, confirmed to the job in July 2025, said Phase 2 “will expand the partnerships and operations needed to address remaining challenges” in those environments.

The specifics came out through Bloomberg, where an FAA official said the agency wants to move past the doorstep deliveries of Phase 1 and examine larger drones moving cargo to places trucks struggle to reach. The official also pointed to flights over greater distances and above 400 feet, territory useful for gathering weather data. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy cast the expansion as a way to keep next-generation aviation developed, tested, and built in the United States.

Phase 1 Logged 70,563 Flights Across Eight Lead Participants

BEYOND launched on October 26, 2020, as the successor to the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Its eight lead participants flew 70,563 flights, 48,383 of them beyond visual line of sight. That flight data now underpins the FAA’s proposed Part 108 rule.

The original eight are the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the transportation departments of Kansas, North Carolina, and North Dakota, the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, the city of Reno, Nevada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, according to the FAA’s program page. All of them stay on for Phase 2, per Bloomberg. DroneXL covered the program’s launch when the Integration Pilot Program wound down, and has followed its participants since, including the Choctaw Nation’s medical supply flights earlier this year.

The work spans package delivery, police support, and pipeline and power line inspection, and the FAA also uses the program to gather community feedback on noise and privacy. Those complaints shape rulemaking as much as the flight logs do.

The Waiver System BEYOND Was Meant to Replace Still Stands

Commercial operators still need visual observers or a case-by-case waiver to fly beyond line of sight, six years after BEYOND began collecting the data meant to replace that system. The FAA proposed Part 108 in August 2025 and has not finalized it.

The agency unveiled the proposed BVLOS rule on August 5, 2025, promising a common set of standards in place of one-off approvals. Amazon Prime Air and Alphabet’s Wing have both said the waiver system stifles industry growth, per Bloomberg. Since then the process has crawled: the FAA reopened the comment period in January with a two-week deadline, then blew past its own deadline for the final rule in June. Earlier this month, the DOT called the delay deliberate, while Zipline warned the uncertainty is freezing drone investment.

The FAA says Phase 1 data helped write the forthcoming rule. Phase 2 data will presumably help write whatever comes after it.

DroneXL’s Take

Doubling BEYOND is the right call, and it is also the easy one. The hard call is finishing Part 108, the rule all this flying was supposed to produce. The FAA has spent over a year not making it, and eight more test sites won’t make it for the agency.

Credit where due: BEYOND is a real program, and the caution behind it is defensible. Big cargo drones above 400 feet share air with crop dusters, medevac helicopters, and general aviation, and testing that in Oklahoma and Alaska before writing it into national rules is exactly how this should work.

But the industry has all the evidence it needs. What it’s waiting on is a signature. Six years of flight logs, 48,383 BVLOS flights, a published proposal, and a reopened-and-closed comment docket already sit on the FAA’s desk. When the DOT said this month that the delay was deliberate, Zipline’s warning about frozen investment stopped being a hypothetical and became the cost of the schedule.

Thursday’s announcement puts a date on nothing. Participants will be selected “at a future date,” and the final rule gets no timeline at all. Watch which lands first: if the FAA names its new data collectors before it publishes the rule six years of data were gathered for, every operator stuck in the waiver line will draw the obvious conclusion. My read is that the expansion is worth applauding exactly once, and then the only question that matters is the one the announcement didn’t answer.

Sources: Bloomberg, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration

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

US Army Throws 1,900 Drones at Its Own Paratroopers in Germany

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:35:00 GMT

The US Army’s resident opposing force in Germany is turning 1,900 autonomous systems on the 173rd Airborne Brigade during Saber Junction 26, the most tech-heavy edition of the annual exercise to date. The 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment laid out its arsenal at the Hohenfels Training Area on Wednesday, hours before more than 3,300 Sky Soldiers were set to parachute in and defend against it.

The fight spans space, the cyber arena, and electronic warfare, with replicated long-range artillery strikes layered on top. About 5,500 troops from 11 nations are taking part, including Ukraine, and the exercise runs through September 13. For the Italy-based 173rd, it is the brigade’s first Saber Junction in two years, and the battlefield waiting for it has changed.

Opposing Force Turns Hohenfels Into a Drone-Saturated Battlefield

Saber Junction 26 runs through September 13 at the Hohenfels Training Area in Bavaria, with about 5,500 troops from 11 nations, including Ukraine. The 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, the resident opposition force, is fielding 1,900 autonomous systems against the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

“We have 1,900 autonomous systems in this rotation. That’s a lot,” Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis, who leads the 7th Army Training Command, told Stars and Stripes as he surveyed the equipment on the eve of the exercise.

The opposition force commander, Lt. Col. Michael Cryer, expects the returning paratroopers to bring their own upgrades. “Everybody’s adapting right now. This will be a good test,” he said.

Per U.S. Army Europe and Africa, about 3,360 of the roughly 5,480 participating troops come from the 173rd, with the rest drawn from allies including Germany, Italy, Poland, and Ukraine, whose drone operators once wiped out two NATO battalions in a single exercise day. The exercise tests regional plans under NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative against a peer adversary modeled on the Russian military.

Skydio X10 and Neros Archer Headline the OPFOR Drone Arsenal

The opposition force’s reconnaissance and attack lineup includes the Skydio X10, Vesper, eBee Vision, Vector AI and Stork surveillance drones, Neros Archer first-person-view attack drones, and the C100, a multi-purpose quadcopter that can observe targets or drop munitions, according to Stars and Stripes.

These are not exotic test articles. The Army placed a $52 million order for Skydio X10D drones in March. Neros made its first deliveries under the Army’s Purpose Built Attritable Systems program in March, the same month it launched the Archer Block 2. And Performance Drone Works’ C100 lased targets for F-35 precision strikes in a test last year. The mock enemy at Hohenfels is flying the same hardware the real Army is buying.

“This is the future right now,” said Sgt. 1st Class Eric Navarro, a drone expert with the battalion, adding that anyone who can’t hide from these systems is in for a bad day.

The drones feed a new reconnaissance company, fielded in January and led by Capt. Luther Salmon, that specializes in reconnaissance at all ranges and pipes real-time battlefield intelligence to exercise planners.

EchoShield Radar and Jammers Back the Drone Fleet

Sgt. Robert Nemec’s team laid out the electronic warfare side of the kit. The TLS Manpack and Beast+ detect and disrupt enemy communications, the EchoShield radar tracks drones at range, and a vehicle-mounted Titan detector-jammer and handheld Mk4 drone gun round out the counter-drone tools.

EchoShield is Echodyne’s high-fidelity radar, the same sensor family behind the company’s $490 million Air Force counter-drone deal in June. (Handheld drone guns have a prominent skeptic: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has trashed the Dronebuster in public.)

The opposition force also set out inflatable decoy vehicles, a page from the Ukraine war’s playbook, meant to soak up the attention of the 173rd’s own reconnaissance drones.

3rd Battalion, 504th Presents Its Ukraine Lessons on the Way Out

A battalion from the 173rd will present what it learned about drone tactics from the Ukrainian military during the exercise. It will be the unit’s last act in that role. The Army ordered 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment back to core infantry tasks in August.

The Army stood the unit up in January 2026 with about 600 soldiers, built to absorb the lessons of Ukraine’s drone war. Seven months later, acting Army chief of staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve ordered it phased out, directing the battalion to return to its “core warfighting tasks” as airborne infantry once Saber Junction ends. Its lessons-learned presentation at Hohenfels doubles as a farewell.

The opposition force’s drone reconnaissance company, meanwhile, was fielded that same January.

DroneXL’s Take

The Army just built the strongest argument against its own decision and parked it in Bavaria. You do not put 1,900 autonomous systems into your premier European exercise to stress-test a fad, and then dissolve the one battalion you created to master that exact fight.

When the order came down last week, I called the 3-504th collateral damage in a changing of the guard, in “US Army Kills the Drone Battalion It Created Just Seven Months Ago.” Hohenfels is now staging my argument for me: the most drone-saturated Saber Junction on record, run while the unit built for this fight packs up.

There is a real case for the back-to-basics move. Drone skills belong in every rifle squad, not quarantined in one boutique battalion, and a lessons brief at Saber Junction is exactly how you spread them. But dispersal without ownership is how lessons evaporate. Ukraine ran this experiment under fire and went the other way: it stood up an entire Unmanned Systems Forces branch in 2024 rather than folding its drone crews back into the infantry.

Watch what happens to the 3-504th’s brief before the exercise wraps on September 13. If it turns into published doctrine and a training pipeline, the dispersal story holds. If it gets filed away while the opposition force keeps its drone company, the Army will have taught its best drone lessons to the unit that plays the enemy.

Source: Stars and Stripes, U.S. Army Europe and Africa

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

SiFly Raises $20M to Build 1,000 US Drones With Chinese Motors

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:26:15 GMT

SiFly has raised $20 million in Series A funding to start production of its Q12 long-endurance drone, with the first revenue-generating deliveries now targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Shield Capital led the round, joined by Qudit, BBK Capital and Alumni Ventures, among others. Founder and CEO Brian Hinman says the money buys roughly 18 months of runway.

The Santa Clara, California company expects to ship about 1,000 Q12s next year from a planned manufacturing site in Sunnyvale. That is a real step for a drone that, when DroneXL covered its May 2025 unveiling, was supposed to start deliveries in Q4 2025. Production has not begun.

Hinman is open about the tension underneath the round: U.S. restrictions on Chinese drones are pushing demand up, and the Q12’s motors still come from China.

SiFly Plans 1,000 Drones a Year From a Sunnyvale Plant

SiFly expects to ship roughly 1,000 Q12 drones in 2027, built at a 15,000-square-foot facility the company is negotiating to lease in Sunnyvale, California. Production has not started yet, and the first revenue-generating deliveries are targeted for the first quarter of 2027, Hinman told Aviation Week.

The Sunnyvale site should carry the company for about 18 months, Hinman told Aviation Week; after that, manufacturing could move to Arizona or Texas. SiFly’s announcement of the round says the money also funds continued work on its DronePort infrastructure and the regulatory side of the business.

The aircraft itself has receipts. The Q12, a quadcopter with a 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) maximum takeoff weight built for endurance and forward flight, set a Guinness World Record on July 26, 2025, with a flight of 3 hours and 11 minutes over California’s Salinas Valley, certified by an adjudicator on site. SiFly pitched the Q12 at its unveiling as a 10-pound-payload, 90-mile (145-kilometer) aircraft for public safety, inspection, mapping and agriculture, and that target market has not changed.

The timeline has. Q1 2027 is five quarters past the delivery date SiFly gave at launch, and Hinman knows what that costs a startup: nobody takes a drone maker seriously, he says, until a lot of units are shipping and people are validating the product.

SiFly’s American Drone Still Runs on Chinese Motors

SiFly sources the Q12’s motors from China and assembles its batteries in Malaysia. Assembling those motors in the United States from globally sourced parts would cost roughly three times as much, Hinman says. Domestic-content rules that reach deeper into the supply chain push the price higher still.

None of that conflicts with the NDAA-compliant label SiFly puts on the Q12: the component rules police where a drone’s cameras and radios come from, not its motors, a distinction DroneXL unpacked in its NDAA-compliant drones guide. It does mean the “American drone” label sits on top of a bill of materials that still runs through China, the pattern DroneXL documented this month in its reporting on the American drone component gap (and the pressure point China squeezed in 2024, when sanctions cut off Skydio’s battery supplier).

The military’s ambitions go further than assembly. Hinman says the military wants motors whose metal is dug out of American ground, down to the neodymium in the magnets. “We need rare earths to make good magnets. That’s just not physically possible today,” he said.

DronePort Fits a Drone Fleet in a Parking Space

SiFly’s DronePort packs three or four Q12s into the footprint of a 20-foot (6-meter) shipping container, occupying about a single parking space. Drones land on the roof and are lowered inside, and Hinman says customers increasingly want the aircraft and the automated base sold as one system.

Beyond the Q12, SiFly is continuing design work on the Q250, a heavy-lift drone conceived around agricultural spraying, with cargo and firefighting behind it on Hinman’s list. He argues the spraying market gets more attractive as restrictions squeeze the Chinese suppliers who dominate it. DJI controls roughly 80 percent of the U.S. agricultural spray market, as DroneXL reported when the Agras T55 and T100 launched globally in July with no word on U.S. availability.

The Series A does not cover full Q250 development. Hinman says that will take more equity and potentially debt. For now, the job is getting Q12s out the door.

DroneXL’s Take

SiFly is one of the more credible American drone stories going, and I don’t hand that out easily. The endurance record was certified by a Guinness adjudicator in a Salinas Valley field, not claimed in a render, and Hinman admits nobody takes you seriously until units ship.

That honesty is rarer in this industry than it should be. It also cuts against SiFly itself: the company has already let one ship date slide, from Q4 2025 to Q1 2027, so its credibility now rides entirely on the new quarter.

But read what this round actually documents. Washington’s restrictions are driving the demand SiFly is raising against, and the drone answering that demand flies on Chinese motors because American assembly would triple the cost. Yes, the restrictions are working as intended in one sense: they are minting real orders for real American aircraft. My read is that they are minting demand far faster than anyone is building the layer underneath it. Banning Chinese aircraft without building the domestic base of motors and magnets underneath them doesn’t end the dependence; it moves it one layer down the bill of materials, where it is harder to see and, per Hinman’s own math, three times as expensive to fix. Skydio’s battery crisis was the warning shot. Hinman saying domestic rare-earth sourcing is “just not physically possible today” is the industry stating it on the record.

Watch Q1 2027. If revenue-generating Q12s are in customers’ hands by spring, SiFly will have done something no press release can: shipped.

Sources: Aviation Week, SiFly via PR Newswire

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

Taiwan Approves $7.6 Billion Drone Buildup, Rejects Lai's Own Plan

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:54:00 GMT

Taiwan’s legislature approved up to NT$240 billion (US$7.56 billion) in drone spending over the next six years on Thursday, and in the same session voted down the NT$210 billion (US$6.6 billion) special budget President Lai Ching-te’s government had requested to build its drone fleet. The opposition-drafted Act on Strengthening Defense Autonomy and Developing the Unmanned Vehicles Industry passed 60 to 50 in the 113-seat Legislative Yuan.

The result is more money on paper than the Cabinet asked for, delivered in a form the defense ministry says it cannot work with. Instead of a dedicated multi-year fund, the act draws roughly NT$40 billion a year from the regular budget, under new legislative oversight, and hands part of the program to the economy ministry.

The goal itself is not in dispute in Taipei. The government wants roughly 210,000 new military drones by 2031, modeled on Ukraine’s drone war, to make a Chinese invasion harder and to build a drone industry that can supply democracies without touching Chinese factories.

Opposition Lawmakers Swapped Lai’s Budget for Their Own Act

The Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party used their legislative majority to pass the Act on Strengthening Defense Autonomy and Developing the Unmanned Vehicles Industry, 60 votes to 50, while voting down the Cabinet’s NT$210 billion (US$6.6 billion) special drone budget the same day.

The opposition parties wrote their objections into law, Focus Taiwan reported. The act caps spending at NT$40 billion a year in principle and allows increases with legislative approval. It creates a drone development committee staffed partly by experts the legislative caucuses recommend, requires that committee to meet every six months, and puts major procurements in front of lawmakers. General industry development goes to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, while the military buys through the Ministry of National Defense.

KMT legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin said the government “cannot simply come asking for money every time without any oversight,” according to the Taipei Times. Senior KMT lawmaker Lai Shyh-bao argued against buying in bulk at all: order a huge quantity at once and “it will quickly become out of date.”

The Defense Ministry Says the Money Comes With the Wrong Strings

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense wanted a dedicated six-year special budget it could spend on its own schedule. The new act draws the NT$240 billion from regular annual budgets instead, with a NT$40 billion yearly baseline the ministry says is too low.

Defense Minister Wellington Koo told lawmakers before the vote that the annual cap would keep Taiwan from building real drone combat power, and his ministry has already programmed NT$42.1 billion in drone spending for 2027, more than the act’s baseline in its first full year. After the vote, the ministry said it regretted the outcome and that the rejected plan rested on internal assessments and coordination with allied nations, Reuters reported.

President Lai had made a final push for the special budget a day earlier, calling it “an important step for Taiwan to demonstrate its determination for self-defence.” Premier Cho Jung-tai said the Cabinet will now weigh whether the act meets the nation’s defense needs. DPP legislator Fan Yun warned that the annual-budget route creates uncertainty for industry and defense alike, and she has a fresh example: the 2026 general budget cleared the legislature only this month, after record delays (the drone line items survived). Her party also objects that caucus-picked committee seats invite politicization and Chinese infiltration, and that reporting procurements to the legislature exposes military secrets.

Taiwan Wants 210,000 Drones Built Without Chinese Parts

The government’s plan calls for roughly 210,000 new military drones, aerial and undersea, built on a supply chain free of Chinese components. Taiwan’s military planners modeled the buildup on Ukraine’s drone war. China currently dominates global drone production by a wide margin.

Taiwanese planners have studied Ukraine and Iran closely, and Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim summed up the timing to the Wall Street Journal: “Better late than never.” DroneXL has followed this shift since Taiwan began rebuilding its drone program around Ukraine’s lessons in 2024, and the fleet the government wants is the hardware half of the drone “hellscape” the Pentagon has said should be waiting in the strait.

The industrial half matters just as much. Taiwan has spent two years selling itself as the democratic alternative to China’s drone supply chain, courting Western buyers with drones built without Chinese parts. American partners are already on the island: three weeks ago, Shield AI handed Taiwan’s NCSIST sovereign control of AI drone pilots after training Taiwanese engineers to run the autonomy stack themselves.

DroneXL’s Take

Nobody in Taipei voted against drones on Thursday: both versions of this program agree Taiwan needs drones by the tens of thousands, built without Chinese parts. The fight was over who controls the checkbook, and the loser is every manufacturer trying to plan a production line.

The KMT’s best argument is real. Lai Shyh-bao is right that drones go stale: Ukraine cycles through airframe designs in months, and a warehouse full of this year’s models ages fast. Annual review of a fast-moving program is not a crazy idea.

But that argument cuts against stockpiling hardware, not against committing money. What a six-year special budget buys is not 210,000 drones on day one; it is the demand certainty that lets a Taiwanese manufacturer hire, tool up, and refuse Chinese components without betting the company on next year’s legislative session. My read is that the act’s authors understand this perfectly well, which is why the NT$240 billion headline number is bigger than the budget they killed. The number is the message. The annual chokepoint is the mechanism.

Watch the 2027 defense budget when it reaches the legislature. The ministry says it needs NT$42.1 billion for drones next year alone, and the act’s baseline is NT$40 billion. Whether the majority that wrote the cap votes through the first exception to it will show whether Thursday was industrial policy or opposition politics wearing its uniform.

Sources: Focus Taiwan, Taipei Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal

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

Ukraine Hands UK Its Drone War Data: 100,000 Combat Videos a Month

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:45:00 GMT

Ukraine will hand the United Kingdom access to Avengers AI Labs, the Defense Ministry platform that takes in about 100,000 drone video feeds a month, making Britain the first foreign partner allowed inside the country’s battlefield AI training archive.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and British Prime Minister Andy Burnham signed the agreement in Kyiv on Monday, August 24, as part of the two countries’ 100 Year Partnership. British companies and researchers get the data to train and test military AI models.

Kyiv has been advertising this opening since March, when then-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov offered allied companies access to millions of strike videos. London is the first to sign for the full archive, and it is paying with more than research help. The UK cleared missile-maker MBDA to release classified information on British components of the SCALP cruise missile so Ukraine can assemble the weapon locally.

Avengers AI Labs Holds Five Million Images of Russia’s Army

Avengers AI Labs is the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s training platform for military AI. It pulls footage from thousands of daylight cameras and infrared sensors along the front, and its archive holds about five million battlefield images and video frames of Russian tanks, artillery, air defenses, and infantry.

The sensors also track what Russia puts in the air, including Shahed attack drones and reconnaissance UAVs, according to the UK government’s August 24 announcement. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has said the platform’s models flag about 70 percent of enemy targets in real time. The five million images and the 100,000 monthly feeds are the ministry’s own counts too, reported by The Record; nobody outside the system has audited any of these numbers. (A 70 percent real-time hit rate is a figure I’d love to see benchmarked outside a war zone.)

British AI minister Kanishka Narayan called the arrangement “AI sovereignty in practice.” The trade itself is proven inside Ukraine: SkyFall trained its Shahed interceptors on thousands of combat videos and got machines that spot incoming drones faster than a pilot’s eyes.

Britain Pays With Pilot Projects and SCALP Missile Secrets

The UK’s side of the deal runs through its companies. Sintela of Bristol, Mind Foundry of Oxford, and Skyral of London will open pilot projects with Ukrainian partners. And MBDA has been cleared to release classified data on British SCALP components for assembly lines inside Ukraine.

Sintela’s project turns buried fiber-optic cable into an AI-enabled sensor grid for military bases, aimed at what the government’s announcement describes as protesters and hostile actors alike. The Kyiv Post reports the pilots also cover low-power AI chips for drones.

Burnham said Ukraine “has become one of the world’s leading innovators in defence technology.” He is buying proof, not praise. As DroneXL reported in July, Kyiv is negotiating security agreements with seven NATO countries, and the aircraft are the smallest part of what it sells. The product is the know-how, and this archive is its purest form.

Germany Beat Britain to Ukraine’s Data by Four Months

Britain is the first partner inside Avengers AI Labs, but not the first to tap Ukraine’s war data. Ukraine announced a similar partnership with Germany in April, built on the Delta battlefield system, and Kyiv has courted allied buyers since March. Washington has a hardware framework and no data agreement.

Delta is the system US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll conceded his own force cannot match, as DroneXL reported yesterday. In a NATO exercise in Estonia, Ukrainian operators running it disabled 17 armored vehicles and rendered two NATO battalions combat-ineffective in about half a day.

The July statement of intent between Washington and Kyiv covers exporting Ukrainian drones for US testing and eventual joint production. Nothing in it opens Ukraine’s data archives, and no American Avengers agreement has been announced.

When Fedorov floated open access in March, I asked in Fedorov’s Gamble whether open-source battlefield data could beat Russian jamming, and expected allied-nation firms to sign data-access agreements with the ministry within six months. The UK deal, which opens the archive to British companies, landed inside that window. The humanitarian objections to training strike autonomy on combat footage were already on the table in March. They have not gone away. They now have a signature under them.

DroneXL’s Take

Data is the one commodity Ukraine holds more of than anyone, and it is spending it like a currency. Germany got Delta access in April. Britain got Avengers in August, with declassified SCALP components as the sweetener. Seven NATO countries are in line for security agreements built on the same expertise. Every one of these deals converts four years of blood-bought footage into bargaining power and production lines.

My read: the loudest thing about this deal is the country missing from it. Washington signed a July framework to test and co-produce Ukrainian drones, and its Army secretary spent this week conceding that his force has no answer to Delta. The nation that leads the world in AI infrastructure has not signed for the best military AI training set in existence, while its closest allies sign up one by one. Whether Driscoll’s public concession converts into an American Avengers agreement is the thing to watch through the fall. The April and August deals show Kyiv is ready to sign.

The strongest objection to all of this is real. This archive will train systems that pick targets with shrinking human review, and the failure modes are not hypothetical: a Russian AI drone chose a Zaporizhzhia gas station on its own and killed three civilians in July. That is the case for putting this data inside accountable militaries with rules of engagement, not the case against sharing it. Machine targeting is coming to every front whether London signs or not. Ukraine paid for this dataset in lives. Its allies would be negligent to leave it unread.

Source: UK Government, The Record, Kyiv Post

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

US Intel Ties Leipzig Drone Bomb To Russia's GRU

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:39:00 GMT

The explosive drone found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport this month was built the way Russia’s military intelligence directorate builds them, a US intelligence source briefed on the investigation told ABC News. The explosives and the device’s construction were “typical” of the GRU, the source said, an assessment reached together with German security and intelligence agencies.

The drone crossed the airport fence at 19:28 on August 4, flew into the wing of a parked Antonov An-124, and dropped to the apron without detonating. The US source said the triggering mechanism was disconnected. Germany has not formally named a culprit, but Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week that investigators will present their findings soon, and that those responsible will pay.

Moscow is already objecting, and the evidence keeps piling up: German investigators have since recovered another drone and a cache of military explosive near the airport.

US Assessment Matches The Leipzig Device To A GRU Signature

The US official briefed on the investigation said both the explosives and the structure of the device were typical of those Russia’s GRU uses, an assessment made in conjunction with German security services. It sharpens earlier US reporting that the drone likely belonged to the Russian government.

That earlier assessment surfaced in the Wall Street Journal in the first week of the case, when US intelligence tied the drone to the Russian state without naming an agency, as DroneXL reported on August 9. The official who spoke to ABC News went further on both counts: the GRU specifically, and a judgment shared with the German agencies running the investigation.

The forensics were already pointing the same way. The charge combined Semtex and PETN, up to 800 grams of it according to Leipziger Volkszeitung reporting that remains single-source, packed onto a quadcopter that sat on the apron for roughly four hours before a bus driver found it feet from the An-124 it had struck. DNA recovered from the device matched a trace from the July 2024 DHL parcel fire at the same airport, a plot Western investigators attributed to the GRU, plus a profile registered in Lithuania. Same airport, same playbook.

The US source also offered the first explanation of why the bomb never went off: its triggering mechanism was disconnected. Federal police still sent a robot to pull the detonator before anyone touched the device.

Merz Promises Findings While Moscow Cries Foul

Chancellor Friedrich Merz says German agencies are working intensively on the Leipzig case and will present findings shortly. Those behind hybrid attacks on Germany will pay, he said. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, meanwhile, accused German politicians of blaming Moscow before the investigation produced results.

Merz spoke to reporters on August 25, ahead of a closed-door cabinet meeting at Neuhardenberg Castle, and said Germany had “increasingly become a target for hybrid attackers.” European officials use the term for the sabotage, arson, and disinformation operations that have spread across the continent since 2022, the campaign that pushed Brussels toward the drone wall Ursula von der Leyen pitched last October. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has said many indications point to a state actor, while declining to name one.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, got its rebuttal in early. In a statement on Monday, it accused German politicians and European media of reaching a conclusion “without even waiting for the preliminary results of the investigation.” (Concern for investigative rigor is a new look for the SVR.)

Investigators Keep Finding Hardware Around Leipzig

German investigators have kept finding hardware since August 4: a third drone in a field at Kabelsketal west of the airport on August 14, roughly 50 grams (1.8 ounces) of the military explosive hexogen at the same site, and a control device taped to a tree in Kursdorf.

NDR, WDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the finds on August 25, citing investigators, per ZDFheute’s account of their reporting. The hexogen turned up at the drone’s find site in Kabelsketal, while the control device, an antenna and electronics north of the airport in Kursdorf, sat near scorched ground and metal fragments, per Euronews. The German outlets count the Kabelsketal drone as the third device in the case, after the armed drone on the apron and the suspected mothership DroneXL covered on August 10. Federal police told ABC News that ongoing investigations rule out further comment.

The backdrop is an airport under sustained pressure. US officials told ABC News there have been 18 drone incidents disrupting air traffic at Leipzig/Halle since January 2026. The field is a major cargo hub that the US military and NATO allies use to move armaments to Ukraine, and investigators believe the armed drone was designed to disable aircraft parked on the airfield, delaying weapons shipments, and to put Germany on notice over its support for Kyiv. Nor is Leipzig alone this month: days after the bomb was found, drones circled the Bundeswehr’s Patriot repair base at Mechernich.

DroneXL’s Take

The US assessment doesn’t settle who flew a bomb into a parked An-124, but stacked on the DNA evidence and the 2024 parcel plot, it comes close enough that I’ve stopped treating attribution as the open question. The open question is what Germany does about it.

The SVR is formally right that Berlin hasn’t published its results, and I’ll grant that much. But when the DNA on the drone matches a trace from a parcel-bomb plot at the same airport two years earlier, and the US signature analysis lands on the same agency Western investigators blamed for those parcels, outrage about premature conclusions is theater. Deniability is what the GRU sells. Hallmark-level attribution is as close as sabotage cases get to a confession, short of an indictment, and this one keeps producing physical evidence: a suspected mothership, a control node taped to a tree, a cache of hexogen in the dirt. The GRU’s drone logistics have a habit of surfacing in the open lately, including the officer who ran a drone-parts pipeline out of Japan until he fled in July.

So watch what Merz attaches to the word pay. His government’s response in the three weeks DroneXL has covered this case has been genuinely fast by German standards: the federal counter-drone unit is doubling to 300 officers, and a counter-drone radar, reported to be an American EchoShield, went up on the old Leipzig tower within a week. All of it defensive. None of it a price. Merz promised findings shortly, and the federal prosecutor general holds the case, so the naming part is scheduled in all but date. Whether anything follows the naming is the part Berlin hasn’t signaled, and Germany’s record in this case so far is hardening targets, not imposing costs.

Sources: ABC News, Euronews, ZDFheute

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

Navy Buys Attack Drone Subs Built in a Philly Marble Showroom

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:45:00 GMT

A 20-month-old startup with 25 employees is building weaponized undersea drones inside a former marble and granite showroom on Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, and the U.S. Navy is on the delivery list.

The company is Albacore, founded in early 2025 by Dante Vaisbort and John Huddleston, who put the first prototype together on a kitchen table near Rittenhouse Square. It says it has raised more than $10 million and holds a contract to supply the Navy. Units are also headed to Taiwan and to buyers Albacore declined to name.

Its product, Ghostfin, is an autonomous mini-submarine built to cross 1,000 nautical miles (1,151 miles) and put a kinetic payload into a warship. On August 25, Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler and Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, toured the 20,000-square-foot plant to promote domestic weapons manufacturing.

Albacore’s Own Spec Sheet Lists a 200-Pound Payload

Albacore publishes Ghostfin’s numbers: a 102-inch base length, a 12.75-inch outer diameter, 425 pounds dry weight, 1,000 nautical miles of range, 30 days of endurance, and a maximum payload of 200 pounds. The founders described a 250-pound weapons payload to WHYY.

That 50-pound gap between the pitch and the published figure is worth pinning down before anyone signs for a fleet. Everything else lines up across sources, including the battery design Albacore credits for the range, which the company says gives Ghostfin ten times the transit distance of comparably sized vehicles.

The vehicle has also grown. Albacore’s Y Combinator listing from the Summer 2025 batch describes a six-foot drone submarine. The current spec sheet lists a 102-inch base length, which is 8.5 feet, with mission modules bolting on from there. Everything is built from commercial off-the-shelf parts so production doesn’t need specialized machinery, and two people can launch one from a beach, a pier, or a boat.

The Ghostfin autonomous underwater vehicle shown in profile, its slender black hull topped by a sensor mast and antenna. Photo credit: Albacore

Early prototypes went into the Schuylkill River. Testing since then has moved to Florida.

Ukraine’s Sea Drones Wrote Albacore’s Business Case

Huddleston traces the company’s founding to the war in Ukraine, where unmanned systems exposed how unprepared the United States was for that kind of fighting. Ukrainian crews have spent three years proving that small, cheap unmanned boats can damage and sink warships worth hundreds of millions.

That record is not theoretical. DroneXL reported in June 2025 that a Ukrainian Magura V7 drone boat shot down Russian fighter jets, a world first. Last December, Ukraine claimed an underwater drone crippled a $500 million Russian submarine. The U.S. Navy had already started moving toward sea drones in 2024.

Huddleston said each Ghostfin “can do severe damage to gray-hulled vessels,” using the military term for warships. Vaisbort describes the technology as “a scaled-down version of what was used in World War II submarines,” rebuilt in a mass-producible autonomous form.

Two Federal Agencies Toured a South Philadelphia Showroom

Loeffler and Cadenazzi visited Albacore on August 25 to promote domestic weapons production. Loeffler told reporters on the tour that small businesses make up 70% of the U.S. defense industrial base, and credited recent tax changes including immediate expensing for research and development and 100% expensing for capital investment.

“This is happening in Pennsylvania, in downtown Philadelphia,” Loeffler said during the tour. Washington Avenue is South Philly rather than downtown, but the geography wasn’t the point of the visit. Cadenazzi’s office runs industrial base policy for the Department of War, including small business participation and Defense Production Act programs.

Albacore intends to build 75 vehicles a year at the Washington Avenue site and eventually several thousand. It plans to at least triple its 25-person staff within a year, hiring recent high school and college graduates alongside engineers from other aerospace manufacturers. Andrew Wong, the company’s associate director of federal affairs, described the assembly work this way: “It’s almost like building Legos, very complicated Legos, albeit.”

Vaisbort cited Philadelphia’s shipbuilding history as a reason to base the company here. Hanwha Philly Shipyard was awarded $2 billion in July to build two missile-tracking vessels for the Missile Defense Agency.

Taiwan Deliveries Put Ghostfin Inside the Indo-Pacific Plan

Albacore names coastal defense of an island like Taiwan as its lead use case, and units are headed there. Huddleston argues that enough Ghostfins in a waterway make an amphibious invasion impractical, which is the same arithmetic behind the Pentagon’s thinking on the Taiwan Strait.

That thinking has a name. Admiral Samuel Paparo’s drone hellscape strategy calls for flooding the strait with thousands of cheap unmanned systems to buy time during an invasion. Ghostfin is the underwater version of that idea, at a price point that assumes losses.

Australia got there first with a partner. Anduril’s Ghost Shark went from concept to a A$1.7 billion (about $1.1 billion) five-year contract with the Royal Australian Navy in roughly three years, and the company opened a Sydney factory to build them. Albacore is aiming much smaller and much cheaper, which is the entire argument for buying hundreds instead of dozens.

DroneXL’s Take

A 20-month-old undersea startup got a Navy contract and a cabinet-level tour this week. Six days from now, on September 2, the FCC’s comment window closes on a proposal to ban previously authorized foreign drones that American operators already own and fly.

Section 232 drone tariffs take effect the day after that. Same government, same week, two opposite theories of how you build an industry.

One objection is fair. An armed submarine built in Philadelphia and a Chinese quadcopter on a roof inspection are not the same policy problem, and the data questions attached to the second one are real. But the FCC docket doesn’t stop at data. It reaches hardware Americans already bought, and there’s no domestic replacement at that price for the operators who lose it. Washington is funding one kind of American drone capability while pulling another off the market, and calling both industrial policy.

What nobody has said is what the Navy actually bought. No contract value, no program name, no delivery date, and no award announcement from the Navy or the Department of War. Albacore’s own public news listing still stops at last October’s $6.5 million seed round. For a company whose entire argument is mass production at scale, the difference between a handful of evaluation units and a program of record is the whole company, and that number is missing from the middle of the story.

The way I read Tuesday’s tour, the government showed up because the narrative is excellent. Kitchen table to Navy supplier in 20 months, inside a marble showroom. That story writes itself, and it deserves the attention. The model underneath it is proven, just not by the Pentagon. Ukraine proved it in public, with cheap hulls and a feedback loop measured in weeks.

So the real test of Ghostfin isn’t whether it works underwater. It’s whether American procurement can actually buy 75 of them a year from a company that had a wall of 3D printers in a Rittenhouse Square apartment 20 months ago.

Source: WHYY.

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

Insta360's $250 Link 2 Pro Webcam Goes Arctic White, Specs Unchanged

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:48:00 GMT

Insta360 released Arctic White versions of the Link 2 Pro and Link 2C Pro on Thursday, August 27, 2026, at the same prices as the black models: $249.99 and $199.99. The sensor, lens, microphones, gimbal and software are identical to the Graphite Black units.

Both webcams have been on sale worldwide since January 13, 2026, when Insta360 launched them at CES. The white bodies go on sale the same day the announcement went out, through Insta360’s own store, Amazon and authorized retailers. The company describes the finish as “designed to complement bright, modern workspaces, home offices and creator setups.”

What has actually changed since January sits in the software, not the shell.

Insta360 Kept Every Spec And Changed Only The Shell

The Arctic White Link 2 Pro carries the same 1/1.3-inch sensor as the black model, paired with a 24mm equivalent f/1.9 lens and dual native ISO running from 100 to 3200. A 2-axis gimbal physically pans and tilts to track a presenter. The Link 2C Pro drops the gimbal and keeps the imaging.

Insta360 rates that sensor at 2.23 times the photosensitive area of the older Link 2, with 2.4-micron equivalent pixels. Maximum field of view is 83.9 degrees diagonal, and the Link 2 Pro body weighs 102.5 g (3.6 oz) bare, 167.5 g (5.9 oz) once the magnetic mount is attached. The 2C Pro comes in at 48.5 g (1.71 oz).

Video tops out at 4K30, with 60fps available only at 1080p and below, over a USB 2.0 connection. No amount of paint moves that ceiling.

Insta360's AI 4K webcam in Arctic White keeps the speaker framed while background distractions stay out of the shot. Photo credit: Insta360

One line the release does not contain: any mention of a limited run. When Insta360 put the Ace Pro 2 in Arctic White in June, it labeled those bundles a Limited Edition. These webcams carry no such wording, which reads as a permanent second colorway rather than a drop. It follows the same play the company ran on the Insta360 X6 launch and across the rest of its 2026 release calendar: ship, then keep the SKU list growing.

Link Controller Picked Up A Teleprompter And Custom Overlays

Insta360’s Link Controller software now includes a teleprompter that holds a script beside the lens while you present, plus Custom Overlays for dropping text, images and video into the outgoing feed. Both landed after the January launch, and both work on the black cameras too.

Integration with Insta360 InSight adds meeting transcription and auto-generated summaries, some of it behind a paid subscription. Elgato Stream Deck support handles exposure, presets and mode switching from physical keys, and WaveLink Pro ties the Link 2 Pro to Insta360’s Wave speakerphone so that whoever is talking gets the camera’s attention.

The audio hardware is a directional and an omnidirectional microphone with beamforming, offering four pickup modes: Standard, Wide, Focus and Original. Focus mode narrows the pickup to roughly one meter in front of the camera.

Insta360's AI 4K webcam in Arctic White mounted on a desktop monitor in a bright home-office setup. Photo credit: Insta360

Natural Bokeh Locks Out AMD Cards And Intel Macs

Natural Bokeh is the feature with hard limits attached. Insta360’s spec sheet requires an NVIDIA GTX 1080 or RTX 2060 and above on Windows, and states plainly that AMD GPUs are not supported. On macOS it needs Apple Silicon, with Intel Macs excluded outright.

Green Screen has its own tiering. Windows machines with NVIDIA cards below a GTX 1050 Ti cannot run it, while non-NVIDIA Windows GPUs reach 4K. Intel Macs cap at 1080p. Background Replacer works on all NVIDIA hardware, and Insta360 lists six specific AMD Radeon cards it has verified.

Buried in the footnotes: the Insta360 Virtual Camera, which is what actually delivers Whiteboard Mode, Natural Bokeh and the beautify tools to Zoom or Teams, does not support 50fps or 60fps at all.

Insta360's AI 4K webcam in its new Arctic White finish, mounted on a laptop during a video call. Photo credit: Insta360

DroneXL’s Take

A paint job is not news, and I am not going to dress it up as one. The cadence behind it is the part worth ten seconds.

Insta360 has shipped the X6, the Luna Ultra, an Arctic White Ace Pro 2 and now a white webcam pair this year, every one of them orderable by an American buyer on day one. DJI spent that same year unable to get an Osmo Pocket 4 or a Mic Mini 2S onto a US product page. Two Shenzhen camera companies, one FCC Covered List, and only one of them gets to run a normal product calendar. That the two firms were comfortable enough to drop their Texas patent suits against each other in July says something about who feels the pressure and who does not. Insta360 also co-engineered the Antigravity A1, an 8K 360 drone that flies over American backyards without an FCC problem, which makes the drone-specific security logic harder to follow every month it goes unexplained.

For anyone actually reaching for a card: check your GPU before you check the color. Background replacement and bokeh are a real chunk of what the Pro premium buys, and on a Windows box with an AMD card or on an Intel Mac, you are paying $249.99 for a webcam that will not run them.

Sources: Insta360 Link 2 Pro product page, Insta360 launch announcement, Insta360 press release dated August 27, 2026.

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

GoPro's 197-Gram 8K Cinema Camera Takes MFT Lenses For $699.99, Manual Focus Only

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 03:18:00 GMT

GoPro opened pre-orders Wednesday for the MISSION 1 PRO ILS, an 8K cinema camera with a Micro Four Thirds lens mount that weighs 197 grams (6.95 ounces) and sells for $699.99, or $599.99 for existing GoPro subscribers. Pre-order units ship next week and retail availability starts globally in September.

The weight is the number that matters here. A RED Komodo brain, the camera at the center of both custom cinelifter builds DroneXL covered this year, weighs 2.10 pounds (950 grams) before a lens or a battery goes on it. The ILS body is roughly a fifth of that and accepts the same category of glass.

GoPro put the constraint in an endnote instead of the headline. The camera has no electronic contacts, so focus and aperture are manual on every lens, every time.

The 197-Gram Body Changes The Payload Math For FPV Cinelifters

A cinelifter exists because a cinema camera is heavy. Svanur, the Iceland-based FPV pilot DroneXL covered in April, flies a custom 11-inch quad on 6S packs that manages five to seven minutes of flight while hauling a RED Komodo. The ILS weighs a fifth as much.

That five-to-seven-minute window is the whole cost of carrying a cinema sensor, and it comes with no return-to-home and nothing in software to stop a crash. We laid the trade out in full in April’s Iceland shootout between a DJI Avata 2 and a $15,000 Komodo cinelifter, and Northside’s Komodo flight over the Matterhorn is the version where the footage justifies the rig.

The ILS does not remove that trade. It moves it. GoPro’s launch post puts the body at 197 grams and calls the camera “the world’s smallest, most rugged cinema camera.” The 2150mAh Enduro 2 battery is rated for over three hours of continuous 4K30 recording, which means the aircraft sets the shot length, not the camera.

What GoPro has not published is a combined weight for the camera with any lens attached. Venus Optics loaned seven Laowa MFT lenses to reviewers ahead of launch, from a 4mm circular fisheye to a 50mm macro cine, and the announcement lists focal lengths and angles of view for all of them without a single gram figure. For anyone budgeting a payload, that is the only number that decides which airframe this flies on.

GoPro Removed The Electronic Contacts, So Every Lens Is Manual

The MISSION 1 PRO ILS has no electronic contacts in its lens mount, which rules out autofocus entirely. GoPro’s endnote limits compatibility to Micro Four Thirds lenses that cover a 1-inch or larger sensor with manual focus and either a fixed aperture no greater than f/4.5 or a manual aperture ring.

Adapters open the mount up to vintage glass, PL mount cinema lenses and other specialty optics, which is the real reason to want this camera. GoPro’s answer to focus is on the rear screen: Focus Assist magnifies up to 8x to verify focus before recording, and Focus Peaking overlays a contrasting color on whatever is sharp, with a High Sensitivity mode for low-contrast scenes.

On a handheld rig, that is a workable process. On an aircraft doing 40 mph, pulling focus is not a thing that happens.

A hand-held GoPro MISSION 1 PRO ILS rig runs a tethered phone monitor with GP-Log2 Rec.709 LUTs while framing a river valley at golden hour. Photo credit: GoPro

The free MISSION Monitor app, out the same day on the Apple App Store and requiring iOS 18 or later, pushes the same tools to an iPhone or iPad along with zebras, a real-time LUT preview for GP-Log2, framing overlays, and record control.

HyperSmooth Support Narrows To Five Profiled Fisheye Lenses

In-camera stabilization does not work with everything. GoPro lists five specifically profiled fisheye lenses, the Laowa 4mm f/2.8, 7Artisans 6mm f/2, 7Artisans 7.5mm f/2.8, Brightin Star 7.5mm f/2.8 and Meike 7.5mm f/2.8, plus rectilinear MFT lenses from 6mm to 500mm. Testing stopped at 50mm.

Anything longer, by GoPro’s own account, may perform inconsistently. That matters more for aerial work than for a car rig, because HyperSmooth is the feature that let naked GoPros replace gimbals on FPV aircraft in the first place. Fly a 17mm prime and you are inside the guaranteed envelope. Fly a 100mm and you are testing it yourself.

GoPro Set The ILS $100 Above What DroneXL’s June Review Described

The launch price is $699.99. When DroneXL published DC Rainmaker’s Mission 1 Pro review on June 1, it described the ILS as costing the same as the Mission 1 Pro, which starts at $599, and GoPro’s subscriber price now matches that figure exactly.

Timing held. Shawn at Air Photography reported in our April coverage of the Mission 1 announcement that the interchangeable-lens model was slated for Q3, and September is Q3.

The rest of the spec sheet is the Mission 1 Pro’s: the same 50MP 1-inch sensor and the GP3 processor DroneXL detailed in March, 8K60, 4K240 and 1440p480 capture, Open Gate up to 8K30, a 10-second 1080p960 burst slow-motion mode, 10-bit GP-Log2 at up to 240Mbps, timecode sync, a four-microphone array with 32-bit float audio to a separate .wav file, 50MP stills and 44MP frame grabs. The standard Mission 1 and Mission 1 Pro are $100 off for a limited time.

DroneXL’s Take

The last time GoPro built a camera aimed squarely at drones, it was the Hero10 Black Bones in April 2022: 54 grams, no housing, powered straight off the flight pack through a standard FPV connector. GoPro understood exactly what an aircraft needed.

The ILS is not that camera. It has a battery, a screen, a weatherproof body, and nothing that plugs into a flight pack. GoPro built a compact cinema camera and left the drone people to notice on their own.

They will. Back in April, closing out that Iceland piece, we argued the cinelifter would keep winning until somebody built a pro FPV platform that takes interchangeable lenses. That was aimed at DJI. GoPro has answered the payload half of it instead of the airframe half, and at $699.99 the answer is roughly a tenth of a Komodo brain.

Manual focus is a real problem and I won’t talk around it. On a moving aircraft you set focus on the ground, pick a hyperfocal distance and live with it. That is also exactly how naked-GoPro FPV work has always been done, and it is exactly why nobody flies a Komodo for a quick sunset lap. The constraint lands on the shots that were never the point.

Retail availability starts in September. That is when we find out whether builders actually rig these, or whether the ILS settles where our June review put it, as a camera for productions that want to bolt hundreds of identical bodies to a set. My money is on both happening. A $699.99 body with a real lens mount is cheap enough that somebody is going to crash one to find out, and that is how every useful FPV camera got adopted, starting with the Bones.

Source: GoPro.

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

Commercial UAV Expo Opens As FCC And Tariff Deadlines Hit Mid-Show

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:53:00 GMT

Commercial UAV Expo opens Tuesday, September 1 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, and the two federal dates that decide what American operators can legally buy fall inside the show’s three days. Comments close September 2 in the FCC proceeding that would pull import clearance from foreign drones the agency has already approved. Section 232 tariffs on imported drones and components take effect September 3.

The conference runs through Thursday, September 3. Pilot Institute returns as an event partner and programs nine sessions across the show’s last two days, all free to every registered attendee. An FAA official and an EASA official share the closing keynote on beyond visual line of sight flight. DroneXL will be on the floor Tuesday and Wednesday, and we have tracked every one of those regulatory threads since the Part 108 proposed rule dropped in August 2025.

Two Federal Deadlines Land Inside The Show’s Three Days

The FCC’s comment window on Public Notice DA 26-758 closes Wednesday, September 2, the middle day of the expo. Section 232 tariffs on imported drones take effect Thursday, September 3, the closing day. Both dates sit inside a trade show built around imported hardware.

President Trump signed the Section 232 proclamation on August 13. Drones above 25 kilograms (55 pounds) at maximum takeoff weight pay 100%, along with any drone carrying a thermal imager, docking stations, and the components listed in the proclamation’s first annex. Nearly everything else pays 25%, a bracket that covers most of the aircraft sitting on the exhibit floor. The duty applies to declared import value rather than retail price, so what actually reaches a buyer depends on how much importers absorb. The proclamation adopts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s finding that the United States is “too reliant on foreign sources of UAS and UAS components.”

The FCC action is separate, and it lands a day earlier. Public Notice DA 26-758, filed under PS Docket 26-189, proposes stripping import and marketing clearance from foreign drones the Commission has already authorized, across seven capability categories that reach thermal sensors and dock-equipped models already on sale. Comments close September 2. A comment window that expires while most of the people it affects are standing on a trade show floor in Nevada is a scheduling choice somebody made.

Pilot Institute Runs Nine Sessions Across Wednesday And Thursday

Pilot Institute returns as a Commercial UAV Expo event partner and programs the Pilot Hub, a session area on the exhibit floor. Nine sessions run Wednesday, September 2 and Thursday, September 3, all of them open to every registered attendee at no extra charge.

Wednesday carries six. Amy Wiegand of Earhart Alden & Associates opens at 10:30 a.m. on customer acquisition, and Vic Moss follows at 11:30 a.m. on the five drone photography mistakes he sees most often, and how to fix each one. Jason Wood, Pilot Institute’s UAS Program Lead and a master thermographer, takes the 1:30 p.m. slot on thermography basics, then walks a solar panel inspection in the Indoor Airspace demo area at 2:30 p.m. A fireside panel at 3 p.m. puts Wiegand, Moss, Desiree Ekstein, and Jared Janacek on stage. Kyle Nordfors of the Mountain Rescue Association closes the day at 4:15 p.m. on aviation safety culture.

Thursday runs three, ending with Pilot Institute co-founder Greg Reverdiau, Wood, and AirData’s Dustin Schocken on how Fortune 500 companies build internal drone programs. Reverdiau also shares the Tuesday opening keynote at 12:30 p.m. with Commercial UAV News content manager Matt Collins, presenting findings from a survey the two organizations ran this year among working pilots and fleet managers. That is the most interesting hour on Tuesday’s schedule. Reverdiau writes the weekly UAS news update on his DroneXL author page.

The paid side is thinner than it looks. The expo’s 2026 workshops page lists no dated Pilot Institute workshop for this year: its single Pilot Institute entry still carries a September 4, 2025 date and a $399 price, and the Pilot Institute partner page marks both “Courses & Workshops” and “Pilot Hub Sessions” as coming soon while displaying last year’s $199 Tuesday workshop. The partner page was last modified on August 11 and the workshops page on August 13. Anyone budgeting a paid add-on around the free Pilot Hub content is deciding without a lineup to decide on.

The DRONERESPONDERS Public Safety Summit runs alongside the main conference again, its UAS Program Management Course splitting Tuesday and Wednesday. DroneXL covered the SAR Working Group’s road to this summit in March. A full conference pass is $1,075 and exhibit hall access alone is $300, with advance pricing gone after August 30.

Thursday morning at 9 a.m., Robert Reckert, acting deputy director of the FAA’s Office of Safety Standards in Flight Standards Service, sits alongside Daan Dousi, head of EASA’s Innovative Air Mobility department. Avtrain CEO Julie Garland moderates. The topic is how each authority is approaching routine BVLOS operations.

The comparison is not flattering to Washington right now. Part 108 was due as a final rule on February 1, 2026 under an executive order, and the Department of Transportation says the delay since is deliberate rather than backlog. Across the Atlantic, the UK’s sandbox alone logged 1,672 BVLOS flights while American operators kept filing one waiver at a time.

DroneXL Is On The Floor Tuesday And Wednesday

DroneXL will be at Caesars Forum on Tuesday, September 1 and Wednesday, September 2, and we are booking meetings now. Anyone with news to share or hardware they want in our hands can reach us through the DroneXL contact form, on or off the record.

Plan around the hall hours. Tuesday runs on workshops and the opening keynote, and the exhibit floor opens only from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. for the UAS Summer Bash. Wednesday is the real floor day, 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., closing with the networking happy hour. We ran the same play at XPONENTIAL in Detroit in May, and the useful conversations were the ones booked before anyone landed.

DroneXL’s Take

Look at the calendar and the story writes itself. On Tuesday the industry walks into a hall full of Chinese-made aircraft. On Wednesday the FCC stops taking comments on whether those aircraft can keep entering the country. On Thursday the tariffs that reprice them switch on, and the show closes.

Yes, the security questions behind the Covered List proceeding are real, and DJI’s data practices have earned scrutiny that DroneXL has never pretended away. What bothers me is a process that runs its clock out on the exact days the affected industry is assembled in a Nevada convention center, being sold hardware that may cost 25% more by the time the trucks leave the dock. The people best placed to tell the Commission what a 100% duty on a thermal aircraft does to a search and rescue budget will spend Wednesday walking an exhibit hall.

So file first. The window under PS Docket 26-189 shuts September 2, and a comment written on a hotel notepad Tuesday night counts the same as one written by a Washington law firm. Then sit in Thursday’s keynote and watch whether an FAA official sitting beside his EASA counterpart says one word about the tariffs that took effect that morning. My read is that he says nothing, because tariffs are Commerce’s file, and that silence will tell American operators more about who is coordinating this policy than the program description does.

Sources: Commercial UAV Expo schedule at a glance, keynotes, and Pilot Institute partner page

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

Michigan Ford Dealer Flies Auto Parts By Drone On $740,000 Grant

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:52:00 GMT

Jack Demmer Ford flew a box of oil filters across Newburgh Road by drone on Tuesday, August 25, opening a state-funded auto parts delivery network in metro Detroit. The Wayne, Michigan dealership is running it with Brighton-based drone manufacturer blueflite and Detroit-based airspace software company Airspace Link, paid for by a $740,000 grant from Michigan’s Advanced Air Mobility Activation Fund.

The flight lasted under two minutes. What is worth more attention is the aircraft that made it. Blueflite’s Cobalt 461 holds a Department of War Conditional Approval exempting it from the FCC Covered List, the same list that swept up every foreign-produced drone in December 2025, and it sits on the FAA’s Section 44807 approved list. Very few delivery drones hold both.

DroneXL flagged this $740,000 grant back in May, in coverage of blueflite’s medical delivery work for Munson Healthcare in northern Michigan. Tuesday moved it off the grant paperwork and into live operations, with a 12-mile (19-kilometer) service radius around Jack Demmer Ford dealerships.

Jack Demmer Ford Sent Oil Filters Over Newburgh Road

The demonstration flight on Tuesday, August 25 carried automotive parts from Jack Demmer Ford in Wayne to a parking lot behind the dealership group’s Quick Lane Tire and Auto Center. The trip took under two minutes and crossed Newburgh Road near Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant.

The payload was oil filters, built to a 7.6-pound (3.4-kilogram) limit, according to the Detroit Free Press, which had a reporter at the demonstration. Two round trips ran that day, flown autonomously, though the aircraft can also be hand-flown by a pilot.

Today that same errand is a technician jogging across live traffic or a truck making the loop. That is the whole problem the program exists to solve, and it is a smaller problem than the phrase “advanced air mobility” suggests.

Tyler Bruder, blueflite’s business development lead, told the Free Press that company staff will be on site during flights for now because of licensing requirements, with the goal of running them remotely from headquarters later. He also said the tiltrotor design keeps the cargo bay steady in flight, and that the aircraft carries a parachute for emergency landings. Neither figure has been independently tested.

Mark Hatfield, who manages the parts department, said the dealership wants to prove the route can support multiple flights per day. How often it will actually fly at the start has not been set.

Michigan’s AAM Activation Fund Put $740,000 Behind The Network

Michigan’s Advanced Air Mobility Activation Fund is putting $740,000 into the program. Four state bodies administer it: MDOT, the Michigan Aeronautics Commission, the Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The money covers deliveries within a 12-mile (19-kilometer) radius of Jack Demmer Ford dealerships.

The state calls the Ann Arbor to Detroit drone corridor the operating environment for the program, per the announcement Airspace Link issued through PR Newswire on August 25. The grant itself is not new. Michigan awarded it in July 2025, alongside Executive Directive 2025-4, which Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed on July 17 of that year to stand up the Michigan Advanced Air Mobility Initiative. Whitmer’s stated aim in signing it was to “reduce our dependence on foreign manufacturing.”

Thirteen months separate that signature from Tuesday’s oil filters.

Justine Johnson, Michigan’s chief mobility officer, was one of the speakers at the dealership on Tuesday. “not just testing in a sandbox, we’re testing in the real world,” she said of the project.

The partners describe the program as one of the first commercial drone delivery operations in the U.S. automotive industry, which is probably fair and also currently amounts to crossing a road. Metro Detroit residents have been watching Amazon Prime Air fly in Hazel Park since late last year, so the sight itself is no longer novel there.

Blueflite has more going on in the state than parts runs. The company has been flying medical samples for Munson Healthcare under a separate Michigan grant program, and Bruder told the Free Press about a Louisiana project involving blood deliveries for crash victims. Jack Demmer wants to extend the network to its Lincoln dealership in Dearborn and to a 27-bay commercial vehicle center opening next year.

Blueflite’s Cobalt 461 Cleared The FCC Covered List In May

The Department of War granted blueflite a Conditional Approval for the Cobalt 461 on May 26, 2026, exempting the aircraft and its data transmission devices, communications systems and flight controllers from the FCC Covered List. The FAA added the same platform to its Section 44807 approved list on June 1.

That sequence is the part of this story the press release does not mention, and it is the part that determines whether the program has a future.

On December 22, 2025, the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau added all uncrewed aircraft systems and critical components produced in a foreign country to the Covered List. Two exits from that list matter here. Hardware that qualifies as a domestic end product under the Buy American Standard is carved out by category. Everything else needs an individual Conditional Approval from the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security. DroneXL covered the first four drones to clear that process in March and VEX AIR’s exemption in June.

Blueflite markets the Cobalt 461 as designed and manufactured entirely in the United States. It nonetheless went through the individual Conditional Approval pathway, which the FCC established for entities producing systems or components in foreign countries. Public Notice DA 26-761, released July 21, spells out what that approval now rests on: DoW removed the December 31, 2026 expiry date and made the exemptions open-ended, “so long as the applicant for Conditional Approval abides by the onshoring plan” in its application. An approval terminates if a company fails to follow that plan or made a false statement in its filing.

Which components put the Cobalt 461 on that track is not on the public record. The FCC’s notices list aircraft, not bills of materials, and blueflite’s own announcements of the approval do not address it. The gap matters because the aircraft’s clearance is now permanently tied to a plan nobody outside the review can read.

The airframe carries one more detail worth noting. Blueflite says the Cobalt 461 is listed with a maximum takeoff weight of 54.98 pounds, two hundredths of a pound under the 55-pound ceiling that separates Part 107 small drone operations from a much heavier certification burden. The Free Press independently reported the same 55-pound all-up figure at the demonstration. That is not a coincidence of engineering. It is a regulatory target the airframe was built to hit.

For now the flights stay inside visual line of sight with crew on the ground, because the FAA’s BVLOS rulemaking under Part 108 is still unfinished.

DroneXL’s Take

A U.S.-built aircraft, flying U.S. auto parts, for a Michigan dealership, on Michigan taxpayer money, needed a Department of War clearance to stay off a communications security blacklist. Read that again, because it is the actual story here, and the ribbon-cutting buried it.

I want to be fair about what Michigan bought. This is not vaporware. Blueflite has real mission counts behind it, 67 flights at a 91 percent success rate in the Munson Healthcare pilot, and that is more operational evidence than most advanced air mobility grants ever produce. The state’s money is going somewhere that flies. Thirteen months and $740,000 to cross Newburgh Road is still a long runway, and everyone involved knows the road is not the point.

The regime it flies under is what bothers me. Appendix B of DA 26-761 lists fifteen UAS entries that have cleared the Conditional Approval door since the December listing. Fifteen, in seven months, for an entire national market. That is not a functioning exemption process, it is a boutique one, and boutique processes reward whoever can afford the lawyers and the federal relationships. Blueflite earned its clearance. Most small American manufacturers will never file for one, and no drone service provider in Michigan gets to fly anything faster because this particular airframe got through.

What I keep circling back to is the onshoring plan. Blueflite’s clearance no longer has an end date, which reads like a win, but the tradeoff is that it now lives or dies on a document the public cannot see, enforced by an agency that has published no criteria for what compliance looks like. A permanent approval conditioned on secret terms is not the same thing as being cleared.

DA 26-761 does give one date to mark. The Buy American domestic end product carve-out now runs to January 1, 2028. Whether the Conditional Approval list is still a fifteen-name club by then, or has become a routine filing that any competent American manufacturer can complete, will tell you far more about the health of this industry than any number of oil filters crossing Newburgh Road.

Sources: PR Newswire (Airspace Link), Detroit Free Press (Eric D. Lawrence), Michigan Executive Directive 2025-4, FCC Public Notice DA 26-524, FCC Public Notice DA 26-761, blueflite

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

STRATCOM Calls Ukraine's Spiderweb Raid 'Utterly Eye-Opening' as Drones Circle US Nuclear Bases

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:49:33 GMT

An official at U.S. Strategic Command has called Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb an “utterly eye-opening” moment for the United States, and a second STRATCOM official says the command that runs America’s nuclear forces is now treating counter-drone defense as a policy problem and a capability problem at the same time.

Neither official is named. Their comments were reported by the Washington Examiner, whose defense reporter Mike Brest traveled with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska on Monday, August 24, and filed from a C-17 over the state. STRATCOM manages about 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 140 bombers and 14 ballistic missile submarines, one of the officials said.

Fourteen months earlier, 117 Ukrainian FPV drones rose out of truck roofs parked near Russian airbases and burned the aircraft that carry Russia’s air-launched nuclear deterrent. In March, unidentified drones worked the airspace over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for a week. DroneXL reported that campaign at the time, and nobody had been identified when we last checked the investigation in April.

STRATCOM Officials Frame Counter-Drone Work as Policy and Capability

Two U.S. Strategic Command officials told the Washington Examiner that Operation Spiderweb changed how the command thinks about small drones. One called Ukraine’s raid an eye-opening moment. The other said STRATCOM is examining counter-UAS from a policy angle and a capability angle at once.

The first official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said STRATCOM leaders discussed the raid among themselves afterward and still talk about it today. That official also said the command is actively looking at ways to protect its nuclear command, control and communications infrastructure against every threat, and named the emerging drone and counter-drone category specifically.

The second official put it this way: “we are looking at specifically counter-UAS from both a policy and capability lens.” That official added that STRATCOM is working inside the department and with policymakers to let defenders take the actions needed to protect strategic assets. “Looking at” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.

Spiderweb Destroyed the Airborne Leg of Russia’s Nuclear Deterrent

Ukraine’s Security Service ran Operation Spiderweb on June 1, 2025, releasing 117 FPV drones from truck roofs parked near Russian airbases. The targets were Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and A-50 radar aircraft, the platforms that fly Russia’s long-range cruise missile raids and its nuclear-capable bomber missions.

The SBU said 41 aircraft were hit across airfields stretching from the Arctic to Siberia. A senior NATO official later put the number destroyed outright at 10 to 13. DroneXL covered the operation on June 4, 2025, including the 18 months of planning behind it and the Russian cellular networks the drones flew on.

The Examiner describes the targets as fighter aircraft. They were bombers, and that distinction is the whole point of the STRATCOM reaction: a country with a fraction of Russia’s defense budget reached the air leg of Russia’s nuclear deterrent using hardware that fits inside a shipping container.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll made the same observation to the Examiner earlier this year. A container anywhere on earth can open its lid and put a drone into the air over local cell coverage, he said, and “that’s not a particularly difficult concept.” Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Q. Brown Jr. said in July that Americans “should not be surprised” if a domestic drone attack happens.

Barksdale Ran the Same Play Over an American Bomber Base

Security forces at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana observed multiple waves of 12 to 15 drones between March 9 and 15, 2026. The drones worked sensitive areas including the flight line. A March 15 briefing assessed them as custom-built, with long-range control links that resisted jamming.

Barksdale hosts the 2nd Bomb Wing’s B-52H bombers and the headquarters of Air Force Global Strike Command, which runs the strategic bomber fleet and the ICBM force. The base issued a shelter-in-place order on the first day and lifted it the same afternoon. DroneXL reported the week-long campaign in March.

The count is contested, and it should be said plainly. Sen. Bill Cassidy, briefed on March 27 along with the rest of the Louisiana delegation, told reporters that five unauthorized flights occurred that week, one of them confirmed as a hobbyist and four of unclear origin. DroneXL laid out that gap between the briefing document and the senator in April. No arrests had been announced and no operator identified.

Eleven days before the Offutt visit, on August 13, Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard was asked at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville whether U.S. Northern Command could defend the country against a drone swarm launched from inside its own borders. He said no. He lacks the sensors to see one forming, and depending on where it flew, may lack anything to shoot back with.

Hegseth’s Offutt Stop Sat Inside a Wider Pentagon Drone Push

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited Offutt Air Force Base on August 24 with Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael and Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey. After a classified STRATCOM briefing, Hegseth and Nebraska Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts addressed hundreds of command employees.

The delegation then flew to Oshkosh Defense in Wisconsin, where Hegseth toured the plant and test-drove a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The stop was part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour of defense manufacturers, and it sits downstream of the drone dominance directive he signed in July 2025.

Not every line in that push runs the same direction. The Army is unwinding its only drone assault battalion in the same month its nuclear command calls Spiderweb eye-opening.

DroneXL’s Take

The March 15 briefing described the aircraft over Barksdale as custom-built and jam-resistant. It said they ran non-commercial signal characteristics and were flown by an operator careful enough to keep the control source from being triangulated. Whoever built those did not buy them at Best Buy.

That is the part Washington keeps refusing to hold in view. American drone policy this year has been an enormous, sustained campaign to make it harder to buy a Chinese camera drone, and a much smaller campaign to stop the thing that worked the airspace over a nuclear bomber base for a week. The FCC Covered List moved. The tariff clock moved. DJI is still the primary aircraft for 97.1% of surveyed Associated Builders and Contractors members who fly, and Northern Command’s deputy commander still says no.

Counter-drone work at a base like Barksdale is genuinely hard, and the second STRATCOM official is right that policy is half of it. Barksdale sits under shared civilian airspace. Bringing something down over Bossier Parish means deciding where the debris lands and who else is flying. That constraint is real and it does not dissolve because everyone agrees it should.

Fourteen months is still a long time to be describing a lens. Ukraine ran Spiderweb on June 1, 2025. DroneXL wrote it up on June 4. The Pentagon’s public position, as of this week, is that it is examining the problem and working with policymakers.

Neither official named anything concrete. Not a program of record, not the statutory authority they want from Congress. That absence is the actual news in the Examiner piece, and my read is that a command describing its counter-drone posture in the language of a study does not yet have a fielded answer. It will get one when an incursion costs more than a closed flight line. I would rather it not take that.

Source: Washington Examiner

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

DroneXL: The Independent Drone Authority — DJI, FAA, Reviews & Deals

Quantum Systems Says CIA-Backed Fund Opened Its US Doors

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Quantum Systems Already Builds Inside the United States

European Lawmakers Are Watching the Investor, Not the Check

DroneXL’s Take

Skyrover S1 Drops to $236 as the FCC Moves to Halt Its Sales

The $236 Price Sits Below Every Number DroneXL Has Logged for the S1

Forty Minutes and Forward Sensing Separate the S1 From the DJI Mini 4K

The FCC’s Proposed Sales Ban Lists the S1’s Own FCC ID

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DroneXL’s Take

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CBS Put A Freeway Dog Rescue On The Evening News

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DroneXL’s Take

Nepal Asks Abroad For Cargo Drones As China Flies 47 Next Door

Nepal Tests A 220-Pound Cargo Drone Four Days After The Flood

China Puts 47 Drones And A Flying Cell Tower Over Gyirong

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DroneXL’s Take

General Cherry Pitches $900 Drone Against Romania's $400,000 Missiles

Romania Spent $1.2 Million in Missiles on Three Drones

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DroneXL’s Take

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The Second Drone Probably Went Through The DHL Freighter’s Engines

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DroneXL’s Take

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Saudi Arabia Lost an Akinci Over Yemen Within a Year of Training Its Crews

The Gulf Bought Chinese Drones First Because Washington Said No

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North Africa Went From Turkish Adversaries to Turkish Customers in Five Years

DroneXL’s Take

Splash Typhoon Drone Boat Launches Kamikaze Drones, Won't Say How Many

Splash Built a Push-Button Launcher Onto a Modular Deck

The Typhoon Runs 600 Nautical Miles at 50 Knots on Splash’s Numbers

RIMPAC Showed the Boat Can Find a Moving Warship on Its Own

Ukraine Put Drones on Drone Boats First

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon Pitches Richmond on Drone Delivery It Is Not Yet Cleared to Fly

Amazon Ties Richmond Service to a 7.5-Mile Circle Around RIC4

Simboli Puts the MK30 at 78 Pounds Empty and 205 to 250 Feet in Cruise

Amazon Left Virginia Off Its Own 500-City List

Simboli Answers the Pool Drop and the Privacy Question

DroneXL’s Take

DOJ Indicts Rocklin Felon From White House Drone Plot, Not For Drones

Prosecutors Charged Perry With Guns And Deleted Data, Not The Conspiracy

The Signal Logs Put Perry Inside The Planning Chats

Perry’s Alleged Target List Ran To Data Centers And Satellite Ground Stations

The Eight-Man Indictment Already Moved The Case Past Criminal Complaints

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon Drone Delivery Returns to California After 2024 Lockeford Exit

Amazon Pulled Out of Lockeford in April 2024

Tracy Gets the Same MK30 Terms as Amazon’s Other 11 Sites

California Was Missing From Amazon’s Own 500-City List

The Return Lands Twelve Days After the Texas Pool Drop

DroneXL’s Take

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