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

Zipline Claims 68% Less Noise, Alibaba Wins Ruling, MI Organ Flights

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:12:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. Zipline rolls out software that’s going to make its drone deliveries a lot quieter. Then we have a judge handing Alibaba a win over a Pentagon lobbying law. And finally, Michigan is funding some drone organ flights. That’s very interesting. Let’s get to it.

Zipline Claims 68% Less Noise per Flight, From Its Own Modeling

First up this week, Zipline says its delivery drones are now flying quieter. The company calls it sound-optimized dynamic flying, and it’s now running across the entire fleet. Zipline claims a 68% drop in overall sound exposure per flight, which is really impressive, and peak volume is down 24%.

Both of these numbers compare against the 2025 fleet and include other hardware and software changes, so Zipline hasn’t said how much comes from the new flight profile alone. Of course, they come from Zipline’s own modeling, not from independent testing. So take them with a grain of salt, but I’m sure there will be additional studies done on that.

Here’s how it works. The drone reads real-time wind data and then uses an acoustic model to adjust its speed and altitude in order to cut the noise. It might dip the nose a little bit to pick up some speed, for example, like a cyclist coasting downhill. The aircraft is also a fixed wing, if you haven’t seen it before, so it can shut down all of the motors except one when it’s cruising, which reduces the noise as well.

Zipline actually says that its flights are 53 seconds shorter and use 21% less energy. So it sounds like a win-win all the way around, which is kind of nice.

You might say, why do we even care? Well, noise complaints have been growing quite a bit. Residents in Richardson, Texas, for example, have complained about the Amazon drones flying over their community. I think community acceptance is going to decide how fast the drone delivery space grows, or doesn’t grow, because of all of the pushback.

A Judge Shields Alibaba From the Pentagon’s Lobbying Law; DJI Has No Such Ruling

A judge in San Jose has blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a lobbying law against Alibaba. Judge Eumi Lee found the law likely violates the First Amendment. It bars Pentagon contracts with any company whose lobbying firm also lobbies for a company on the Pentagon’s list of “Chinese military companies.”

That law took effect on June 30, and the list is what they call the Section 1260H list. Now, why do we care about this? Well, DJI has been on that list since October 2022.

Alibaba says that it lost all of its lobbyists. DJI, meanwhile, still had two outside firms lobbying for its U.S. arm after the law took effect, according to July-to-September lobbying reports. CLS Strategies reported $170,000 in DJI income for the quarter, and Liberty Government Affairs reported $27,500. That breaks no rule: the law doesn’t stop a firm from keeping a listed client, it stops the Pentagon from contracting with that firm’s other clients.

Now, keep in mind that the ruling only protects Alibaba. Any company that shares a lobbyist with DJI gets no such shield. A DroneXL search of federal court dockets on CourtListener on October 27 found no DJI challenge to this law, so watch whether that changes. Also remember that a separate rule, Section 805 of the 2024 defense act, already bars the Pentagon from buying from listed companies directly, and its ban on indirect purchases through suppliers starts June 30, 2027.

Michigan Puts $245,000 Behind Drone Organ Flights to Michigan Medicine

And then finally, Michigan is putting real money into drone projects, which is kind of cool. The state announced 12 grants worth about $1.7 million on October 21. The biggest one is $245,000, and it’s going to blueflite, which is going to test flying donor organs to Michigan Medicine.

Michigan Medicine is in Ann Arbor, and the testing starts at the Mcity Test Facility.

The partners set public targets. The goal is at least 20 demonstration missions. They want to cut last-mile transport time by 30%, which is kind of the big goal here, and they also want 95% mission reliability, which surprisingly is actually, I think, a pretty low number. Remember, those are goals, not results.

Eight of the 12 projects are in Detroit, and they total $990,000, so almost a million just for Detroit. Another grant gives the Battle Creek Police a drone as first responder program.

They set clear targets here, and hopefully we’ll see the results later, as I personally think this is a great use of drone tech. I’ve mentioned this before. As far as drone delivery goes, this is what makes the most sense to me: something that’s going to save people’s lives and hopefully help get people back on their feet through organ transport. This is very time critical, as you can imagine. Minutes lost in traffic can really hurt the outcome.

The conversation is going to continue on Post Flight, where we’re going to talk about all these stories uncensored in the premium community. There’s a link in the description if you want to participate. We’ll see you for the live Q&A on Monday. Have a great weekend, and thank you for watching.

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.

DJI Teases a Folding Thermal Drone for November 5 With the 5TD Gimbal

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:19:00 GMT

DJI Enterprise will launch a new product on November 5, 2026, at 7 AM EST, and the 14-second teaser it posted on X on October 29 spends its first three seconds on a thermal sensor and the next two on a camera gimbal under a drone with folding arms, before the slogan and logo. The clip is titled “Always in Its Element.” DJI’s teaser page carries the date and the slogan with a sign-up button, and names no product. UK dealer Heliguy’s launch page says only that a new DJI Enterprise product is coming on that date.

The gimbal in the clip matches the Matrice 5TD’s window for window. That is the dock drone DJI launched with Dock 4 on October 14, with a 1280 by 1024 thermal camera and three 50 MP cameras on one housing. The 5TD’s arms are fixed. The arms behind the gimbal in the teaser fold, the way a Matrice 4T’s do.

The Teaser Gimbal Puts the Thermal Camera Where the Matrice 4T Had Its Zoom

The gimbal in DJI’s clip carries a large telephoto lens top left, a round thermal lens below it, three stacked windows on the right, and a small round window above them. The Matrice 5TD’s gimbal has the same six openings in the same places. The Matrice 4T’s does not.

On the Matrice 4T, the thermal camera sits top left and the 168 mm telephoto sits below it. DJI’s Matrice 4 series specs give that thermal camera a 640 by 512 detector on a 12 μm pitch behind a 53 mm equivalent f/1.0 lens, and it reaches 1280 by 1024 only as a Super Resolution output. The 5TD swapped the two positions and moved the wide and medium cameras into a column on the right.

The thermal lens fills the frame three seconds into DJI's teaser, with the telephoto lens above it and a smaller camera window to the right. Image credit: DJI Enterprise

The clip does not say what sits behind the thermal lens. The Matrice 5TD specifications list an uncooled vanadium oxide microbolometer at 1280 by 1024 on an 8 μm pitch, with a 2560 by 2048 UHR mode. DroneXL checked that figure against the spec sheet on October 26, after a Los Angeles drone maker’s X post about it passed 165,000 views and replies argued the number was a 640 upscaled in software. It is native.

The Matrice 5TD’s Sensor Has 78% More Area Than the Matrice 4T’s

DJI opens the teaser on a rendered detector array, pixel grid visible. A 1280 by 1024 array on 8 μm pixels measures 10.24 by 8.19 mm, or 83.9 square millimeters. The 4T’s 640 by 512 array on 12 μm pixels covers 47.2, so the 5TD’s detector is 78% larger.

The opening frame of the teaser: a rendered detector array in a thermal palette inside a lens barrel. Image credit: DJI Enterprise

DJI has sold the 1280 format since the Zenmuse H30T of May 2024, on a 12 μm pitch, as a payload for the Matrice 350 RTK and later the Matrice 400. The 5TD was the first DJI aircraft with it built in, and the 5TD can only be flown from its dock. The folding airframe in the teaser would be the first with that sensor a pilot can fly from a remote controller.

The Folding Airframe Has Surfaced Twice Already

The arms behind the teaser’s gimbal fold at the body, with the front pair set high. That layout appeared on October 19 in a Polish fire equipment dealer’s Facebook post about Dock 4, on a Matrice 5 with Matrice 4 folding arms. Igor Bogdanov photographed the same airframe in July.

Bogdanov’s July 26 photos showed a gray prototype on tall legs with a dome consistent with LiDAR and a gimbal with five sensor windows. The Polish dealer’s image hid the gimbal, so until October 29 nothing had tied the folding airframe to the 5TD’s camera. The teaser ties them. DJI’s teaser page still names no product. The Matrice 4 line used E for the version without a thermal camera and T for the one with it.

The timing matches DJI’s last enterprise launch. DJI posted its Dock 4 teaser on October 8 and launched six days later. This teaser gives seven.

The Covered List Keeps the Drone Out of the United States

No new DJI model had received FCC equipment authorization between the Covered List action of December 22, 2025 and the Dock 4 launch, and Dock 4’s spec sheet lists transmitter power for Canada, Europe, China and Japan only. A November 5 drone needs a grant the FCC cannot issue.

The thermal camera is also one of the seven capabilities the FCC’s Docket 26-189 proposal uses to define a “military-grade” drone. The July 21 notice proposes barring the import and sale of foreign models that have any of them, which would cover the Matrice 4T already on sale. DJI asked the bureaus to rescind the notice on September 2, and the FCC had not finalized the proposal as of DroneXL’s October 14 report.

DroneXL’s Take

I think DJI built this teaser around the one spec American regulators are trying to write out of the market. The thermal sensor gets the first three seconds and its lens the fourth, before the drone is even in frame. The Matrice 4T is the thermal drone US police and fire departments carry in the truck, and the FCC’s own proposal would bar its replacement for having the camera that made it worth buying. If the sensor is the 5TD’s, four times the pixels on a 78% larger detector is the upgrade those departments would have ordered first, and on November 5 their counterparts in Canada, Europe and Japan can. My read is that a US department watching the stream gets the clearest demonstration yet of what the Covered List costs it: no security gain anyone has documented, and a thermal camera it will see in a neighboring country’s hands before it sees one in its own.

Sources: DJI Enterprise on X, DJI Enterprise teaser page, DJI Dock 4 and Matrice 5TD specifications, DJI Matrice 4 series specifications, Heliguy launch page

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

DJI Pocket 4P at 100 Days: A US Owner's eBay Unit Has No US Warranty

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 19:14:00 GMT

The DJI Osmo Pocket 4P is now the go-to camera for The Film Alliance, a filmmaking channel on YouTube, after what its reviewer counts as 100 days of near-daily shooting. The review posted today covers B-roll, talking heads, 4K slow motion and night work. The reviewer says the camera was bought with personal money and that DJI did not sponsor the video.

The reviewer lives in the United States, where DJI does not sell the Pocket 4P, and bought this one on eBay. The same review lists a gimbal head and screen that are easy to break, with no proper hard case to protect them, and the reviewer doesn’t know how to get warranty service on the camera: “If I drop it, I might be in trouble.”

The Reviewer Shoots Faces On The 3x Camera, Which Cannot Record D-Log 2

The reviewer films talking heads on the 60mm-equivalent 3x camera because skin tones from the wide camera look poor. That telephoto cannot record D-Log 2, the profile behind the 4P’s 17-stop claim. When a shoot moves between both lenses in log, the reviewer’s workaround is the older 10-bit D-Log.

Partner creator Jake Sloan hit the same wall in his August comparison with the Pocket 4, so this is not one unit’s quirk. The reviewer found a second problem in the edit: mixed D-Log and D-Log 2 clips carry no label telling them apart, which is why every shoot now sticks to one profile. Plain D-Log gives up some grading room, and the reviewer calls it good enough.

DJI lists the wide camera at 20mm equivalent. The reviewer says it frames closer to 18mm, which makes faces look small, though the video doesn’t say how that figure was measured. The 1-inch sensor behind it performs outstandingly in low light, by the reviewer’s account. After dark the reviewer avoids the smaller-sensor telephoto, and day to day uses the Standard color profile about 90% of the time.

For travel, vlogs and family video, the reviewer says the 4P can replace a mirrorless camera, while high-end professional work still needs interchangeable lenses and dual card slots. The reviewer would buy the 4P again “without even thinking twice.” The video carries a paid segment for Neewer ND filters, and the channel offers its own Pocket 4P course and LUTs.

DJI’s Policy Allows A US eBay Pocket 4P Only Paid Repair, Not Warranty

DJI’s after-sales policy covers products bought in North America under warranty only if they come from DJI authorized dealers, and no authorized dealer can legally sell a Pocket 4P in the US. An eBay unit sits outside that warranty, and DJI offers paid cross-regional repair depending on part availability.

Even the warranty a camera does carry stays home. The policy ties warranty service to a DJI repair center in the region where the product was purchased, and sending a camera to another region’s repair center needs DJI’s consent. The review doesn’t say who sold the camera on eBay or where it first came from.

DJI has been on the FCC Covered List since December 22, 2025, which keeps new DJI hardware from the equipment authorization it needs for legal US sale. DJI’s US product page for the 4P still redirected to a 404 when DroneXL checked today. The camera launched worldwide on July 30 at £529 for the Standard Combo. DroneXL found it on Amazon at $980 through an importer the day before.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d budget for a US-bought Pocket 4P as a camera with a repair bill attached, because DJI’s warranty doesn’t follow it here. That cost comes from the Covered List, and it lands on American filmmakers holding a handheld camera that never leaves the ground. The rule kept the authorized dealer out of the US, and in North America the authorized dealer is the only route to DJI warranty service. It did not keep the camera out, because this one reached a US creator through eBay. Anyone who takes this review’s advice and buys a 4P the same way should plan on paying for any repair after a drop, if DJI has the parts.

Sources: The Film Alliance on YouTube, DJI After-Sales Service Policies

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

AUVSI Gives the FCC as Many Speakers as the FAA at Its DC Drone Forum

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:34:00 GMT

The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) on Thursday announced the program for its Drone & AAM Policy Symposium, November 9 and 10 at Nationals Park in Washington. Its published speaker list names four Federal Communications Commission officials and four from the FAA, which also gets an executive session of its own. One of the FCC four is Hunter Deeley, who took over the agency’s Enforcement Bureau on August 31.

The program runs 27 sessions with more than 50 speakers, and Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) give the keynotes. It is the first symposium under Heather Lee, who took charge of AUVSI on October 1 after Michael Robbins left for the Semiconductor Industry Association and now carries the title of interim president and CEO. “Restrictions protect the industry, and strategy is what builds it,” Lee said in the announcement.

Titus is billed to discuss implementation of the FAA’s Part 108 BVLOS rule on November 10. Federal law requires that rule by December 7, and the FAA has not published it.

The FCC Bureau That Fined Suspected DJI Fronts Gets a Monday Panel

Deeley shares a 25-minute panel at 2:20 p.m. on November 9 with Cliff Jones, chief of the FCC Laboratory Division, and Peter Hyun of Rainfall Strategies, on enforcing drone equipment authorization and supply-chain rules. The bureau Deeley now runs proposed $25,000 fines in July against eight suspected DJI front companies.

Patrick Webre, Deeley’s predecessor, signed those notices after the eight companies ignored the bureau’s letters of inquiry. A week later the bureau proposed cutting off imports and sales from nine companies, XAG among them. Before his promotion Deeley was the bureau’s chief of staff and deputy chief, and the FCC’s announcement says he supervised its national-security enforcement work. He came to the FCC from the Justice Department’s National Security Division, where he handled CFIUS and Team Telecom reviews.

The other two FCC officials appear in separate sessions, according to AUVSI’s published program. Arpan Sura, senior counsel to Chairman Brendan Carr, holds a 20-minute fireside chat on spectrum with Qualcomm’s Leslie Barnes on Monday, 11 days after the commission voted to open the 800 MHz cellular band to drones, an order AUVSI publicly backed. Adam Chan, the FCC’s senior national security counsel, joins Assistant Secretary of Commerce Steven Haines and Hidden Level’s Brad Garber at 2 p.m. Tuesday for a session on supply chain security and domestic manufacturing.

Part 108 Is Still Unpublished as Titus Prepares to Discuss Implementation

Titus, co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, speaks at 11:30 a.m. on November 10. The FAA proposed Part 108 on August 7, 2025. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 gave the agency 16 months to finish it, so her keynote lands 27 days before the deadline.

The rule still sat unsigned when the FAA put $12 million into its drone test sites in early October. Its companion, Part 146, would certify the automated data service providers that BVLOS operators lean on, and it gets its own Tuesday session with the FAA’s Marcus Cunningham. Welch follows Titus at 12:15 p.m. as lead Senate sponsor of the Aviation Innovation and Global Competitiveness Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at making FAA certification faster and more predictable.

A Tuesday afternoon panel takes on the FAA’s Section 2209 proposal, published May 6, which lets critical infrastructure sites apply for drone flight restrictions. The FAA counted roughly 125,000 candidate facilities. AUVSI’s announcement calls it one of the most consequential proposed rules for large UAS operations. Skydio’s Jenn Player and Southern Company’s William Wheeler are on that panel, and the FAA, DOT and NTSB are listed as invited agencies.

AUVSI holds a separate forum, AUVSI Defense, in the same space on the same two days, with Sen. James Lankford, Rep. Rob Wittman and Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Director for Drone Dominance. That forum is closed to media under the Chatham House Rule, while the policy symposium is open to credentialed press.

DroneXL’s Take

The FCC gets as many named speakers as the FAA because it now decides which drones can be sold in this country. Robbins welcomed the December Covered List action for AUVSI within hours, and Lee’s opening line still treats restrictions as protection. In August the Drone Service Providers Alliance asked AUVSI for a reset built on measurable risk rather than country of origin, and my read is that this isn’t it.

The FCC’s proposed ban on foreign “military-grade” drones in PS Docket 26-189 drew comments from DJI and from the spray drone distributors’ coalition, which says U.S. spray drone sales fell 59% between 2024 and 2025. Someone in the Champions Club on Monday afternoon should ask Deeley and Jones what enforcement looks like for a dealer holding previously authorized aircraft if that proposal is adopted. The operators who can’t afford a fleet swap need that answer, and the panel runs long enough to ask for it.

Sources: AUVSI announcement, October 29, 2026, AUVSI Drone & AAM Policy Symposium program, AUVSI 2026 speaker list, FCC announcement of Hunter Deeley as Enforcement Bureau chief, August 31, 2026

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

Rantizo Prototype Pairs GPS With LORAN, Which the US Shut Off in 2010

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:22:00 GMT

Rantizo, the Houston drone company that started trading on Nasdaq as RNTZ on October 13, unveiled a prototype fixed-wing surveillance drone on October 28. The release lists border security first among five uses for the battery-powered aircraft. Rantizo expects it on sale in mid-2027, after testing.

The release gives the prototype two different range targets. Its spec table lists “GPS / LORAN” for navigation, and the US Coast Guard began shutting down its LORAN-C network in 2010.

A Singapore Utility Contractor Took Rantizo Public

Rantizo reached Nasdaq through SKK Holdings, a Cayman Islands company whose subsidiaries lay cables and water pipes underground in Singapore. SKK bought Rantizo, Inc.’s drone assets for about $258.8 million, mostly in new shares, in a deal that closed October 12 and switched the ticker to RNTZ.

SKK had listed in October 2024 with a $10 million IPO at $4 a share. Under SKK’s closing announcement, Rantizo, Inc. received 51,966,591 new Class A shares and owns about 87% of that class after closing. Certain individuals were granted management shares valued at $12 million, and both blocks of shares are locked up for six months. Rantizo’s homepage names the Harvest 100 spray drone and the Titan fire and forestry drone. It says the company holds FAA authorization in more than 15 states and counts Nutrien and Helena as distribution partners.

The name has changed hands before. Rantizo, an Iowa City startup, won FAA approval to spray crops by drone in 2019. In August 2025 it sold its spraying business to an unnamed investment group that kept the Rantizo name, and the original company became software maker American Autonomy. The Rantizo, Inc. that sold its assets to SKK is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Houston. Neither Rantizo’s October releases nor its website say whether it is the group that bought the Iowa business. Marianne McInerney became president of the listed company at closing.

Rantizo’s Release Gives One Prototype Two Range Targets

Rantizo’s release text gives a targeted range of “up to 130 miles” (209 km). Its spec table lists “150 miles >” (241 km). Other targets include a 75 mph (121 km/h) top speed, a 43.4 mph (70 km/h) cruise and a ceiling above 12,000 feet (3,658 m).

The release says the specifications “are subject to change as testing progresses.” Flown at the stated cruise, 130 miles would take about three hours and 150 miles about three and a half. The release gives no endurance figure or battery capacity to check either number against. Rantizo calls the airframe compact, with a 43.9-inch (112 cm) wingspan, a 45.4-inch (115 cm) fuselage and more than 4 pounds (1.8 kg) of payload. It says the drone carries a camera with target recognition and lists its detection profile as “Low,” without saying what that is measured against.

Rantizo’s fixed-wing page, checked October 29, calls the aircraft “long-range” but has no range figure in its spec sheet. Its list of applications does not include border security, the mission the release leads with. A graphic on the page is labeled “targets, not flight data.” The images there show the aircraft marked “100M,” a designation the release never uses, and six of them lined up on a table.

The prototype on its carry case, in an image from Rantizo's product page. Image credit: Rantizo

The Coast Guard Switched Off LORAN-C in 2010

LORAN-C was the land-based radio navigation network the US Coast Guard ran for decades, until the White House declared it obsolete in May 2009. Congress allowed its termination that October, and the Coast Guard began shutting it down in February 2010, according to the federal GPS program’s LORAN-C history.

The Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2015 later let the Coast Guard partner on a GPS backup that “may consist of an enhanced LORAN system.” Rantizo’s release lists “GPS / LORAN” for navigation and stops there. It doesn’t say which LORAN signal the drone would receive or where one is broadcasting for it. A working GPS backup would be a strong selling point on a border surveillance drone. In New Mexico, military GPS jamming at White Sands was active when a medevac crew flew into a mountain.

DroneXL’s Take

I want this kind of company to win. After the FCC barred new foreign-made drones last December, American farmers and fire crews need US-built aircraft, which is the pitch on Rantizo’s own homepage. A surveillance drone pitched to government buyers lives or dies on its numbers, though, and this one arrived with two range targets and a spec table that lists LORAN, a signal the US stopped broadcasting 16 years ago. Two weeks into life as a public company, Rantizo is showing this aircraft with what its own page calls targets, not flight data. If I were a sheriff or a Border Patrol sector buying in 2027, I’d ask Rantizo for one flight log showing the drone covering 130 miles on a single battery, and for the LORAN signal it would use.

Sources: GlobeNewswire (Rantizo release), Rantizo fixed-wing product page, SKK closing announcement, IPOScoop, GPS.gov LORAN-C history, Iowa Farm Bureau, Precision Farming Dealer

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

FCC Opens 800 MHz to Drones, but BVLOS Still Waits on FAA Part 108

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:32:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-0 on Thursday, October 29, to let drones use the 800 MHz Cellular band, ending a 1991 airborne ban that kept unmanned aircraft off 50 MHz of licensed, nationwide, low-band spectrum. Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty approved the Report and Order, FCC 26-72, at the agency’s October open meeting in Washington.

The order opens the band to drone command, control, communication and payload links, as proposed in the draft DroneXL covered on October 9. Routine flight beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) still depends on the FAA’s Part 108 rule. Federal law requires that rule by December 7, and it has not appeared in the Federal Register.

The FCC Has Not Yet Posted the Adopted 800 MHz Order

The FCC had not posted the adopted text of FCC 26-72 by late Thursday morning, so any changes from the October 8 draft are not public. The draft set the effective date at 30 days after Federal Register publication, and the FCC’s release gives no date.

The FCC’s release on the vote says the airborne restriction “is no longer necessary as applied to unmanned aircraft systems” because modern networks can keep drones from interfering with them. The 1991 ban was written to stop phones on planes from disrupting ground networks, a decade after the FCC first licensed 800 MHz cellular service in 1981.

Carr and Trusty issued separate statements, and Gomez approved without one. The commission’s next drone spectrum votes come on November 19, when it takes up 450 MHz control links and 24 GHz drone-detection radar.

Amazon and Red Cat Backed the Order Alongside AT&T and Verizon

Two days before the vote, the FCC published statements from 11 organizations supporting the change. They included AT&T, Verizon, CTIA, Amazon, Red Cat, Ondas and AUVSI. Ashleigh de la Torre, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, tied it to delivery: “reliable wireless communications are essential.”

Red Cat, whose Black Widow drone won the Army’s short-range reconnaissance contract in 2024, said maturing drones need carrier networks as a “backup link.”

DroneXL’s Take

I don’t think spectrum was ever what kept American operators from flying BVLOS at scale. Drones already fly on carrier networks at 700 MHz and in the PCS band, so 800 MHz mostly gives AT&T and Verizon more capacity to sell to drone customers. That is worth having, and the FCC got it through on a unanimous vote, from a draft that cited no opposition. The decision that changes what a pilot may legally do belongs to the FAA. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 gave the agency 16 months from its August 7, 2025 proposal to finish Part 108, which puts the deadline 39 days out. Until that rule is final, an operator with a carrier plan gets a bigger network once FCC 26-72 takes effect and keeps flying BVLOS under a waiver or an exemption.

Sources: FCC October 2026 Open Meeting, FCC news release “FCC Opens More Cellular Spectrum for Drones,” October 29, 2026, FCC “What They Are Saying” release, October 27, 2026, FCC draft Report and Order, FCC-CIRC2610-03

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

ESA Funds Ondas-Backed Drone Maker to Fly 10 Minutes Without GPS

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:27:00 GMT

The European Space Agency signed a contract on Tuesday with Rift Dynamics, the drone maker in Sandnes, Norway, to keep low-cost, expendable drones navigating for 10 minutes while satellite navigation is jammed or spoofed, then recover cleanly once the signal returns. Comrod is the subcontractor, and the system will go through jamming and spoofing trials in the Arctic.

Rift is the company Ondas Holdings invested in last year, taking exclusive U.S. distribution of its Wåsp drone through the Ondas subsidiary American Robotics. The contract was one of three ESA signed with Norwegian companies at Spaceport Norway in Oslo under its Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), with Norwegian Space Agency money behind the call.

ESA did not say what any of the three contracts are worth, or which aircraft Rift’s navigation system is meant to fly on.

ESA Gives No Method or Schedule for Rift’s 10-Minute GNSS-Denied Target

Beyond the Arctic trials and the 10-minute target, ESA’s announcement gives no test schedule and does not describe the navigation method Rift will use. Comrod, a Norwegian maker of tactical antennas and masts, is the only partner ESA names on the project.

A drone that loses GPS falls back on whatever else it carries, typically inertial sensors and cameras, and those position estimates drift the longer the outage lasts. Orqa drones running KEF Robotics navigation software completed two missions under GPS jamming in front of Army Green Berets in Alabama in August.

The only aircraft on Rift’s website is the Wåsp FPV+, which the company describes as a cross between an armed FPV drone and an AI-capable surveillance drone. Rift and Ondas say it is built to meet EASA C2 class requirements. Ondas placed an initial order for 500 Wåsp systems on October 2, 2025. On October 13 it brought in Nammo to supply warhead payloads for an armed version aimed at the U.S. defense market. Neither release mentions GNSS or jamming.

Testnor Will Turn Jammertest’s Recorded Jamming Into a Test Library

Tromsø-based Testnor, which coordinates Norway’s annual Jammertest exercise, will use its NAVISP contract to build a Signal Data Library of real jamming recordings and RF playbacks, starting with Jammertest data, which ESA says is conceived as a market-ready service for companies testing navigation hardware.

For drone makers that is the more immediately useful of the three contracts. Jammertest is an open-air event on Andøya, and a recorded library lets a team replay those conditions on a bench instead of waiting a year for the next one. The third contract went to Norse Navigation in Trondheim for ship positioning sensors that use Galileo’s OSNMA signal authentication and detect jamming and spoofing on merchant vessels.

Norway Puts a Week Without Satellite Positioning at NOK 3.4 Billion

The Norwegian Space Agency funded the call. Its satellite navigation advisor cites a government analysis putting a seven-day loss of satellite positioning at NOK 3.4 billion (EUR 320 million), plus a Norwegian Defence Research Establishment report on total defense, as the reasons resilience is a national priority.

That advisor, Kristian Svartveit, made the case when ESA announced the contracts. “Strengthening PNT resilience is a priority for Norway,” he said.

NAVISP was created in 2016 as an optional ESA program, supported by 20 states, to fund positioning, navigation and timing work that backs up or complements satellite navigation. Its remit covers European and Canadian industry, and the program is designed to carry part of the commercial R&D risk.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m glad to see a civil space program paying for jam-resistant navigation on cheap drones, because jamming is no longer something only soldiers deal with. Military GPS jamming tied to White Sands was running the night a medevac crew flew into a New Mexico mountain, and Norway’s government prices a week without satellite positioning in the billions of kroner. Navigation that survives a jammer is dual-use by nature, and the delivery and inspection drones DroneXL readers fly will need it as much as a military quad does.

ESA should still publish the contract values and say which aircraft Rift’s system is for. NAVISP exists to carry commercial R&D risk with public money, and the public should know where that money lands. If the work does end up in the Wåsp, it would reach a drone that American Robotics distributes in the U.S. Ondas reports third-quarter results on November 12, the first scheduled chance for the company to say so.

Source: ESA, “ESA and Norway pen projects for resilient satellite navigation,” October 28, 2026, ESA on X, Ondas Holdings press releases

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

Wing Says Good Neighbors Fly Quiet. A Texas Yard Saw 52 Amazon Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:18:00 GMT

Wing says drone delivery starts with being a good neighbor. In a LinkedIn post on Thursday, the Alphabet-owned company said its flights have to stay “safe, quiet, and unobtrusive to those who didn’t order anything,” and that it has completed more than one million US deliveries this year.

People in Richardson, Texas, have spent the fall describing the other version. A resident there logged 52 Amazon Prime Air drones over her yard on a single Friday in September and called it a slow day, The New York Times reported, in a story DroneXL laid out against the FAA’s paper trail. Richardson residents were still asking Amazon to fly higher after the company raised its average outbound altitude.

Wing’s post gives one number for its own quiet, 43 dBA for a drone cruising overhead. For the moment a Wing aircraft stops over a yard and lowers a package, it gives a comparison instead: quieter than a typical mail truck.

Wing’s 43-Decibel Figure Covers Cruise, Not the Delivery Hover

Wing’s 43 dBA is for cruise, which it puts at 150 to 200 feet (46 to 61 meters), and Kirkwood, Missouri’s planning report put a cruising Wing drone at about 43 decibels too. For the delivery hover, that report said about 63 decibels, and Wing told Kirkwood’s council about 62.

Wing’s post calls the cruise figure an Leq, a level averaged over a measuring period, and calls it quieter than ambient neighborhood sound. It does not say what period the average covers. The FAA’s April 2025 review of Wing’s Charlotte operations measures the agency’s way, as a day-night average: a spot overflown 800 times stays at or below 40.7 decibels, against a residential threshold of 65.

Accounts of how Wing sounds split. St. Charles Mayor Dan Borgmeyer ran his own decibel meter test and put the drone at about a passing car, DroneXL reported from Kirkwood. Janet Ward Graves told the Kirkwood council that residents in other Wing markets were promised the sound of a passing van and got a leaf blower. Wing says it designed a quieter propeller after feedback from its early trials in Australia, and that in real-world testing the overflight was unnoticeable inside a home.

The image Wing chose for its good-neighbor post: a drone passing over a front yard. Photo credit: Wing

Amazon’s MK30 Weighs 83 Pounds and Hovers 13 Feet Over the Yard

Amazon’s MK30 weighs 83 pounds (37.6 kilograms) at takeoff to carry a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) box, and the FAA’s Baton Rouge filing puts its delivery hover, 13 feet (4 meters) over the drop point, at a sound exposure level of 92.1 decibels measured 25 feet (7.6 meters) away.

Wing’s 7000W-B weighs 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms) at maximum takeoff, per the FAA’s national table, and its larger 8000-A weighs 24.3 pounds (11 kilograms). Wing’s aircraft stays about 23 feet (7 meters) up and lowers the package on a tether that lets go if it snags. In cruise, the FAA’s Chicago noise appendix puts an MK30 at 63.7 dBA SEL measured at 200 feet (61 meters), as DroneXL reported Monday. SEL and Leq are different measures, so that figure does not line up directly with Wing’s 43. Amazon spokeswoman Lindsay Hamilton told the Times the drones are quieter than a passing car during delivery. For people under Amazon’s routes, DroneXL’s residents’ guide covers what a town can and cannot do.

Neither company flies a parachute: Wing’s FAA filings show none, and Amazon’s MK30 has none either. Wing’s post defends the choice, as the company did in a May 2024 video. A deployed parachute ends all control and could set the aircraft down in a busy road, Wing says, and it adds weight. When onboard checks flag a problem, the drone returns to its nest or makes a slow, controlled landing in a field or a large tree, and a ground crew goes to collect it. Wing says those landings outside a nest are intentional and happen before a critical failure, and it gives no count. It also says its foam airframe is built to break apart on contact. I think that is an argument Wing’s 14- and 24-pound aircraft can make and an 83-pound MK30 cannot.

Wing Takes Its Pitch to Manchester, Missouri, After Kirkwood Let a Nest Die

Wing presents to Manchester’s Board of Aldermen on November 2 and holds a City Hall open house on November 4, part of a push for about seven St. Louis-area Walmart nests. Kirkwood’s council let a permit its own planners recommended die without a motion on October 15.

Residents’ objections in Kirkwood led with noise. One resident asked the council to bring a Wing aircraft to the resident’s house and drop a package through the mature oaks out front, the kind of up-close demonstration Wing’s post says it hosts, and the council never took up the offer. In Manchester, Mayor Ben Toben watched Wing deliveries demonstrated at a meeting with city staff in August.

DroneXL sent Wing 30 written safety questions on September 8 for its Drone Delivery Tracker, including one on measured noise. As of October 29, the only reply in DroneXL’s inbox is an automated acknowledgment from Wing Support.

DroneXL’s Take

Wing is right that drone delivery lives or dies on people who didn’t order anything. A drone residents hear as a leaf blower gets a Kirkwood council that would not make a motion, or Richardson residents emailing officials in El Paso and Richmond about the drones.

Wing has the better hardware for that test. Its 14-pound 7000W-B stays 23 feet up and lowers a box on a breakaway tether, which makes it a different neighbor from an 83-pound MK30 dropping to 13 feet over a customer’s yard. But the number Wing published is the cruise one. The moment a drone hangs over the yard next door is the one its post describes with a mail truck instead of a number. Wing should bring a sound meter to Manchester on November 2, measure the delivery hover at the property line, and publish the reading. I suspect it would beat every number Amazon has on the record, and a company that wants to be welcomed as a neighbor should put that number in writing.

Sources: Wing on LinkedIn, FAA, The New York Times.

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

Amazon North Haven Drone Decision Not Until 2027, Official Says

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:28:00 GMT

North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda says no decision on Amazon’s plan to fly up to 1,000 Prime Air drone deliveries a day from its North Haven warehouse will be made until sometime in 2027, “from what we were told, what we heard.” He said so after a Monday, October 26, meeting of the New Haven region’s mayors and first selectmen. Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), which is reviewing the plan, has received more than 1,000 letters of public comment, WTNH reported on Wednesday.

On October 3, Freda wrote that Amazon had put the plan on hold and agreed to make no decision before a round of meetings it would run. Monday’s meeting was the South Central Regional Council of Governments, the board of the region’s 15 municipal leaders. State legislators met Amazon earlier this month, and Rep. Dave Yaccarino of North Haven says Amazon put off the controversial questions they asked. Amazon says it will keep meeting community members and other stakeholders in the coming months.

DEEP’s review runs on a federal clock, and the agency told CT Mirror columnist Jim Cameron, in a column published October 18, that its final ruling would come by mid-November.

Federal Coastal Rules Point DEEP’s Ruling to This Fall

Federal consistency rules gave DEEP 60 days from the FAA’s August 17 request, to October 16, plus one 15-day extension if asked, and neither DEEP’s notice page nor the FAA’s review index mentions 2027. The FAA cannot act before day 90, November 15, without DEEP’s concurrence or an agreed alternative.

Those dates assume DEEP treated the FAA’s August 17 package as complete, because the 60 days run from receipt of the full supporting information. The same rule lets the FAA presume concurrence if DEEP misses its deadline, and lets both agencies agree to a different period. DEEP officials told House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora that the FAA had granted a 15-day extension of the public comment period, WTNH reported on October 4, and the deadline moved from October 1 to October 15. If that extension also covers the 60-day review, DEEP’s answer would be due October 31. The mid-November date DEEP gave Cameron for his CT Mirror column is where the 90-day mark falls. Any extension beyond the first 15 days takes the FAA’s agreement under 15 CFR 930.41. DEEP’s notice page, checked on October 29, still lists only the October 15 comment deadline and does not mention a decision date or any extension of DEEP’s review agreed with the FAA.

WTNH’s report does not say who told Freda about 2027 or which decision the date refers to. DEEP’s coastal ruling, the FAA’s operating approval for Amazon, which is not public, and Amazon’s own call on when to launch are all still open. The FAA’s drone environmental review index listed 110 PDF links and none for Connecticut, North Haven or New Haven when DroneXL checked it on October 29. The FAA can clear a hub against its July 28 national environmental finding without posting a site document of its own.

North Haven Lawmaker Says Amazon Put Off Legislators’ Hard Questions

Amazon met state legislators this month and answered anything controversial with “We’ll get back to you; we’ll see,” says State Rep. Dave Yaccarino, a North Haven Republican who wants residents to have a greater say. Some lawmakers left with more questions than they brought in, WTNH reported.

Freda wants Amazon to hold separate meetings in each affected community inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery zone, a request he made to WTNH for himself and his colleagues. Gov. Ned Lamont and Republican state Sen. Ryan Fazio, both running for governor, have said municipalities should make the decision, according to the same report. WTNH’s account of Amazon’s statement gives no date for a public session.

Connecticut law gives towns the launch pad and nothing over the flights. Public Act 17-52, codified at Conn. Gen. Stat. § 7-149b, bars any municipality from regulating the operation of a commercial drone, as DroneXL laid out in its North Haven filing guide. North Haven’s Planning and Zoning Commission used the ground lever on May 4, approving application P26-17 by 5-0. Westborough, Massachusetts, the other New England hub that surfaced in September, went the other way on October 19, when Town Meeting voted 510 to 13 for a bylaw banning commercial drone pads, pending the Massachusetts attorney general’s review.

Residents inside the circle can reach Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 or through the customer-service chat on Amazon’s site, choosing “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” The rest of what they can do is in DroneXL’s residents’ guide, and the Prime Air tracker follows North Haven alongside Amazon’s other hubs.

Amazon's MK30, the drone the FAA's request to DEEP describes at 83.2 pounds at takeoff, on display at the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Photo credit: DroneXL

DroneXL’s Take

Residents and officials should plan around DEEP’s ruling, which the agency puts in mid-November. It is the one decision here with a federal rule and a date, and it goes on the record whatever Amazon says in a meeting. No DEEP or FAA record I checked carries the 2027 date.

Yaccarino’s account worries me more than the calendar does. Amazon wants up to 1,000 flights a day over the New Haven region, and legislators who asked hard questions about it got, by Yaccarino’s account, “we’ll get back to you.” I’m for drone delivery when the cargo earns the flight, and Zipline’s P2, which lowers packages on a tether and carries parachutes, shows how it can be done. The MK30 carries 5 pounds in an 83-pound aircraft with no parachute, and both drones in the Tolleson crane strikes fell into parking lots after hitting the crane. Amazon should put its answers to the legislators in writing before DEEP rules.

Sources: WTNH via Yahoo News, October 28, 2026, WTNH via Yahoo News, October 4, 2026, CT Mirror, October 18, 2026, Connecticut DEEP public notice, 15 CFR 930.41, FAA NEPA and Drones, Connecticut Public Act 17-52.

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

Matternet Deal Opens 2,300 Hospitals to a Drone the FAA Hasn't Cleared

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:53:00 GMT

Matternet will sell its M3 drone delivery system through TransLogic, the Swisslog Healthcare unit whose pneumatic tube systems run inside more than 2,300 North American hospitals, including 18 of the top 20 U.S. hospitals, under a partnership the two companies announced Thursday morning. TransLogic’s sales team becomes a distribution channel for the M3 across its customer base of more than 3,000 hospitals worldwide. The first deployments target hospital systems in California, Florida and Arizona during the partnership’s first year.

The pitch is one automated network that runs from the tube station inside a hospital to the satellite buildings outside it, with the drone carrying medication, lab specimens and urgent supplies between buildings that couriers drive between today.

The aircraft the deal is built around has no FAA type certificate. Matternet unveiled the M3 on September 28 with commercial service targeted for the second half of 2027.

TransLogic Sells the M3 to Its Tube Customers and May Install It Too

The agreement makes TransLogic’s sales team the channel for Matternet’s M3 systems into hospitals that already buy its pneumatic tube, pharmacy automation and specimen tracking products. The two companies also plan to explore having Swisslog Healthcare’s field service organization install, support and maintain Matternet’s docks at hospital sites.

The M3 carries up to 11 pounds (5 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) service radius and flies without anyone on site. Between flights it sits in the M3 Dock, which Matternet says fits on a hospital rooftop or any other unused space. Spread across a health system, the docks tie its buildings into one on-demand network, per Thursday’s release.

Swisslog Healthcare is the hospital arm of German robot maker KUKA, with more than 1,000 employees. TransLogic, based in Westminster, Colorado, builds the tube systems in the United States. Cory Kwarta, CEO of Swisslog Healthcare, said hospitals have automated what happens inside their walls for years, and “this partnership extends that automation to everything outside them.”

Matternet founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos described a lab specimen flying from a remote clinic to a central lab by drone, then riding the tube inside the hospital to its bench. “End-to-end automation will define the future of hospital logistics,” he said. The release names no hospital and puts no price or order count on the deal.

The M2 Flies Hospital Routes Today and Earned $121,439 Last Reported Quarter

Matternet booked $121,439 in revenue for the quarter ended June 30. The 10-Q it filed on August 19 puts the nine months to that date at $255,564. All of it came from Matternet M2 operations, the only delivery drone with a standard FAA type certificate.

The Matternet M2, the aircraft that flies Matternet's hospital routes today and the only delivery drone with a standard FAA type certificate. Photo credit: Matternet

Matternet has flown for health systems since 2017 in Switzerland and since 2019 in the United States, where it started with WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and added Wake Forest Baptist Health in 2020. Those U.S. flights are flown by UPS Flight Forward and Ameriflight under their Part 135 certificates, because Matternet holds none of its own, and the filing says some customer programs depend on a single operator. One customer produced 80% of the nine months’ revenue.

The same filing says the company lost $15.1 million over those nine months, held $23.1 million in cash on June 30, and expects that cash to run out within a year of the filing under its current plan, which raises spending on the M3. Management says it can defer some of that spending, but not enough to close the gap, and it concluded that substantial doubt exists about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern, and said it plans to raise more money through debt or equity. Matternet went public in June through a $33 million reverse merger and has since named SoftBank Robotics America, Amprius, Beeline UAS, AVI-SPL, Dave’s Hot Chicken and Apian as partners. None of those announcements carried a dollar figure either.

The M2’s type certificate took 22 months from proposed airworthiness criteria to issuance, and as of Thursday the Federal Register holds no criteria for an M3. The BVLOS rule that would let hospital routes scale without case-by-case waivers, Part 108, sits unsigned too.

DroneXL’s Take

I think this is the best distribution deal Matternet has ever signed, and it is a sales channel for an aircraft that does not yet exist in the FAA’s eyes. A tube-system rep who already walks the loading dock at 2,300 hospitals is worth more than any launch partner on the list above, because hospital logistics directors buy from the vendor they already have a service contract with. Swisslog Healthcare installing and maintaining the docks would close the biggest gap in Matternet’s U.S. model, where someone else has flown every commercial route since 2019.

But 2,300 hospitals is a call list, not an order book. The product the reps will sell has no certificate and no flights before late 2027 by Matternet’s own calendar. The product that can fly today has been in U.S. hospitals since 2019 and brought in $121,439 in the last reported quarter, and the release names only the M3 without saying which aircraft flies the first-year deployments. My read is that this deal was priced for the fundraising the 10-Q says is coming, not for 2027 revenue. Matternet’s fiscal year closed September 30, so the 10-K due this winter is where a signed hospital or a dock order would first show up, and the drone delivery tracker will log the first one that does.

Source: Matternet press release, October 29, 2026, Matternet Form 10-Q, filed August 19, 2026, Matternet on X

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

Utica Names Axon and Skydio for Drone Trial Flock Pitched in June

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:52:00 GMT

Utica, New York is starting a 90-day Drone as First Responder trial for its police and fire departments, with two docked drones supplied through Axon and Skydio, the Utica Police Department said in a statement reported by the Observer-Dispatch on October 28. The drones would launch to 911 calls and fire scenes, often ahead of the officers or engines, the statement says.

Four months ago the same department announced the same program with a different company. On June 10 police spokesman Captain Michael Curley told the Rome Daily Sentinel that Flock Safety would supply two drones for a free six-month pilot and that the department hoped to have them in the air by August.

The new statement does not mention Flock, and it does not say whether a Flock drone ever flew in Utica.

Utica’s June Pilot Was a Free Six-Month Flock Deal Due in August

Utica’s June announcement aimed to have the Flock drones flying by August. Captain Curley said the aircraft take about 12 weeks to build and that one dock would sit at the police station on Oriskany Street West. Flock was to carry the cost for the six months.

The department hoped grant money would pay for the drones after the pilot. Flock already ran a gunfire-detection pilot in the city, the Sentinel reported. Curley said the drones would fly at 200 feet (61 meters) or higher, carry night-vision cameras, never be weaponized, and respond to calls such as fights and disorderly groups, which he said are often dispersed by the time officers arrive. He put the share of calls a drone could close without an officer at 20 percent or more, and said a public dashboard of flights was being developed.

The police department has flown drones for searches before, and the Utica Fire Department has never had one. Flock’s Drone as First Responder business has had a mixed year in city halls. Bridgeport, Connecticut’s council committees killed its Flock drone contract five days after the launch event in January, while Edison, New Jersey bought a Flock drone with forfeiture money in September.

Skydio's Dock for X10. Utica's trial calls for two drones with docking stations placed around the city. Photo credit: Skydio

The Axon and Skydio Trial Keeps the Two Drones and the 20 Percent Claim

The October statement cuts the trial to 90 days and names Axon and Skydio as partners in what it calls a continued partnership. The hardware plan is unchanged, with two drones in docking stations placed around the city, flown by police and fire. Neither start date nor cost is given.

The word “continued” suggests Utica already uses Axon products, and the statement does not say which. Much of the rest of it is the June statement reissued: WKTV carried the same 20 percent sentence, the same hot-spot language and the same surveillance disclaimer on June 10. “Statistics show that roughly 20% of calls can be handled without patrol resources,” the department said, tying the figure to staffing pressure and rising call volumes. For the fire department, the drones’ night vision and thermal cameras are meant to find hot spots and tell the commander on scene how to attack a working fire.

Axon has sold Skydio’s docked drones as its Drone as First Responder package since the two companies announced their partnership in June 2024, and the trial model is standard for Skydio: Nashville began a trial of up to 45 flight days on loaned Skydio aircraft in May, and Minneapolis’s council voted down a no-cost 75-day trial in July. Lakeland, Florida put its Axon drones inside a ten-year, $22 million bundle this month.

Utica promises flight logs, mission reports, public dashboards and community input on when drones launch and what triggers a flight, according to the Observer-Dispatch. The department said “transparency and accountability will be the guiding principles.” Fifty miles west, Syracuse bought Axon drone hardware in November 2024, and a year later its Common Council had still not approved the software to launch the program.

DroneXL’s Take

I want Utica’s drones in the air. A drone over a house fire or a fight in progress two minutes after the call is the best use of this technology, and the fire department has been working without one. But a free trial is a sales call, and Utica has now announced two of them from two competing vendors in four months without telling residents what happened to the first. The department changed the vendor and the clock and kept the press release. That tells me the 20 percent figure was never Utica data. The department owes the public a short account of whether the Flock drones ever arrived, why the program moved to Axon and Skydio, and what the city’s existing Axon relationship covers. Bellingham, Washington published its flight log before its program went fully live. Utica should do that on day one of the 90 days, not at the end, because the end is when the sales contract arrives.

Sources: Utica Observer-Dispatch (October 28, 2026 and June 11, 2026), Rome Daily Sentinel (June 10, 2026), WKTV (June 10, 2026).

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

Pentagon's 60,000 Attack Drones Hit a 1940s Explosives Bottleneck

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:32:00 GMT

The Pentagon has committed to buying 60,000 attack drones, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the United States does not make enough explosives to arm them. All U.S. production of HMX and RDX, two powerful military explosives, comes from a single plant in Tennessee that was built during World War II.

A new joint venture called Odin Energetics wants to change that. Chemicals maker Solugen and warhead builder Kraken Kinetics announced it this month and committed $115 million. Odin says it can start supplying the military in small quantities next year.

The Army’s own fix is running late. Its $1 billion modernization of that Tennessee plant was due in 2025 and now targets 2029 or later.

Drone Dominance Needs a Warhead for Nearly Every Drone It Buys

Drone Dominance is the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion program to field low-cost drones by the end of 2027. A department official told the Wall Street Journal that virtually all of its 60,000 committed attack drones are designed to carry explosives. The payload order is nearly as large as the airframe order.

That 60,000 figure is the Phase 3 round the Pentagon opened on September 28 with $450 million and a 400-drone delivery gate. The competition is organized around drone makers, and payloads arrive through partners: Gauntlet II entrants were each paired with one or more lethality providers. Kraken Kinetics builds that kind of hardware, from warheads to fuzing and safe-and-arm devices. Neither the Journal nor the Gauntlet II results name it as a supplier to any entrant.

The shift traces back to Defense Secretary Hegseth’s July 2025 directive, which classified small drones as consumables. Expensive weapons fired rarely were the old model. Attack drones are meant to be used in large numbers, and every one of them uses up explosive.

Holston Makes 3% of What It Made in 1944

Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, has been the only U.S. producer of HMX and RDX since widespread closures of government-owned plants in the 1990s. Tyler Hacker of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates the 84-year-old plant now runs at about 3% of its 1944 peak.

Industry experts told the Journal the wait for Holston product runs one to two years, and the paper reports the plant has been beset by explosions and pollution violations. BAE Systems, which operates it, referred questions about the plant to the Army, which owns it. Army spokeswoman Ellen Lovett said the upgrade timeline shifted to ensure safety and technical standards were being met, and that the service is proceeding with safety and other improvements.

For now there are few other options. European explosives are going to Ukraine or staying home for rearmament, and many of the ingredients the U.S. once bought from Russia and China are now under export restrictions. The Army announced a $903 million research facility in Kentucky in March to raise HMX and RDX output before 2031, and the Pentagon set up a new office for energetics production.

It is the production gap Anduril’s Brian Schimpf spent nine years warning about, seen from the explosives end. Kraken Kinetics CEO Brian Davis, an Odin co-founder, put the timeline bluntly: “We have actually been in an energetics crisis for 20 years.”

Odin Says It Can Make About a Tenth of Holston’s Output

Odin says it can already produce close to a tenth of the roughly 11 million pounds of HMX and RDX that Holston makes each year, in modular factories that the Wall Street Journal reports can be built in about six months and set up at bases, test sites or battlefields.

Odin’s website calls its shipping-container factory Nitroforge. Solugen, whose largest investor is Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, ships the starting chemicals by ordinary truck, and the explosive is only produced at Odin’s site. Executives pitch that as a safety answer to an industry where accidents have killed workers and shut plants for months, and as a way around local opposition to bomb factories.

At a test range just over an hour from Houston, Odin detonated a new formulation its makers say is 30% more powerful than what the military currently puts on drones. That figure is the company’s own.

The Army, which is looking at bringing energetics production onto its bases, is in discussions with Odin about supplying advanced explosives. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, a lending office, has discussed possible funding with the company, executives said.

DroneXL’s Take

Drone Dominance put its public scoreboard on airframes. Gauntlet II did require lethality payloads and the Pentagon has an energetics office now, but my read is that the explosive inside the warhead got far less attention than the drone carrying it.

When we worked through the Phase 3 prices in September, the $450 million ran $150 million past what the listed drone prices add up to, and we wrote that payloads may explain part of the gap. If those warheads depend on HMX and RDX, a 60,000-drone order sits on one plant running at 3% of its wartime peak with a one-to-two-year queue, and no airframe competition shortens that queue.

I like where Odin is aiming. Factories that can be built in six months and dropped onto a base are the same bet Drone Dominance made on airframes, many cheap and fast producers instead of one old plant. But a venture announced this month that promises small quantities next year is still selling a plan. The number to watch is whether the Army or the Office of Strategic Capital turns those talks into a contract before Phase 3’s drones need their warheads.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Odin Energetics, Kraken Kinetics, Soldier Systems Daily

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

Trump Gives Robots Trade Talks After Drones Got Up to 100% Tariffs

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 01:08:00 GMT

President Donald Trump signed a Section 232 proclamation on October 28 that finds imports of robots, industrial machinery and their parts threaten U.S. national security, and then imposes no tariffs. The Commerce Secretary and the U.S. Trade Representative are told to negotiate agreements with trading partners instead.

Drones already have their own Section 232 order. Trump’s August 13 drone proclamation put tariffs of 25% to 100% on imported drones and listed components from September 3. The robot order reaches the factory floor instead: the CNC mills and welding robots manufacturers buy to make parts.

Commerce’s Robot Probe Covers CNC Mills and Leaves Drones Out

Commerce opened the robotics investigation on September 2, 2025. Its Federal Register notice covers robots and computer-controlled mechanical systems, from CNC machining centers and milling machines to welding, stamping and laser-cutting equipment. It sets unmanned aircraft systems aside, citing the separate drone investigation.

The proclamation adopts Commerce’s finding that the United States relies on foreign imports for most types of robots and industrial machinery, and produces less than it consumes. It ties the sector to about $7.1 trillion in 2024 shipments of manufactured goods and about $86 billion worth of equipment produced that year.

The security case will sound familiar to anyone who followed DJI. Robots and machines from “certain foreign entities” pose risks, the proclamation says, because they “routinely process and store sensitive data.” It names no country. Its military examples include humanoid and quadruped robots used for reconnaissance and jobs such as mine clearing, the category where DroneXL reported Chinese parts inside American humanoid robots in April.

Robot Tariffs Stay Possible After a 180-Day Check-In

The negotiators owe Trump a progress update by April 26, 2027, 180 days after signing. Depending on how the talks go, he may consider tariffs, duties, quotas or fees, or a program to encourage new U.S. production. Section 232 also lets him act if no agreement is reached by then.

The drone order ran the other way, duties first. Most drones pay 25%, while drones over 25 kilograms (55 pounds), thermal drones, docks and listed critical components pay 100%. Qualifying drones from allies such as the European Union and Japan pay 15%, and Commerce can grant relief to companies building drone plants in the United States. A third tier of drone components follows on February 9, 2027, 76 days before the robot update is due.

The White House fact sheet names drones among the goods Trump has hit with Section 232 tariffs since returning to office, alongside steel, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.

DroneXL’s Take

I think talks first is the right call for machine tools, and drone makers should want it to stay that way. The August tariffs only pay off if American drone factories get built, and by the government’s own finding, the United States imports most types of robots and industrial machinery. Any drone maker that equips a U.S. plant is shopping in that import market. A tariff on mills and robot arms would tax the onshoring the drone order is demanding. If the April 26 update leads to duties, a U.S. drone maker would pay tariffs on the imported parts it flies and again on the imported machines it bought to make those parts at home.

Sources: The White House proclamation, White House fact sheet, Federal Register, 90 FR 46382

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

FCC Nov. 19 Drone Vote Would Rewrite Two Single-Licensee Bands

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:32:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on November 19 on two orders that would rewrite spectrum rules for drones, drone-detection radar and in-flight internet. Chairman Brendan Carr announced the items on October 28, in a release that bills them as final rules for “American Drone Dominance.” The draft text goes online on October 29, the same day the commission votes on opening the 800 MHz Cellular band to drones.

The first order covers three bands. It would let drones carry control data at 450 MHz, in spectrum now limited to voice calls from high-flying private planes. It would let ground radars track drones at 24.45 to 24.65 GHz and loosen power rules in the 800 MHz air-ground band that carries in-flight Wi-Fi. The second order opens all of 28.35 to 28.6 GHz to low-Earth orbit satellite terminals on moving vehicles, drones included.

The FCC proposed the three changes in the first order on January 13, 2025, a week before President Trump’s second inauguration, when Jessica Rosenworcel chaired the agency and Carr voted for it as a commissioner. In two of those three bands, the agency’s own proposal names a single company as the only licensee.

Echodyne Asked the FCC for Drone-Detection Radar Rules in 2018

The 24 GHz rule answers a petition Echodyne filed on October 24, 2018, adding federal and non-federal secondary radiolocation to the 200 MHz between 24.45 and 24.65 GHz, so ground radars can detect drones near airports, borders, prisons, stadiums and critical infrastructure without disturbing the band’s primary users.

Those primary users are aircraft radionavigation systems, including detect-and-avoid radar, and inter-satellite links. Until now drone-detection radar has run in the band on waivers. The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau granted Echodyne a site-by-site waiver in June 2019 and extended it by five years in June 2024, the same day it granted one to MatrixSpace. The January 2025 proposal noted two comments on Echodyne’s petition, from Black Sage Technologies and In-Q-Tel, and both supported it. Echodyne’s radar already sits inside a $490 million Air Force counter-drone program.

Radiolocation means detection, with no navigation use of the data. A rule that lets a radar see a drone gives no one the power to jam it or bring it down. That authority comes from federal law, which now extends it to the mitigation-certified local agencies DroneXL covered in September.

Gogo Has Been the Only 800 MHz Air-Ground Licensee Since 2013

The first single-licensee band carries in-flight internet. The 2025 proposal would rewrite power rules for 849 to 851 and 894 to 896 MHz, four megahertz Gogo Business Aviation has held alone since 2013, and measure transmitter power by average instead of peak, as Gogo petitioned in July 2022.

The FCC auctioned the band in 2006, and Gogo won three of its four megahertz, then took over the fourth when it bought LiveTV in 2013. Gogo asked for a waiver to use average power in May 2021, and the FCC’s Mobility Division granted it on June 21, 2022. The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) asked the FCC to reconsider that grant a month later. The FCC already switched PCS and AWS to average power in 2008 and the Cellular band in 2017, each with the same 13 dB cap on power spikes the 2025 proposal sets for Gogo’s band. Carr’s release says the final rules keep protections for public safety communications.

AURA Would Turn Its 450 MHz Licenses Into One Nationwide License

The 450 MHz change acts on a February 2021 petition from AURA Network Systems and A2G Communications. The FCC calls AURA the band’s only incumbent licensee. The 2025 proposal covers 650 kilohertz at 454 and 459 MHz and would convert AURA’s licenses into one nationwide control-link license with no auction.

In the FCC’s words, the current site-based rules effectively prohibit “wide-area, low-altitude service.” Carr’s release repeats that passage from paragraph 6 of the January 2025 proposal, WT Docket 24-629, nearly word for word. The proposal adds a primary aeronautical allocation for control and non-payload communications (CNPC), the link that flies the aircraft rather than the camera feed. AURA filed its petition as a condition of a 2021 waiver that already let it offer some drone services from its 53 sites. The conversion is voluntary, and the proposed eligibility test describes the band’s only incumbent: nationwide coverage at 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) from sites placed so that nobody else can build a regional service. The FCC says the leftover spectrum between those sites cannot reasonably go to anyone else without harmful interference.

The FCC paired that with build-out conditions. If the licensee keeps high-altitude coverage, it must serve 400 feet (122 meters) over 17.5% of each of the country’s regional license areas within four years and 35% within eight. If it drops high-altitude service, the targets double to 35% and 70%. Missing the first benchmark cuts the 15-year license term to 13 years, and missing the final one in any region terminates the license automatically. The FCC tentatively concluded the conversion would not create undue enrichment for the incumbent, because building drone service takes heavy investment against uncertain demand, and asked whether a windfall payment should apply anyway.

DroneXL’s Take

I want all three rules passed. Echodyne has waited eight years for a permanent version of a rule it has run on by waiver since 2019, and a licensed control link that reaches 400 feet is something the 450 MHz rules have never allowed without a waiver.

The airspace sovereignty branding adds nothing to a proposal Carr already voted for as a commissioner. Finishing it as chairman is good government. Read the 400-foot benchmark first when the draft posts on Thursday. Under the 2025 proposal, the only company holding licenses in the band gets a nationwide license without bidding against anyone. The 400-foot coverage targets and the termination penalty behind them are what make AURA build a drone network on it. If the draft weakens them, the FCC is handing one company a nationwide license with the drone part made optional. I’d want the commissioners to explain that before they vote on November 19.

Sources: FCC news release, October 28, 2026, FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking FCC 25-7, WT Docket 24-629, FCC November 2026 Open Meeting

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

DJI Mini 5 Pro Long-Term Review: Great Camera, but Some Report 254 g

Greg Reverdiau — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 21:57:00 GMT

DJI put a 1-inch sensor into a drone that weighs less than a can of seltzer water. We’ve had time to move past the launch and really put the DJI Mini 5 Pro to the test, so this is my long-term review: the camera, the video modes, the intelligent flight modes, the safety systems and how it flies.

I’m Greg from Pilot Institute. We have trained over 450,000 pilots and tested dozens of drones. By the end of this, you’ll know what the Mini 5 Pro does well, where it falls short, and whether it’s the right tool for you.

The 50MP 1-Inch Sensor Is the Main Reason to Buy the Mini 5 Pro

The Mini 5 Pro has a 50-megapixel 1-inch sensor behind a 24mm equivalent lens with an f/1.8 aperture. The Mini 4 Pro only had a 1/1.3-inch sensor, so moving up to a full 1-inch chip is not a minor spec bump. It’s the leap Mini owners have been waiting for.

There are other helpful upgrades, like true vertical video, gimbal rotation and 42 GB of internal storage, which is enough that you may not need an SD card. But the camera is the reason you’re going to buy this drone.

A larger sensor gathers a lot more light. That means cleaner shadow detail, richer colors and more flexibility in post. A bright sky over a dark foreground wrecks smaller drones, because it forces you to choose between a blown-out sky and a black background. The Mini 5 Pro holds detail in both, so it works very well near sunset or as the light fades.

That doesn’t mean every night shot looks clean. The dark parts still get grainy, because the ISO has to climb to pull out the detail. What I really like is how deep into the evening you can keep shooting before the image falls apart.

During the day, the f/1.8 aperture lets in so much light that you need ND filters to keep the 180-degree shutter rule and natural motion blur. They’re absolutely a must.

The 2x Medium Tele Mode Crops the Sensor Instead of Adding a Second Lens

Like the other Minis, the Mini 5 Pro has only one lens, so DJI added a 48mm equivalent medium telephoto mode. In flight you switch between 1x and 2x, and the 2x view crops into the 50MP sensor for a lossless 12MP image instead of a typical digital zoom.

It’s like zooming in afterwards using all the pixels you have. That’s handy for a subject that’s a little further away, or when you want more parallax in your shot. Still, neither view is a true optical telephoto, and if you’ve flown a drone with a second lens, you’re going to miss it. That’s the honest trade for a drone this small and this light.

4K at 120 fps and D-Log M Give the Mini 5 Pro Room to Work

The Mini 5 Pro records 4K at up to 120 frames per second, which is huge for a mini drone. Previous models topped out at 100 fps. In 1080p you get super slow motion at 240 fps, and all three color profiles record 4K in 10-bit H.265.

For most of our flights, we film 4K at 30 fps and only go higher when we want to slow the footage down in post.

Normal is the easy choice when you want good video and less editing. You give up some dynamic range, but the footage looks great and colorful straight out of the camera. In Normal you can also step down to 1080p, where you’re capped at 8-bit H.264.

D-Log M gives you a lot more room to change colors in post, which helps when you need to match other cameras or you’re shooting a heavy-contrast scene. The Mini 5 Pro has great dynamic range, and D-Log M keeps more information in the highlights and shadows so you can really push the grade.

HLG is the HDR video format. It also gives you high dynamic range, it has a bigger color space, and it needs less adjusting in post, but you need an HDR-compatible screen to take full advantage of it.

A flat profile is not always the best choice. If you don’t plan to color grade, Normal will serve you better. If you want the most out of this drone, take the time to learn proper color grading. We typically film in D-Log M.

True Vertical Video Rotates the Gimbal for a Full 4K Frame

The Mini 5 Pro physically rotates its gimbal for vertical video, so you get a full 4K vertical frame. The Mini 3 and Mini 4 did the same. The Air 3S crops inside the sensor instead and maxes out at 2.7K, so this is one thing the Mini does better.

If you make content for Instagram, YouTube Shorts or any social media, it’s a great feature to have. We have friends who fly this drone over the Air 3S specifically for that reason.

Honestly, I’m a big fan of 16:9 content. There’s more to work with, and I think it’s more cinematic at the end of the day. But some shots have a natural composition that works well vertically.

The gimbal also has 225 degrees of controllable roll for tilted horizons and smooth spinning shots. That’s a fun tool, but probably not a reason to buy the drone by itself. If you shoot a lot of social media content, the vertical video might be.

The Mini 5 Pro Is the Best Size-to-Quality Trade for Video and Photos

After flying it for a while, the best part is the mix of size and image quality. You can carry the Mini 5 Pro almost anywhere and still get video that looks like a paid job, with a sharp image and colors that are easy to work with.

Photos come in 12MP or 50MP, as JPEG or DNG RAW. The 50MP mode shows a lot more detail in good light, but more pixels don’t always mean a better photo. The 12MP mode can work a lot better in low light or when your subject is moving. RAW is best when you want to fix the light, color or white balance in software afterwards.

All of these modes can make the setup a little hard to learn. That’s why we made free deep dive courses on every drone we review, and the Mini 5 Pro one is linked in the video description.

Obstacle Avoidance Is Night and Day, but ActiveTrack Still Needs Open Space

The Mini 5 Pro senses obstacles all the way around, with forward-facing LiDAR and a downward infrared sensor. We’ve tested a lot of the newer models, and obstacle avoidance has improved a ton over maybe the last 10 years. I’ve rarely seen it fail in regular conditions with larger objects.

The safety system lowers the risk, but you still need to pick a safe flight path and keep a safe distance from obstacles that little camera may not see. That matters even more with ActiveTrack.

The Mini 5 Pro has ActiveTrack 360 and Spotlight, plus a trace wheel in the app that lets you choose the drone’s position around your subject. If you’re a solo creator, this can be one of the best tools on the drone.

The two modes are very different. Spotlight keeps your subject framed while you stay in control of the flying. ActiveTrack hands the flight path over to the drone. In a wide open field, that works great. Near trees, wires, houses or hills, it can get a little tricky.

I’ve crashed the DJI Neo quite a few times using ActiveTrack. Granted, I was running, and it was following me and going all the way around. Luckily, the drone was okay and it’s still flying.

Reported 254 g Weights and Wind Are the Mini 5 Pro’s Real Limits

DJI lists the Mini 5 Pro at 249.9 g, with a variance of plus or minus 4 g, and a lot of people have reported drones that weigh up to 254 g. You can still fly one recreationally, but at that weight you have to register it with the FAA.

For a lot of folks, that’s not really an issue. (The FAA has no weight tolerance at the 250-gram line.) The good news is that the Mini 5 Pro comes with Remote ID built in as standard, so you won’t have to add a module on top of it.

Wind is the other thing to consider, as with any Mini drone. The Mini 5 Pro is rated for Level 5, so it can potentially handle gusts up to 24 mph. From experience, I can tell you it struggles a little in winds over 20 mph. I recommend staying closer to 15 mph so you’re not stressed out while you fly. The Air and Mavic series show a big difference here, in performance and in battery life.

Buy the Mini 5 Pro if you want very good video from a small drone that’s easy to carry and quick to deploy. It’s a strong pick for travel, social media, real estate, solo video work and some paid jobs. It also fits pilots who need true vertical video.

Skip it if you need an optical telephoto lens. The Mavic or the Air is probably the better platform if you want to fly in stronger winds, and if you already own a drone that does everything you need, you don’t need this one.

For the right pilot, I think this is one of the best small camera drones you can buy right now. The choice comes down to one question: which features matter most to you as a pilot, a photographer or a videographer?

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full DJI Mini 5 Pro long-term review on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Zipline Says Its Drones Got 68% Quieter. The Number Is Still a Model

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:55:00 GMT

Zipline said on October 27 that every drone in its fleet now flies what the company calls sound-optimized dynamic flying, and that the update, combined with other hardware and software changes, has cut sound exposure per flight by 68% and peak loudness by 24% against its 2025 fleet. Each aircraft reads the wind at takeoff and runs a custom sound model to pick the quietest way onto the wing and back off it. The same change trims 53 seconds off the average flight and 21% off the energy it uses.

I covered the flight-profile change in September, when co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn posted the first fleet numbers on X. The October release gives the technique a name and two headline noise figures, and says it now runs fleetwide. Both figures, by Zipline’s own wording, are “based on internal modeling.” Zipline has published no ground-measured decibel readings for the new profile.

Zipline’s Drones Now Pick the Quietest Climb Using Wind and a Sound Model

Sound-optimized dynamic flying replaces a fixed route with one the aircraft computes on board. At takeoff the drone measures the wind and feeds that reading into Zipline’s acoustic model. It then chooses how to dip and climb so the loud transition onto the wing takes less time and power.

Zipline’s Platform 2 aircraft lifts off on hover propellers, then tilts onto a fixed wing and cruises on a single motor. The hand-off between the two modes is where the noise and the battery drain concentrate, and I walked through the physics of that in the September article. The new profile dips the nose to gain speed, which Zipline compares to a bike coasting downhill, and pitches up to bleed speed off at the end instead of braking with its motors. Zipline says the aircraft now spends roughly 50% longer on the wing per flight.

Zipline's illustration of sound-optimized dynamic flying: the aircraft descends to accelerate after takeoff and climbs to decelerate before lowering its droid, instead of flying a flat box. Image credit: Zipline

Oksenhorn’s September 5 numbers put the median mission 48 seconds shorter, and the October figure is an average rather than a median. The release says the technique “now enables” higher-altitude deliveries and more elaborate maneuvers to come.

Zipline’s 68% Figure Is a Modeled Output Against Its 2025 Fleet

The 68% cut in sound exposure and the 24% cut in peak loudness are modeled outputs. They compare Zipline’s current fleet, hardware and software changes bundled together, with its 2025 fleet, and Zipline’s press release does not say how much the new flight profile contributes on its own.

The release also restates two claims Zipline has made before. It says its two-part design keeps the aircraft about 330 feet (100 meters) up during a delivery, against an average of 32 feet (10 meters) for other delivery drone services, a comparison that is Zipline’s own and that names no competitor. In a March 25 newsroom post, the company said its aircraft are six times quieter during a delivery than others in the industry, that a software update it described as recent had cut perceived noise 30%, and that it plans to raise its cruising altitude to 400 feet (122 meters).

Co-founder and chief technology officer Keenan Wyrobek framed the goal as acceptance rather than tolerance. “We want people to love having Zipline available, not just tolerate it,” he said in the release.

The Release Landed in a Month of Town Fights Over Amazon’s Drones

The pitch that carried the release to my inbox opened with the towns, not the drone. Zipline’s PR firm wrote that noise is the complaint communities raise most, and that “fewer propellers spinning means less noise.” The pitch names no competitor, and the towns it refers to are fighting Amazon.

Amazon’s Prime Air is the company drawing the rules. Westborough, Massachusetts, voted 510 to 13 on October 19 to ban drone launch pads and drop zones, and Governor Maura Healey is weighing a permit freeze aimed at Amazon’s hub there. Kirkwood, Missouri, let a Walmart and Wing drone nest die without a motion on October 15. In Richardson, Texas, residents who call themselves drone warriors are still asking Amazon to fly higher after the company raised its cruise altitude.

The noise numbers those towns quote are Amazon’s, and the FAA put them on the record. The agency’s Chicago noise appendix puts a cruising MK30 at 63.7 dBA SEL measured at 200 feet (61 meters), and its Baton Rouge filing carries the 92-decibel figure Amazon’s own marketing leaves out. Zipline’s own Texas draft assessment has a noise appendix too, and it concludes the company’s flights produce no meaningful noise anywhere in the study areas. The MK30 descends to yard level to drop a package. Zipline’s offer to towns is that its aircraft never does.

DroneXL’s Take

Zipline has the quietest delivery architecture flying in the US, and I have said so since the Platform 2 reveal in March 2023. Keeping the aircraft 330 feet up and sending a droid down a tether beats anything Amazon or Wing descends to a yard with, and software that spends less time in the loud transition phase is the right next layer. The press release is also smart. Towns from Westborough to Kirkwood are voting on drone rules this fall, and a company that can walk into those meetings with a quieter aircraft and a noise story will win permits that Amazon is losing.

But the number those towns need is the one Zipline still hasn’t published. In September I wrote that Zipline should put microphones under a flight path in Princeton and publish the before-and-after, and the October release answers with a bigger model. A 68% modeled reduction will not survive the first council meeting where a resident holds up a phone with a decibel app. The FAA’s environmental reviews put Amazon’s numbers on the record, and Zipline’s own Texas appendix is a model as well. Zipline can beat Amazon’s figures with a microphone, and I think it would, which makes a published measurement the cheapest argument the company has left to make.

Source: Zipline press release, October 27, 2026, Zipline newsroom, March 25, 2026

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

Wing Picks KDDI for Japan Drone Delivery. KDDI Owns Half the Store

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:04:00 GMT

Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, signed a partnership with Japanese carrier KDDI and its subsidiary KDDI SmartDrone on October 27 to bring drone delivery to Japan, the three companies said. The first flights are planned for 2027 in a handful of areas, carrying groceries and daily goods, and the one retailer named is the convenience store chain Lawson.

KDDI has owned half of Lawson since 2024. The carrier also supplies the mobile network Japanese drones fly on beyond the pilot’s sight. Wing supplies the aircraft, and the retailer and the network belong to its partner.

Wing’s own announcement sets the goal as service in select areas “by the end of 2027” and calls Japan a market that is still developing its drone delivery rules. Japan has allowed autonomous flights over residential areas since December 2022.

Wing Brings the Aircraft, KDDI Brings the Network and the Paperwork

The KDDI release splits the work in two. Wing contributes its autonomous aircraft, its flight operations software and its automated ground stations. KDDI and KDDI SmartDrone contribute the communications layer, the regulatory handling and their experience putting drones to work with local governments across Japan.

KDDI SmartDrone controls aircraft over the carrier’s 4G LTE network, which is what lets a drone fly out of the operator’s line of sight. The company is building drone ports around the country and in September flew remote surveys of flood damage in Ishikawa Prefecture after heavy rain. It also runs a drone school at more than 20 sites that trains pilots for Japan’s national licence. The three companies will deliver food, daily necessities, over-the-counter medicine and small retail orders, and they say the product list and the service map will grow through deals with municipalities and regional partners after the 2027 start.

Wing’s record going in is more than one million home deliveries as of this month, thousands a day across five US markets, usually inside 30 minutes of the order. The release gives no delivery-time target for Japan.

Wing aircraft in the air at dusk. The company says it flies thousands of deliveries a day in five US metros. Photo credit: Wing

KDDI Owns Half of Lawson, So the First Shelf on the Route Is Its Own

KDDI, Mitsubishi and Lawson signed a capital partnership on February 6, 2024, and KDDI’s tender offer at 10,360 yen a share closed that May. Lawson has since been delisted, Mitsubishi and KDDI hold 50 percent each, and KDDI’s new release counts the chain among its own consumer businesses.

The release leans on a government figure to make the case for flying groceries. Japan’s agriculture ministry estimated in 2020 that about 9.04 million people have trouble reaching a food store as stores close and the population ages. KDDI pairs that with the “2024 logistics problem,” the name Japan gave to the driver shortage that followed an annual cap of 960 overtime hours on truck drivers in April 2024. Its third argument is dual-income households with children, who it says have no time left to shop.

The partners also want the network available for deliveries when a disaster cuts roads.

A Wing aircraft lowers a package on its tether. KDDI's release says orders will go to a spot the customer chooses, to cut redeliveries. Photo credit: Wing, via KDDI

Japan Opened Residential Drone Routes in 2022, and Wing Still Calls the Rules Unfinished

Japan lifted its ban on autonomous flights over inhabited areas on December 5, 2022, as DroneXL reported when the revised Civil Aeronautics Act took effect. The transport ministry calls them Level 4 flights and asks for a Class 1 aircraft certification, a Class 1 pilot certificate and a flight permission.

Wing’s post still describes Japan as a country that “develops a safe, scalable regulatory framework for drone delivery,” which reads as a company that expects the permission step to take time. Its Japanese partners are the ones who have been through that process, and the release says so.

Japan would be Wing’s first new country since Ireland, where it started flying in Lusk in 2022, and it flew in Australia before any US suburb. Wing’s locations page today lists five US metros flying, 14 more coming soon, and nothing outside the country. In the US it is adding Denver and Seattle with Walmart for the same year it has promised Japan.

DroneXL’s Take

Japan is a better fit for drone delivery than any US suburb Wing flies today, and KDDI is a better partner than Walmart. The US case for drone delivery is convenience, and two Denver suburbs froze hub applications before Wing had even named the city. Japan’s case is nine million people who can no longer get to a store and a trucking industry that ran out of drivers by law. That is a public service, and it is why Japan cleared residential routes in 2022 while the FAA’s Part 108 still sits unsigned.

KDDI will hold the aircraft contract, the network the aircraft fly on, half of the only retailer named, and the relationships with the towns that approve the routes. Walmart brings Wing the stores and nothing else. The 2027 launch will show whether KDDI opens that network to a competing chain or keeps it as a Lawson delivery service with a Wing logo on the wing. I expect the first version to be Lawson only, and I expect the municipalities, not KDDI, to push for the second.

Sources: KDDI, Wing, KDDI, Mitsubishi and Lawson agreement, Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.

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

Mexican TV Host Kicks Drone on Live Show, It Hits Model in the Face

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:10:00 GMT

A television host in Monterrey, Mexico, kicked a small camera drone during a live broadcast on Monday night, October 26, and the drone flew into the face of a model standing a few feet away. Ernesto Chavana, the longtime host of Es Show on Multimedios’ Canal 6, lashed out at the quadcopter as it hovered low beside him. It shot across the studio floor and hit Isabella Rojas, a Colombian model and cast member known on the show as “La Colombiana,” in the mouth.

Rojas covered her face, bled on camera and was helped off the set by castmates, and paramedics treated her off camera. She returned to the studio later in the program and told viewers her injuries were minor. Chavana apologized on air later in the broadcast. Clips of the kick have been viewed more than three million times on X since Tuesday.

Chavana says his bosses have summoned him to a meeting on Thursday at noon. None of the Mexican outlets covering the story as of Wednesday morning quote Multimedios or the production on who was flying the drone or why it was at leg height in a studio full of people.

Chavana Blamed the Production, Then Took the Blame Himself

Chavana stayed put after the kick and did not go to Rojas, and Infobae reports he was still angry and blamed the production while castmates helped her off the set. Multimedios’ own sister outlet Milenio says he appeared sorry afterward and did not answer its questions.

“Me hago responsable de lo que acaba de pasar,” he told viewers. He said this later in the broadcast, adding that he felt very embarrassed and ashamed of what he had just done. Es Show’s production confirmed to reporters that Chavana would pay for the damage caused to Rojas.

Esto acaba de pasar en un programa de México. 😳
- Decko. (@Frankzm) October 27, 2026

In a video posted the next day, Chavana went further and called himself the only one responsible, saying the kick was never meant to hurt anyone and that if there was something to pay, he would pay it, SDP Noticias reported. SDP also reported that the production barred him from discussing the incident on air, and Milenio says the summons came from Multimedios’ human resources department. Viewers have called on the network to suspend or fire him. The company had not announced any sanction as of Wednesday morning, and Rojas, who SDP says already has legal advice, has not commented on whether she will act.

The Drone Was Flying Unguarded at Leg Height in a Live Studio

The clip shows a small black quadcopter with four exposed rotors hovering what looks like a foot (30 centimeters) off the floor, a few steps in front of the cast. Milenio says it was filming the studio for the show. None of the outlets covering the story identify the pilot.

DroneXL has covered a string of drone-to-face injuries on sets and stages. An actor ran into the propellers of a hovering DJI Inspire 2 during a film shoot in Wales in 2022. A photographer was fined in 2024 after losing control of his drone, which crashed onto the stage during a Fatboy Slim concert. And a 14-year-old was hospitalized with propeller lacerations on a Florida fishing pier the same year. In none of those cases did a person strike the aircraft. In Monterrey a man kicked it.

DroneXL’s Take

Chavana kicked the drone, so the injury is on him, and he said as much. But I keep looking at where that quadcopter was before his foot got to it. Somebody on the Es Show crew put a drone with bare propellers roughly a foot off the floor, by my read of the clip, in a live studio, with a dozen performers standing within a few steps of it. That is a flight plan for an accident even without a host losing his temper. Drones built to fly close to people indoors, the DJI Neo and the ducted Avata 2 among them, ship with full prop guards for a reason. A ducted drone kicked across a studio still hurts. A guarded one is far less likely to open a lip. My read is that Multimedios will sanction the man who kicked and keep flying the same drone the same way. The fix belongs to the production: guard the props, keep the aircraft above head height or behind the talent, and give the pilot the authority to land it the moment a host starts swatting at it.

Source: Milenio, SDP Noticias, El Imparcial

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

Wing Wants Seven St. Louis Drone Hubs Live at Once. Manchester Is Next

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:49:00 GMT

Wing wants to open about seven Walmart drone delivery hubs across the St. Louis area together instead of testing a single store first. Wing spokeswoman Jessie Poole-Strang told the St. Louis Business Journal, in a report published Tuesday, that the approach would bring the service to tens of thousands of households at once.

The next city to hear the pitch is Manchester, Missouri. Wing presents to the Board of Aldermen on Monday, November 2, and holds a public open house at City Hall on Wednesday, November 4. Kirkwood, the first St. Louis-area city to take up a filed Wing permit, let it die without a motion on October 15, after its own planners had recommended approval.

Kirkwood’s own planning report puts Wing’s target at 12 Walmart stores in the metro, and Wing’s St. Louis web page lists none of them.

Wing Plans a Seven-Nest Launch With 12 St. Louis Walmarts in Play

Wing plans to open about seven St. Louis nests together, and its applicant told Kirkwood planners it is pursuing 12 Walmart stores in the metro. Kirkwood’s proposed nest held up to 18 drones behind a fence in a corner of the store parking lot.

Poole-Strang described the same strategy in August, when she told Spectrum News that “when we enter a new market, we really want to target multiple sites.” She said then that Wing was still finalizing its initial sites with Walmart, the step that starts permitting. The Business Journal reported that Walmart and Wing have approached six cities so far, according to meeting minutes: St. Charles, Wentzville, Kirkwood, Maplewood, Manchester and Glen Carbon, Illinois. Kirkwood’s September 2 Planning and Zoning subcommittee report names a seventh store, in High Ridge.

If each named city has one store in play, that leaves at least five of the 12 unaccounted for. DroneXL searched the meeting agendas of about 20 other St. Louis-area cities, on both sides of the river, and found no Wing or Walmart drone item. Arnold, Chesterfield, O’Fallon, Missouri, St. Peters and the St. Louis County Planning Commission could not be searched.

High Ridge Is the Only Approval Reported, and No County Agenda Shows It

Kirkwood’s September 2 report is the only source for Wing’s one St. Louis approval, saying “the only approval so far is at the High Ridge store,” and no 2026 Jefferson County agenda that DroneXL found mentions drones in unincorporated High Ridge.

A site approval handled by county staff would not reach an agenda, so a permit may exist that has not been published.

The other six named cities are at every stage short of a yes. Wentzville gave Bill 4914, its drone delivery zoning ordinance, a first reading on October 21, and its Board of Aldermen meets next on November 4. Maplewood’s Plan and Zoning Commission recorded on September 2 that a formal Wing application “has not yet been received but is expected,” and its October 5 agenda carried no drone item.

St. Charles heard a presentation from Wing and Walmart at its August 18 City Council meeting, referred by Mayor Dan Borgmeyer, and no permit or ordinance has appeared on a council or zoning agenda since. In Glen Carbon, the Building and Development Committee’s July 28 agenda listed a “review and recommendation on use of drones at Walmart.” Nothing on drones has reached the Village Board.

Manchester Hears Wing Twice in Three Days With No Vote Scheduled

Wing presents to Manchester’s Board of Aldermen at 7 p.m. on November 2 at the Manchester Justice Center, then hosts an open house at 6 p.m. on November 4 at City Hall. The city’s October 24 notice says the service would operate “out of the Manchester Walmart store.”

The city says no formal board action or vote will take place on November 2, and its officials have already seen the drones work. Mayor Ben Toben told aldermen on August 17 that he had attended a meeting that day with city staff, Walmart and Alphabet “where they demonstrated drone deliveries,” according to the meeting minutes.

The notice’s figures do not all match Wing’s own. Manchester describes drones that reach up to 65 mph and operate within a 6- to 7-mile radius of the store. Wing’s St. Louis page says its aircraft fly at up to 60 mph and travel up to 12 miles (19 kilometers) round trip, which works out to the six-mile radius in Kirkwood’s report.

A Wing drone leaves a fenced nest in a Walmart parking lot in the Charlotte area. Manchester residents are being asked about one nest like this in a planned network of about seven. Photo credit: Wing

No FAA Comment Period Is Required for St. Louis Under the National Finding

The FAA’s public list of drone delivery environmental reviews has no Wing document for Missouri or Illinois. The FAA signed a national environmental finding on July 28, 2026. Under it, a Wing site that fits its limits can be cleared through an internal checklist, with no public comment period.

Wing’s Atlanta and Houston decisions, both signed in August, went through metro-specific assessments with public drafts. St. Louis will not get one unless Wing or the FAA chooses that route, and the national finding itself is under challenge: Illinois is one of 15 states suing the FAA to throw it out. Missouri is not.

A city cannot regulate the flights, only the nest on the ground, as DroneXL’s guide to how drone delivery approval works explains. That leaves aldermen and zoning commissions as the only public venue for Wing’s St. Louis plan.

DroneXL’s Take

Wing is planning St. Louis as one network and asking for it one parking lot at a time. It says it is still finalizing sites with Walmart, and a company aiming to open seven nests at once should show cities the list before asking any of them to vote.

I support the national finding. A full environmental study for every identical parking lot was never going to tell anyone much. But those metro studies had one side effect worth keeping. They put hub addresses on paper, which is why DroneXL’s tracker can list Amazon’s hubs by street address. St. Louis gets no such document. The public record holds a count of 12 stores in a Kirkwood staff report and the names of seven communities.

A Manchester resident at the November 4 open house will be asked about one nest at one Walmart. The aircraft over that resident’s yard could come from any nest within six miles, and the resident will not see that map unless Wing brings it. Manchester’s aldermen should ask Wing for the full list of 12 on November 2, and Wing should hand it over.

Sources: St. Louis Business Journal via MSN, City of Manchester, October 24 notice, Manchester Board of Aldermen minutes, August 17, City of Kirkwood, October 15 council packet (September 2 subcommittee report), Maplewood Plan and Zoning Commission, October 5 packet (September 2 minutes), City of St. Charles council minutes, August 18, Village of Glen Carbon, July 28 committee agenda, Spectrum News, Wing St. Louis page, FAA Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations

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

Alibaba Says a Pentagon Law Cost It Every Lobbyist. DJI Kept Two Firms

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:29:00 GMT

A federal judge in San Jose on Monday blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a lobbying restriction against Alibaba, finding the law likely violates the company’s First Amendment rights. The law took effect June 30. It bars the Defense Department from contracting with any company that hires a lobbying firm that also lobbies for a company on the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list of “Chinese military companies.” By that date, Alibaba says, it had no registered lobbyists left.

DJI has been on the same list since October 2022. Lobbying reports for July through September, filed with Congress this month, show two outside firms lobbying for its U.S. arm, DJI Technology, Inc., after the law took effect: CLS Strategies, which reported $170,000 in DJI income for the quarter, and Liberty Government Affairs, which reported $27,500.

Section 4663 Binds The Pentagon And Reaches Lobbyists Through Their Clients

Section 851 of the 2025 defense act, now 10 U.S.C. § 4663, does not bar a firm from lobbying for a listed company. Absent a Secretary of Defense waiver, it bars the Pentagon from contracting with that firm’s clients. The firm breaks no rule by keeping a listed client.

The cost lands on its other clients that want Pentagon work, and Judge Eumi K. Lee’s 26-page order spells out how that plays out. Defense contractors will not risk Pentagon work when plenty of capable firms are available, she wrote, so the firm has to choose, and “The only rational choice for a lobbying firm is to stop representing Alibaba.” Alibaba told the court it had retained more than two dozen lobbyists and multiple firms before the designation, some of them for almost a decade, and that several firms named the law as the reason they withdrew.

DJI’s filings describe a much smaller operation, with three named lobbyists across its third-quarter reports. DJI is the only client CLS Strategies lists in its 2026 lobbying filings, and its third-quarter report covers “issues and policies pertaining to Unmanned Aircraft Systems” under the aviation, defense and natural resources issue codes. Liberty’s filing covers the FY2027 defense authorization act and the FCC’s authority. DJI’s own report, which counts its in-house team and its spending on outside firms, came to $240,000 for the quarter and lists the FCC Covered List and H.R. 9430, the American Drone Manufacturing Dominance Act of 2026. That total had already dropped from $640,000 in the last quarter of 2025 to $200,000 in the first quarter of 2026. Lobbying reports show a firm’s lobbying clients only, not its other contracts, which the law also reaches.

Two other firms ended their DJI registrations earlier this year: Porter Wright Morris & Arthur effective January 31, and MO Strategies, whose filings covered border-security work with the Department of Homeland Security, on May 24. Neither termination filing gives a reason, and the form does not ask for one.

The Judge Found The Pentagon Brought One Exhibit

Judge Lee applied strict scrutiny because the rule restricts political speech based on who the speaker is. The government’s only exhibit was a joint explanatory statement from the 2024 Congressional Record, and the order says that statement contains no finding that lobbyists for listed companies pose a security risk.

The statement told the Comptroller General to report by December 23, 2025, on consulting firms that contract with both the Pentagon and the Chinese government or its affiliates. At the August 27 hearing, government lawyers could not confirm whether that report reached Congress by the deadline, and they did not provide a copy. Judge Lee also pointed to Nebraska, which makes lobbyists for 1260H-listed companies file an extra acknowledgment, as a less restrictive option. The government’s answer, that disclosure would still leave “access and the potential for influence,” was speculation, she wrote, and the Pentagon failed even the easier intermediate-scrutiny test.

The injunction applies to Section 4663 only as it relates to Alibaba: the Pentagon may not refuse a contract to any company because it shares a lobbying firm with Alibaba. The judge rejected Alibaba’s facial challenge at this stage, citing too little information about the statute’s full scope. She declined to remove the company from the 1260H list because that question belongs to its separate administrative-law claims, and set a $100 bond.

Courts Keep Questioning The Pentagon’s China List

Three 2026 rulings went against 1260H designations before this one: lidar maker Hesai at the D.C. Circuit, WuXi AppTec in federal court in Washington on August 7, and DJI’s partial reversal on August 14. None vacated a designation, though the WuXi court blocked enforcement of WuXi’s.

DJI’s win turned on a Pentagon justification that is fully redacted in the public record, and its case is back before District Judge Paul Friedman, who upheld the designation in September 2025.

Two U.S. subsidiaries of EV maker BYD filed a similar First Amendment challenge to Section 4663 in Los Angeles on September 25, Courthouse News reported. A CourtListener search of federal dockets on October 27 found no DJI challenge to the law. The list matters beyond lobbying: Section 805 of the 2024 defense act already bars the Pentagon from buying from listed companies directly, and its ban on indirect purchases through suppliers starts June 30, 2027.

DroneXL’s Take

Section 4663 is the clearest example yet of the 1260H list doing work Congress never had to justify. A company lands on the list, sometimes for reasons nobody outside the Pentagon gets to read, and that status now decides which lobbyists will take its calls. Required to show the danger, the government brought one exhibit with no findings about lobbyists.

DJI’s filings are the better test of the law’s logic. I see no national security difference between DJI’s lobbyists and Alibaba’s. As I read the statute, what decides a firm’s exposure is who else it works for, not anything it knows or carries, so the rule polices client lists and does nothing about what anyone hears in a meeting. If Congress thinks a lobbyist for a listed company is a channel for military information, a federal version of Nebraska’s acknowledgment rule would flag every one of them without cutting anyone off.

Alibaba’s relief is its own, so any company that hires a firm lobbying for DJI’s U.S. arm gets no such shield if it wants Pentagon work. Watch whether DJI files its own as-applied challenge in Judge Lee’s footsteps, and whether the government finally produces evidence when Alibaba’s summary judgment briefing starts.

Sources: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. v. U.S. Department of Defense, No. 5:26-cv-06227, order of October 26, 2026; Lobbying Disclosure Act filings for DJI Technology, Inc. by CLS Strategies, Liberty Government Affairs and DJI; BYD Motors LLC v. U.S. Department of Defense, No. 2:26-cv-11173 (C.D. Cal.); Courthouse News.

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

SFPD's Proposed Drone Rules Stop Short of Sonoma's Court Settlement

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:05:00 GMT

San Francisco’s Police Commission voted 5-1 on October 14 to advance the rules for the San Francisco Police Department’s 98 drones, without the broader warrant requirement public speakers asked for. Six weeks earlier, Sonoma County settled an ACLU lawsuit over drones its code inspectors had flown over private homes. DroneXL covered that lawsuit when it was filed in June 2025.

CalMatters reported this week that fights like these are now playing out across California, where police departments are pushing to expand drone use from emergency calls to everyday patrols.

Under the Sonoma settlement, county code inspectors need a warrant or a resident’s consent before a drone watches or records a home or its yard. San Francisco’s proposed order requires a warrant, or a recognized warrant exception, only when an operator intentionally focuses on the inside of a home or on an enclosed yard not visible from a public spot at ground level.

Sonoma’s settlement also makes the county tell residents when a drone watched them

The ACLU of Northern California announced the Sonoma settlement on September 2. Beyond the warrant-or-consent rule, which has an emergency exception, Permit Sonoma must tell residents when a drone has surveilled their home, delete footage after 30 days and keep images of homes away from third parties.

That 30-day clock runs from collection, or from the close of the investigation the footage belongs to, and images of homes can still go to third parties where the law requires it, according to the ACLU’s announcement. The county hands its flight logs to the ACLU for two years, and a revised drone policy goes to the Board of Supervisors for public comment. Each of the three residents who sued gets $50,000, KQED reported.

The program started in 2019 to target illegal cannabis grows and, the ACLU says, spread to routine code cases. A Permit Sonoma spokesperson told KQED the agency disagrees with the ACLU’s characterization, has defended its drone use successfully before, and is settling to avoid an expensive legal process, with no admission of fact. ACLU senior attorney Nick Hidalgo said the deal will “protect everyone’s right to privacy in and around their homes.”

San Francisco’s order bans general surveillance but has no notice rule

General Order 10.12 passed the commission 5-1 with Commissioner Kevin Benedicto voting no, and it still needs the Board of Supervisors. The four-page amended proposal contains no resident notification provision, though it bans general surveillance and caps retention of public footage at 30 days, the same clock Sonoma agreed to.

A captain or higher can extend that limit for an open criminal investigation. Benedicto, Mission Local reported, wrote that “the public has expressed serious concerns about surveillance.” About 50 people showed up, where the commission usually draws a handful, and after the vote most of those still in the room chanted against Skydio on their way out. A member of the privacy group DeFlock SF had asked commissioners to cancel the Skydio contract and write in a warrant requirement, CalMatters reported, and the commission sent the policy to labor negotiations instead.

The order DroneXL read the day before the vote still leaves “public safety response,” which I read as the broadest reason to launch a drone, undefined. Police policy director Asja Steeves told Mission Local the language is written so officers can understand it, and that public safety uses won’t differ from current practice. She said a data protection policy covering drones and license plate readers will reach the commission in several months.

That policy would arrive for a fleet of 98 drones, 14 of which launch remotely from the department’s Real Time Investigation Center, according to SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky. The department’s Skydio drone feeds sat on the open internet for about six months, DroneXL reported in July.

California has no comprehensive police drone law, so each city sets its own limits

California has no comprehensive state law on police drones, Holland & Knight attorney Katie Inman told CalMatters. The 2021 law AB 481 requires a city or county governing body to approve a police “military equipment” policy at a public meeting. Drones count, and agencies must file annual reports.

That leaves departments to apply Fourth Amendment case law built on manned aircraft. Inman, who previously worked at the FAA, said the Supreme Court has allowed aerial observation of what’s visible from lawful altitudes, but drones are different: “With drones, you can fly at much lower altitudes.”

Nearly 60 California law enforcement agencies run drone programs, CalMatters reports, citing the Los Angeles Police Department. Santa Ana’s council approved a $682,900 Drone as First Responder program on a 4-3 vote on February 3. Stockton’s council voted 7-0 on March 31 to add $3.15 million to its Flock Safety contract for a drone program tied to about 120 Flock license plate cameras, Stocktonia reported. CalMatters puts the fleet at six drones. Police Lt. David Padula projected response times of 30 seconds to about four minutes. Outside California, a 6-6 Minneapolis council vote in July killed a free 75-day Skydio trial after members cited the company’s ICE and Israeli military ties.

Berkeley’s drone review is a slide deck that found no proof of a safety payoff

The UC Berkeley Criminal Law & Justice Center review CalMatters links to is a February 2026 presentation to Berkeley’s Police Accountability Board. It found no empirical basis for drone claims on staffing, de-escalation or safety, and urged the City Council to reject the police department’s proposal as written.

The presentation leans on SFPD clearance rates from 2023 to 2025. Crime types with heavy drone use improved 0.6 percentage points more after drones arrived than before, while low-drone categories improved 5.9 points more, a gap its authors attribute largely to swings in arson numbers. They call their own comparison descriptive, not causal. The fleet Berkeley police proposed was DJI hardware, including the Avata 2 and Matrice 4T, and the deck warns that three of the four proposed models were caught by the FCC’s December 2025 Covered List action. Berkeley has since put its public safety technology package out to competitive bids.

DroneXL’s Take

I back Drone as First Responder, and California police departments should copy Sonoma’s terms before a lawsuit forces the same ones on them. Sonoma had not published its drone policy, and a settlement now makes it publish and revise one, pay $150,000 and hand two years of flight logs to the ACLU. San Francisco flies 98 drones over a far denser place, and its proposed order would hold its police to looser warrant and notice rules than Sonoma’s code inspectors now face.

My read is that resident notification is the cheapest fix on that list. It costs a department a letter. If DFR works as well as its backers say, nothing about the program breaks when residents find out a drone was over their house.

Sources: CalMatters, ACLU of Northern California, KQED, Mission Local, San Francisco Police Department General Order 10.12 (amended proposal), Stocktonia, UC Berkeley Criminal Law & Justice Center

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

Percepto Opens Its Inspection AI to Rival Drones Under a New CEO

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:09:00 GMT

Percepto, the Austin-based maker of the autonomous drone-in-a-box systems Florida Power & Light signed up for in 2022, launched Axion on Tuesday, a subscription platform that analyzes inspection data from other companies’ drones, fixed sensors and old inspection archives.

Percepto’s previous launch, on June 22, packaged its AI with next-generation Percepto Air drones, and co-founder Dor Abuhasira was quoted as CEO. Tuesday’s announcement names Julien Bellanger as chief executive and does not mention Abuhasira.

Axion Runs 160-Plus AI Models on Data Percepto’s Drones Never Collected

Axion applies more than 160 AI models to RGB photos, radiometric thermal data, gas-imaging video and orthomosaic maps from any supported source. Percepto says it trained those models on more than 100,000 hours of autonomous inspection data. It sells Axion as software-as-a-service and has not published pricing.

The platform sorts every image and finding by asset, so a tower’s history sits in one place. In Percepto’s launch announcement, the company says the models judge condition in context: a downed wire is identified by where it sits relative to the hardware around it, and a hot spot is scored against how that asset normally runs and the weather at the time.

Axion's transmission view lists each tower's open findings next to the flagged insulator discs. Image credit: Percepto

Operators can also type questions about an asset in plain English. In Percepto’s own demo, a utility worker sending a lineman to a pole asks what else is wrong with it, and Axion answers that a deteriorated crossarm was detected on June 3 and a vegetation crew trimmed a nearby tree two months ago.

The plain-language assistant pulls crew history and earlier findings for a single pole. Image credit: Percepto

Percepto Keeps Its Drones and Moves Their Production to the US

Percepto still sells hardware under the Ranger drone and Harbor station names, for operators who need more frequent coverage. The company says it is consolidating engineering, manufacturing and assembly in the United States, alongside its existing US remote operations, tying the move to “American Drone Dominance.”

The phrase is the administration’s: its first White House Drone Dominance event hosted roughly 40 drone makers in August, about two weeks before Section 232 tariffs on drones took effect on September 3. Percepto’s website lists the Ranger with 61-megapixel full-frame RGB and radiometric thermal cameras and says the Harbor is tested for Category 5 hurricane winds.

The same asset view applied to an oil and gas tank site, with a tank's corrosion, valve and thermal findings listed by date. Image credit: Percepto

Flights still run under the nationwide BVLOS waiver the FAA granted in 2023, alongside a $67 million funding round. Percepto also says a “leading U.S. energy company” has signed a multi-year contract for aerial data collection and AI analytics across its transmission network, extending a long relationship. It did not name the utility or the contract’s value.

Percepto’s AI Read DJI Footage in 2021, and Now the Software Leads the Sale

Axion’s hardware-agnostic design is not new. Percepto’s AIM software accepted footage from DJI drones and from fixed cameras as of its November 2021 release. For most of Percepto’s history, though, that AI reached customers through Percepto’s own drones and stations, and Axion is built to be sold without them.

Percepto also partnered with Boston Dynamics in 2020 to bring Spot’s inspection data into AIM. In a post published with the launch, Bellanger says most operators already run drone programs, sensors and inspection contracts, and the bottleneck has moved to reviewing what they collect. He says the drones and stations stay a core part of the business.

Bellanger comes from software. He was CEO of application-security company Prevoty when Imperva bought it for $140 million in 2018. Percepto’s leadership page, which describes a team based in the US and Israel, now lists 12 executives, and neither Abuhasira nor co-founder Sagi Blonder is among them. Bellanger’s post credits the founders with starting Percepto in 2014 and says he is “grateful to the founders for building it.” Neither the post nor the release says what roles they hold now.

DroneXL’s Take

Selling the AI without the drone is the right call. Percepto’s own 2021 DJI integration shows it has known for years that its customers fly other companies’ aircraft. Percepto hasn’t published which drones Axion supports, and its product page names none.

If the list includes DJI, as AIM’s did, Percepto will build drones in the US under a Drone Dominance banner while selling software that makes the Chinese fleets those drones are meant to replace more useful. I think that’s good business, and it’s the honest answer to the DJI ban for American operators: they keep the hardware they paid for and still get the analytics. Any inspection manager with a shelf of DJI Matrices should ask for that list on the demo call.

Sources: Percepto via PR Newswire, Percepto: next chapter post, Percepto June 22 release, Percepto leadership page, Percepto Ranger, Percepto 2023 Series C release, Percepto: Sagi Blonder, Percepto AIM 2022 release, SDxCentral

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

Amazon Drones Fly Over Chicago Suburbs. The FAA Still Shows a Draft

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:32:00 GMT

Amazon’s MK30 delivery drones are flying over the south suburbs of Chicago from the company’s fulfillment center in Markham, Illinois, and Amazon says it has about 21 of them there, NBC 5 Chicago reported on Monday, October 26. Homewood residents have filmed the aircraft descending to deliver in their neighborhood, and one of them believes he has already had a package delivered that way. It is the launch Amazon said in February would come “later this year,” after a summer start date the company put out ahead of its March 2 Tinley Park meet-and-greet came and went.

NBC 5 reported that the company has not yet officially launched the rollout. The Village of Homewood, by contrast, told residents the service has launched and that Homewood sits inside the delivery radius, the Country Herald reported the same day. The drones are the same 78-pound (35-kilogram) aircraft that hit a construction crane twice in Tolleson, Arizona a year ago, and the FAA’s environmental review index for drone delivery, last updated October 14, still lists the agency’s Chicago file as a draft with a comment period that closed August 14 and no decision posted.

Amazon Says 21 Drones Fly From Markham. NBC 5 Calls the Rollout Not Yet Official

Amazon has deployed approximately 21 drones at the Markham fulfillment center, the company told NBC 5, each carrying up to five pounds (2.3 kilograms) as far as eight miles (13 kilometers). NBC 5 reported the rollout is not yet official and that Amazon plans to deploy drones at additional centers.

The eight miles is Amazon’s figure. Prime Air senior manager of commercial operations Josh Brundage told ABC7 in February that anyone within an 8-mile radius of the buildings should be eligible, and the FAA’s own draft for the Chicago hubs sets the MK30’s operating range at 7.5 miles (12 kilometers). NBC 5 also reported that Amazon says a delivery will cost the company less than $5. Chicago outlets reported in February that Prime members would pay $4.99 an order, and an internal Amazon projection reported in December 2024, which DroneXL covered in Amazon’s Prime Air Meets Reality, put the company’s cost at about $63 a package by 2025.

“It’s got a weird sound to it,” Homewood resident Paul Bochenk told NBC 5. It was not as loud as he expected, he said, but annoying. Marty Tully, also of Homewood, thinks he has already had a drone delivery and likes the idea for one reason. “I enjoy it because they can drop off medications,” he said, adding that fewer drivers means less traffic.

CBS Chicago reported the Markham drones delivering 12 days earlier, on October 14, after Homewood residents filmed one coming down the day before. “It was decently noisy!” one resident told CBS, and Julian Gomez asked who was piloting it. Amazon told CBS that nobody watches the onboard cameras live, that they exist for navigation and obstacle detection, and that the Markham program created 30 jobs, a figure Amazon corrected from 55 after the story aired. Amazon compared the sound to a passing car, and spokesperson Caitlin Tully told CBS the response has been positive. Prime Air’s delivery is “safe, reliable, and the customer response has been overwhelmingly positive,” a company spokesperson told NBC 5.

The FAA’s Public Chicago File Ends at a July Draft With No Decision

The FAA’s drone environmental review index, last updated October 14, 2026, lists one Chicago assessment and its appendices: a draft environmental assessment dated July 2026 for three Prime Air hubs, with comment closed August 14. No final assessment or signed finding was there when DroneXL checked on October 27.

The draft describes the Markham hub, Amazon’s IGQ1 robotics fulfillment center at 2201 W. 159th Street, with the nearest homes about 1,900 feet (580 meters) to the northwest. It proposes up to 1,000 MK30 flights a day from each of the three sites, in Markham, Matteson and West Chicago, between 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m., seven days a week, with up to 100 of those flights in the first hour and the last half hour. The FAA’s noise appendix puts a cruising MK30 at 63.7 dBA SEL measured at 200 feet (61 meters), the same figure the FAA’s Baton Rouge filing likened to an air conditioner heard from 100 feet. Amazon’s passing-car comparison comes with no distance or metric.

Whether the Markham flights rest on that draft, or on something else, is not on the public record. On July 28 the FAA signed a national environmental finding that lets it approve new Part 135 delivery markets against one nationwide study, and 15 states, Illinois among them, asked the Second Circuit to throw it out on September 28. No public FAA document names the authorization under which Markham flies. Its Prime Air newsroom page, checked October 27, carries nothing on Chicago since the August 19 notice that promised the metro area “soon.” Matteson, the second south-suburban hub in the draft, is not named as flying in either the NBC 5 or the CBS report.

Amazon's MK30, the aircraft now flying from Markham, at the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas in September. The FAA's Chicago draft puts it at 78 pounds empty and 83.2 pounds at takeoff. Photo credit: DroneXL

Homewood Says It Cannot Ground the Drones, and Illinois Law Agrees

Homewood cannot prohibit drones over the village, set local flight restrictions or regulate the noise of an airborne drone, the village told residents, as the Country Herald reported on October 26. Federal aviation rules and Illinois law govern them. Illinois took that power from its villages in 2018.

Section 42.1 of the Illinois Aeronautics Act, 620 ILCS 5/42.1, makes regulating unmanned aircraft “an exclusive power and function of the State” and denies home-rule units the right to write their own rules, with one exception for a city of more than a million people, which is Chicago. DroneXL set out what that leaves a south-suburban village in its Matteson drone delivery guide: the building permit, the lot, and a state legislator. Markham, for its part, signed a zoning letter on November 4, 2025, saying drone delivery is permitted by right on the IGQ1 lot, per the FAA draft.

The Country Herald’s report gives residents amazondronefeedback@amazon.com as Amazon’s drone contact. That inbox is no longer monitored, according to an automated reply Amazon sent DroneXL in September. Residents can instead call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 and say it is about drone delivery, or open the customer-service chat and pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what is left once the drones are flying, and the Amazon Prime Air tracker lists the hubs and incidents DroneXL has documented. The closest precedent for what Homewood is about to live with is Richardson, Texas, where a resident’s tracker logged 52 drones over one yard in a day under an FAA decision that analyzed the same 1,000 flights a day.

DroneXL’s Take

Tully’s medication run is the case for this technology, and Amazon is flying the wrong aircraft for it. Medication to someone in Homewood who can’t get to a pharmacy earns its noise, and I’d want it flown the way Zipline flies its P2, hovering at 300 feet and lowering the package on a tether, with a parachute on board. Amazon is flying a 78-pound MK30 with no parachute over yards with mature trees and overhead wires, and each of its three collisions on record, the Tolleson crane, the Waco internet cable and the Richardson apartment building, put the aircraft on the ground, one of them on fire. My read of the FAA’s index is that Markham is flying on the July 28 national finding rather than on the Chicago draft the agency never finished, and if that is right, the 30 days of email to Washington in July and August were the only federal comment period the south suburbs will get. Amazon has not said which document it is flying under, and the FAA’s page has not changed since October 14.

Sources: NBC 5 Chicago, CBS Chicago, Country Herald, ABC7 Chicago, FAA Draft Environmental Assessment, Amazon Prime Air, Chicago, July 2026 (PDF), FAA Appendix E, Technical Noise Report (PDF), FAA drone environmental review index, 620 ILCS 5/42.1.

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

China's 48-Volt Drone Motor Rule Is Narrow. Its Propeller Rule Is Not

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:17:00 GMT

China’s export licenses for heavy drone motors take effect in three weeks, and the spec sheets of the two biggest Chinese suppliers show the rule lands in a different place than the trade coverage says. Read from a single row of test data, the four motor tests catch neither Hobbywing’s X15 nor T-Motor’s U15 II, the largest multirotor motors either company publishes full test tables for. The propeller entry is the one that bites. The 64 to 73 inch blade options on Hobbywing’s P-series and the 62-inch carbon-fiber blades on DJI’s Agras T100 run past the lengths Announcement No. 49 lists.

DroneXL reported the thresholds when the Ministry of Commerce published them on October 19: a brushless motor needs a license from November 18 if it meets all four of rated voltage of 48 volts or more, rated power of 3 kilowatts or more, rated power density of 3 kilowatts per kilogram or more, and rated speed of 3,000 rpm or less. Hobbywing labels two of those on its sheets, rated voltage and rated power. Neither company publishes a rated speed or a rated power density, and T-Motor labels nothing “rated” at all. It publishes a full-throttle test row and a “maximum continuous power” figure a quarter the size, and which of the two counts decides whether its flagship needs a license.

Hobbywing’s Spray Motors Miss the Density Test, Its Big Blades Hit the Length Test

Hobbywing’s X11 Plus runs at 54 volts, is rated at 2,130 watts and turns 3,414 rpm at full throttle, and fails three of China’s four motor tests. The X15 runs at 69 volts and a rated 4,400 watts, but its motor weighs 2,850 grams with wire, 1.5 kilowatts per kilogram.

Both sets of figures come from Hobbywing’s own X11 Plus and X15 product pages. The density test is what does the sorting. A motor that crosses it must deliver 3 kilowatts from a kilogram of motor, and Hobbywing’s agricultural motors are built heavy for cooling and duty cycle. The company’s P-series is a different animal: its product page lists the P50M at 280 to 450 volts and 6 kilowatts rated output, the P65M at 8.8 kilowatts and the P115M at 18.3 kilowatts. Hobbywing publishes neither the bare motor weight nor a rated speed for any of them, so the two tests that would decide the P-series cannot be run from the public sheet.

Those model numbers are also where a chunk of the trade coverage went wrong. Army Recognition reported on Monday that Hobbywing’s “50 V and 65 V motor lines” sit above the 48-volt floor, and TechTimes wrote a week earlier that the P50M is rated at 50 volts and the P65M at 65. The 50 and the 65 are kilograms of rated thrust per rotor. The P50M’s input range starts at 280 volts.

The blades are simpler. Entry 9A901.c covers a carbon-fiber composite blade that passes through the center of rotation when it measures 30 inches (762 millimeters) from center to tip, a blade that does not pass through the center, such as one bolted to a hub, at 25.5 inches (648 millimeters) from root to tip, and any blade with a variable-pitch root, no length given. The P-series flies 54 to 73 inch propellers, and the three largest options put each blade past the longer line. DJI’s T100 spec page lists 62-inch carbon-fiber composite propellers that fold, so each blade is a separate part on a hub, about 4 inches past the shorter line by my arithmetic. Hobbywing sells the X15’s 63-inch propeller as two 400-gram blades and describes them as carbon-fiber-reinforced nylon. Whether that counts as the notice’s “carbon fiber composite” is a classification question Hobbywing will have to put to the ministry.

T-Motor’s U15 II Is Controlled Only if Customs Mixes Two Rows of Its Own Table

T-Motor’s U15 II KV80 lists a maximum continuous power of 1,932 watts, which is under the 3-kilowatt floor. At full throttle on 60 volts the motor pulls 8,580 watts and lifts 36.5 kilograms, but turns 3,546 rpm, over the 3,000 rpm ceiling. Read from one row, it is not controlled.

The 1,932-watt figure is the 55% throttle point at 60 volts on the company’s store page, where the motor turns 2,316 rpm. At 1,740 grams with cables, that row is 1.1 kilowatts per kilogram, so the continuous reading fails the power test and the density test together. The full-throttle row is 4.9 kilowatts per kilogram and T-Motor’s note says the test ran for one minute, which is where the speed test fails instead. The only reading that catches the U15 II takes its power and density from the full-throttle row and its speed from the continuous one, and nothing in the notice says a customs officer cannot do that.

The Shanghai law firm Allbright’s reading of the notice tells exporters to build a parameter database for every model and request a formal classification ruling where a number is in doubt. T-Motor also sells the U15 II in a custom 40 KV winding for 24-cell, 100-volt packs, which it markets for freight transport and manned aircraft programs. A lower KV motor turns slower per volt, and that version is the one the entry reads as written for. The 40-inch propeller T-Motor pairs with the stock motor sits 10 inches under the blade line.

T-Motor is the brand of Nanchang Sanrui Intelligence Technology, which Caixin reports booked 1.075 billion yuan (about $161 million) in 2025 revenue, 48.8% of it overseas, and grew first-half 2026 revenue 68.8% to 735 million yuan. Caixin puts Hobbywing’s overseas share at 21.9% of core revenue in the first half of 2025, down from 30.1% in 2022, with Europe and the United States its main foreign markets. Neither company has posted anything about Announcement No. 49 on its news pages.

Exporters Have Three Weeks to Produce Numbers Their Spec Sheets Do Not Carry

Announcement No. 49 makes exporters declare an item’s indicators to customs and mark the form “subject to export control” when the item is listed. A part that comes close to a threshold gets the same declaration, marked “not subject to export control.” If customs doubts the numbers, the goods wait.

The companion Announcement No. 52 sets the clock on that wait: the exporter gets 7 working days to answer a query, customs 15 to decide, and the ministry another 15. A T-Motor shipment to a German cargo-drone builder, or a Hobbywing X15 order for an Australian spray fleet, therefore needs a rated speed and a rated power density on paper before November 18, whether or not the motor crosses the line.

Liu Xinyu, a partner at King & Wood Mallesons, wrote in The Paper on October 20 that the new notice also removes the drone-specific catch-all clause from the 2024 rules, while the general catch-all in Article 12 of the Export Control Law still applies to anything an exporter knows or should know is headed for military use. Companies with a working internal compliance program, an export record and stable end users may apply for general licenses.

Shipments to the United States get none of that. Since August 5, listed drone items bound for the US sit under case-by-case review with no facilitation, per Xinhua, and the new motor and blade entries join that queue on November 18.

Ukraine’s Direct Chinese Drone-Part Imports Fell From 90% to 28% Before the Rule Lands

Nearly 90% of Ukraine’s imported drone parts came directly from China in early 2024. In the first eight months of 2026 the share was 28%, according to Ukrainian customs data the AP reported on October 17. Analysts say much of the Polish and Czech volume was built in China.

The parts Ukraine burns through at scale are the ones the rule skips. A 5-inch or 7-inch FPV drone runs a 6-cell pack at about 22 volts and a motor under 100 grams, nowhere near 48 volts or 3 kilowatts, and Motor-G alone ships 200,000 of those motors a month from inside Ukraine. Oleksandr Yakovenko of TAF Industries told the AP that switching entirely to Western parts could raise costs by as much as 60% and cut production by a similar amount. The exposed Ukrainian hardware is the heavy-lift bomber class and the long-range strike drones, the aircraft that fly U15-class motors and blades past 60 inches.

Washington Is Banning the Same Chinese Motors From Its Own Side

The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program barred Chinese-origin motors and batteries from its second round in August, and Tobyhanna Army Depot opened a motor line on June 30 that officials say can build “upwards of 500,000 motors annually.” Those are motors for small drones, not the 3-kilowatt class Beijing is licensing.

The Section 232 proclamation put tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones and components, as DroneXL broke down in August. November 18 is also the first day of the APEC leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen, the city Hobbywing calls home. The Shenzhen government lists the meeting for November 18 and 19, and the Asia Society’s account of the September White House summit says both Trump and Xi intend to attend. The trade truce the two sides extended in September runs to January 10.

DroneXL’s Take

I think the motor entry is narrower than the headlines said, and the propeller entry is the one American and European heavy-lift builders should be reading. A motor that holds 3 kilowatts per kilogram under 3,000 rpm at a continuous rating is a cargo-drone and manned-aircraft part, and the biggest off-the-shelf multirotor motors from Shenzhen and Nanchang miss it on their own test tables. A 62-inch carbon blade is on every 100-liter sprayer, and the blade test has no density escape hatch. If you build with the P-series or anything turning a propeller over 60 inches, the fix is a second blade supplier, not a lawyer.

The bigger problem is the word “rated.” T-Motor’s flagship is uncontrolled if customs reads its continuous row and uncontrolled if it reads the full-throttle row, and controlled only if it takes the power from one and the speed from the other. Nothing in the notice says which row counts, so every number customs sees on November 18 will have been chosen by the exporter in the previous three weeks, and every hold will be argued over a definition. My read is that this is the point: the ministry does not need to refuse a U15 II shipment to Munich, it only needs the right to hold it for 37 working days while it asks what “rated speed” means. Washington banned the same motors from its own procurement in August. Between the two capitals, a heavy-lift builder in Ohio has a motor it may not be able to buy from China and cannot buy from the Army at all.

Sources: Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 49 of 2026 (via Xinhua), Hobbywing X11 Plus, Hobbywing X15, Hobbywing P-series, T-Motor U15 II KV80, DJI Agras T100, Caixin Global, Allbright Law Offices, The Paper, Xinhua, AP via Taipei Times, Army Recognition, Tobyhanna Army Depot, Shenzhen government, Asia Society Policy Institute, Nikkei Asia

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

NATO Needs Drones to Become '32 Ukraines,' Ex-UK Defense Chief Says

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:58:00 GMT

NATO should field tens of thousands of cheap air, land and sea drones along its borders so that Russia faces what amounts to 32 Ukraines, two retired heavyweights argued in The Hill on Monday. Harlan Ullman, principal author of the shock-and-awe doctrine, and Field Marshal Lord David Richards, Britain’s former chief of the defense staff, call drones the only option that can hold the alliance together as Washington shifts its forces toward homeland defense and Taiwan.

They hang the plan on NATO’s top commander. US Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich laid out a theory of victory in Poland to “blunt, block and break” a Russian attack, the authors write, in a speech they say has not been released. SHAPE, the NATO command Grynkewich runs, has the full transcript and video posted on its website.

Ullman and Richards Want Drones to Fill the Gap US Troops Leave

The op-ed in The Hill proposes stationing unmanned systems across Europe, from the UK, Norway and Finland in the north to the Baltic states, Greece, Turkey and Romania. The authors say the drones would cut demand for US troops in Europe and absorb any redeployment to Asia.

They call the plan a variant of the Porcupine Strategy they first pitched in a Telegraph column in March 2025: make any first assault so costly it would become unacceptable. “Imagine how Russia would fare against 32 Ukraines,” they write, crediting Ukraine’s drone war with holding a far larger Russian army to a standstill for nearly five years.

The authors concede that “unmanned” oversells the idea, since people still have to maintain, repair and launch every system.

Grynkewich’s Transcript Pairs Cheap Drones With High-End Strike

Grynkewich spoke at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, and SHAPE’s transcript runs the sequence block, blunt, break. Land forces block the first assault. Autonomous systems and sensors help blunt any follow-on push. Breaking the attack takes precision munitions layered with an “overpowering mass of affordable and scalable systems.”

That is a high-low mix, and Grynkewich used those words when asked about a two-front war. Affordable mass is one part of the theory that would look different without Ukraine’s large numbers of short- and long-range drones, he said, and NATO is still learning from Ukrainian partners. Nothing in the transcript treats drones as a replacement for troops. Asked whether American soldiers would be in the ground force, he called it ultimately a political decision, then pointed to US troops already on the Eastern Flank and said no one should question the US commitment to the alliance.

The authors’ quote also swaps the first two steps. Grynkewich said block, blunt and break, in that order, three times in the speech. An unnamed NATO spokesman called the theory “consistent with and grounded upon” the alliance’s defense plans, according to Grosswald. The detailed plans stay classified.

The Pentagon’s Europe Troop Cut Recommendation Is Due November 6

The Pentagon is weighing a cut of 25,000 or more of the roughly 80,000 US troops in Europe, possibly 40,000, NBC News reported in September. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to receive a final recommendation on November 6, Anadolu Agency reported, before any proposal goes to President Trump.

Germany, Italy and Spain, which host some of the largest US deployments, are among the countries likely to lose troops. The Army canceled a planned armored brigade rotation to Poland this spring, and a Pentagon spokesman called the 5,000-troop surge that followed a temporary delay of the plan to cut Europe’s brigade combat teams from four to three, Military Times reported.

The US Army’s own drone unit in Europe is gone too. The 173rd Airborne Brigade’s drone assault battalion at Grafenwoehr went back to airborne infantry work on September 13, less than three weeks before Germany announced a 600-soldier drone regiment of its own.

DroneXL’s Take

Ullman and Richards are right that Europe needs cheap mass, and fast. I don’t like how they’re selling it. Pitching drones as a way to need fewer American troops makes them a consolation prize for Europe. Ukraine’s drone war runs on trained operators and a domestic industry that keeps redesigning what they fly, and Europe would have to build and pay for both.

Grynkewich’s version is more honest about it. He wants cheap drones on top of the high-end force, not in place of it, and he credits Ukraine for teaching NATO how to do it. The op-ed calls the lessons of Ukraine largely unique to that war in one paragraph and tells NATO to become 32 Ukraines in another, and those two claims don’t fit together.

The test comes after November 6. If the Pentagon pulls 25,000 troops and Europe answers with drone orders but no new operators, the alliance ends up with fewer soldiers and more hardware, which is the opposite of what Grynkewich described in Warsaw.

Sources: The Hill, SHAPE, Anadolu Agency, Military Times.

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

Army Apaches Train to Kill Shaheds, but the Newest Ones Outrun Them

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:09:00 GMT

U.S. Army AH-64E Apache crews from the 2-159th Attack Battalion, the “Gunslingers,” spent October 5 and 6 shooting target drones out of the sky over the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany. The exercise, Operation Skyfall II, trained attack helicopter crews to hunt the propeller-driven one-way attack drones known as Shaheds. The New York Times reported on the drills Monday.

In June an Apache went down over the Strait of Hormuz after an Iranian drone struck it, and a Navy sea drone pulled both crew from the water. The crews who flew Skyfall II say a jet-powered Shahed is out of their reach.

A Ground Radar Found the Drones Before the Apaches Fired

In Skyfall II, a ground radar found the drones and the helicopters killed them. An AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel radar from the 5th Battalion, 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment tracked MQM-170 Outlaw drones and passed each track through a tactical operations center to the crews, who destroyed three on October 6.

That handoff was the point of the test, according to the Army’s account of Skyfall II. The first Skyfall, in March, showed an Apache could engage a drone using ground sensor data, and the second gave crews more shots at it. The Sentinel sees threats farther out than the Apache’s own sensors, which gives the helicopter an earlier warning and lets the air defenders’ operations center confirm each kill. Lt. Col. John Verwiel, who commands the air defense battalion, said his crews send the track’s position in time and space “so the Apache pilot knows exactly where the track is.”

The Outlaw, built by Griffon Aerospace, is a propeller target with a wingspan of about 11 feet (3.3 meters), flown from the ground by a pilot with a radio controller. On one flight, the Times reports, a single crew took out all four drones launched.

An Apache fires its 30mm chain gun on October 6 while a Sentinel radar of the 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade tracks the target in the foreground. Photo credit: Sgt. Luis Garcia, U.S. Army

The Apache’s 30mm Gun Is the Cheap Shot Air Defenders Want

The Apache’s 30mm cannon rounds are among the cheapest ammunition in Army inventories, the Times reports. Verwiel said nations are building drones and the ability to launch them all at once. His answer to that mass is to bring every system he can, the helicopter included.

The crews fired in 20-round bursts, Stars and Stripes reported, and the Times says they used steel training rounds, not the explosive rounds they would carry into combat. “If we had our go-to-war load, it would be a lot easier,” Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jarrad Walter, one of the pilots, told the Times. A round designed for this job already exists. The Army live-fire tested the proximity-fuzed XM1225 APEX for the Apache’s M230 cannon at Yuma Proving Ground last December, as DroneXL reported in February. It bursts near a drone instead of needing a direct hit.

A Drone Struck the Apache Lost Over Hormuz

An Iranian drone struck the Army Apache that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz on June 8, a U.S. investigation found, Axios reported the next day. The investigation had not determined whether the drone targeted the helicopter or collided with it by accident.

Experts have debated whether that Shahed could hunt a moving helicopter, the Times reports. It may have carried targeting technology like that on Russia’s more advanced drones. The boat that pulled them out was a Saronic Corsair, in a rescue that took years of preparation. The Times also reports that Iranian Shaheds have caused almost all American deaths in the war with Iran to date.

Jet-Powered Shaheds Fly Faster Than the Apache Can Chase

Speed sets the Apache’s limit against the newest Shaheds. Boeing lists the AH-64E’s top level speed at just over 150 knots (173 mph), while Russia’s jet-powered Geran-4 flies at up to 310 mph (500 km/h), according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. A radar track does not close that gap.

“It’s really the speed that’s a factor for us,” said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Cody Schoonover, the battalion’s master gunner, who told the Times a jet-engined drone is out of the ballpark for a helicopter. Russia built the Geran-4 because Ukraine’s $2,000 interceptor drones got good enough to force a redesign, Ukrainian intelligence said in May. Ukraine still flies Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopters against the propeller Shaheds, the Times reports, and it has started testing helicopters as launchers for drone interceptors aimed at the jet variants.

The pilots expect a smaller job for the Apache. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Weisskopf said, Apaches could loiter over a battle for hours. Now they would have to rush in undetected, hit a target and leave. “We’re not envisioning these at the front,” he said. The front is where a Ukrainian unit this month released video of an FPV drone hitting a Russian attack helicopter, the Times reports.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d put the Army’s counter-drone money behind the Sentinel and the handoff it runs. Skyfall II showed a ground radar can pass a track to a shooter in the air, and that handoff can feed any shooter the Army has. The Apaches are already in Europe and their 30mm rounds are cheap, so turning them on slow propeller Shaheds costs little extra, and Apaches have already flown against one-way attack drones over the Strait of Hormuz this year. Jet drones are a harder problem for everyone. Ukraine’s quad interceptors top out around 196 mph (315 km/h), well short of the Geran-4’s 310 mph. Russia will keep redesigning, so the shooter at the end of the chain will keep changing, and the sensors and data links are the part worth building to last. The Apache is one of those shooters for now, in the role its own crews describe, away from the front.

Sources: The New York Times, U.S. Army via DVIDS, Stars and Stripes, Boeing, Axios.

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

FEMA's Olympic Counter-Drone Money Gives Host California 46% Less

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:23:00 GMT

The White House Task Force on the 2028 Summer Olympics is gathering federal counter-drone officials, state and local agencies and drone-security vendors at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on November 9. The forum lands one week before states have to apply for the second $250 million round of FEMA’s counter-drone grants, due November 16 at 5 p.m. Eastern.

This round is the first open to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories, and FEMA wrote the Los Angeles Games into its priorities, down to the torch relay. California, home of the Games, gets $18,665,396. In the World Cup round last December, it got $34,591,628.

Guaranteed Minimums Claim 70% of the Olympic Round

California’s share shrank because this round has to reach 56 jurisdictions instead of 12. Every state, Puerto Rico and D.C. is guaranteed $3,325,000, and four smaller territories at least $760,000 each. Those floors add up to $175.94 million, which leaves $74.06 million for FEMA’s risk formula.

That remainder follows the DHS terrorism risk methodology and how DHS Science and Technology reviewers score the effectiveness of each state’s projects. California’s $15.3 million above its floor is the largest slice, ahead of New York at $10.6 million and Texas at $7.2 million, according to FEMA’s allocation table. Vermont gets the smallest state award, $3,414,026.

The first round worked the other way. FEMA split $250 million among 11 states hosting or supporting World Cup matches and the National Capital Region, and California’s $34.6 million was the largest award, ahead of Texas at $30.3 million, as DroneXL reported in January when Missouri’s $14.24 million share surfaced. Both rounds come from the same $500 million that Congress put in the July 2025 reconciliation law.

The Forum Puts Five Federal Drone Officials in a Room With 2,000 Buyers and Sellers

DRONERESPONDERS and the Commercial Drone Alliance co-host the November 9 event with the White House task force. Organizers expect about 2,000 attendees, up from the more than 400 the first edition drew in November 2025 under the World Cup task force.

The event page lists Nicholas Forni, deputy executive director of the Olympics task force; Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of Joint Interagency Task Force 401; Brian Reed, director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council; Steven Willoughby, executive director of the DHS program executive office for drones and counter-drone systems; and Reuben Coleman, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. Homeland Security Today listed the second $250 million tranche among the forum’s topics.

Registration is free for public safety and government personnel. Companies apply to exhibit, and a private meeting room for the day costs $15,000. Each state’s allocation is already published. Vendors get a day with the agencies that will decide what that money buys, a week before the applications are due.

FEMA Wants Grant-Bought Jammers Working Olympic-Class Events 80% of the Time

The notice of funding opportunity sets a target that 80% of mitigation systems bought with this money protect the Olympics, the torch relay, or other National Special Security Events and SEAR-rated events. Only 20% of their use should go to events without national significance.

Mitigation means mobile jammers, radio-frequency protocol manipulation and command injection or cyber takeover systems, and only categories on the federal Authorized Technologies List qualify. Fixed mitigation equipment is not allowed. DHS Science and Technology reviewers score each state’s projects after award, with two big categories: up to 40 points for supporting a named event of national significance between 2027 and 2029, and up to 30 for mobile mitigation tied to a specific list entry.

Buying a jammer and switching it on are separate steps. Under the Safer Skies Act rules, only an accredited law enforcement or correctional agency can operate one, and only through officers holding the FBI’s mitigation certification, which is taught in person at the bureau’s Redstone Arsenal school and nowhere else. An agency can apply while its officers are still enrolled in or scheduled for the course. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in October that the school will more than double its capacity, without saying what the current capacity is. The lower detection-and-warning certificate is a free online course with no waitlist, and the government expects about 1,500 agencies to hold it within two years.

As a condition of the award, any agency buying detection hardware, software or data services with this money must give DHS access to the detection events, flight tracks, sensor metadata and Remote ID or other identifier information the system collects, to support what FEMA calls nationwide low-altitude air domain awareness.

The notice adds that the Justice, Energy and War departments, the FAA, the FCC and NTIA may also request data from recipients. Agencies report back at close-out with each sensor’s make and model, hours in use, detections, distinct drones identified and criminal investigations opened from what the systems found.

One of FEMA’s long-term targets is to launch criminal investigations on 100% of identified violations where an operator endangers the public, violates established airspace restrictions or uses a drone in another crime.

DroneXL’s Take

The detection money is easy to defend. Radar finds the aircraft. A Remote ID receiver tells an officer where the pilot is standing. After the World Cup, Willoughby told reporters that federal teams talked to nearly every operator whose drone was seized, since intent is never known until someone asks.

FEMA’s scorecard points somewhere else. A program goal of a criminal investigation for every airspace violation counts cases opened as success, and every close-out report has to tally them. Federal agencies seized more than 700 drones at the World Cup and arrested about a dozen people, and I suspect that ratio means most violators were careless rather than dangerous, the hobbyist who wandered into a TFR with a Mini. FEMA’s separate goal of sorting 90% of detected drones into commercial, recreational or malicious is the right instinct, and I’d grade the whole program on threats stopped and pilots educated. A pilot who busts an Olympic or torch relay TFR in 2028 should assume a county sensor logged the Remote ID and that the case count is part of how the program gets judged.

Sources: FEMA FY 2027 C-UAS Grant Program NOFO, FEMA Tranche 2 Fact Sheet, FEMA C-UAS Grant Program, DRONERESPONDERS, Homeland Security Today.

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

Tekever Sells Drones to US Special Operations but Won't Say Which

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:53:00 GMT

Tekever, the Portuguese-British maker of AI-driven surveillance drones, said Monday that U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has bought its uncrewed aircraft systems. The purchase followed validation and acceptance testing, with flights at several locations.

The customer is the only detail Tekever named. Its announcement says the number, model and configuration of the aircraft are not being disclosed, and it gives no contract value. It is datelined Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Tekever’s U.S. office.

Nineteen months ago, Tekever put an aircraft through an exercise with SOCOM in California, and that time it named the model.

Tekever Ran Its AR3 Through a SOCOM Exercise at Camp Roberts in 2025

The only Tekever drone named in the company’s announcements of work with SOCOM is the AR3. Tekever said in March 2025 that it had completed an operational exercise with the command at Camp Roberts, California, with the AR3 at the center and operating in a contested electronic warfare environment.

That March 2025 release pitched the AR3 on vertical takeoff and landing, which removes the need for separate launch or recovery equipment, and on a low acoustic and visual signature. Its swappable payloads included electro-optical and infrared cameras, radar and signals intelligence sensors.

Tekever's AR3 with its vertical-takeoff lift rotors fitted. Photo credit: TEKEVER

The current version, the AR3 EVO, weighs up to 55 pounds (25 kg) at takeoff, or 66 pounds (30 kg) in its VTOL setup. Tekever’s product page lists up to 22 hours of endurance as a pure fixed-wing and 14 as a VTOL, a 13-pound (6 kg) payload, a 46-knot cruise and a datalink range of up to 143 miles (230 km). It lands in a 16-by-16-foot (5 by 5 meter) space.

Monday’s USSOCOM announcement describes a “highly deployable” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system with a modular mix of aircraft, payloads, communications and AI mission software. Tekever uses the same modular language for the larger AR5, the aircraft behind the British Army’s new surveillance program. The AR5 needs an airstrip, even an unprepared one, so “highly deployable” fits the VTOL AR3 better. Tekever has not said which model SOCOM bought.

Tekever Opened Its Fayetteville Office Five Months Before the Announcement

Tekever opened its first U.S. office in Fayetteville on May 18, the first day of SOF Week in Tampa, where it was due to exhibit at the NATO DIANA booth. Fayetteville sits next to Fort Bragg, home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and the office supports U.S. end users.

When DroneXL covered Tekever’s $74 million round in November 2024, U.S. expansion was the pitch. SOCOM is now the fourth government customer Tekever has announced since August. The Portuguese Air Force ordered AR5s on August 11, and Tekever signed the British Army’s CORVUS contract, worth up to £400 million ($530 million), on September 16. On October 13 it said the Bundeswehr had taken delivery of its first Tekever system, a heavy-lift aircraft, as it opened a German headquarters in Munich.

In between, Tekever announced the first close of a $580 million Series D at a $6.4 billion valuation, led by the University of California’s investment office and Baillie Gifford. CEO Ricardo Mendes called the SOCOM buy “an important milestone in a relationship that has been built over time.”

DroneXL’s Take

Washington now holds two opinions about drones like Tekever’s. SOCOM tested the company’s aircraft and bought them. The FCC put every foreign-made drone on its Covered List in December, with Chairman Brendan Carr saying they “pose an unacceptable national security risk,” and in July it proposed banning imports and sales of foreign drones it calls military-grade to any buyer outside the federal government. Thermal imaging puts a drone in that category, and the AR3’s payloads include infrared cameras. The proposal carves out imports for federal use, so SOCOM’s purchase is untouched. A U.S. pipeline operator or a county sheriff who wanted the same aircraft would need an exemption, such as a Blue UAS listing or a Conditional Approval from the Department of War. My read is that the risk lives in the airframe and its supply chain, not in the buyer’s letterhead. If the Department of War trusts Tekever’s drones with special operations surveillance, it should tell the FCC whether a civilian buyer can trust them too.

Sources: Tekever, Tekever (Camp Roberts exercise), Tekever (North Carolina office), Tekever (Germany), Resilience Media

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

BA's 'Four Toasters' Drone Is an Unknown Object in the Airprox Report

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:38:00 GMT

A British Airways Boeing 777 climbing out of Heathrow on June 24 reported a shiny silver object passing no more than 50 feet (15 meters) above its right wing, and The Independent reported it on October 26 as a drone “the size of four toasters.” The UK Airprox Board, which reviewed the report at its September 16 meeting, did not call it a drone. It filed the object as unknown.

The crew saw it at 5,800 feet (1,768 meters), about 4 nautical miles (7.4 km) northeast of Guildford, on a departure to New York. NATS, the UK air traffic service, found no radar contact for it. Of the 13 drone and unknown-object reports the Board assessed that month, this is the only one it rated Category A, its highest collision-risk grade.

Airprox Board Rates the BA Encounter Category A Without Identifying the Object

The Board’s September 2026 report lists Airprox 2026127, the BA departure, as a B777 against an “Unk Obj” and grades it Category A. On the object itself, the Board said it was “unable to determine the nature of the unknown object.”

That grade means the Board found providence played a major part or a definite collision risk existed. The crew reported 50 feet of vertical separation and gave no horizontal distance.

Eight of the 13 reports in the same batch got the Board’s standard drone finding, that the description was enough to indicate the object “could have been a drone,” but this one did not.

The pilot’s written report calls the object “likely a mid-size drone” that passed “in the opposite direction, very fast.” The fuller description came over the radio. The London controller’s account says the crew described it as probably silver, metallic and reflective, and gave the four-toasters size when the controller asked how big it was. The report logs the sighting at 12:08 UTC, which was 1:08 p.m. in London.

British Airways told The Independent the crew did not need to take any action to avoid the object and the flight reached New York as planned. Its statement opened with “We take matters such as these extremely seriously,” nearly word for word what the airline was reported as saying after a 2023 Mumbai flight’s drone report.

The Same Airprox Batch Shows Crews Confusing Foil Balloons and Drones

Silver, metallic and reflective also describes a foil party balloon, and two other crews in the September batch raised that possibility. A Cessna 172 pilot near Lee Valley Reservoir first took a drone for “a metallic helium balloon.” An airliner crew near Rochdale could not rule one out.

The Board gave the Cessna sighting its drone finding because that pilot got close enough to see rotors and lights. It filed the Rochdale object as unknown, the verdict it also gave the BA sighting.

The crew’s “very fast” does not settle it either way, because a hovering drone and a drifting balloon would both pass a climbing airliner at close to the airliner’s own speed. The Independent’s headline has the drone “hovering” over the plane, while its own story, like the crew’s report, describes an object passing in the opposite direction.

In 2021 an Envoy Air crew leaving Chicago O’Hare told controllers “I believe we hit a drone,” and the FAA later concluded it was a party balloon. In April 2023 a Finnair crew near Heathrow reported a round, purple and turquoise object as a drone passing under their A320 at 3,000 feet (914 meters), an identification DroneXL questioned at the time.

DroneXL’s Take

The Airprox Board did its job here: it wrote down what the crew saw, graded the risk on what they reported and declined to name something nobody identified. The crew called it a likely drone, and the coverage dropped the “likely” and put “drone” in the headline.

Drones do get flown where they have no business being. In the same batch an Airbus A319 crew 14 nautical miles (26 km) east of Heathrow described a dark grey four-rotor drone with black rotors at 3,750 feet (1,143 meters). That crew saw rotors, which is more than the BA crew reported, and my read is that a stray foil balloon explains every word of the BA crew’s description at least as well as a drone does. DroneXL raised similar doubts about a British Airways 787 report over Windsor in 2023. Until someone produces better evidence than a silver, reflective object moving very fast at 5,800 feet, I’d call it what the Board called it: an unknown object.

Sources: UK Airprox Board, Monthly Meeting September 2026, The Independent.

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

Army Calls Its Drone Demand 'Artificial.' Makers Want A Year Of Orders

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:22:00 GMT

The Army’s small-drone manufacturing lead says the Pentagon is trying to “artificially induce” demand so that American companies will build a domestic drone supply chain. Jon Strzelec holds that job at Army Materiel Command, and the Army is the largest single buyer of small drones in the U.S. military.

The companies on the receiving end are split. Skydio says the signal is strong. Performance Drone Works CEO James Slider says he still needs to see sustained orders, and he put a number on it: one award, then 1,000 drones a month for a year.

That is 12,000 drones from one award. The largest base order in Gauntlet I of the Drone Dominance Program, the Pentagon’s flagship small-drone buy that DroneXL has tracked since its first results in March, was 2,560 drones, due within four and a half months.

Gauntlet Orders Are Sized In Months, Not The Year Slider Wants

Gauntlet I split 30,000 drones among 11 winners, from 1,520 for Farage Precision to 4,960 for Neros including bonus orders, the program’s leaderboard shows. No winner reached half of Slider’s 12,000. Six of the 11 got bonus orders on top of their base orders.

“We need to see sustained, normalized demand,” Slider told Breaking Defense. The program’s delivery terms run the other way. Gauntlet I winners had to ship half their base orders within two and a half months and the rest within four and a half. At that pace even the 2,560-drone order averaged under 600 drones a month, for less than half a year.

Gauntlet II in August was bigger: 30,000 drones in each of two missions, with orders of 8,000 down to 4,000 for the top five. Neros placed on both boards and announced a combined 14,000-drone order covering both missions, the only Gauntlet award that clears Slider’s 12,000, and only by adding two placements together. At the roughly 1,200 Archers a week Neros said it was building when it closed its Series C in August, that order is under three months of output. The leaderboard also says quantities are set at contract award and that awards are not guaranteed.

PDW is not on either leaderboard. It competed in Gauntlet I and is listed among the companies that did not rank, and it took part in the Phase 2 Qualifier at Camp Grayling, Michigan, but was not among the 19 companies advanced to Gauntlet II, according to the program’s participant page. PDW holds Army contracts for reconnaissance drones like the C100, and on July 31 it signed a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million with the Office of Strategic Capital to build drone component capacity. That loan would fund capacity. Slider’s question is who orders the drones.

The Army Says It Is Inducing Demand Because Many Makers Won’t Invest Without It

Army officials describe the Gauntlets as a deliberate push, not a steady market. Strzelec said many companies tell the Army there isn’t enough demand to justify building a U.S. supply chain, so the department is trying to force one to stand up by creating that demand itself.

Andrew Evans, who directs the Strategy and Transformation Office in the Army’s G-2 intelligence directorate, said the department’s challenge is keeping production lines open even when demand falls between buys. “How do you incentivize industry to build if your ordering period is so episodic?” Evans said.

The program was built that way, as repeated smaller deals adding up to $1 billion over two years. Skycutter won Gauntlet I with 99.3 points and fell to fourth on Gauntlet II’s Deep Strike board. Neros’s Gauntlet I bonus orders included 800 drones it picked up from rivals that missed their deadline. The same structure that rewards delivery leaves a company with no guaranteed follow-on order between rounds.

Skydio Hears A Strong Signal, While AeroVironment Wants Steady Awards

Skydio sells across the federal government and reads the market differently. Chief Revenue Officer Callan Carpenter said on October 13 that demand is strong at the Department of War, Homeland Security and civilian agencies, and that Skydio sells into all of them.

“The demand signals are very strong, and it’s not just DOW either,” Carpenter said.

Skydio does not appear on the Drone Dominance Program’s participant or leaderboard pages, and its biggest Army order came outside the program. The Army placed a $52 million order for more than 2,500 X10D drones in March, which Skydio called the largest single-vendor small drone buy in Army history.

Chad Chasteen, who leads Army business development at AeroVironment, said during a panel at the AUSA conference the same day that the Army’s habit of switching solutions every year or two throws the supply chain into disorder. He wants continuous orders to follow continuous competitions, not rounds of white papers. “There is no supply without demand,” Chasteen said.

John Burer, CEO of the American Center for Manufacturing & Innovation, said he would not invest ahead of a large budget or a consistent signal if he made drones. Slider said he does not expect much more private equity to flow into the sector without stronger commitments.

The $54.6 Billion That Would Answer Slider Is Stuck In Reconciliation

The money Slider says would change his read, $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, Replicator’s successor, in the Pentagon’s FY27 budget request, has not been appropriated, and most of it rides on a reconciliation package Congress has not passed.

Slider said seeing DAWG money flow down to companies would be very encouraging, even if it lands in the base budget at those levels. For now, he said, the answer on whether that money arrives changes with whoever he talks to.

Congress holds the other open piece too. The four-star Autonomous Warfare Command Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered on September 30 needs legislation before it can stand up, and his memo set no budget line for it.

DroneXL’s Take

Strzelec is right to call the signal artificial, and I give the Army credit for saying so plainly. Moving undelivered drones to companies that did ship is merit-based competition, and it beats picking a winner once and living with it for a decade.

PDW didn’t rank in Gauntlet I or reach Gauntlet II, so Slider has a stake in how the Pentagon buys. His number still holds up. A thousand drones a month is roughly a fifth of what Neros says its line already builds, so Slider isn’t asking for Neros-scale volume, only for it to last. In two rounds and 90,000 drones, one company has cleared his 12,000, by combining two placements, and that order still covers less than three months of its own production. My read is that the Gauntlets can keep choosing the best drone every six months, but they can’t give anyone a year of production on their own. Appropriated DAWG money can. Until Congress passes it, I’d give Slider’s skepticism more weight than Skydio’s optimism, because Skydio’s biggest Army order didn’t come out of a Gauntlet.

Sources: Breaking Defense, Drone Dominance Program leaderboard and participant list.

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

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