Drone policy, incidents, and industry news across the United States — from statehouses to the national airspace.
China has quietly crossed another unmanned aviation threshold, this time with something that looks less like a drone and more like a small aircraft that forgot to hire a pilot. On December 28, 2025, the Lanying R6000 completed its maiden flight at the Deyang Shifang test site in Sichuan Province, becoming the first known six…
Colombia is reopening a chapter it thought it had closed a decade ago, but this time the crop dusters have rotors instead of wings. After banning aerial fumigation in 2015 due to health and environmental concerns tied to glyphosate, the Colombian government has approved a new plan to spray coca crops using drones, a move…
Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. I only have two stories for you this week, although one is kind of a long one. The FCC adds all UAS and UAS critical components manufactured in a foreign country to the covered list. And that was kind of a plot twist. The second story has to…
A routine afternoon walk in LaGrange, Kentucky turned into a 29 hour fight for survival, and a drone roughly the size of a pizza box ended up being the difference between a recovery and a rescue. On December 20, Oldham County search and rescue teams were alerted that a local man had gone missing. He…
When Massachusetts officials told residents a deer hunt was necessary at Quabbin Park, some locals were not convinced, as reported by the Boston Herald. They questioned the headcount, the math, and possibly the eyesight of whoever was doing the counting. So the state brought in an impartial referee that does not argue on Facebook. A…
The day we’ve all been dreading is finally here, but it came with a pretty big unexpected surprise that I don’t think anybody was expecting. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recently announced that the FCC has added foreign-produced drones and drone components to the covered entity list. We all knew it was…
DJI has issued its first official response to the FCC’s decision to add foreign-made drones to the Covered List, calling the action “disappointing” and accusing the administration of protectionism rather than legitimate security enforcement. In a statement provided to DroneXL, a DJI spokesperson confirmed that existing DJI products are not affected by yesterday’s FCC action…
Yesterday, I wrote about the FCC’s sweeping ban on all foreign-made drones and critical components. Today, the New York Times published an article that exposes a fundamental problem with the administration’s “American drone dominance” strategy: the batteries don’t exist. The FCC’s National Security Determination explicitly lists “batteries and battery management systems” as covered critical compon
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