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Belvedere Votes on Drone Delivery Monday. Here Is the Residents' Guide

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:29:00 GMT

Belvedere, a city of 2,126 people on two islands in Richardson Bay, takes its final vote Monday, October 12, on the first drone delivery ordinance in Marin County. DroneXL has published a plain-language guide for Belvedere residents ahead of that vote: what is coming, who decides what, what the ordinance says section by section, and what a resident can still do before the meeting.

The guide exists because the argument in Belvedere has outgrown the facts. The council voted 3-2 on September 14 to give the rules a first reading, and the only split was over delivery hours. No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep. No company has said one will. Wing said in March it would bring delivery to the Bay Area “in the coming months” and named the region again in June on a Walmart list for 2027, without naming a city either time.

The Guide Separates What Belvedere Controls From What the FAA Owns

The Federal Aviation Administration decides who flies, where, how high and how often. Belvedere decides what happens on the ground: where a drone may land or drop a package, whether a delivery facility is allowed, and in which zone. Chapter 8.34 regulates only the ground.

The ordinance says so in its own text. Section 8.34.010 states that the chapter “does not regulate drone flights,” and section 8.34.100 defers to federal law wherever the two meet. The guide walks through all ten sections of the staff report and draft ordinance: the consent rule for deliveries onto private property, the 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. window (11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday), the 20-deliveries-a-month line that turns a home into a facility, the conditional use permit any facility would need in the mixed-use zone, and the privacy and complaint sections.

It also explains, with the same reasoning as DroneXL’s How approval works page, why the city cannot do the things residents keep asking for. A federal court struck down Newton, Massachusetts’ altitude limit, overflight ban and local drone registration in 2017, and the guide lists which demands fall on that side of the line. Noise limits in the air, a drone-only curfew, a no-fly zone over a school: a council that writes them is writing a lawsuit. The hours in 8.34.030(D) mirror the city’s existing noise code for everyone, not drones alone, which is the version most likely to hold up.

Residents Get a Checklist, Their Representatives and an Anonymous Survey

The guide ends with a checklist for the days before the vote, the City Clerk’s route for written comment, Assemblymember Damon Connolly, Senator Mike McGuire, and a two-minute anonymous survey: your town, where you stand, whether you would use it, what worries you, what would change your mind.

The survey collects no name, email or address. A bot check, a one-time device token and a rate limit keep it to one response per person, and submitting again replaces your earlier answer. An optional free-text line goes to DroneXL and is never published. Results are public and update as answers come in, and they are a count of who answered, not a poll of the town. The questions reach past Belvedere on purpose: a drone base, if one ever comes, would sit in Mill Valley, Corte Madera, Larkspur or another town with the commercial space, and the aircraft would cross Tiburon and Belvedere on the way to a neighbor who ordered. Those neighbors are asked too.

Every claim in the guide traces to a document listed in its sources section. If something in it is wrong, there is a correction form at the bottom of the guide, and DroneXL will fix it the day it hears.

DroneXL’s Take

Belvedere did something I have rarely seen a town do this year. Richardson and Papillion found out about drone delivery after the operator had chosen a site, and both ended up telling residents to call Washington. Belvedere read the preemption map first, found the part it owns, and wrote rules for a drone that has not arrived. I think the council should pass the ordinance Monday, and I think the louder residents should read the guide before they speak, because half the objections I have seen are aimed at a power the city does not have. DroneXL is not against drone delivery. A defibrillator across the bay in four minutes is a flight worth any amount of noise. A toothpaste run at 9 p.m. has to earn it, and the people under it get a say. The guide is built so they can use it.

Source: City of Belvedere, City Council staff report and draft Chapter 8.34, Sept. 14, 2026, DroneXL Belvedere resident guide.

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

Wingtra Ran 180 Simulations in Six Months to Design the RAY Drone

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:34:00 GMT

Swiss drone maker Wingtra ran 180 aerodynamic computer simulations in six months to get from the WingtraOne to the WingtraRAY, according to a video AirShaper published on October 7, 2026. AirShaper is the Belgian cloud simulation company whose software ran those tests, and the video is its own case study of the project.

The video puts the result at 56% more payload capacity, 12% more aerodynamic efficiency and 20% more of what AirShaper calls fuel efficiency than the WingtraOne, plus a wider operating envelope. Wingtra’s own RAY product page lists none of those three figures. It sells the drone on 59 minutes of flight time and 550 hectares (1,360 acres) covered per flight instead.

Wingtra Traded Wing Span for a Drone That Fits in a Case

Wingtra limited the RAY’s wing span so the drone fits in a standard transport case, even though AirShaper says a glider-sized wing would have been more efficient. A tailsitter takes off on propeller thrust, then tips over so the wing carries the aircraft and the propellers only overcome drag.

The drone assembles on site without a runway, with the GPS modules mounted on magnets for quick access. The RAY carries several interchangeable sensors, and each one moves the center of gravity, so the airframe had to stay stable across a range of weights rather than at one tuned point. AirShaper says a shift of a few centimeters on a drone optimized for a single set point can put it in a dangerous part of its flight envelope.

The RAY from above: the lifting wing, the fin and the two propeller pods that provide forward thrust in cruise. Photo credit: AirShaper

The airfoil thickness sat in the same trade. AirShaper says a thinner wing is slightly more efficient but stalls sooner and loses lift more abruptly, which makes it less predictable in gusts, and that was one of the compromises weighed in the design. The optional parachute, which DroneXL covered at launch as the route to FAA Category 3 operations over people, came out of the safety requirements rather than the aerodynamics.

Wingtra Skipped Prototypes Because the WingtraOne Had Already Been Wind Tunnel Tested

Wingtra modeled all 180 candidates in 3D and simulated them on AirShaper instead of building prototypes. It could do that because it had already checked the same software against a wind tunnel. The finished WingtraOne went into a tunnel, and the video says lift, drag and pitching moment all matched.

The team mapped every candidate against cost, weight, stability, looks and aerodynamic efficiency, picked the strongest and iterated from there. AirShaper’s platform accepts surface models that are not watertight, so sketch-stage geometry could go straight into a simulation. Setting one up took about five minutes: the software detects the propeller axis, the engineer enters the RPM, and the solver builds a moving reference frame around each propeller to compute thrust, power and torque, including the swirl the propwash puts across the wings.

The RAY banking over a haul road. The team simulated flap deflections and propwash across the wing before building a prototype. Photo credit: AirShaper

Wingtra ran quick low-accuracy comparisons across wildly different concepts and detailed runs for the geometries with propellers, panel gaps and flap deflections. AirShaper’s argument is that field and wind tunnel testing belong at the end, where prototypes and tunnel time get expensive, and the video says the RAY has since been validated in use. Wingtra itself has not published the simulation story or the three performance figures. This is the same workflow Luke Bell used on his solar-powered drone and his endurance build, at a hobbyist’s scale.

A surveyor flies the RAY from a tablet at a quarry. The airframe assembles on site without a runway. Photo credit: AirShaper

DroneXL’s Take

The wind tunnel check matters more than the 180 number. Wingtra could iterate that fast because it had spent money earlier on measuring the WingtraOne in real air and comparing the result against the software, and plenty of drone startups skip that step and trust the pretty flow pictures. The performance figures deserve more skepticism than the process does. They come from the vendor whose software is being sold, and Wingtra does not repeat them on its own product page. I believe the direction, because Wingtra’s published 40% faster coverage over the GEN II points the same way, but coverage speed mixes in cruise speed and sensor choice and does not isolate aerodynamics. The 56% payload gain is the figure a surveyor would buy on, and Wingtra should confirm it on its own spec page before anyone does.

Source: AirShaper on YouTube

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

FCC Vote Would Shut Out Chinese Labs That Test 82% of US Devices

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 04:16:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on October 29, 2026 on an order that ends FCC recognition of every test lab in mainland China on December 1, 2028. Chairman Brendan Carr announced the item on October 7 and the agency published the draft the next day. Labs in China tested 82% of the devices that applied for FCC authorization in 2025. Labs inside the United States tested less than 4%.

Every phone, camera, router and drone sold in the US needs FCC authorization before it ships, and the testing behind that authorization is done by private labs the FCC recognizes. The draft limits that recognition to labs in the United States and in economies that have a mutual recognition agreement or a reciprocal trade deal with Washington.

Hong Kong is on the reciprocal list. Mainland China, where DJI’s Osmo Pocket 4P was tested, is not.

The Order Gives Mainland Labs 25 Months and Keeps Hong Kong and Taiwan

The draft Third Report and Order in ET Docket 24-136 stops FCC recognition of test labs and certification bodies in non-reciprocal economies on December 1, 2028. Its Appendix D lists more than 60 reciprocal economies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan among them. Mainland China is not on it.

The draft order, circulated as FCC-CIRC2610-05, counts 609 FCC-recognized test labs. It puts 25.1% of them in China, 18.4% in Taiwan and 17.9% in the United States. In 2007, US labs handled about 31% of FCC applications and Chinese labs about 13%. By 2025 those shares stood at 82% and under 4%.

Labs in China keep their recognition until the transition date, and the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology will keep issuing new recognitions to them, all of which expire on December 1, 2028 whatever day they were issued. Grants issued before that date stay valid, and applications filed before it are processed under the old rules. The draft declines to create a waiver process for individual labs, and it declines a broader ban, backed by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on labs anywhere that are owned by non-reciprocal entities.

China’s WTO Technical Barriers to Trade enquiry center filed against the rule and called it discriminatory under Article 5.1.1 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. The Consumer Technology Association, ITI and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation opposed it too, and several industry commenters asked for three to five years. The Commission gave them roughly two years and wrote that the reliance claims “generally lack evidentiary support.” Carr’s own line in the October 7 announcement was that the FCC will “insist on fair and reciprocal treatment in international commerce.”

DJI’s Handheld Cameras Still Get FCC Grants, and a Shenzhen Lab Tests Them

The FCC filing for the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P lists SGS-CSTC as its test firm, reached at a Shenzhen phone number, with SGS North America issuing the grant. Three other SGS-CSTC branches, in Shanghai, Xi’an and Guangzhou, already lost FCC recognition under the 2025 Bad Labs rules.

DJI’s aircraft were cut off on December 22, 2025, when the FCC put every foreign-made drone and UAS critical component on the Covered List, and the draft order cites that notice as background. A Mini 5 Pro cannot get a new grant whoever tests it, so this rule changes nothing for the ban. It reaches the DJI products that can still get a grant, which is the Osmo line DroneXL has been tracking through the FCC database, and every Chinese-made charger, camera and accessory that falls outside the Covered List. It also reaches every American and European brand that ships its hardware to Shenzhen for testing, which one US lab owner, Compliance Testing CEO Michael Schafer, told the FCC happens because mainland labs price 30 to 70% below what a US lab can charge.

The Bad Labs rules adopted in May 2025 have stripped recognition from 29 labs the FCC found to be owned or controlled by a foreign adversary. In June the agency found 33 incorrect or false test reports from SLG-CPC Test Laboratory, some of them identical reports filed for different products, and the draft counts that lab and Shenzhen STS Test Services among the recognitions it has since withdrawn. In August it told every certification body to tighten its screening after one of them approved the HOVERAir Versa, a Chinese flying camera the Covered List prohibits.

The lab item shares the October 29 agenda with the 800 MHz drone spectrum order DroneXL covered on October 9.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the first Carr order aimed at China this year that I would sign. The Covered List ban took hardware away from American pilots on a national security determination the FCC has kept out of the public record, and I have said so since December. This order asks that the lab testing a device sit in a jurisdiction where the FCC can audit it, it gives everyone 25 months, it leaves every existing grant alone, and it keeps Hong Kong and Taiwan in the system. Reciprocity is a trade principle I can defend to a DJI owner, and the SLG-CPC case, 33 grants on copied test reports, is more evidence than the drone ban’s public record ever showed me.

Carr’s release blames offshoring for gutting American labs, but the order’s own figure says US labs hold 17.9% of recognitions and win under 4% of the work. That tells me the capacity exists and the prices don’t compete. Twenty-five months is enough time for Shenzhen to put its hardware on a plane to Taipei or Hong Kong, and I’d bet that is exactly what DJI and every other mainland manufacturer will do. Nothing in the 76 pages explains why a national security rule trusts Hong Kong, a jurisdiction Beijing has run under its National Security Law since 2020, on the strength of a 1999 APEC arrangement. Watch the October 29 vote, then watch the Further Notice that goes out with it, because the question it asks, how to get testing capacity back into the United States, is the one this order does not answer.

Sources: FCC draft Third Report and Order, FCC-CIRC2610-05, Chairman Carr announcement, October 7, 2026, Reuters via The Business Standard

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

FAA Lets Tower Inspection Drones Fly Above LAANC Grids, No Tower Call

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:58:00 GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration has rewritten the internal order that decides what drone pilots get back from FAADroneZone. Order JO 7200.23E, Processing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Requests, is listed on the FAA’s orders page with an October 1 issue date and takes effect October 31. It cancels the April 2023 version and runs to 36 listed policy changes.

The one most Part 107 pilots will feel first: a drone inspecting a cell tower or high-rise inside controlled airspace can now be authorized above the LAANC grid ceiling without any coordination with the control tower. The same order writes down, for the first time, how the FAA handles requests inside the Class E surface area around smaller airports, and it takes multi-day approvals at grid altitude away from everyone except first responders. Every Part 91 drone approval now carries a see-and-avoid waiver.

The order’s own change list says the Class E surface rule exists because “this type of request was not addressed in previous versions of the order.” Those surface areas already carry UAS Facility Map grids on the FAA’s public map.

Tower Inspectors Get 100 Feet Above the Structure With No ATC Coordination

Paragraph 3-5 of the new order says air traffic facility coordination “is not required” above the facility map altitude for a Part 107 line-of-sight inspection of a vertical structure. The pilot stays within a 100-foot (30-meter) radius of the structure and no more than 100 feet above its top.

The drone also stays at least 2 nautical miles (3.7 kilometers) from any runway, heliport, seaplane base or vertiport unless a separate authorization covers it, keeps 500 feet (152 meters) below and 2,000 feet (610 meters) horizontally from clouds, and the pilot needs 3 statute miles (4.8 kilometers) of visibility from the control station. Bridges and power lines do not qualify. The order names cell towers, communications towers and high-rise buildings as examples and excludes “vertical structures with horizontal spans.”

The authorization can be written for a specific site or for the whole country. The order says a Service Center can “write a nationwide authorization for companies that make such a request,” with coordination among the FAA’s Service Centers left to the processing team manager. Tower inspection authorizations under this paragraph can run 24 months, against a single day for an ordinary request at a LAANC-enabled airport.

Requests still go through FAADroneZone, even at LAANC airports, and the order excludes airspace delegated to the Department of War. For a specific-area authorization, paragraph 4-5 says the Service Center is not required to verify that the operator meets the criteria, only that it “can do a cursory check.” The order puts compliance on the pilot: “It is the proponent’s responsibility to ensure they comply with the AA requirements.”

Class E Surface Areas Get a Formula the Order Says Nobody Wrote Down Before

Paragraph 3-3 covers the Class E surface area designated for an airport. On a sectional it is the dashed magenta ring around a field with no tower. The FAA says the facility map grids came from a national safety risk management panel using concentric circles from the airport reference point.

The circles are now policy. Inside 2 nautical miles (3.7 kilometers) of the reference point, a Part 107 pilot gets nothing without prior coordination and approval from the air traffic facility. From 2 to 3 nautical miles the ceiling is 100 feet (30 meters). From 3 to 4 it is 200 feet (61 meters), and beyond 4 nautical miles it is 400 feet (122 meters). Every authorization also requires a 1,000-foot (305-meter) cloud ceiling, a condition the standard facility map grid never carried.

Recreational flyers under Section 44809 get the same rings with a harder edge. Inside 2 nautical miles, requests “are not authorized” at all. Where a facility has built its own map that does not follow the circles, the facility’s map wins.

The order also closes a door on hobbyists. Individuals asking for a fixed flying site under Section 44809 are to be denied with the line “Individuals will not be granted approval for fixed sites,” and fixed sites and aviation events are reserved for community-based organizations. The FAA will issue those as airspace authorizations instead of letters of agreement.

Multi-Day Approvals at Grid Altitude Now Go to First Responders Only

The one-day rule survives for ordinary pilots. A request in airspace managed by a LAANC-enabled facility, at or below the grid altitude, is issued for a single day. Ask for a week and the Service Center issues the first day. It then tells the pilot to use LAANC next time.

The 2023 order let any operator with a defined project, a construction job for example, get a multi-day authorization at grid altitude. The new one reserves that at-grid option for first responders, and only when the approval saves the agency or the FAA paperwork. Above the grid, the rules the 2023 order already carried stay: a multi-day approval needs the facility manager’s sign-off and a project with a start and end date, and first responders get relief from the single-day policy. The one addition there is a buffer of up to 14 days “to address potential flight cancellations or delays due to weather,” with the air traffic facility’s approval.

The public safety demand is on the record. DroneXL reported in August that a FOIA release showed the FAA had cleared more than 1,000 agencies for drone first responder flights in ten months, and departments like Warwick, Rhode Island, which is waiting on zero-foot grids at T.F. Green to fly its Flock drones, are the operators the at-grid exception now serves.

Part 107 operational waivers now move through the FAA’s Aviation Safety Hub instead of FAADroneZone, and the order adds the moving-vehicle waiver under 107.145 to the list, which it says “was missing” from the 2023 version. COA extensions are capped at 60 days and barred once a COA has expired.

Every Part 91 Drone Approval Now Carries a See-and-Avoid Waiver

Chapter 5 was rebuilt around one sentence: all drone operations under Part 91, “whether within VLOS or beyond visual line of sight,” require relief from 14 CFR 91.113(b), the rule that requires a pilot to see and avoid other aircraft. The 2023 order attached that waiver to BVLOS flights only.

The new one attaches it to every Part 91 approval, because a drone has no pilot on board to see anything. The FAA split the work between two offices. A September 3, 2025 memorandum of agreement delegated line-of-sight 91.113(b) waivers to the Air Traffic Organization’s Service Centers, which process them with the COA itself and must list 91.113 on the FAA Form 7711-1. BVLOS waivers moved out of the headquarters UAS policy team, which ran a multi-office technical review and had applicants present their case to a panel, and into Flight Standards office AFS-750, which takes a concept of operations by email and issues the waiver before the pilot applies for airspace in CAPS. Applications and renewals are due 60 business days ahead, and a COA still expires at 24 months.

The 2023 order’s Tactical BVLOS section for first responders is gone from the main text. The FAA’s own public safety FAQ says the expedited public safety COA it introduced in April 2025 replaced the Tactical BVLOS approval, which DroneXL first covered in June 2023. The new order does not list the removal among its 36 changes.

The order also drops a numerical error. The agency agreements that let NASA, the Interior Department, the Forest Service and Customs and Border Protection fly small drones in Class G without a COA cap those flights at 1,199 feet (365 meters) above ground, and the 2023 text had said 1,200. The whole document now refers to the Pentagon as the Department of War, and a new chapter formalizes how the FAA and NAV CANADA handle six border airports, including Bellingham and Sault Ste. Marie, where one country’s controllers manage the other’s airspace.

Trade group NATA posted a short note on the order on October 6, the only coverage DroneXL has found. The order’s PDF carries a September 22 date in its filename, nine days before the issue date on the FAA’s listing.

DroneXL’s Take

I read the tower paragraph twice because it is the most useful thing the FAA has written for working Part 107 pilots in a while. A pilot inspecting a monopole inside Class D used to choose between a grid ceiling that stopped below the antennas and a bespoke authorization that took weeks and a tower’s goodwill.

Now the FAA has said, in its own order, that a drone hugging a tower is not a conflict for the pattern. The facility maps should have carried that rule from the start, and it took until 2026 to say it.

The Class E circles are harder to cheer. The FAA is admitting that the grids around its non-towered Class E airports came from a panel formula rather than from anyone who knows the field, and the fix is to make the formula official, with a cloud ceiling requirement the rest of the map system does not have. A pilot 2.5 nautical miles from a quiet Class E airport gets 100 feet, and a pilot at a busy Class D airport with a tower that bothered to draw its map can get 400 feet. My read is that the circles are a placeholder the FAA never expected to publish, and the order publishing them is the first chance anyone outside the agency has had to argue with them.

The bigger signal is in Chapter 5. The FAA has now put in writing that no drone under Part 91 can comply with see-and-avoid, line of sight or not, and that every approval needs a waiver to say so. It is the same question that stalled Part 108 over who yields in the sky, and the agency answered it for Part 91 with a form field while the civil rule sits at the White House. Watch what the AFS-750 email queue does to BVLOS waiver times between October 31 and whenever Part 108 publishes, because every Part 91 BVLOS request now runs through it.

Sources: FAA Order JO 7200.23E, FAA Order JO 7200.23D, NATA.

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

Dallas Drone Pilot Faces 8 Years. The Runway Charge Carries Just One

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:23:00 GMT

A federal grand jury in Dallas has indicted a 24-year-old man on four counts accusing him of flying a drone into the airspace of Dallas Love Field and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on consecutive nights in June 2025. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced the case on Thursday, October 8. Pujan Prashantkumar Gajjar faces up to eight years in federal prison if convicted on all four.

The indictment, returned September 16, alleges Gajjar flew a drone into the runway exclusion zone at Love Field around 11:30 p.m. on June 26, 2025, and that the drone crossed an active runway. The next night, it alleges, he flew the same drone into the restricted airspace around DFW. On both flights, it says, he knowingly and willfully acted as an airman without an airman’s certificate. Agents arrested him on September 22.

Twelve days earlier, DroneXL reported on a Charlotte pilot who pleaded guilty to flying between two live runways. He faces up to a year.

The Airman Counts Carry Three Years Each, the Runway Count One

The press release does not name the statutes, but its wording does. “Runway exclusion zone” is the term 18 U.S.C. § 39B uses, and that offense carries a maximum of one year. Acting as an airman without a certificate, 49 U.S.C. § 46306, carries up to three years per count.

The 2018 law that created the runway offense defines the zone as a rectangle half a mile wide, running one statute mile past each end of an active runway at a Class B, C or D airport. It does not require that any aircraft was put at risk. Crossing the runway, the one operational detail in the release, changes nothing about the statutory maximum.

If the four counts come from those two statutes, eight years adds up one way: the two airport flights at a year apiece, and two three-year counts under § 46306. The DFW count could instead be the one-year national defense airspace offense, 49 U.S.C. § 46307, and the total would not move. The release describes the airman allegation as covering both flights and says nothing about registration, a separate three-year offense under the same section. DroneXL has not seen the indictment, so the count structure is my reading of the arithmetic, not a quote from the charging document. Gajjar made his initial appearance on September 22 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Harris Toliver.

A Hobbyist Can Be Charged as an Airman After Entering Class B Without Approval

The release does not say whether Gajjar flew for fun or for money. For the certificate counts, that may not matter. A recreational pilot needs no FAA certificate only while the flight stays inside the limits of 49 U.S.C. § 44809, one of which is authorization before entering Class B.

Both Dallas airports sit under Class B. Pilots who need to fly near them request that authorization through LAANC before takeoff. A flight that breaks any of the recreational limits falls under the rules that apply to everyone else, and among them is 14 CFR 107.12: nobody flies a small drone without a remote pilot certificate, or a certificated pilot supervising. That certificate is an airman certificate, which is why a hobbyist with no Part 107 card who flies into an airport’s airspace without approval can be charged the way a person flying a Cessna without a license would be.

The FBI Dallas field office and the Federal Air Marshal Service investigated, with help from the Federal Aviation Administration, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney from the office’s National Security Section is prosecuting. FBI Dallas Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock said in the release that drones in restricted airport airspace threaten “pilots, passengers, and crew in the air as well as communities on the ground.” Rothrock is a familiar name on this beat. He was the acting special agent in charge in Baltimore in February 2024, when federal prosecutors charged the pilot who stopped the AFC Championship with the same airman offense.

Neither the release nor FOX 4’s report says how investigators tied the two flights to Gajjar, or what happened in the 15 months between the flights and the indictment. In Charlotte, the airport’s drone-detection system flagged the flight the moment it started, and federal marshals tracked it for seven minutes.

Raybould’s Office Brought the Same Airman Charge at Dallas Stadium in June

U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould’s office brought the certificate count during the World Cup. On June 27, agents traced a drone spotted over Dallas Stadium before Argentina played Jordan to an Arlington man who admitted he lacked the FAA credentials, and charged him with operating without an airman’s certificate.

The sentencing record on that count is thin. Matthew Hebert, whose drone halted the AFC Championship game in Baltimore in January 2024, pleaded guilty in March 2024 to a misdemeanor airspace violation and received one year of probation and a $500 fine. He had told investigators he relied on his drone’s app and did not know the stadium was restricted. Xiaodong He, the Chinese tourist charged with the airspace offense and the airman offense over a 12-minute flight near Kennedy Space Center, pleaded guilty to the airspace count on September 18. What became of his airman count is not yet in the public record.

Charlotte’s Marco Antonio Ochoa pleaded guilty on September 22 to a single § 39B count for a seven-minute client video shot from a park between two active runways. That was the same day federal agents arrested Gajjar in Dallas. Ochoa has no sentencing date yet.

An indictment is an allegation, and Gajjar is presumed innocent.

DroneXL’s Take

The flight the indictment describes, a drone crossing an active runway at Love Field at 11:30 at night and the same drone inside DFW’s airspace the next night, is the flight Congress had in mind when it wrote the runway exclusion zone into law in 2018. If that is what happened, two nights at two airports is a pattern, and the law doesn’t ask whether anyone was on short final at the time.

The eight-year figure is a prosecutor’s ceiling. The one offense that describes the dangerous act is worth a year of it, and in the only airman-certificate case DroneXL has followed to a sentence, Hebert’s, the certificate count produced no prison time: he pleaded to the airspace misdemeanor and got probation. I expect this case to end nearer that outcome than the headline number, and if it doesn’t, I’d expect the second night to be the reason.

Recreational pilots should read the certificate counts as the lesson. The exception that lets you fly without a Part 107 ends the moment you enter Class B airspace without a LAANC approval. Past that line, the government can charge you as an unlicensed airman at three years per flight, whatever you were flying and whoever you were flying for.

Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Texas, FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, The Baltimore Sun, 18 U.S.C. § 39B, 49 U.S.C. § 46306, 49 U.S.C. § 46307, 49 U.S.C. § 44809, 14 CFR 107.12

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

FCC Oct. 29 Vote Ends 35-Year Ban on Drones in 800 MHz Cellular Band

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:15:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on October 29, 2026 on a draft order that lets drones use the 800 MHz Cellular band, 50 MHz of licensed spectrum that carriers have held nationwide since the 1980s. Chairman Brendan Carr announced the item on October 7 and the agency published the draft text the next day. The rule it rewrites was written to keep passengers from using cell phones on airplanes. The draft carves drones out of that ban and leaves the airline part in place.

The band sits at 824 to 849 MHz and 869 to 894 MHz. Drones already fly on carrier spectrum at 700 MHz and in the PCS band at 1.9 GHz, because those bands carry no airborne restriction. The FCC first asked whether to drop the 800 MHz ban in January 2023, and the question sat unanswered for three years and nine months.

FCC Finds a 1991 Airplane Phone Rule Has Blocked Drones for 35 Years

The draft order says the 800 MHz airborne ban began as a 1984 policy, was codified in 1991, and targeted fast-moving handsets in airplanes that could see many towers at once. The FCC finds that premise no longer holds for drones, so it adds a drone exemption to section 22.925.

The draft Report and Order, circulated as FCC-CIRC2610-03, adds a paragraph (b) to the rule stating the prohibition “shall not apply to uncrewed aircraft or uncrewed aircraft systems” using Cellular Radiotelephone Service frequencies. It also adds a primary mobile allocation for drones in the band to the U.S. Table of Frequency Allocations. The rule takes effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register if the commission adopts it.

The question came back to life through the “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” public notice, DA 26-314, which DroneXL covered when it was released on April 1 and again ahead of its May 1 comment deadline. Replies closed May 18. The draft order cites that record, plus the 2023 rulemaking in WT Docket 22-323, and says the FCC “received overwhelming support” for opening the band.

Carriers Told the FCC Their Networks Already Handle Drones

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and the trade group CTIA filed in favor. Ericsson and Qualcomm supplied the engineering case. The draft leans on 3GPP Release 15, which added drone identification, height reporting and interference management because a drone in the air sees many base stations at once.

The order’s cost-benefit section states there are no added interference costs for licensees from the change, and that the FCC is “not aware that drone operations have led to interference issues” in the 700 MHz and PCS bands where they already fly. AT&T told the commission that manufacturers have been reluctant to build drone radios that work around band-by-band airborne prohibitions, or to customize firmware to strip prohibited bands out of existing modules. So a modem that cannot legally transmit at 400 feet gets left out of drone designs.

Zipline and one individual commenter asked the FCC to permit drone use at reduced power or below a set altitude. The draft declines both, stating the record “supports eliminating the restriction for UAS entirely.” Skydio, Lockheed Martin, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Commercial Drone Alliance, the Small UAV Coalition and AUVSI also filed in support. The order cites no commenter opposing the change.

The Order Opens a Carrier Band, Not Your Controller’s Link

Opening 800 MHz changes what AT&T and Verizon can sell to drone operators and leaves the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz unlicensed links on consumer drones alone. Drones in the band fly under Part 22 rules, inside licensed carrier service areas, and under every FAA rule.

The draft spells out the limits. A drone acting as a mobile station communicates “with and through base transmitters only” under section 22.923, and a drone carrying its own base station is bound by the band’s power and field-strength limits. In the 890 to 894 MHz slice, international allocation rules mean drone operations cannot claim protection from interference or cause it. The order also states its interference analysis “does not speak to any airborne restrictions in other bands,” because some of those were adopted to protect specific incumbents, so every other airborne ban stays where it is.

The use cases the order names are the networked ones: precision agriculture, utility and pipeline inspection, search and rescue, wildfire monitoring and last-mile delivery. Those are BVLOS operations that ride on carrier networks, which is why Zipline and Skydio filed and DJI’s consumer customers have no stake in this item. The 5030 to 5091 MHz band the FCC set aside for drone control links in 2024 is a separate proceeding, and as of the April notice the commission had still not taken the steps needed to put it into service.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the easiest yes the FCC has had on its drone docket all year, and it says something that it took from January 2023 to October 2026 to get here. The order cites no one opposing it. The carriers and the drone companies wanted it, the chipmakers wrote the interference analysis, and the spectrum next door at 700 MHz has carried drone traffic for years without the FCC noticing an interference problem. The commission asked the question in January 2023, issued its 5 GHz drone order in the same docket in September 2024 without resolving it, and had to ask again in April 2026. I think the April notice gave the Wireless Bureau political cover to clear old business, and the 800 MHz item was the one with a finished record and no enemies.

The harder items are the ones that still have none of that. The 5 GHz drone band is the harder item, and it is still waiting. The airborne bans in every other band get one footnote saying this order does not reach them. And the one group with the most to gain from a cheap, long-range licensed link, the hobbyist and small operator flying a DJI aircraft, has been cut off from new hardware by the same commission’s Covered List since December. Carr’s statement puts “consumer drones” on the list of beneficiaries, but the order’s own use cases are farm fields and pipelines. Watch October 29 for the vote, then watch what the Bureau does with 5 GHz, because that is the band that would reach a pilot who does not have a carrier contract.

Sources: FCC draft Report and Order, FCC-CIRC2610-03, FCC October 2026 Open Meeting agenda, Chairman Carr statement, October 7, 2026, FCC Public Notice DA 26-314

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

Zipline Starts Austin Deliveries With FAA Comment Window Still Open

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:56:00 GMT

Zipline opened drone delivery in the Austin area on Friday, October 9, with its First Flight early-access program taking orders in Round Rock for the first 5,000 residents who sign up. Customers within 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) of 3000 E. Palm Valley Blvd. can order from the Zipline app, and members get $10 off their first three orders, no service or delivery fees, facility tours, and a shot at company swag.

Austin is Zipline’s third Texas metro in 14 months, after Dallas-Fort Worth in August 2025 and Houston in April. The company announced Austin as its next Texas market in June without naming a neighborhood. Round Rock, in Williamson County north of the city, is the answer.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s draft environmental assessment covering Zipline’s Austin operations is still open for public comment. The comment period closes on Sunday, October 11, two days after the first Round Rock order.

Zipline Launched Round Rock With a High School Demo and a County Judge

Zipline flew a demonstration delivery over Stony Point High School on Thursday, October 8, a day before the service opened to the public. The Round Rock ISD school runs a drone aviation program, and Zipline told KXAN the partnership will bring students classroom visits, career fairs and facility tours.

Zach Hill, who leads community engagement for Zipline, told the students the company was excited to kick off the partnership and bring them along for the journey. Community Impact, which covered the demonstration, reports a delivery weight limit of about 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) per order, lowered on a tether into a backyard or another spot the customer picks.

Williamson County Judge Steven Snell supplied the quote in Zipline’s own announcement. “Williamson County has developed into an important technology center,” he said, calling Zipline’s choice of Round Rock as its first Austin location evidence of that. Zipline’s announcement names no merchants for the Round Rock zone. The Houston launch opened with nine restaurant and retail partners, Walmart and Chipotle among them, and Zipline says hundreds of businesses now sell through its app.

Zipline's launch graphic for Austin. The company pitched the service against the city's traffic, citing TomTom data that put 2025 commutes 40 percent longer than free-flow travel. Image credit: Zipline

The FAA’s Austin Review Caps Zipline at 30,000 Deliveries a Day

The FAA’s September 11 draft would amend Zipline’s Part 135 operations specifications to cover five Texas metros, Austin among them. For Austin, the ceiling is 30 Chargers, 600 Dropbox pickup kiosks and 30,000 deliveries a day across 2,498 square miles (6,470 square kilometers). DroneXL reported the filing when it appeared.

Houston set the pattern. Zipline began flying Cypress on April 29, and the FAA’s draft review of Houston opened for comment on September 11, four and a half months later. Zipline holds a Part 135 air carrier certificate, and the draft covers an amendment to its operating areas rather than permission to fly at all. The FAA’s nationwide programmatic assessment, final since July, still requires an operations specifications amendment for each new area. Zipline’s announcement does not say which authorization covers the Round Rock flights today, and DroneXL has not asked the company.

Zipline’s scale claims have moved since the summer. The company said on July 14 that it had passed 2.5 million commercial deliveries. Friday’s announcement puts the total above 3 million, with more than 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) flown and more than 30 municipalities served in four US states.

Zipline Says It Is Six Times Quieter and Wants to Fly at 400 Feet

Zipline called its system six times quieter during delivery than others in the industry in a March 25 engineering post, and said it plans to raise its typical cruise altitude to 400 feet (122 meters). The delivery sequence, droid on its tether, takes about 90 seconds.

The Platform 2 holds station above 300 feet (91 meters) while the droid rides the tether down to the customer. Image credit: Zipline

That post also described a software update that cut perceived noise by 30 percent by trimming the time the aircraft spends in mixed propulsion, the awkward stretch between hover and wing-borne flight. A later update, which DroneXL took apart in September, has the drones dive to build speed and climb to brake, spending 19 seconds less per flight at peak noise. The six-times figure is Zipline’s own comparison, and the March post gives no decibel measurements or competitor aircraft behind it.

DroneXL’s Take

Round Rock is a good first zone. It is suburban and dense enough for a Charger to earn its keep, and it comes with a county judge who wanted to be in the press release and a school district that handed Zipline a drone aviation class to recruit from. That is the Texas playbook from Rowlett and Cypress, run a third time, and it works.

I wrote in September that asking Houston to comment on flights that had been overhead since April taught residents their comment was decorative. Austin got a tighter version: the comment form is still live while the first pods come down in Round Rock. Zipline may well be flying inside an authorization it already holds, and I expect the FAA to approve the Texas amendment. I would still like one Texas launch where the paperwork lands before the drone does, because the day one of these assessments ends up in front of a judge, the order of operations is the first thing the other side will read aloud.

Sources: Zipline, Community Impact, KXAN, Zipline engineering post, 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.

FAA Part 107 Test Adds Chart Questions Oct. 26 Not in the Supplement

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:36:00 GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration will start putting sectional chart questions on the Part 107 knowledge test on October 26, 2026 that do not appear in the printed testing supplement applicants study from. The agency announced the change in its Airman Testing Community Advisory, and its September special edition repeats it.

The change applies to the Unmanned Aircraft General-Small test, the exam every new remote pilot takes at a PSI testing center. The new questions use images from current FAA VFR charts instead of the figures in the supplement. The FAA published two sample questions: one asks what airspace surrounds Millville Municipal Airport in New Jersey and whether a drone needs air traffic control authorization there, and the other asks which frequency to use at Grand Canyon National Park Airport when the tower is closed.

The printed supplement stays in the test center for now. The FAA has set no date for removing it, and the new chart questions will not be in it.

FAA Pulls Part 107 Chart Questions From Current Sectionals, Not the Supplement

The FAA’s August 2026 advisory says the Unmanned Aircraft General-Small test will include image-based questions “not found in the test supplements” from October 26, 2026. The images come from current FAA sectional charts, and the date is a correction: the June edition of the advisory said October 27.

Millville Municipal Airport on the FAA Washington sectional. The FAA's first sample Part 107 question asks what airspace the dashed magenta ring marks and whether a drone needs ATC authorization inside it. Image credit: FAA

The same change hits the Instrument Rating Airplane test on the same day, with excerpts from approach charts and low altitude enroute charts.

The work is part of what the FAA calls its Graphics Conversion Project, run with its testing contractor PSI Services. The agency is embedding the image inside each question so the printed supplement becomes unnecessary. The drone test already carries some embedded-image questions. The October 26 change is different because the chart excerpts are not in the supplement, and the FAA says it cannot preview them because an embedded image is part of a live test question.

The agency also says some questions may need measuring tools, that applicants will get the tools they need on screen, and that it cannot yet describe how those tools work. Any new on-screen tool will be announced in a future advisory before it reaches a test center.

Applicants who learned the exam from the supplement’s numbered figures lose a shortcut. One of the five trick questions Greg Reverdiau of Pilot Institute, a DroneXL partner, walked through in June 2025 hinged on reading an obstacle’s height off a supplement sectional excerpt, and another on what Class D airspace becomes when the tower closes. The October 26 questions ask the same things on charts nobody can study in advance.

The Sample Questions Ask for Millville’s Airspace and Grand Canyon’s Frequency

The first sample shows Millville Municipal Airport on the Washington sectional and asks what airspace surrounds it and whether a small drone needs ATC authorization. The answer is Class E, with authorization required. The second sample asks for Grand Canyon National Park Airport’s frequency when the tower is closed: 119.0.

Grand Canyon National Park Airport on the FAA Las Vegas sectional. The FAA's second sample question asks which frequency is the CTAF when the tower is closed. The star next to CT 119.0 marks the part-time tower. Image credit: FAA

Both answers sit on the chart for anyone who knows the legend. The dashed magenta ring around Millville is Class E to the surface, and the star after the Grand Canyon tower frequency marks a part-time tower whose frequency becomes the common traffic advisory frequency when it closes. Neither question asks for a number from a memorized figure.

The FAA points applicants to PSI’s sample test site to see the new format. Current sectional charts are free from the FAA’s digital VFR chart downloads, and they are the same charts the test images come from.

One in Six Part 107 Applicants Already Fails the Knowledge Test

The FAA’s 2025 knowledge test statistics list 73,914 Unmanned Aircraft General-Small tests taken last year, with a pass rate of 82.96% and an average score of 79.31%. Across all 293,516 FAA knowledge tests in 2025, the pass rate was 89.56%.

The drone exam is the FAA’s highest-volume knowledge test, ahead of the 44,657 private pilot airplane tests, and its pass rate sits below the average across all of them.

The recurrent test left the PSI centers first: the FAA allowed online recency training as a pandemic measure in April 2020, then replaced the recurrent exam with free online training for good under the Operations Over People rule in April 2021. The initial test is the one that still has to be taken in person.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the right change, and I’d have made it years ago. A remote pilot who can only answer airspace questions about the figures in the supplement has memorized a booklet, not learned to read a chart. The sectional is the document that tells you whether the field you’re about to fly near has a Class E surface area or a part-time tower, and it changes every 56 days. Testing on a current chart tests the thing you’ll actually do before a flight.

The 83% pass rate says the exam isn’t a formality, and the applicants who scrape through on figure recall are the ones this will catch. Download the sectional for your own area from the FAA, find every airport within 10 miles, and work out the airspace and the frequency for each one. If you can do that on a chart you’ve never seen, October 26 changes nothing for you.

Sources: FAA Airman Testing Community Advisory, August 2026, FAA Airman Testing Community Advisory, September 2026 Special Edition, FAA CY2025 Airman Knowledge Test Statistics

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

DJI Neo 3 Unboxing Leak, 71,207-Drone Record, FAA $12M, FBI School

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have four stories for you this week. The DJI Neo 3 has a video leak. We have a Sky Elements Guinness World Record. The FAA hands out $12 million to drone test sites, and then the FBI doubles its counter-drone school capacity. So, let’s get to it.

The DJI Neo 3 Comes Out of the Box in a 49-Second Leak

First up, a 49-second unboxing video of the DJI Neo 3 Fly More Combo has leaked. This one comes from DroneXL’s Jasper Ellens, who posted it on Tuesday, and he says that it first appeared on TikTok. Now, this time the drone actually comes out of the box.

We talked about this before a little bit, and as you can see, it has a spoked prop cage on all four propellers. Then there’s the RC Mini controller with the screen, which looks almost like a Game Boy, a charging hub, and three different batteries. The drone itself appears to have a small screen on the nose, but it’s unclear at the moment what it’s actually going to be for. A production listing puts the weight at 192.7 grams, which is very lightweight.

The RC Mini has FCC approval, but we talked about this before, the Neo 3 does not have approval, so the aircraft itself will not be able to be sold or purchased in the United States.

Sky Elements Flies 71,207 Drones for Two Guinness World Records

Next up, Sky Elements has set two Guinness World Records in Blue Ridge, Texas. Working with Damoda America, they were able to fly 71,207 drones during shows between September 27 and September 29. Now, the old record was 55,939 drones.

Six of the shows used more than 10,000 drones each, with a finale of 11,000 drones.

The company says that this is the largest drone show ever flown in the United States. Crews had to recharge and reset and relaunch the entire fleet between the shows, which I’m sure was a ton of work. We’ve seen these drone shows before, and it’s quite an amazing production.

The CEO says that shows this big have mostly happened only in Asia and the Middle East. Sky Elements now wants to sell these large drone shows to sports leagues and cities and brands.

And yes, before you ask, this is absolutely legal. Every time we talk about drone shows, people ask about the legality of doing this. You have to get waivers in order to fly more than one drone, but it is absolutely possible.

The FAA Hands $12 Million to 19 Projects at Its Nine Test Sites

Now, to the FAA. On Monday it announced $12 million for 19 drone research projects. Each project is paired with one of the nine FAA UAS test sites approved in the US. The projects are going to cover detect and avoid, command and control, traffic management, and drone identification.

And as always with these grants, the FAA really wants to have real-world data that it can use in future rulemaking.

This is not new money. We actually talked about these grants a while back. Congress ordered $6 million a year in the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act, and companies that are awarded this money must match the funding at least one to one.

The word is that the data should inform Part 108, the BVLOS rule that has sat at OIRA since July 10. Now, that was 87 days as of Monday. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re going to get the data before they go public, but an FAA official, Robert Reckert, said last month that it’s at the 10-yard line, whatever that means, and they hope that it gets published later this year. We’re going to have to wait and see, and we’ll keep you posted.

The FBI Doubles Its Counter-Drone School After 700 World Cup Takedowns

And finally, the FBI is doubling its counter-drone school. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward toured the National Counter-UAS Training Center in Huntsville, Alabama, on October 1, and he stated that the capacity will be more than doubled in year two.

Woodward said that every host city for the World Cup attended, and over 700 drones were taken down. He also noted that none of the aircraft that were mitigated carried ordnance, which is a good thing.

If you’re not familiar, since July 1 it’s the only place a state or local officer can earn authority in order to take down a drone under the Safer Skies Act that was recently passed. Now, when the rule was published, only 61 officers nationwide held that certificate, and the first class last October had just 12 people in it.

Woodward didn’t say the current capacity, so the doubling really has no public baseline, but the FBI plans on graduating 250 more officers next fiscal year.

Now, according to that information and other publicly available information, those 700 drones were not a threat. They were just pilots who flew into the restricted airspace without having approval. And it’s always a good reminder to be sure to check TFRs every single time you fly.

That conversation is going to continue on Post Flight, where we’re going to talk about all of this uncensored in the premium community. There’s a link in the description. We’ll see you for the live Q&A on Monday. Have a great weekend. See you then.

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

Amazon Tells North Myrtle Beach: Ask the FAA. FAA: Ask Amazon and City

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 03:35:00 GMT

Amazon representative Tareq Wafaie told the North Myrtle Beach Planning Commission on Wednesday, October 7, that whether its delivery drones fly over a neighborhood is the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision, not the city’s and not his. The same day, the FAA told WPDE that drone operators and local community leaders carry the primary responsibility for addressing community concerns about those flights.

The workshop at City Hall was the public session the commission asked for after it withdrew an approval motion on September 22, as DroneXL reported in North Myrtle Beach Amazon Drone Vote: Staff Ask Oct. 20, Forum Oct. 7. No vote was taken. The commission takes up the drone paddock behind Amazon’s Water Tower Road warehouse again on October 20, when it can approve, deny or postpone the application again.

Wafaie also told the room the drones never go above 68 decibels, according to the Island Packet’s account. The FAA’s noise filing for Amazon’s Baton Rouge hub, built on readings Amazon took of the same aircraft, puts takeoff at about 82 decibels 20 feet from the pad.

Amazon Puts Overflights on the FAA, and the FAA Hands Them Back to the Operator and the City

Wafaie said towns inside the circle other than North Myrtle Beach have no say on the land use, because the pad sits in North Myrtle Beach, and that the FAA controls all of the airspace. “That is a matter of the FAA, not me,” he said of stopping overflights.

Asked whether that meant no say at all, he told the Island Packet he would not couch it that way, because Amazon will do outreach across the service area and take the feedback. The FAA’s statement to WPDE said Amazon Prime Air operates under an FAA exemption with specific conditions and limitations, and that “operators and local community leaders have primary responsibility” for raising awareness and addressing community concerns, with the agency’s own role limited to safe integration and compliance. No FAA representative attended. One resident asked the commissioners whether they felt disrespected by that, and said they should.

The FAA’s drone environmental review index listed Amazon documents for Baton Rouge, Chicago, Detroit, Florida and the other existing hubs when DroneXL checked it on October 9, and none for South Carolina.

Amazon Says 68 Decibels. Its Own Measurements in the FAA File Say 82 Up Close

Amazon’s slide gives 65 dBA at departure and 68 at arrival at the pad, 55 and 53 at 500 feet (152 meters), and 68 dBA in the backyard and 61 from the front yard during a delivery. It gives no distance for the pad or backyard figures and no metric.

Amazon's noise slide from the October 7 workshop: 65 and 68 dBA at the pad, 55 and 53 dBA at 500 feet, 68 dBA in the backyard during delivery. Image credit: Amazon, via the North Myrtle Beach Planning Commission

The FAA’s Baton Rouge filing gives both. Its technical noise report is built on measurements Amazon’s own Prime Air team took at its Pendleton, Oregon test range in October 2024, analyzed by the FAA’s consultant ESA. It lists the MK30’s maximum level at takeoff at 82 decibels 20 feet (6 meters) from the pad and about 70 decibels at 75 feet (23 meters). Its sound exposure levels, which fold the whole event’s duration into one number and run higher than the peak, are 90.5 decibels for takeoff at 20 feet, 92.1 for the delivery hover at 25 feet and 63.7 for a cruise pass at 200 feet (61 meters). DroneXL laid those figures out in Amazon Says Quieter Than a Truck. Its FAA Filing Says 92 Decibels, after Amazon’s Baton Rouge manager, Tyra Jones, made the comparison Wafaie repeated Wednesday: a delivery van on your street is louder than the drone overhead.

The two sets describe the same aircraft at different distances, because a decibel figure without a distance and a metric is not a measurement. Amazon’s 68 at arrival sits close to the FAA’s 70 maximum at 75 feet. The 92.1 is the sound of a box being dropped 13 feet (4 meters) above a lawn, measured from the next lawn over, and the FAA’s comparison for it is a diesel truck at 50 feet. Its vacuum cleaner at 10 feet is for the 69 decibels you would hear 75 feet from the drop. Wafaie’s comparison for hearing the drone from a quiet yard was an electric toothbrush held at arm’s length.

The MK30 Amazon Showed: 83 Pounds, a 5-Pound Box, 100 to 400 Feet and No Landing

Amazon’s spec slide lists the MK30 at 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 meters) tall, up to 83 pounds (38 kilograms), a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) payload, a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) range, about 15 minutes of flight, a 60 to 74 mph (97 to 119 km/h) cruise and operation from 14 to 113°F.

Amazon's delivery path diagram from the workshop: takeoff from the warehouse, a cruise leg out, a drop from 4 meters, and a return at a different altitude. Image credit: Amazon, via the North Myrtle Beach Planning Commission

The plan calls for 12 drones and Amazon is limited to 1,000 deliveries a day, WMBF reported, the same ceiling Amazon’s FAA environmental assessments carry for its other hubs. Flights run between 100 and 400 feet (30 to 122 meters), the drone never lands at a house, and the yard needs an 18-foot (5.5-meter) clear circle with no sheds or overhanging wires. Wafaie said the aircraft returns with 70 to 80 percent of its battery and cannot fly in anything beyond very light wind.

Customers opt in through Amazon, which checks the address with GPS and lidar and accepts single-family homes only. The fee is $2.99 for Prime members and $4.99 for everyone else, and the pitch is 60-minute delivery of diapers, batteries and tablets. Wafaie told residents worried about the cameras that nothing is recorded unless a flight has a problem, that the file is overwritten by the next flight, and that the system is “completely different” from Flock’s because the cameras are used only to navigate. Human monitors can ground a drone but cannot watch its camera in flight.

Resident Lisa Watts told the commission the drops looked indiscriminate: “based on maybe some type of GPS.” Wafaie said anything other than a clear yard disqualifies the address.

The Commission Votes Oct. 20 With No Drone Ordinance and Its Lawyers Still Researching One

Chairman Silvio Cutuli told WPDE the decision “stays with the Planning Commission,” because the paddock is a minor amendment to the industrial park’s planned development district. Assistant planning director Suzanne Pritchard told the Island Packet the commission could postpone again on October 20, or vote either way.

The enlarged site plan in the city's workshop packet: a 13,627-square-foot paddock with six launch and landing pads, a divert pad, turn stations and storage containers behind the existing fulfillment center at 8651 Water Tower Road. Image credit: Timothy M. Lott, AIA, for Amazon.com Services, via the City of North Myrtle Beach

The workshop packet repeats the staff finding that approval of the pad authorizes no flight, and that Amazon is separately pursuing its federal authorization. Pritchard told the Myrtle Beach Sun News the resident feedback so far has been almost overwhelmingly negative, on safety, noise, property values, wildlife and the coastal environment. City spokesperson Lauren Jessie said the legal department is researching whether the city can write an ordinance covering operating hours or noise, which is the preemption question DroneXL’s October 2 guide said the city attorney should answer in public before the vote.

South Carolina’s Act 150, in force January 1, 2027, leaves takeoff and landing sites to municipalities. The DroneXL Amazon Prime Air tracker lists no other South Carolina site, and the Island Packet reported this would be Amazon’s first delivery area in the state. Amazon’s drone line is 1-888-280-4331, and the customer-service chat reaches the drone team through “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” For the levers that apply in any town Amazon enters, see DroneXL’s residents’ guide.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon and the FAA spent Wednesday pointing at each other. If the operator says overflights are the FAA’s call and the FAA says community concerns are the operator’s and the city’s, then the only document anyone in North Myrtle Beach will ever sign is the one in front of the Planning Commission on October 20. Richardson approved its pad in 2025 with hours but nothing on flight counts, and by this April its council had dropped a rezoning threat on legal advice and was pointing residents at the FAA and Congress.

The 68-decibel slide is the reason to attach something. It is not a false number, as far as I can tell: it matches the FAA’s 70 at 75 feet. But it is a number with its distance removed, and the FAA file for this aircraft puts the peak at 82 decibels 20 feet from the pad, with exposure levels of 90 to 92 for takeoff and the drop. A city that has Amazon’s slide and not that table in its file has half the record.

My position on the aircraft hasn’t changed since Parachute Shmarachute: 83 pounds with no parachute is the wrong machine for a shoebox over Barefoot. The commission doesn’t need my view to act. It needs Jessie’s legal answer on hours and noise in writing before October 20, and the FAA’s Baton Rouge table in the file next to Amazon’s slide.

Sources: The Island Packet, WMBF News, WPDE, Myrtle Beach Sun News, City of North Myrtle Beach, Planning Commission workshop packet, Oct. 7, 2026, FAA, Baton Rouge draft EA Appendix B, FAA, Baton Rouge technical noise report, Appendix E.

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

DJI Teases Dock 4 With Battery Swapping for October 14, Not for the US

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 02:44:00 GMT

DJI Enterprise will launch its next dock and dock drone on October 14, 2026, at 8 AM EDT, and the six-second teaser it pinned to its X account on October 8 shows the new dock swapping a battery into the aircraft instead of charging the one on board. The pairing has leaked as Dock 4 and the Matrice 5TD, the successors to Dock 3 and the Matrice 4TD from February 2025. DJI has confirmed neither name. The clip, titled “Always There, Always Ready,” follows a battery pack down a set of rails into a rotating carousel, then lifts it into the empty bay on the back of a folded-arm quadcopter. DJI’s trailer page carries the date and the slogan and names no product.

No DJI dock sold today swaps anything. The original DJI Dock of 2022, Dock 2 of 2024 and Dock 3 of 2025 all charge the battery inside the landed aircraft, and Dock 3 needs 27 minutes to take a Matrice 4TD from 15% to 95%. The aircraft in the teaser has the Matrice 4D’s folding arms and top-rear battery bay. The only new dock aircraft on any registry filing DroneXL has seen is the Matrice 5TD that surfaced in China on September 21, 750 g heavier than the 4TD.

The Teaser Shows a Carousel Feeding Batteries Into the Drone’s Rear Bay

The video on DJI’s trailer page renders the dock as a wireframe with one battery pack lit green, carrying a DJI flight battery’s four-LED charge indicator. The pack drops along guide rails into a carousel, which turns it under the drone and lifts it into the bay.

The final frame of DJI's teaser: a charged battery, outlined in green, seated in the drone's rear bay above the dock's battery carousel. Image credit: DJI

The carousel is built around a central gear hub with at least five battery bays, and every bay but the lit one holds a dark pack. The drone’s own bay sits empty for the first half of the clip. The clip is a render, and DJI has not described the mechanism in words anywhere on the trailer page or in the post. The X version, pinned on the @DJIEnterprise account, shows the same aircraft from behind inside the dock with its arm lights on and four green LEDs lit on the pack.

Today’s Dock 3 Spends 27 Minutes Charging Between Flights, and DJI Sells It on Response Time

DJI’s Dock 3 spec sheet lists 27 minutes to charge the aircraft from 15% to 95% at 77°F (25°C). The pack is 149.9 Wh and rated for 400 cycles. Its Dock as First Responder page promises an aircraft airborne in under 15 seconds. Neither figure includes the recharge.

The same page promises eyes on a scene 0.6 miles (1 km) away in under 100 seconds, and the Matrice 4TD flies 54 minutes forward or 47 minutes hovering before it comes back to charge. A department running one Dock 3 as its first responder lives with that cycle on every call. Dock 3 already delivers the “Always There” half of DJI’s new slogan, a box on a roof that launches on its own. The swap carousel is what makes the “Always Ready” half literal, because the aircraft is never sitting on a flat pack.

The Matrice 5TD Filing and a Leaked Dock 4 Fit the Date

Leaker Igor Bogdanov posted China’s UOM registry entry for a DJI Matrice 5TD on September 21. It lists 2.6 kg (5.7 lb) empty and 3.05 kg (6.7 lb) at takeoff, filed for power line inspection. On September 25 he wrote that a DJI Dock 4 is coming, without a source.

His dock line was one sentence, that it “will be used in stores soon.” The Matrice 5 prototype he photographed in July carries a dome consistent with integrated LiDAR and a cylinder consistent with built-in RTK, which is where the extra 750 g would go. DJI has published no name for either the dock or the drone, and UK dealer Heliguy’s launch page says only that “a new DJI Enterprise product is launching on October 14, 2026.”

The cadence matches the last two docks. DJI posted its “Rise to Any Challenge” teaser on February 24, 2025 and announced Dock 3 with the Matrice 4D and 4TD three days later. Dock 2 and the Matrice 3D launched globally on March 26, 2024, four months after their China release.

The Covered List Keeps Dock 4 Out of the United States

Dock 3 and the Matrice 4TD hold FCC equipment authorizations granted before the December 22, 2025 Covered List action blocked new approvals for DJI hardware. A new dock and a new aircraft would each need a grant the FCC cannot issue while the designation stands.

DJI told the Ninth Circuit in April that the action voided 14 existing authorizations and blocks 25 planned 2026 launches, and it skipped the US on the O4 Wide Air Unit in June. American agencies can watch the October 14 stream but cannot order what it shows.

DroneXL’s Take

Battery swapping is the feature the drone-as-first-responder pitch has been missing since the first DJI Dock, and I’d bet DJI built this one around the public safety sales call rather than the inspection one. A dock that charges in place answers one call and then sits for most of half an hour, so the second call in that window goes to a pilot in a truck or goes unanswered. A department with two docks already has a second aircraft ready, and it paid for two docks and two roofs to get it. A carousel of charged packs in one box does the same job for the price of the batteries.

This is the first DJI dock cycle since the Covered List, and it is the cleanest measure yet of what that designation costs a US program: no security gain anyone has documented, and a 27-minute response gap that a department in Rotterdam or Osaka will not have after October 14. If the Ninth Circuit narrows the designation, that gap closes with a purchase order. If it doesn’t, Dock 3 is the last DJI dock an American department will ever buy.

Sources: DJI Enterprise trailer page, @DJIEnterprise on X, DJI Dock 3 specifications, DJI Dock as First Responder, Heliguy launch page, Igor Bogdanov on X (September 21, September 25)

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

DJI Neo 3 Specs and Features: What 23 Days of Leaks Have Settled

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:52:00 GMT

The DJI Neo 3 specs and features have leaked in pieces for 23 days, and as of Thursday they add up to most of a spec sheet. A square 1/1.1-inch sensor, 192.7 g, a three-cell 18.9 Wh battery, caged propellers that need a screwdriver, and a DJI RC Mini controller with its own screen are all on the record from photos and videos of boxed units carrying Not For Sale stickers.

The newest video surfaced overnight. Turkish account @DroneFeast posted it at about 4 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, tagging Ellens and Bogdanov, and Xdrones Studio, a Portuguese drone account posting as @D2Help, reposted it four hours later with its own watermark and a caption. It is the first clear look at the top of the drone: a ribbed grille behind the battery bay, a round sensor at the tail, a blue screen on the nose and four battery LEDs beside the power button. The caption adds 4K/30 vertical recording and O4 video transmission to 6.2 miles (10 km), two lines no leaked document carries.

Four things are still not on the record anywhere: a price, a launch date, a flight time and a route to the United States. DJI has not announced the drone, and Jasper Ellens, who writes for DroneXL, guessed six weeks when a reader asked.

The Camera Is the Osmo Action 6 Sensor, Shooting Vertical at 4K/30

The Neo 3 carries a square 1/1.1-inch CMOS sensor, the same size and shape as the DJI Osmo Action 6 chip, per the marketing sheet Igor Bogdanov leaked on October 1. It records vertical or horizontal at full resolution without turning the camera. The Neo 2 has a 1/2-inch sensor.

The sheet lists native vertical shooting and 2x lossless zoom, and DroneXL went through it on October 3. Xdrones Studio’s caption on Thursday puts the vertical mode at 4K/30 fps without loss. The account does not say where that figure comes from, and no leaked document so far prints a resolution or a bitrate.

The top of the DJI Neo 3: nose screen, battery LEDs and power button, the ribbed grille behind the battery, and the round upward sensor at the tail. Frame from the video Xdrones Studio posted on October 8, 2026. Photo credit: Xdrones Studio / @D2Help

The Airframe Weighs 192.7 g and Puts Every Propeller Behind a Screwed-On Cage

A production listing Bogdanov surfaced on September 21 puts the Neo 3 at 192.7 g, against 151 g for a bare Neo 2 and 160 g with its clip-on transceiver. The box lists nine items and no transceiver, which points to a built-in radio, as Ellens has said.

The propellers sit inside spoked cages moulded into the arms. Ellens showed on Wednesday that changing one means unscrewing a diamond-shaped part from the bottom of the cage, then the motor. On the original Neo the guard unclips and one screw holds each propeller.

The sensor set is the fullest of any Neo. The spec sheet promises omnidirectional obstacle detection, the unboxing video shows sensor windows on both arms, a slit above the camera and a round lens facing up from the tail, and Xdrones Studio’s caption adds forward LiDAR, which the Neo 2 already carries. The ribbed grille on the top deck is not described in any earlier coverage. The caption calls the design “improved heat dissipation,” and the flight batteries carry rows of slots across their tops, the detail DroneXL wrongly called AI-drawn in September and corrected on October 6.

The Battery Is a Three-Cell 18.9 Wh Pack, and the Controller Already Cleared the FCC

The flight battery label reads 1,800 mAh, 10.5 V nominal and 18.9 Wh: three lithium-ion cells in series, where the Neo 2’s 1,606 mAh pack runs two cells at 11.5 Wh. A reader counted seven contacts against the Neo 2’s five, so no Neo 2 spare fits.

The box holds the aircraft, three batteries, a charging hub, the RC Mini, two RC Mini accessories, spare propellers, a screwdriver and a USB-C cable, per the back panel DroneXL read on September 20. The RC Mini pairs from its own screen with no phone, shows the camera’s live view, and hides a scroll wheel on its back edge. Xdrones Studio’s caption reads “New DJI RC-N3/RC Mini with integrated screen.” No box or sheet names an RC-N3, and that controller has no screen of its own.

A DJI RC Mini has held a US FCC grant since December 19, 2025, three days before the FCC’s Covered List blocked new authorizations for foreign-made drones. The aircraft has none. Without one, DJI cannot sell the Neo 3 in the United States, and the Neo 2 never launched there either.

The Units Filmed So Far Carry Not For Sale Stickers, and None of Them Dates the Launch

The unboxing and first-flight videos Ellens relayed came from an owner in Indonesia, and Wednesday’s propeller and battery photos were taken on a dealer’s counter there. Thursday’s walk-around over hexagonal pavers carries no location, and none of the three names a date.

The retail box in the September photos wears a “Not for sale” sticker, CE and UKCA marks and China’s two mandatory drone standards in force since May 1, 2026, and the battery label adds a Thai TIS safety mark.

Ellens wrote that DJI’s small drones often show up early in Malaysia and Indonesia.

DroneXL’s Take

DJI has built the beginner drone I’d hand a first-time pilot, and American pilots will read about it and not fly it. My read is that DJI launches the Neo 3 everywhere else within weeks, because boxed units with Not For Sale stickers are already being filmed by their owners, and the US launch repeats the Neo 2’s: none. If you are in the US, follow the Covered List proceedings rather than the leaks, because nothing in a leak changes an FCC grant. The DJI ban hurts hobbyists more than it hurts DJI, and a 193 g drone with caged props is the clearest case for that argument the ban has produced.

Sources: Xdrones Studio (@D2Help) on X, Jasper Ellens on X, Igor Bogdanov 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.

DJI Osmo 360 II Beginners Guide: Getting Started With 360

Shawn Air Photography — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:32:00 GMT

Good day, folks. Shawn here from Air Photography. This is my beginner’s guide for the newly released DJI Osmo 360 II. It’s geared to those who have never used a 360 camera before, to help you get familiar with the hardware and the basic functions.

There are some great upgrades in the Osmo 360 II, including replaceable lenses. The lenses on a 360 camera stick out, so if it falls on concrete or rocks there’s a chance they’ll get scratched or broken. Now you can buy a lens replacement kit and swap them yourself instead of sending the camera to DJI. It’s a very easy process, and all the tools you need come in the kit.

Every Osmo 360 II Bundle Has the Same Camera

Only the accessories change from one bundle to the next.

The Standard Combo gets you the camera, one battery, a charging and data cable, a soft carrying case, a lens cover, a lens cleaning cloth, and an information pack with booklets and stickers.

A second bundle adds another battery for two in total, plus an extension stick and a magnetic mount that connects the stick to the camera. The extension stick is probably one of the most common ways you’ll use a 360 camera, so for a lot of people this may be the best bundle.

The Adventure Combo, another very popular one, adds a third battery and a charging hub that holds all three, which makes charging a lot more convenient.

Getting to Know the Buttons, Doors and Mounts

The camera has a very simple button layout. The power button on the side is also the quick switch button for changing modes. Below the screen, the left button is the shutter, and the right one switches between the front and rear camera by default.

The Osmo 360 II, with its side door and the mounting points on the bottom. Photo credit: Air Photography

One side door covers the USB-C port for charging and data. The other covers the battery and the memory card slot. Press the tab and slide down to open them, and make sure you hear a click when you close them. The camera is waterproof without a housing, but only if those doors are sealed.

On the bottom, you can attach anything with a quarter-inch (1/4-20) thread, or use DJI’s magnetic mounts. For 360 filming, a quarter-inch connection is often the best option because it keeps the stick perfectly in line with the camera, which is what you need for the “invisible selfie stick” effect. The stick has to stay in the stitch line.

The magnetic mount in the box is locked straight for the same reason. If you’re vlogging in single-lens mode and want the lens pointed at you, press its button to tilt it, then press again to straighten it for 360. The standard mounts from DJI’s action cameras fit too.

An extension pole is one of the most common ways to use a 360 camera. Photo credit: Air Photography

The pins on the bottom are for DJI’s power handle extension stick. It powers the camera so you can record longer, and its connectors let you control the camera from the handle.

Memory: 105GB Built In, but Get a Card

The camera has 105GB of internal storage. That may be enough for a few small clips during the day, but for most people it won’t be, especially filming 360 video in 8K. It fills up very fast.

I recommend a 256 or 512GB card, and the camera takes up to 1TB. I’m using a 512GB SanDisk Extreme Pro, and I’ve always had good luck with those, but the brand doesn’t matter too much. DJI lists recommended cards on its website. The slot sits right above the battery: insert the card with the printed side facing the battery and push until it clicks.

Charging: Bring Your Own 45W USB-C Charger

Line up the battery contacts and it slides right in. You can charge in the camera, or in the charging hub if your bundle has one.

None of the bundles include a charger head. Most of us already have one for a tablet, phone or laptop, and my MacBook Air charger works perfectly. If you don’t have one, you can buy one from Amazon. DJI sells its own, but most will work. I recommend a USB-C charger of at least 45 watts.

Plug in through the smaller side door and the screen shows the battery percentage with a lightning bolt. Fast charging takes a battery from empty to about 80% in roughly 20 minutes. The last 20% takes a bit longer.

The hub can also be bought separately. Open the lid or press the front button and the lights show each battery’s state: yellow needs charging, green is full. It charges one, two or three batteries, and with batteries inside it doubles as a power bank for any USB-C device, like a phone running low.

Activating and Updating the Firmware With DJI Mimo

Before you use the camera, activate it and update the firmware with the DJI Mimo app. Mimo also lets you preview, transfer and edit your footage, and use your phone as a live-view remote. It’s on the Apple App Store. On Android, I believe you download it from DJI’s website, but I’m not 100% sure, so just Google it. Create a DJI account and sign in.

The DJI Mimo app handles activation and firmware updates for the Osmo 360 II. Photo credit: Air Photography

Turn the camera on with a quick press of the power button and pick your language. You can skip activation and use the camera up to five times, but I highly recommend updating first so you get all the features.

Open Mimo and it may find the camera on its own. If not, tap the button at the bottom right to search. Tap connect, then confirm on the camera. That one-time step stops random people from connecting to your camera. Agree to the activation terms and the camera is activated. Mimo then offers DJI Care Refresh as a one- or two-year plan. I skipped it.

A firmware update starts downloading right away, so do this with an internet connection. The percentage covers download and install, so at 50% the download is usually done. Tap install, connect to the camera’s Wi-Fi, and let it run. It takes anywhere from a few minutes to 5 or 10, depending on your connection and how busy DJI’s servers are, and the camera may restart. When it’s done, both the app and the camera confirm the update, and the camera gives you a quick on-screen tour.

Reading the Screen and Finding the Menus

Press and hold the power button to turn the camera off. Around the edge of the screen:

Top right: battery level.
Top left: where you’re recording and how much time is left. A camera icon means internal storage, a memory card icon means the SD card. My settings left 1 hour and 55 minutes of video.
Middle left: the play button for your media.
Bottom left: the current mode. A globe means spherical video.
Bottom center: resolution, frame rate and field of view, like 8K 30W.
Bottom right: front and rear camera switch.
Middle right: the side menu.

Swipe down from the top for the main settings, which run across two pages, and tap the gear icon for more. The side menu holds image and audio settings: filters, Endurance Mode to stretch your battery when you’re running low, and Pro Mode for manual white balance, ISO and shutter speed.

To change where you record, swipe down, swipe sideways and tap the memory card icon. It shows free space on internal storage and on the card. Tap the one you want, confirm, and the top-left icon changes to SD. To wipe a card, go to Storage and choose to format internal storage or the memory card. Transfer everything you want to keep first, because it erases everything.

360 Mode vs Single-Lens Mode

This camera works two ways. As a spherical camera, it uses both lenses to capture everything around you, and later you export a spherical video or reframe it into a flat one with the perspective you choose. In single-lens mode, it works like a traditional action camera with just the front or rear lens.

Tap the mode button and pick “360” or “Single Lens” at the top. Do it right away, because that screen disappears fast. 360 mode has night shots, Spotlight Follow, Vortex, time lapse and slow motion along with photo and video. Single-lens mode has fewer options.

With the camera on, the power button cycles through modes too. Mine only shows photo, Boost Video and video, because you can choose which modes appear for both 360 and single lens. The same customization menu turns off the voice prompts that announce each mode.

Single-lens video is ready to share, edit and transfer the moment you stop recording. Spherical video has to go through the app to become a flat or spherical video before you upload it. Some people worry that’s difficult and time-consuming. It can take a little time, but it’s actually very easy.

The front/rear button matters most in single lens. In 360 mode you’re recording every direction, so it only helps framing. In single lens, what you see is what you get, so flip it to face you for vlogging or selfies.

Resolution, Field of View and Stabilization

The default in 360 video is 8K at 30 frames per second with a wide field of view, the highest quality. Swipe up from the bottom to change it: 6K or 8K, and 60 frames per second if you want to slow footage down by half. I always leave it at 8K. If your computer or phone is older, a lower resolution can help it handle the footage, but most devices from the last few years are more than capable of spherical 8K.

Field of view comes in Ultra Wide, Wide and Standard Dewarp. In 360 mode it mostly doesn’t matter, because you can adjust it later. In single-lens mode, what you set is what gets recorded. Ultra Wide captures the most but distorts, which you can see at the back of my desk. Wide is a good middle ground. Standard Dewarp is a tight shot with no distortion at all. Distortion usually isn’t noticeable unless you’re very close to your subject.

For stabilization, I leave it on RockSteady most of the time. It keeps things smooth with nice natural movement, and that movement adds energy, especially in action footage. HorizonSteady keeps the horizon perfectly level even as I rotate the camera, but it crops in very tight, so it isn’t for every situation.

Boost Video and Vertical Video

In single-lens video, tap the shooting modes and you’ll find Boost Video, with an extremely wide field of view. Chest-mounted or on a bike, this is the mode for very immersive action footage.

Single lens is also where you set your aspect ratio, before you record. In 360 mode you choose that later when you export. Swipe up and tap the 16:9 setting to see the options. 9:16 shoots vertical for social media. 1:1 shoots square, so you film once and crop to vertical or horizontal later in DJI Mimo, which is handy if you post to several platforms. If you only need one format, shoot in that one.

Four More Ways to Start Recording

The shutter button starts and stops recording. There are four other ways, and each has to be turned on first.

Twist to Shoot: turn it on from the swipe-down menu, then twist the camera twice quickly to start, and twice again to stop. That’s very useful when it’s out on an extension stick and you can’t reach the buttons.
Voice control: pick your language, then say “start recording” or “stop recording.” You don’t have to be in the right mode. In spherical video mode, “take a photo” switched the camera to photo mode and took a picture.
Gesture control: show the camera an open palm to start and stop capture.
Snapshot: turn it on under the gear icon. With the camera off, press record and it powers up and starts recording right away, which matters when something is happening in front of you. When you stop, it counts down and turns off, unless you tap the screen to keep it on.

Reviewing Your Footage on the Camera

Tap the play icon to see your last video. You can rotate around 360 clips, with limited zoom, scrub with the slider, and adjust or mute the sound. The three dots let you delete a clip, favorite it, or see its file information. The icon at the top left opens a grid of everything on the current storage, labeled by format, and tapping the top lets you switch between the SD card and internal storage. Swipe in from the right to exit.

Pairing a DJI Mic 3 or Mic Mini 2

For vlogging or really good audio, you can buy the Mic 3 or Mic Mini 2 transmitters on their own at a reasonable price, without the full kit. They pair directly with the camera, two at a time.

Turn on the mic and its light blinks. On the camera, swipe down and tap “Mic,” then pick the first transmitter. Press and hold the link button on the mic until it flashes blue and green, and a second later you get a green checkmark. Repeat with the second transmitter for another mic. A green audio meter then appears at the top, and the mic setting and the Pro Mode side menu hold audio settings like level, noise reduction and tone.

Using DJI Mimo to Control, Trim and Transfer

Open Mimo, connect and join the camera’s Wi-Fi, and it goes straight to the gallery. It shows both the memory card and internal storage, with every file labeled as video, Boost, spherical or photo.

The icon at the bottom right opens a live view with full control of the camera. You can start and stop recording, take photos, start a time lapse, change modes and settings, and switch between single lens and 360.

You don’t have to transfer a clip to edit it. You can work right off the memory card. One of my videos ran 2 minutes and 36 seconds, but storage on phones is sometimes very limited, and maybe you only want a short clip for social media. Tap trim, then the scissors, select a section, and export. My 13-second clip saved straight to my phone’s photo gallery. For a lot of people, that’s the best way to work.

You can also batch transfer everything with the select button at the top and the download button at the bottom. Remember that spherical content stays inside the app until you export it as a regular video, while single-lens footage goes straight to your gallery. I’ll cover editing and managing 360 content in another video, hopefully in a few weeks, so if you’re new to 360, stay tuned.

That’s my basic beginner’s guide for the Osmo 360 II. I’ll have more tutorials in the coming weeks and months. Thanks so much for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Shawn. Watch the full video on the Air Photography YouTube channel, and find more of Shawn’s work on his DroneXL author page.

DJI Neo 3 Battery Goes to Three Cells. Neo 2 Owners Buy New Packs

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:55:00 GMT

The DJI Neo 3 flies on a three-cell battery. A label photo that surfaced Wednesday afternoon in the replies to Jasper Ellens’s latest Neo 3 post reads 1,800 mAh, 10.5 V nominal, 12.9 V maximum charge and 18.9 Wh. The DJI Neo 2 battery is a two-cell, 1,606 mAh pack at 7.16 V and 11.5 Wh, so no Neo 2 pack will ever go into this drone and no Neo 3 pack will go into a Neo 2.

Ellens, who writes for DroneXL, posted two photos at 3:02 p.m. Eastern from the same Indonesian owner whose videos DroneXL covered on Wednesday morning: the drone from the front on a shop counter and the underside of a propeller cage with its screws. He put them up to answer readers who asked how the Neo 3’s propellers come off, and to close the argument over whether the footage was AI-generated. Reader Ángel, posting as @gelon1983, added the battery photo two hours later and counted seven contacts on the pack against five on the Neo 2’s.

The leaked spec sheet never mentioned a battery, and it still lists no flight time.

The Neo 3 Pack Holds 64 Percent More Energy Than the Neo 2’s, in a Third Cell

The Neo 3 flight battery stores 18.9 Wh, against 11.5 Wh for the Neo 2 and 10.5 Wh for the original Neo. Its 10.5 V nominal and 12.9 V charge voltage mean three cells in series, against two before. Capacity is 1,800 mAh, just 194 mAh above the Neo 2’s.

The DJI Neo 3 flight battery label: 1,800 mAh, 10.5 V nominal, 18.9 Wh, built by Xiamen Ampace Technology. Photo posted by Ángel (@gelon1983) on X in reply to Jasper Ellens.

The label names Xiamen Ampace Technology as the cell maker and SZ DJI Technology as the authorizing company, cites China’s GB 42590-2023 battery standard, and carries a Thai TIS 2217 safety mark next to an importer line, on a drone photographed in Indonesia. The cell code along the bottom edge begins 3INP6, the IEC designation for three prismatic lithium-ion cells in series.

Ángel wrote that the pack has “7 pins instead of 5. So, yeah, new set of batteries once again.” He pointed out that DJI kept one battery across the Mini 3, Mini 3 Pro and Mini 4 Pro, and that the same pack works in the Mini 5 Pro. For scale, the Mini 4 Pro’s standard battery is 2,590 mAh at 7.32 V, or 18.96 Wh: the Neo 3 pack holds the same energy at a higher voltage and lower capacity.

No document yet says how long that energy keeps the Neo 3 in the air. The spec sheet Igor Bogdanov leaked on October 1 gives no flight time, and the production listing puts the Neo 3 at 192.7 g against 151 g for a bare Neo 2. The Neo 2’s 1,606 mAh pack is rated for 19 minutes.

Changing a Neo 3 Propeller Means Unscrewing the Cage Hub and Then the Motor

Ellens’s answer is that you unscrew a diamond-shaped part from the bottom of the cage and then unscrew the motor. His photo of two cages from below shows a screw in the centre of each hub and a third where the two cages meet, with the blades inside the spokes.

Two DJI Neo 3 propeller cages from below, with the hub screws Ellens says come out first. Photo credit: Jasper Ellens / @JasperEllens

On the original Neo the guard unclips from the airframe without a tool, and each propeller is then held by a screw that DJI’s bundled screwdriver turns. The Neo 3’s cages are moulded into the arms, so the blades sit behind the structure instead of under a removable guard. Reader Taison looked at the photo and asked whether changing one propeller takes eight screws. Ellens had not answered him by Wednesday evening. The retail box DroneXL went through in September lists spare propellers and a screwdriver in the Fly More Combo.

The front photo shows the Neo 3 on a glass counter at the same dealer, with a DJI Lito X1 box on the shelf below it, the gimbal camera in its cradle and dark sensor windows on both arms. Ángel wrote that in the owner’s TikTok upload, where the music sits lower in the mix, the Neo 3 sounds as loud as the Neo 2 at about the same pitch. Ellens replied that he is still waiting for a pocket drone that “doesn’t scream in my ears when filming.”

Ellens closed the post with a line for readers who still think the images are generated: if you are still convinced you are looking at AI, “you are pretty much in denial and nothing will convince you.” DJI has not announced the Neo 3, and the aircraft holds no FCC grant, as DroneXL reported on Wednesday.

DroneXL’s Take

The battery is the biggest change DJI has made to the Neo since it launched the line, and it costs every Neo 2 owner their spares. Three cells at 18.9 Wh is Mini 4 Pro energy in a 193 g drone. My read is that DJI went to a third cell for motor headroom, because the Neo 3 weighs 42 g more than a bare Neo 2 and now carries cages and a bigger sensor, and I’d accept that the airframe needed the voltage. The cost is a pack that fits nothing else DJI sells today. Ángel is right that DJI ran four Mini generations on one battery, so DJI knows how to protect an owner’s spares when it wants to. If you already own three Neo 2 batteries, the Neo 3 is a fresh start at the checkout.

Jasper Ellens (@JasperEllens), October 7, 2026

Source: Jasper Ellens 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.

Amazon Prime Air Is Hiring in Australia. The Job: Get CASA to Say Yes

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:08:00 GMT

Amazon is hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals, Australia, for Prime Air, and the job ad says the hire’s success will be measured by the approvals obtained, the timelines hit and, in the ad’s words, “Australian customers receiving drone deliveries.” The role is based in Sydney or Canberra and reports to a Leader, Prime Air Expansion, Asia Pacific. The ad carries no posting date. The Register described it as recently published on September 28, and SmartCompany reported it in Australia on October 6.

Australia would be Amazon’s third country outside the United States. Prime Air flies in Britain from a single warehouse in Darlington under a trial permission that expires in December, and Amazon stopped its Italian program in December 2025 after test flights in San Salvo.

The ad’s second sentence says Prime Air “evaluates Australia and other countries.” I read the rest of it as a launch plan: it names the regulator, the airspace rules, the certificates and the government offices the hire has to get through, and it lists existing relationships inside CASA’s drone team as a preferred qualification.

The Ad Lists Every Australian Approval Prime Air Would Need

The hire owns type acceptance and airworthiness certification of Amazon’s aircraft with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), airspace authorizations under CASR Parts 101 and 102, operating certificates, and the safety documentation behind them. Land use permissions for flight corridors from state and local governments round it out.

The ad does not name an aircraft. The MK30 is the only one Amazon flies. Amazon wants five years in aerospace or aviation, prior formal applications to CASA or another national aviation authority, and familiarity with the Specific Operations Risk Assessment method CASA uses for drone approvals. Under preferred qualifications, the posting asks for established working relationships with CASA’s RPAS regulatory team that can speed up Prime Air’s approval timelines. Airservices Australia, the air traffic agency, is named for route and traffic management integration.

CASA is the regulator that in October 2025 refused to classify the DJI Mini 5 Pro as a sub-250 gram micro drone over the variance in what the drone weighs on a scale. It also opened a 12-month beyond-visual-line-of-sight self-assessment trial that same month, which Sydney’s Sphere Drones used to cut site approvals from months to days. That trial runs to October 15. The ad has the hire dealing with CASA on airworthiness for the aircraft and with its RPAS team for where it may fly.

Wing Flew More Deliveries in Australia Than Anywhere, Then Left in January

Wing, Alphabet’s delivery drone company, ended its DoorDash partnership in Australia on January 16, 2026 and stopped delivering there after seven years, Australian Aviation reported in May. A Wing spokesperson said the company stopped “to focus on increased demand and the pace of scale in the United States.”

Wing once made more deliveries in Australia than in any other country, per the same report. It delivered with DoorDash in Logan, Queensland, from 2022 and in 26 suburbs of eastern Melbourne from July 2024. Before that it ran Canberra from a warehouse in Mitchell for almost five years, until the end of August 2023, when spokesperson Jesse Suskin told Region the company had no suitable shopping centre to launch from and faced Commonwealth airspace in the capital. Wing’s Canberra story began with a trial in the suburb of Bonython in July 2018, and a 2024 paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A credits the Bonython residents’ noise campaign with pushing Wing out of that suburb.

Wing’s current aircraft weigh 14 and 24 pounds (6.4 and 11 kg) at takeoff in its FAA filings, per DroneXL’s aircraft tracker. Amazon’s MK30 weighs 83 pounds (37.8 kg) and carries no parachute in any of its FAA filings. SmartCompany noted that drone delivery in Australia can need aviation, planning and federal noise approvals, and that any flight beyond the pilot’s line of sight needs CASA’s sign-off.

Amazon has not said where in Australia it would fly or when. The Register said it had asked Amazon which other Asian countries it plans to enter and had no response when it published on September 28. SmartCompany said on October 6 it had asked Amazon for comment. In the United States, Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a figure DroneXL’s tracker reads as every municipality inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) circle around each hub Amazon has filed with the FAA, operating or planned. In Richardson, Texas, one resident counted 52 drones over her house in a day.

Australians who end up inside one of those circles will have a different rulebook than Americans, but the same company on the other end. US residents can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331, and anyone with an Amazon account can open the customer-service chat, pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what a town can still do once a hub is proposed, and the Prime Air tracker lists every hub, aircraft and incident on record.

DroneXL’s Take

I read this ad as a decision, not a study. Amazon does not hire a head of approvals to find out whether it wants approvals, and when the ad asks for CASA relationships that can speed up its timelines, I take that to mean a timeline exists. If Amazon goes, I think Australia is the hardest test Prime Air has taken on. Wing, with a far lighter aircraft and more Australian deliveries than anyone, left Canberra in 2023 and the whole country in January, and CASA would not round a few grams off a DJI drone to make a rule fit. Amazon would be bringing an 83-pound aircraft with no parachute, flying consumer orders, to that regulator and those neighbors. I’m for delivery drones when the flight carries something urgent, and a phone charger in 30 minutes is not that. Watch CASA’s airworthiness file on the aircraft and the federal noise approval, because I expect the hard questions to be answered there before any Australian hears the drone.

Sources: Amazon Jobs, Head of Regulatory Approvals, Australia, Prime Air, The Register, September 28, 2026, SmartCompany, October 6, 2026, Australian Aviation, May 28, 2026, Region, September 19, 2023.

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

Laredo Police Vow to Take Down Drones at Hotel Fire. FAA Lists No TFR

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:55:00 GMT

Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez told reporters Wednesday morning that officers will mitigate and take down any drone flown over the DoubleTree by Hilton fire scene at 800 Garden Street in Laredo, Texas. The three-alarm fire was reported at 12:52 a.m. on October 7 and spread across several floors of the 14-story hotel. Four people went to Laredo Medical Center for smoke inhalation, four more sought care on their own, and nobody died.

Mayor Dr. Victor Treviño declared a local state of disaster at 10 a.m. that runs through October 14. Fire Chief Guillermo Heard said the building is structurally unstable, Treviño said officials saw cracks in parts of it, and the declaration cites a possible collapse, so the city is flying a drone of its own to inspect it before anyone goes back in.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s list of active flight restrictions carried none for Laredo as of Wednesday evening.

Laredo Police Will Mitigate Drones While the City Flies Its Own

Rodriguez told the Wednesday briefing that officers hold a closure perimeter around the hotel, from Jefferson Street south to Shea Street, while firefighters and engineers work the building. The perimeter could stay up into the weekend. Of the 203 registered guests, 115 had been accounted for by the briefing.

Rodriguez said drones could interfere with firefighters, engineers and other emergency personnel at the scene, and officers would step in if anyone flew one. “If they are flying drones, we’re going to mitigate the drones,” Rodriguez said, according to the Laredo Morning Times. “We’re going to take them down.”

Treviño called drone technology essential to assessing and investigating the fire. Out of an abundance of caution, he said, “a drone is being used to help assess the structural integrity of the hotel.”

Laredo PD knows the hardware. It runs a drone-as-first-responder program on BRINC aircraft launched from fixed stations, and in May its RAVEN drones found a burglary suspect hiding in brush. Rodriguez also said videos of drivers stopping on Interstate 35 to watch the fire were circulating on social media, and that the fire left him without enough officers to deal with them, LMT reported.

Federal Law Lets Local Police Take Down Drones Only With FBI Certification

The SAFER SKIES Act, signed December 18, 2025, and a Justice and Homeland Security interim final rule in force since July 1 let state and local police mitigate drones under their own authority. Each officer needs Mitigation Certification from the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center, a two-week residential course.

As of July 1, when the rule took effect, 61 officers at roughly 46 agencies nationwide held that certification, and the FBI’s drone program chief put the number trained since then at roughly 500 by September. DroneXL covered the numbers when 1,500 agencies lined up for counter-drone powers in September, and the 2026 defense bill that created the authority in December.

Certification is only the entry ticket. A mitigation needs a signed operations plan, a credible-threat finding, equipment from the federal Authorized Systems List, notice to air traffic control within five minutes of switching the system on, and a report within 48 hours. Uncoordinated mitigation draws civil fines of up to $100,000 per violation.

Neither the chief’s remarks nor the city’s statements on Wednesday said whether any Laredo officer holds the mitigation certification. In Wednesday’s statements and in DroneXL’s coverage of the department’s drone program since 2025, Laredo PD has described flying aircraft, not downing them.

No FAA Flight Restriction Covered Laredo on Wednesday Evening

The FAA’s temporary flight restriction list showed 91 active restrictions at 6 p.m. Central on Wednesday. None covered Laredo. The nearest Texas entries were a VIP movement and a security restriction in San Antonio, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) to the northeast, and both expired the same day.

A fire department or city can ask the FAA for a disaster-area restriction under 14 CFR 91.137, the rule used for wildfire TFRs. Once one is in place, flying inside it is a federal violation and most consumer drones show the boundary in their flight app.

Without one, the federal hooks are thinner than at a wildfire. The 2018 drone statute, 18 U.S.C. 39B, makes it a crime to knowingly or recklessly interfere with an occupied aircraft, and its companion, 18 U.S.C. 40A, covers wildfire suppression. A hotel fire with no helicopter overhead is neither, which leaves the FAA’s careless-operation rule under Part 107. The federal statutes fit when a drone pilot hit an LAPD helicopter in 2020 and when drone incursions grounded firefighting aircraft over Spokane in August.

DroneXL’s Take

Rodriguez is right about the airspace. Nobody flying a Mini over a burning high-rise with a collapse risk is doing anything but getting in the way of the city’s own drone and the crews under it, so stay home and watch the news like everyone else.

He is wrong about the remedy, and the gap matters because the law changed this year to make it precise. Taking a drone down is now a federal process with a named course, a named list of hardware and a $100,000 fine for skipping the paperwork. A chief who means it has one certified officer and an operations plan on file, and a chief who does not has a figure of speech.

Mitigate at a briefing can also mean finding the pilot and ordering the drone down, which needs no certification at all. I think Rodriguez meant the figure of speech or the order to land, because a department holding the certification would have said so. Either way, a chief should only promise the takedown he can legally carry out.

The tool Laredo actually has costs nothing. A request to the FAA can put a disaster TFR over Garden Street, and DJI’s app then flags the zone for every pilot in Webb County. That stops more hobby pilots than a threat ever will, and it keeps the officers at the scene on the right side of the same federal rules they are enforcing.

Sources: Laredo Morning Times, Laredo Morning Times, KGNS, FAA TFR list, Congressional Research Service

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

Worcester Asks If It Can Stop Amazon Drones. Shrewsbury Says It Can't

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:09:00 GMT

Worcester’s City Council on Tuesday night, October 6, asked City Manager Eric D. Batista for a report on whether the city has any authority to restrict or control the Amazon Prime Air drones Amazon wants to launch from its Otis Street warehouse in Westborough. Parts of Worcester, New England’s second-largest city, sit inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery circle Amazon drew around the site.

Hopkinton’s Select Board voted the same night to organize against the plan. Westborough’s Planning Board, which reviews the site plan for the MK30 launch pad, had Amazon’s request to continue its hearing to November 10 on the agenda, as DroneXL reported in Amazon Asks Westborough to Delay Drone Pad Vote as Board Says No. A residents’ appeal of the pad’s zoning status, covered in Amazon’s Westborough Drone Launch Now Hinges on a Zoning Appeal, is still pending.

Shrewsbury’s town manager said in a statement published that morning that Amazon needs no approval from the towns where its drones only deliver.

Worcester’s Council Added a Jobs Report to Rosen’s Drone Order

Councilor-at-Large Gary Rosen’s order asks what regulatory authority Worcester has over the drones and how residents will be consulted on the project’s effects. Vice Chair Khrystian King amended it to add a report on workforce impacts in communities with drone delivery, and the council approved it, MassLive reported.

Rosen questioned in the chamber whether local businesses could compete with one-hour delivery. “I don’t see any good coming from this,” he said. He had told MassLive on Monday that he was presently opposed, and told Spectrum News the service may raise privacy, environmental and noise issues, and safety issues for animals, young people and seniors.

Councilor-at-Large Morris Bergman backed the report but said drones could one day bring prescriptions to people at home, and that he did not know whether the city could stop the technology. “I don’t know if we should,” he added.

Hopkinton Voted to Oppose an Amazon Hub It Says It Cannot Stop

Hopkinton’s Select Board voted unanimously on October 6 to reach out to stakeholders and officials to oppose the hub, the Hopkinton Independent reported. Members conceded the town cannot stop it, though the circle covers western Hopkinton. Amazon did not answer Chair Shahidul Mannan’s invitation to attend.

Member Amy Ritterbusch said it doesn’t sound like the town has any jurisdiction, because the FAA controls aircraft and flight patterns, and suggested writing to Hopkinton’s state and congressional delegation. Member Matthew Kizner called Westborough’s role “a wildly hostile act.” Member Brian Herr pointed to the coalition of neighboring towns that formed against a proposed casino in Milford as the model.

Shrewsbury Says Towns Can Regulate Launch Sites, Not Flights

Shrewsbury Town Manager Kevin Mizikar based his answer to Spectrum News on federal preemption. “Commercial drones fall under the regulations of the FAA; thus, local regulation is preempted.” His town is now reviewing its zoning bylaws in case a company wants to launch drone deliveries from a site in Shrewsbury.

Mizikar told his Select Board on August 12 that the town keeps authority over the ground end of the operation, as DroneXL reported in Amazon Wants Drones Over 6 Massachusetts Towns. Not All Have Been Told. Tallahassee’s city attorney told commissioners in September that Florida law bars a city drone ordinance and limits what the city can do about the drone port itself. Castle Rock, Colorado, went after the ground instead and froze drone hub applications for six months, a move DroneXL covered in Castle Rock Froze Walmart’s Drone Hub 7-0.

In Westborough the ground fight runs through two boards. Wednesday’s reports from MassLive and the Hopkinton Independent do not say how the Planning Board voted on the continuance, and Westborough’s online Agenda Center had posted no minutes for the meeting by Wednesday afternoon. MassLive, citing the town website, expects the next hearing no earlier than November 10. Westborough’s posted agendas through October 15, checked Wednesday, list no Zoning Board of Appeals hearing on the appeal. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists the Westborough hub as in review. The MK30 it would fly weighs 77.9 pounds (35.5 kilograms) empty and has a maximum takeoff weight of 83.2 pounds (37.8 kilograms) with a full five-pound (2.3-kilogram) package, according to an August 2025 FAA environmental re-evaluation. It has no parachute, as DroneXL reported in Amazon’s 83-Pound MK30 Heads To 500 Cities.

Residents can 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 a town can still do once a hub is proposed.

DroneXL’s Take

I expect the city’s report to tell the council what Mizikar told Spectrum News, that Worcester has no say over a single flight. Bergman asked the better question in the chamber when he brought up prescriptions. A drone that brings medicine to someone who can’t get to a pharmacy is the case for this technology, and I’d want it flown the way Zipline flies its P2, which lowers the package on a tether from a hovering aircraft. Amazon wants to fly consumer orders over parts of Worcester with a 77.9-pound MK30 that weighs more than 15 times the five-pound package it can carry and has no parachute. I’m against that, and so is Rosen.

Sources: Spectrum News 1, MassLive, October 7, MassLive, October 5, Hopkinton Independent, Town of Westborough Planning Board agenda, October 6, 2026.

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

DJI Neo 3 Flies in First Leaked Video on a Remote With a Scroll Wheel

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:57:00 GMT

The DJI Neo 3 has flown on camera. A 91-second video posted to X on Wednesday at 11:34 a.m. Eastern by Jasper Ellens, who writes for DroneXL, shows the unannounced drone lifting off a residential street in Indonesia, hovering over a row of potted plants and landing on the pavers, steered from the DJI RC Mini controller the pilot holds in one hand.

Ellens said the clips come from an Indonesian owner who has been posting videos of his new Neo 3, including a comparison with the DJI Neo 2 and a first flight. He posted them, in his words, “to end the AI questions,” after readers asked whether the earlier Neo 3 footage, including Tuesday’s unboxing video, was AI-generated.

The video also shows the one part of this kit DJI can legally sell in the United States. The RC Mini has held an FCC grant since December 19, 2025. The drone it is flying has none.

Jasper Ellens (@JasperEllens), October 7, 2026

The RC Mini Pairs From Its Own Screen and Carries a Scroll Wheel on Its Back Edge

The RC Mini’s screen walks the pilot through pairing with no phone involved. It reads “Connect to Aircraft,” says to press once, then press and hold the aircraft power button, and offers “Pair now” when the drone does not connect by itself. In flight it shows the camera’s live view.

Below the screen sit the DJI logo, two short control sticks, a combined return-to-home and pause button, an orange shutter button and four green battery LEDs. When the pilot turns the controller over, a ribbed scroll wheel appears on the back edge, next to a sliding cover and a hinged clip on the side. Ellens called it “a new control wheel on the bottom.” Nothing in the footage shows what it adjusts. On DJI’s full-size controllers, a wheel in that position tilts the gimbal.

The scroll wheel on the back edge of the DJI RC Mini, with a sliding cover and a side clip. Screenshot from video shared by Jasper Ellens.

The pairing screen, the sticks and the wheel are the first look at how the RC Mini works. The retail box DroneXL went through on September 15 only showed its face. The RC Mini AG, the pocket controller DJI launched for its spray drones in China last November, has a 1.97-inch, 800-nit display and three hours per charge. Whether the consumer RC Mini shares that hardware is not something the video can settle.

A reader asked Ellens whether the RC Mini could fly the Mini 5 Pro. “DJI should do that, but don’t know man,” he answered. DJI planned a pocket controller for its bigger drones once before: the RC Track leaked alongside the Air 3S in October 2024 and was cancelled before launch.

The Neo 3 Makes the Neo 2 Look Small on the Same Table

Early in the clip the owner stacks the Neo 3 on his grey Neo 2, and the new drone appears to overhang the old one on every side. The production listing puts the Neo 3 at 192.7 grams, against 151 for the Neo 2, or 160 with its transceiver.

The DJI Neo 3 stacked on a DJI Neo 2. Screenshot from video shared by Jasper Ellens.

The Neo 3’s cages are taller and its arms thicker. The top of the Neo 3 carries a power button, four battery LEDs and a small rectangular screen behind the gimbal that glows blue when the drone is on. The underside is ribbed with vents along the full length of the fuselage. Both details match Tuesday’s unboxing video and the spec sheet Igor Bogdanov leaked on October 1.

The flight itself is short and uneventful: a takeoff from the pavers, a slow hover a few feet up along a garden wall, a landing. The footage is shot on a phone from behind the pilot, so it does not show what the Neo 3’s camera recorded.

The DJI Neo 3 hovering over a residential street in Indonesia on its first flight, flown from the DJI RC Mini. Screenshot from video shared by Jasper Ellens.

Asked why the drone surfaced in Indonesia with no test program behind it, Ellens wrote that DJI’s smaller drones often show up early in Malaysia and Indonesia, and that it takes one or two people to treat an NDA unit like any other drone they can show customers. He has seen no sales date, and when asked for a guess he said six weeks. DJI has not announced the Neo 3.

DroneXL’s Take

The remote is the story now. DJI has spent two years trying to get a controller this size into pilots’ hands, and the RC Mini is the cancelled RC Track idea finally shipping, with a screen, a pairing flow that needs no phone, and a gimbal wheel on a controller DJI could have left as a two-stick toy. My read is that DJI built this controller for more than the Neo 3, and the reader asking about the Mini 5 Pro is asking the right question. The twist for American pilots is that the controller cleared the FCC and the drone did not. The Neo 2 never launched here either. Until DJI pairs the RC Mini with a drone that already holds a US grant, Americans get the approved controller and nothing to fly with it.

Source: Jasper Ellens 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.

Upstate Medical's New Drone Port Is Already Cleared To Fly To Utica

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:41:00 GMT

Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, New York, opened a drone port on Tuesday for Air Upstate, the program that flies lab specimens, medications and blood products between Upstate facilities. The program already has clearance to fly to Wynn Hospital in Utica, a hospital Upstate does not own, CNY Central reported.

Air Upstate has completed 8,838 medication deliveries by drone since 2023. CNY Central described the operation as running in partnership with Causey Aviation, the FAA-certificated company Upstate named as its drone operator in 2023. When Upstate announced its FAA waiver in April, its release described Air Upstate itself as the operator, a change DroneXL flagged three weeks ago when Upstate hired a former FAA official to run the program.

Upstate Medical University officials at the opening of the Air Upstate drone port in Syracuse on Oct. 6, 2026. Photo credit: CNY Central

Upstate Is Building Its Drone Program Around A 2027 Pathology Institute

Upstate is building its drone program around a pathology institute scheduled to open in June 2027. Robert Corona, the pathologist who runs Upstate University Hospital as CEO, said the drones will be central to the institute and can make deliveries in just three minutes, according to CNY Central’s report.

The institute, under construction in East Syracuse, includes a drone bay for recharging and maintaining the aircraft. Air Upstate already flies two routes. Lab specimens go between the Upstate Transplant Center in downtown Syracuse and the Upstate Cancer Center. Prescriptions go from the Upstate Outpatient Pharmacy to patients being discharged from Upstate Community Hospital.

Upstate Medical University President Dr. Mantosh Dewan called the opening a historic day: “We want to fly into the future.” He credited government support for getting Air Upstate launched.

Air Upstate Is Cleared For Utica, With Causey Aviation As Its Partner

Causey Aviation Unmanned holds an FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate. Upstate said in 2023 that Causey was the fifth US company to earn one for healthcare drone deliveries. Causey also flies Flytrex delivery drones in North Carolina and Texas.

Causey secured that certificate in February 2023, with Flytrex as its delivery partner.

Wynn Hospital belongs to the Mohawk Valley Health System and opened in downtown Utica in October 2023, replacing two older MVHS hospitals. It sits at the far end of the roughly 50-mile (80-kilometer) beyond-visual-line-of-sight corridor the FAA granted Upstate in February, a waiver that runs through June 2029. The aircraft built for that distance is already in Upstate’s fleet: in 2023, Upstate became the first US owner of the RigiTech Eiger, a fixed-wing VTOL with a nine-foot (2.7-meter) wingspan that RigiTech rates at up to 60 mph (97 km/h).

CNY Central’s report gives no date for a first delivery to Wynn and does not say whose certificate the Utica flights will run under.

DroneXL’s Take

The drone port is the photo op. Whether drones ever land at Wynn Hospital depends on who holds the FAA certificate for that run, and Upstate’s public answer has moved from Causey in 2023, to Air Upstate itself in April, to a partnership with Causey in this week’s coverage.

Michigan has the counterexample. Munson Healthcare’s medical drone trial in Traverse City was supposed to start its second phase in May with DroneUp as the licensed operator. DroneUp quit the project, and the flights were rescheduled to restart this Tuesday, with aircraft maker blueflite taking over the FAA paperwork. Hospitals buy the drones and stage the press conferences. The certificate usually belongs to someone else, and that company can leave.

Nothing on the record says Upstate has that problem. It owns its aircraft and holds a waiver through 2029. I’d still like Upstate to name the operator for the Utica run before the first flight, because a delivery into another health system’s hospital is where an unclear certificate holder stops everything.

Source: CNY Central, “New drone port at Upstate speeds transport of lab specimens, meds and blood products,” by Matthew Benninger, Oct. 6, 2026; RigiTech via UAS Magazine

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

Anduril's $3.7B Maryland Shipyard: Trump Adds Drone Subs, 40% Stake

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:27:00 GMT

Anduril Industries will spend $3.7 billion to build Arsenal-2, a 2-million-square-foot shipyard at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, Baltimore County, Maryland. The Navy has awarded the company a contract worth up to $2.9 billion for submarine components, including torpedo tubes and doors, with payments tied to production. President Trump announced the project on October 6 at the site, a former Bethlehem Steel complex, with first operations planned for 2030 and 3,100 direct jobs promised.

This is Anduril’s second Arsenal. The first, outside Columbus, Ohio, was set to start building FURY combat drones in March, about four months ahead of its July 2026 target.

Trump told the crowd that Sparrows Point would build autonomous submarines. Anduril’s own announcement, published the same day, describes a yard for Virginia-class components and does not say it will build uncrewed vessels.

Arsenal-2 Starts With Torpedo Tubes For Virginia-Class Boats

Arsenal-2 will build Virginia-class components and large assemblies for final assembly at General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, Anduril’s announcement says. Anduril president Chris Brose said the company starts with torpedo tubes.

Anduril's rendering of Arsenal-2 at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, Maryland. Image credit: Anduril Industries

From there Anduril moves to more complicated modules and potentially full ship sections such as bows and sterns, Brose told reporters, Fox45 reported. He also said Anduril wants to hire workers without college degrees and use software to break submarine work into tasks they can learn.

The Navy contract pays on output. Payments are “tied directly to demonstrated production outcomes,” and Anduril says that leaves it carrying most of the execution risk. An industry official told reporters the federal money pays for what Anduril produces, not for the shipyard Anduril is financing. The administration is looking mainly to fiscal 2028 and later budgets to fund the contract, according to Fox45.

The work starts before the yard exists. Anduril is opening a 160,000-square-foot plant in Orange County, California, to prototype torpedo tubes and qualify its production for SUBSAFE, the Navy’s submarine safety certification program. That gives it a two-year head start on Baltimore, the same playbook it ran in Ohio.

Anduril’s Drone Subs Come Out Of Sydney And Rhode Island

Anduril already builds uncrewed submarines at two other sites. Its factory in Sydney, Australia, makes the Ghost Shark and the Dive-XL. A 150,000-square-foot plant at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, opened in late 2025 to build the smaller Dive-LD, according to Defense Daily.

Anduril plans a second Quonset Point line for the Dive-XL, which the Navy and the Defense Innovation Unit picked in March for an extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle program. Trump’s line, as Reuters reported it, put “autonomous subs, torpedo tubes, and critical components” in Sparrows Point. Anduril’s release lists Sydney and Quonset Point as separate sites in its production network.

Nothing in Anduril’s release rules out drone subs at Arsenal-2 later, and I read its “reconfigurable production lines” as leaving room for them. But the contract, the timeline and every component Anduril named are for crewed attack submarines. Anduril also has competition for Navy drone sub money, including a Philadelphia startup building Ghostfin attack drones in a former marble showroom.

Anduril Says The Navy Needs Up To Three Virginia Subs A Year, Gets One

Anduril says the Navy needs two to three Virginia-class submarines a year and gets barely one, and its chart puts today’s rate at 1.2 to 1.4 boats. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said in May the two-a-year build rate won’t arrive until the 2030s, USNI News reported.

Anduril's chart puts today's Virginia-class rate at 1.2 to 1.4 boats a year, or six submarines in five years, against a future need of three a year. Image credit: Anduril

Meeting the Navy’s fleet goals and the AUKUS commitment to Australia takes more suppliers working in parallel, Anduril argues, and Arsenal-2 sits between the two builders. By Anduril’s count it is about 300 miles south of Groton and 200 miles north of Newport News.

Anduril's map places Arsenal-2 in Baltimore County between Huntington Ingalls Industries in Newport News, Virginia, and General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut. Image credit: Anduril

Anduril founder Palmer Luckey called it “America’s largest shipyard since WWII.” The company’s own posts use a narrower claim, the biggest investment in a new American shipyard since World War II, and the boats will still be finished in Groton and Newport News.

Anduril's "The Shipyard is the Weapon" poster, released with the Arsenal-2 announcement. Image credit: Anduril

Trump’s 40% Taxpayer Stake Isn’t In Anduril’s Or Maryland’s Releases

Trump also told the crowd that American taxpayers will receive a 40% stake in the new shipyard, and he did not say how. Anduril’s release and its Arsenal-2 page don’t mention government ownership, and neither does the Maryland Department of Commerce announcement, all checked October 6.

Reuters reported the visit was part of a pre-election tour ahead of November’s midterms, in which Trump has been announcing or claiming credit for private investments and government spending.

Maryland and Baltimore County have committed to match up to 13% of Anduril’s investment through existing programs and new appropriations, some of which still need approval from the Maryland General Assembly and the Baltimore County Council. Fox45 put the full 13% at about $481 million, a figure state officials have not committed to. The state puts total support at more than 14,000 jobs and $2 billion a year in economic output, and Anduril’s Arsenal-2 page puts the 3,100 direct jobs at 2034.

Governor Wes Moore praised the deal in the state’s release but skipped the event. His spokesman said Moore was blocked from speaking, and the White House said he boycotted it, the Associated Press reported.

DroneXL’s Take

Arsenal-2 is a good bet, and its contract is the best part. The Navy pays on demonstrated production, and Anduril says it carries most of the execution risk. I’d like to see every drone and defense contract written that way, including the ones DroneXL covers every week.

The president described a different project, though. Anduril’s release and Arsenal-2 page support neither the autonomous subs nor the 40% stake, and the stake is the one that matters. Luckey is also co-directing the Pentagon’s Project Meridian future-warfare study, which DroneXL reported last week. Nothing I’ve seen ties Meridian to this contract, and that’s why the terms belong on paper. Until the Navy or Anduril publishes them, I’m treating the 40% figure as a campaign line.

Sources: Anduril Industries, Maryland Department of Commerce, Reuters, Associated Press, Fox45 Baltimore, Defense Daily, Naval News, USNI News, Anduril Industries on X, Palmer Luckey 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.

Wing Lists 19 Walmart Metros. Walmart's Hometown Isn't One of Them

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:45:00 GMT

Wing’s Walmart delivery page lists 19 metros, five marked “Now serving” and 14 “Coming soon,” after Monday’s addition of Denver and Seattle for 2027. Bentonville, Walmart’s hometown, is not on it, and neither is anywhere in Arkansas.

Walmart executive Greg Cathey said at the UP.Summit conference, Fortune reported on October 1, 2025, that Walmart would add drone delivery at a Walmart across the street from its old Bentonville headquarters and at a store in nearby Rogers. A month earlier, Bentonville’s Planning Commission had voted 7-0 to approve a Wing drone nest in 27 parking spaces at Store #100, 406 S. Walton Blvd.

13 of Wing’s 14 Coming-Soon Metros Were Named After Walmart Picked Bentonville

Of the 14 metros Wing marks coming soon, only Tampa, named in June 2025, was announced before Cathey spoke. Wing and Walmart added Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami on January 11, 2026, seven more metros on June 8, and Denver and Seattle on October 5.

Wing’s October 5 release named Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston and Orlando as places the partnership already reaches, and quoted Cathey, now Walmart’s senior vice president for eCommerce transformation, on Seattle and Denver. It did not mention Bentonville, and Wing’s Walmart page does not mention Arkansas as of October 6.

Bentonville’s Permit Allows a Wing Nest About 210 Feet From Residential Property

Walmart’s engineering firm, CEI, asked for two fenced enclosures at Store #100: a Nest where drones charge and park, taking 27 spaces, and an Autoloader where staff load orders. Flights would run 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with the nearest residential property about 210 feet (64 meters) east.

City staff recommended nine conditions, including monthly reports of average daily flights and any NTSB-reportable events on request, a 24/7 emergency contact, property-line noise checks, a quarterly airspace meeting with city and Bentonville Municipal Airport staff, an eight-foot fence, and validity for one year from approval. The commission discussed the hours, the airspace meeting and the fence, then approved the permit 7-0 with no public comment, according to the staff report and minutes. The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported it that day as a one-year permit. Under staff’s recommended term, the permit would have run to September 2, 2026. The minutes do not restate the one-year condition. No renewal or extension has appeared on a Planning Commission or City Council agenda since (a staff-level extension would not need to), and DroneXL has not asked the city whether the permit remains in force. Fortune’s account of Cathey’s remarks a month later named neither the store number nor the drone operator.

A Wing nest seen from above: drones park and charge on pads inside a fenced section of a store parking lot. Bentonville's permit covers this kind of layout across 27 spaces at Store #100. Photo credit: Wing

The lot has hosted delivery drones before. DroneUp ran a two-story hub for Store #100, which DroneXL covered in 2022, and CEI’s application says the earlier tower was demolished when the store expanded into that area. The next line reads: “Walmart has changed to a new drone company, Wing.” Walmart ended its DroneUp partnership at the end of 2024.

The FAA’s Public Reviews List Only Zipline in Arkansas

The FAA’s national drone delivery assessment, signed July 28, 2026, lists Wing’s completed reviews in Texas, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina. Arkansas appears in its operator table once, under Zipline’s Pea Ridge hub. The FAA cleared that hub on March 24, 2026 for 400 deliveries a day.

The table, in the FAA’s programmatic assessment, is dated July 2025. The agency’s public list of drone delivery reviews, last updated September 24, 2026, has since added Wing decisions for Houston and Atlanta, and its only Arkansas documents are Zipline’s, including the Pea Ridge re-evaluation that places the hub in a Walmart parking lot. Walmart U.S. chief executive David Guggina said on Walmart’s May earnings call that its drone delivery covered 66 locations across four states, Arkansas among them, Retail Dive reported.

The Democrat-Gazette has described Wing as already flying here. Its reporter Serenah McKay wrote in January that “Wing also operates from Walmart stores” in Dallas-Fort Worth and Northwest Arkansas, wording close to Walmart’s own June 2025 release about “existing operations in Northwest Arkansas.” A Nexstar wire story in June and KNWA on October 6 listed Bentonville among Wing’s announced expansion plans. DroneXL found no Wing release, FAA environmental document or city agenda describing Wing flights from Store #100, though none of those records would necessarily show a launch.

A Wing launch would not need a public FAA review of its own either. Under the national assessment, a site that fits its limits can be approved through an internal FAA checklist without a new comment period, as DroneXL’s guide to how drone delivery approval works explains.

DroneXL’s Take

Bentonville wrote the most useful drone nest conditions I’ve read this year. Monthly flight counts and property-line noise checks are figures Wing has not given DroneXL: we sent Wing 30 written safety questions on September 8 and have not had one answer. Walmart’s hometown got a staff condition making those flight counts available to the city on request, in a single meeting.

If you live near Store #100, ask the Planning Department whether case CU25-0028 is still active and whether the city has ever requested a flight report under it. If the permit has lapsed, the next Wing application in Northwest Arkansas should carry the same conditions. Northglenn, Colorado, where staff expect a first reading of a drone hub ordinance on October 12, could borrow them too. I suspect Store #100 cleared its city paperwork and then stalled. Nothing public puts it among the 19 metros on Wing’s own list, and the only Walmart drone site in Arkansas with a public FAA record is Zipline’s Pea Ridge hub.

Sources: City of Bentonville Planning Commission packet, Sept. 2, 2025, case CU25-0028, Bentonville Planning Commission minutes, Sept. 2, 2025, Fortune, Oct. 1, 2025, FAA programmatic environmental assessment for Part 135 drone package delivery, FAA re-evaluation for Zipline, Pea Ridge, Arkansas, Wing, October 5, 2026 announcement, Wing Walmart delivery page, DroneXL Wing tracker

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

RayNeo GT Max Review: Flying a Mavic 4 Pro on a Truck-Sized Screen

Russ 51 Drones — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:37:07 GMT

I was not prepared for how much fun it was going to be to fly my DJI drone using AR glasses. These are the RayNeo GT Max AR glasses, and after flying my Mavic 4 Pro with them for just a couple of minutes, I can tell you this is an amazing experience. Every once in a while something comes along that makes flying a drone more immersive and more fun, and these are it.

Full disclosure: RayNeo did send these to me and they are sponsoring this video, but I have full autonomy to share my honest opinion, including the things I don’t like. And these are definitely not just for drone pilots. I’ve also been using them for movies, gaming and my computer.

The GT Max Becomes a Giant Screen for Whatever You Plug In

The RayNeo GT Max is a massive personal display you wear like glasses, with no camera on the front, and when you connect it to a compatible phone, tablet, laptop, gaming handheld or, with the correct setup, a drone controller, it becomes that device’s screen.

Each eye gets a full HD micro-OLED display, 1920 by 1080, with 10-bit color and up to a 120Hz refresh rate. The field of view is 59 degrees. The virtual screen defaults to the equivalent of 267 inches, and you can drop it to 85% of that or push it to 115%, which is the equivalent of a 307-inch screen. There isn’t really a 300-inch TV floating in front of your face, but that’s honestly what it feels like.

There is a little AI processing involved: the glasses convert normal SDR footage to look more like HDR, and in darker movie scenes and games I could see more detail in the shadows instead of everything disappearing into the black. RayNeo rates the brightness at 1,200 perceived nits with eight levels, and in a dark room, beside a bright window or out in the sunlight, I never felt they weren’t bright enough.

My Mavic 4 Pro Feed Filled a Screen as Long as My Pickup

I plugged the GT Max into the RC Pro 2 over USB-C and saw the live view instantly. Superimposed on my pickup, roughly 20 feet (6 meters) long, the image ran the length of the truck and stood about one and a half times as tall.

I’ve been flying drones for 10 years, and even an incredible drone like the Mavic 4 Pro starts to feel a little too familiar. This made flying feel new again. It is kind of disorienting at first, because in follow mode the screen moves when your head moves, but it only takes a few minutes to get used to. At brightness level eight in the sun, it was so clear.

I can also see underneath the glasses to check the controller screen, and over the top of them. I didn’t need a visual observer: I could look up and see my drone right there, 215 feet (66 meters) away, so I still had situational awareness. I will definitely be using these on a regular basis with the Mavic 4 Pro.

Follow Mode Got About 90% of My Viewing Time

I’ve used follow mode about 90% of the time. The screen can also be pinned in one place, or set to steady mode for riding in a vehicle, since it helps prevent motion sickness. Pinned is the way to go for gaming.

I pinned a giant monitor in front of me and played Valheim, one of my favorite games, with the glasses on. A whole new experience. On my MacBook, an extended display as big as my office’s back wall was very cool, but the glasses are pretty dark and my physical monitor was hard to read through them, so mirroring made a lot more sense.

The 78-Gram GT Max Stayed Comfortable Through a Whole Movie

The glasses weigh 78 grams, heavier than sunglasses, but thick nose pads, flexible arms and stick-on temple pads make them surprisingly comfortable, and I’ve worn them for a couple of hours watching a movie with no discomfort. I do wish the arms adjusted vertically, even one or two clicks.

Swapping the different-size nose pieces raises or lowers the glasses on your face instead. RayNeo offers small, medium and large sizes based on your interpupillary distance, so measure yours before you order. Mine is 67 mm and I have the large. Clip-on prescription inserts are available, and there’s a sample in the package.

The Bang & Olufsen Audio Became My Favorite Feature

The four open speakers are tuned with Bang & Olufsen, and they were the one thing I didn’t expect to be impressed by. They’re my favorite feature. They sound crisp and have a little bit of bass, which I don’t understand from tiny speakers right above your ears.

Because they’re open, you hear what’s around you, and someone close by might hear your audio if it’s too loud. Volume goes to level 15. I tested it in the video with the camera about two and a half feet (0.8 meters) away, and level eight is a perfect listening level for a car or an airplane. I don’t think the person next to me would hear it.

You essentially have your own private movie theater: in bed while your spouse reads, in a hotel room, or on a plane instead of that little seatback screen, which I can’t wait to try. Mostly I’ve used them on the couch while my wife watches yet another crime documentary on Netflix, and I watch the Vikings win on my own private screen. The RayNeo XR app on your phone can also convert some 2D videos into immersive AI 3D, and it feels like you’re inside the movie.

The Cable and Video Output Are the Catches, Not Deal Breakers

The GT Max needs a video signal, and a USB-C port doesn’t always output video. The glasses definitely work with the RC Pro 2, DJI Smart Controller and DJI RC Plus 2, and the only device in my house they haven’t worked with is one of my drone controllers.

Separately, I can’t confirm the GT Max works with the DJI RC 2, though I know other RayNeo glasses work with the RC 2. Do your own research before you buy.

They also require a cable at all times. It runs from the back of the arm, behind your ear, to the controller, because the glasses have no battery and take power and video from your device. I haven’t flown with a cable in three or four years, so it felt cumbersome at first, but I got used to it really quickly. With a private display that big, the cable is not that big of a deal.

After about two weeks, the standout for me was flying my Mavic 4 Pro. It’s a whole different way to experience a drone I already love flying, and that made these glasses much more interesting than I expected. Could you see yourself using something like this regularly? Let me know in the comments on the video.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Russ. Watch the full video on the 51 Drones YouTube channel, and find more of Russ’s work on his DroneXL author page.

FAA Raised Amazon's Omaha Drone Band on Paper. Its Noise Model Didn't

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:24:00 GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration’s final environmental assessment for Amazon Prime Air’s Omaha hub expects MK30 drones to cruise between 205 and 370 feet, up from the 180-to-377-foot band in the June draft. The noise report attached to it still models the draft’s numbers, with a typical outbound cruise of 200 feet.

FAA branch manager Joseph Hemler Jr. signed the decision on September 9, 2026, nearly six weeks after MK30 drones began delivering from Papillion on July 30. It was missing from the FAA’s list at the September 11 update cited in our report on the eagle buffer and noise complaints, and it was posted by the September 24 update. Neither the decision nor the FAA’s answers to 21 public comments explains the altitude change.

The FAA’s Final Omaha Assessment Expects Outbound Drones at 205 to 250 Feet

The June draft expected outbound MK30 flights between 180 and 279 feet and inbound flights between 279 and 377 feet. The final assessment expects 205 to 250 feet outbound and 325 to 370 inbound, and says its noise analysis assumes a 205-foot outbound cruise.

The noise report it cites says something else. Appendix E, consultant ESA’s technical report still dated September 2025, models a typical outbound cruise of 200 feet within a 180-to-279-foot range and an inbound cruise of 345 feet within 279 to 377. Its results are the draft’s results: en route noise of up to DNL 46.0 decibels at any location, under the FAA’s 65-decibel threshold, and 92.1 decibels SEL at 25 feet for a single delivery, from Amazon’s October 2024 tests at Pendleton, Oregon. Amazon’s Baton Rouge operations manager told a Rotary Club in September that the drones are quieter than an idling delivery truck.

DroneXL read the final assessment, the decision and the FAA’s answers to all 21 comment submissions on October 6, and none explains the change. Two commenters quoted the draft’s 180-to-377-foot band, and the FAA’s general reply describes the new 205-to-370 band without saying anything moved. Amazon has raised MK30 altitudes after complaints elsewhere: in Richardson, Texas, it lifted its average outbound altitude to 225 feet.

The FAA's map of the 7.5-mile operating area around Amazon's OMA2 hub, from the final assessment. The circle covers southwest Omaha, Chalco, La Vista, Papillion, Gretna and Springfield, and stops short of Offutt Air Force Base. Image credit: FAA

The FAA Answers 21 Omaha Comments With Its 65-Decibel Threshold

The FAA logged 21 comment submissions during the June 23 to July 22 window and noted general support in one reply. Commenters raised noise, privacy, wildlife at Chalco Hills, and low-flying traffic from Offutt Air Force Base and Millard Airport, and the noise replies rest on the 65-decibel threshold.

One reply goes further and says there will be no “ongoing noise monitoring of drone operations” once flights begin, because monitoring falls outside the environmental review. On local control, the FAA’s stock answer is that it does not choose where commercial drone operators fly from and that zoning is typically a state and local matter. On eagles, the final text keeps the draft’s conditional promise of 1,000 feet (305 meters) of separation from any nest Amazon identifies. Amanda Grint of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District said in September that Amazon had agreed with federal officials in August to keep that distance from the nests at Chalco Hills.

Residents with a complaint can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 or use Amazon’s customer-service chat, choosing “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what else works, and the Amazon page on our drone delivery tracker now shows Omaha as operating with a September 9 decision.

Omaha’s Decision Opens Its Own Federal Appeal Window

The decision is a final FAA order open to challenge in a federal appeals court within 60 days of its issue, under 49 U.S.C. § 46110. Its “Issued on” line is blank. Sixty days from the September 9 signature is Sunday, November 8. That rolls to Monday, November 9.

Counted from the FAA’s September 22 notice of availability, the window would run to November 23, and the FAA has not said which date governs. Either way it is separate from the lawsuit 15 states filed in the Second Circuit on September 28 against the FAA’s national drone delivery finding, and Nebraska is not one of the petitioners.

The final assessment still describes Amazon as seeking authorizations “needed to integrate the MK30 drone and commence commercial drone package delivery operations,” language carried over from the June draft, and it does not mention the July 30 start. Neither that document nor the FAA’s review page, checked October 6, says which authorization covered the Papillion flights from July 30 to September 9. The national finding, which lets the FAA approve new delivery markets against one national study, was signed July 28, two days before launch.

DroneXL’s Take

If Amazon flies the new band, I think 25 more feet helps the people under the outbound routes, and I’d like to know who asked for it. The FAA wrote the higher numbers into its assessment and left the noise model on the old ones, so the document can’t tell a Papillion resident what the change does to the sound in their yard. By the time the decision was signed, the drones had been flying for nearly six weeks under an authorization nobody has named.

My position on the aircraft hasn’t changed. Drone delivery earns its noise when it carries medication or a defibrillator, and Zipline’s P2 is the reference, with a lighter airframe and a parachute. The MK30 has an 83-pound maximum takeoff weight, carries up to five pounds, and no parachute appears in any of its FAA filings. In Omaha it is delivering retail orders from a fulfillment center.

Sources: FAA Final Environmental Assessment and FONSI/ROD, Amazon Prime Air, Omaha, Nebraska, September 2026, FAA Appendix E, technical noise report, FAA Appendix F, public comments and responses, FAA Draft Environmental Assessment, Omaha, June 2026, 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.

Pentagon Picks 3 Lasers And A Drone-Frying Microwave For US Bases

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:37:00 GMT

The Pentagon has picked the four directed-energy weapons that will defend US military bases against drones for the next year: high-energy lasers from AeroVironment, Kord and Boeing, plus Epirus’ Leonidas, a high-power microwave that knocks drones out of the sky by the swarm. The Department of War announced the selections on October 5 for the pilot run by Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401), the Army-led counter-drone task force.

Congress ordered the pilot in the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The task force named five host installations in May: Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Bliss in Texas, Naval Base Kitsap in Washington, Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. DroneXL reported in September that the weapons will run there for 365 days.

The announcement leans on an FAA safety assessment at White Sands Missile Range to call the program safe. The laser the FAA assessed there came from AeroVironment’s LOCUST family, the company says.

Three Lasers And One Microwave Made The Pentagon’s First Cut

AeroVironment’s Palletized High-Energy Laser, Kord’s Firefly and Boeing’s Compact Laser Weapon System are the three lasers in the pilot. Epirus’ Leonidas is the lone microwave, and the only pick designed to disable an entire drone swarm with a single pulse of energy.

AeroVironment’s entry is the roll-on, roll-off version of LOCUST, the configuration that downed drones from the flight deck of USS George H.W. Bush in October 2025. The Army committed to the company in September with a $464.8 million production contract for the 30-kilowatt LOCUST X3, the deal DroneXL covered alongside the Army’s claim that its border laser cut cartel drone flights 75%.

Kord, a KBR subsidiary, builds Firefly as a palletized, mobile laser. Boeing said in October 2024 that its 5-kilowatt system had downed nearly 500 drones in demonstrations, swarms among them, including Group 3 aircraft weighing up to 1,320 pounds (600 kilograms) at the Red Sands exercise in Saudi Arabia.

Leonidas has the most dramatic record. At Camp Atterbury, Indiana, in August 2025, Epirus says it disabled all 61 drones it faced, finishing with a 49-drone swarm knocked out in one pulse. The Army has bought the system twice, with a $66.1 million contract in 2022 and $43.5 million in 2025.

Ross Doubts The Per-Shot Price That Sells These Weapons

The pilot exists to measure what directed energy costs a base to own and run: the October 5 release lists requirements, costs and best practices as the data it will collect. JIATF 401 director Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross has already questioned the number the industry sells these weapons on.

That number is the price of one shot, which AeroVironment puts at $3 for LOCUST. Ross told reporters in August that the math leaves out the hardware, Defense News reports. Describing a hypothetical $6 million system that fires once a year, he said “you can’t tell me that that shot only costs 8 cents.”

More weapons are coming. In December the Pentagon will host a directed-energy shoot-off at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to test additional lasers and microwaves, and Ross has said systems that perform there can go straight to a purchase order.

The FAA’s Safety Finding Covers AeroVironment’s Laser, Not Leonidas

The FAA announced on April 10 that a joint assessment found “a high-energy laser counter-drone system” posed no undue risk to passenger aircraft. AeroVironment later said that laser was its LOCUST. The October 5 release cites no FAA finding for Kord, Boeing or Epirus.

The Army fielded that LOCUST as AMP-HEL, and during the March 7 test at White Sands it shut itself off automatically when a commercial aircraft bound for Albuquerque drifted into its tracking angle. The FAA’s statement says the same methodology will be built in from the start for systems used in the homeland.

That assessment was a repair job. In February, a laser near Fort Bliss fired at what turned out to be party balloons and the FAA closed El Paso’s airspace. Two weeks later the same program shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone because CBP had not told the Pentagon it was flying.

A microwave raises a different safety question than a laser, because its pulse covers an area. Epirus calls that pulse low-collateral and says Leonidas picked one of two drones flying side by side at Camp Atterbury, then dropped another inside a software-defined safe zone. Nothing the FAA or JIATF 401 has published describes how far the pulse reaches or how those zones will be drawn on a US base.

DroneXL’s Take

Picking a microwave is the right call. A base cannot fight a swarm one beam at a time, and Leonidas is built for the problem Northcom’s deputy commander admitted in August: his command cannot stop a swarm launched inside US borders.

But the paperwork does not match the pitch. In May the Department of War wrote that White Sands validated that “the systems” pose no undue risk to passenger aircraft. The FAA’s own statement says it assessed one system, and AeroVironment says it was its own. El Paso is what happened the last time the Pentagon got ahead of its coordination with the FAA.

My read is that each of the other three weapons, the microwave first, needs its own FAA finding announced in public before it switches on at a base with civilian neighbors. The Camp Atterbury safe-zone demo is a claim from the company selling the weapon, and the FAA should test it the way it tested AeroVironment’s laser, on a range, before the pulse goes live over a US base.

Correction, October 7, 2026: An earlier version of this article reported, citing Defense News, that Brig. Gen. Matt Ross gave reporters a four-base list in August and that JIATF 401 had not told Defense News whether all five installations named in May remain in the pilot. Defense News has since removed both statements from its article, and they have been removed here, along with the section heading that referred to them.

Sources: U.S. Department of War, Federal Aviation Administration, Defense News, DefenseScoop, Epirus, Boeing, KBR

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

Bellingham Police Pick Skydio for DFR, 1 Response in 23 Logged Flights

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:46:00 GMT

The Bellingham Police Department in Washington is running its new Drone as First Responder program on Skydio, a detail left out of both the City Council’s agenda bill and the Bellingham Herald’s report on it. The vendor shows on the program’s public flight dashboard, which runs on Skydio’s cloud under a “Powered by Skydio” footer.

A $475,417 state grant pays for it through 2028. Police Chief Rebecca Mertzig briefed the council’s Public Health, Safety, Justice, and Equity Committee on Monday. The drones sit at the police station, the city’s Pacific Street Operations Center and Bellis Fair mall.

When I pulled the dashboard on October 6, it listed 23 flights since August 19. One of them is tagged as an incident response.

A $3.7 Million State Award Pays for Bellingham’s Drones

The $475,417 is one line in a $3.7 million award Bellingham Police received from Washington’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, which the city announced in May. The money traces to House Bill 2015, the 2025 state law that created a $100 million public safety grant program for cities and counties.

The drone line works out to about 13 percent of the total. Among other items, the city’s May 28 announcement lists refilling three officer positions frozen in 2025, a new warrant officer, dashcams for every patrol car and new tools to stop pursuits.

The agenda bill for Monday’s meeting says the grant “fully funds” the program and lists the source as “CJTC House Bill 2015.” It does not say who pays after 2028. The same law lets cities adopt a 0.1 percent public safety sales tax by council vote until June 30, 2028, after which voters must approve it, according to the Association of Washington Cities.

The FAA Cleared Bellingham Police for DFR in February

FAA records released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation under FOIA show Bellingham Police received a public safety waiver for BVLOS flights on February 18, 2026, the same day the agency logged the application, covering the 200-foot shielded tier through February 28, 2030.

Bellingham is one of 20 Washington agencies on that list, alongside Everett and Bellevue police, Whatcom County Fire District 5 and Redmond police, who first flew a docked DJI drone to 911 calls in 2024. DroneXL went through the full list in August: more than 1,000 agencies cleared in ten months under the FAA’s expedited process.

The Herald cited EFF for “more than 1,000” DFR programs operating across the U.S. EFF’s report counts waivers, not launched programs, and Bellingham is the example. It held its waiver for six months before the first flight on the dashboard, and the state money was only announced in late May.

Bellingham’s Flight Log Shows a Program Still in Training

Twenty-two of the 23 logged flights are labeled as training or carry no purpose label. The only incident response came on September 30: a 12-minute Public Works assist. Mertzig told the Herald the program starts with four operators, and staffing it around the clock will take time to train more.

Flights so far run from two to 23 minutes, and October 1 was the busiest day, with six training flights. Across the state, Spokane’s four Skydio X10s flew about 400 missions in the first three weeks of its pilot.

The city’s DFR page promises a drone over the scene in two minutes or less and sets out the privacy terms. The camera stays level with the horizon in transit and tilts down only at the scene. The drones carry no license plate readers and never fly without a human pilot. Video goes into the same evidence system as body-camera footage, and the city says its vendor agreements bar Skydio from accessing it.

Other city departments will get the video, but “Only BPD officers will pilot the drones,” Mertzig told the Bellingham Herald. She pointed to the 2023 Harris Avenue fire as a case where a thermal camera could have located people inside the building. The department has flown drones under a separate program since 2019.

DroneXL’s Take

Bellingham did the most useful thing a city can do with a police drone program: it published the flight log before the program went fully live. That log shows a training operation with one real job on the books, and it is the only city record I found that names the vendor. Drones that reach a 911 call before a patrol car are drones for good, and a city earns the public’s patience for them by answering questions before anyone asks. I’d call Bellingham most of the way there. Two of the August 21 flights still carry no purpose. The city should label every flight and put the aircraft’s name on its DFR page.

Source: The Bellingham Herald, City of Bellingham agenda bill 25079, City of Bellingham DFR program page, Bellingham Police DFR flight dashboard, Electronic Frontier Foundation FAA waiver records.

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

Manna Adds Two East Tulsa Drone Bases Rated for 'Thousands' a Week

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:34:00 GMT

Manna Air Delivery is launching drone delivery from two new bases in east Tulsa this week, one at The Shops at Alameda near 21st Street and Sheridan Road and one behind Plaza Santa Cecilia at 2160 S. Garnett Road. A third base, near 31st Street and Garnett Road, is due in the coming weeks. The expansion lands eight weeks after Manna opened its first full-scale US base on Cherry Street on August 12, and two weeks after it and the Tulsa Fire Department presented a drone defibrillator pilot.

Residents within two miles of each new base can order from Sr Lucas, Baga Sushi and Cakes & Churros through the Manna app. Each base has “the capacity to complete thousands of deliveries each week,” CEO Bobby Healy said. They launch with three aircraft apiece, flying noon to 8 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday by FOX23’s account.

Manna Goes From East Tulsa Permit Filings to Launch in Six Weeks

Manna filed city permit applications for all three east Tulsa sites on August 25, the Tulsa Flyer reported, and two of them launch this week, six weeks later. The third, in a lot east of Citi Trends at 11215 E. 31st St., awaits what News On 6 called final logistics.

Each new base copies the Cherry Street layout of three aircraft in a fenced operating area with an enclosed structure. Healy’s quote in FOX23’s report praised east Tulsa’s small-business scene, echoing the line Manna’s own release used for Cherry Street in August.

Dublin went the other way. Fingal County Council refused its Coolmine hub on May 19, a decision Manna answered with a Trinity College noise study, and by July 1 the company had announced it was pulling out of Dublin 15, Dublin People reported.

A Manna drone lowers an order on its tether over a residential street. Photo credit: Manna Air Delivery

Healy’s ‘Thousands’ Only Adds Up on a Full Week With No Downtime

On Healy’s own figure of up to eight deliveries an hour per aircraft, three aircraft reach 2,000 a week only on the full seven-day, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule: 3 × 8 × 12 hours × 7 days is 2,016. The launch schedule caps each base at 768.

News On 6 lists the launch days as Wednesday through Sunday rather than FOX23’s Wednesday through Saturday. The extra day lifts the ceiling to 960, still short of one thousand. Healy gave the eight-an-hour figure in 2025 for flights within three miles, crediting hot-swapped batteries, and DroneXL walked through those unit economics at the time. Tulsa’s two-mile radius means shorter trips, which could lift the rate. The same 2025 figures had one loader at an eight-aircraft base handling 25 to 30 deliveries an hour, which points the other way.

Every one of those ceilings assumes a three-aircraft fleet flying eight sorties every hour it is open. Manna head of operations Stuart O’Callaghan told KJRH on September 23 that the aircraft do not fly in heavy rain or in winds above 20 knots (23 mph, 37 km/h). Neither Manna’s Cherry Street release nor the FOX23 and News On 6 reports put a date on the full schedule. News On 6 says only that it comes as operations ramp up.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m for this rollout. Small bases in shopping-center parking lots, a two-mile radius, local restaurants, and six weeks from permit filings to launch: that is how drone delivery should arrive in a US city, and it is what Fingal’s planners refused Manna at Coolmine.

My problem is the unit Manna keeps selling Tulsa in. In July, Healy told a town hall he hoped to reach 20 to 30 bases, per News On 6. Now it is thousands of deliveries per base, a figure its launch hours can’t reach at Healy’s own rate. Manna’s newsroom, checked October 6, carries capacity figures and no Tulsa delivery count. Tulsans will judge the service by how many orders actually landed in their yards, and only Manna can publish that number.

Sources: FOX23, News On 6, Tulsa Flyer, Manna Air Delivery, KJRH, Dublin People

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

DJI Mini 3 Hits $269 for Prime Big Deal Days, Matching Its June Low

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:32:00 GMT

The DJI Mini 3 with the RC-N1 controller is $269 on Amazon for Prime Big Deal Days, $150 under its $419 list price and level with the lowest price DroneXL has recorded for it. The price is exclusive to Prime members, and the two-day event runs through Wednesday, October 7.

The same listing carries the Mini 3 Fly More Combo with the screen-equipped DJI RC at $600, down from $719. That box adds two more batteries, a charging hub and a shoulder bag. A month ago DroneXL logged the base Mini 3 at $315 for Labor Day, so today’s price is $46 lower.

Get the DJI Mini 3 for $269 on Amazon

The Mini 3 unfolded, small enough to hold in one hand. Photo credit: Billy Kyle

The $269 Mini 3 Ties Its June Low, While the Fly More Combo Is $119 Off List

Prime members paid $269 for the base Mini 3 during Prime Day in June, and nothing DroneXL has logged has gone lower. The Fly More Combo with DJI RC at $600 is $119 under list and $25 under its Labor Day price. Gizmodo recorded it at $449 on June 30.

DroneXL called $335 the lowest ever on Black Friday 2025, and Amazon has gone under that several times since. Today’s listing is sold by Yeehui Innovations and shipped by Amazon. Dealnews listed the $269 price for Prime members in a June deal that expired on June 28.

The combo costs $331 more than the base kit. The biggest part of that is the DJI RC, whose 5.5-inch screen runs DJI Fly on its own, so your phone stays in your pocket. The middle configuration, the Mini 3 with DJI RC alone, shows only a used unit at $399 today, and DroneXL’s Prime Day roundup had it new at $339 in June. DroneXL checked all three prices at 3:32 p.m. Eastern on October 6.

The Mini 3 Shoots True Vertical Video on Its Full 1/1.3-Inch Sensor

The Mini 3’s gimbal rolls 90 degrees, so it records portrait photos and video on the full 1/1.3-inch sensor instead of cropping a horizontal frame. Video tops out at 4K/30 with HDR, and DJI’s dual native ISO, at 100 and 800, holds detail in highlights and shadows.

A 9:16 clip comes off the card ready for a vertical feed, and the Mini 3 still sells nearly four years after launch because of it. Billy Kyle reviewed the drone for DroneXL in December 2022 and said “vertical video is here to stay at least for the short term.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Billy Kyle's DJI Mini 3 footage. Photo credit: Billy Kyle

DJI Mini 3 Specs: Under 249 g, 38 Minutes, 10 km and No Obstacle Sensors

The Mini 3 weighs under 249 g and flies 38 minutes on a standard battery. DJI O2 transmission reaches 10 km (6.2 miles) under FCC rules. Top speed is 36 mph (16 m/s), and wind resistance is Level 5, or 24 mph (10.7 m/s).

The camera behind the f/1.7, 24 mm-equivalent lens shoots 12-megapixel stills, or 48 megapixels in high-resolution mode, and records at up to 100 Mbps. 2.7K and 1080p run at up to 60 frames per second. Footage goes to a microSD card, and QuickTransfer pulls files to your phone over Wi-Fi at up to 25 MB/s.

The only vision sensors point down, for hovering and landing, so the Mini 3 has no forward or rear obstacle avoidance and no ActiveTrack. Live view runs at 720p/30fps, which Billy Kyle found a little fuzzy next to the 1080p feeds he was used to. The propellers fasten with small screws rather than quick-release mounts.

The Mini 3's 24 mm-equivalent f/1.7 lens on its three-axis gimbal. Photo credit: Billy Kyle

A Plus Battery Pushes the Mini 3 Past 249 g and Into FAA Registration

On its standard battery the Mini 3 stays under the FAA’s 250 g threshold, so recreational pilots skip registration and Remote ID. The Intelligent Flight Battery Plus raises flight time to 51 minutes and weight to about 290 g, and then the drone must be registered and broadcast Remote ID.

The Fly More Combo ships with three standard batteries, so the catch only applies if you buy the Plus separately. Every recreational pilot still needs the free TRUST certificate, and anyone flying for money needs Part 107 and a registered aircraft at any weight.

The Mini 3 received its FCC equipment authorization in 2022, years before the FCC’s December 22, 2025 Covered List decision blocked new DJI models. That is why Amazon can still sell it.

DroneXL’s Take

The $269 Mini 3 is the camera drone I’d hand a first-time pilot this week, because full-sensor vertical video on a three-axis gimbal doesn’t get cheaper than this. The $600 Fly More Combo makes sense if you fly long sessions and want 114 minutes of rated flight time with a screen controller. Buy it for that kit and not for the strikethrough, since it sold for $151 less in June. And remember this drone can’t see the tree in front of it, so keep it where you can see it yourself.

Sources: Amazon DJI Mini 3 listing (checked October 6, 2026), DJI Mini 3 specs, Gizmodo

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 Buzz Cleveland Heights Homes. The Mayor Wants Them Moved

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:46:00 GMT

Cleveland Heights Mayor Jim Petras has a meeting scheduled with Amazon next week, after residents complained about the Prime Air drones that began flying out of North Randall on September 24, as DroneXL reported at launch. Petras told Spectrum News 1 the drones currently fly over residential neighborhoods, and he plans to ask Amazon whether the flight pattern can be adjusted to a more commercial area.

Cleveland Heights sits inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery circle around Amazon’s North Randall warehouse. Some Northeast Ohio residents told Spectrum the drones sound like a swarm of bees or a lawn mower. “Nobody asked me if I wanted things flying overhead,” said Joe Iacobucci, who also worries about surveillance and about someone flying a lookalike drone.

Amazon has made a version of this change before, and it has also said no to the bigger version. In Richardson, Texas, it moved some outbound flights over a commercial area after residents complained, and DroneXL revisited those changes after the New York Times visit. When Richardson residents asked for routes over major roads, Amazon turned them down.

Amazon Shifted Some Richardson Flights but Refused Road Routes

Amazon implemented its Richardson changes in February and presented them to the city council on March 9, Community Impact reported. It raised the minimum altitude for outbound flights to an average of 225 feet (69 meters) and sent select departures east over a commercial area before they entered a neighborhood.

Several residents asked for more: paths over major roads instead of homes. Sam Bailey, who presented the changes for Amazon, said no. “Routing over roads, I think it creates an additional safety issue,” he told the council, adding that it would use far more energy. He also said a quieter drone would take a hardware change that is not coming soon.

In Baton Rouge on September 9, asked at a Rotary Club event whether Amazon had considered flying higher, an Amazon spokesperson said altitude changes require Federal Aviation Administration approval, as DroneXL reported.

Shaker Heights Says Amazon and Cleveland Clinic Drones Fly in the Area

Shaker Heights officials confirmed that delivery drones operating in the region fly for Amazon and for Cleveland Clinic, 19 News reported on September 29. The city said the FAA regulates the flights and that it is still gathering more information.

The city told residents it is collecting that information from the drone operators, and pointed them to the FAA’s Northeast Ohio Flight Standards District Office, WKYC reported. Spectrum lists that office at 440-686-2001. Not every drone over the east side is an MK30. Cleveland Clinic’s Zipline prescription service flies from Beachwood, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) northeast of Amazon’s warehouse, and has flown there since the program went live in August.

Amazon has said its fully electric drones produce less noise than an idling delivery truck during drop-offs, WKYC reported. The FAA’s Baton Rouge filing gives the MK30’s delivery phase two numbers. One is about 69 decibels Lmax measured 75 feet (23 meters) from the drop point, which the FAA likens to a household vacuum cleaner at 10 feet. The other is a maximum of 92.1 decibels SEL measured 25 feet (8 meters) away, for which the filing offers a diesel truck at 50 feet, at roughly 80 to 90 decibels, as its reference. The filing gives no figure for an idling truck; DroneXL searched it on October 6.

Amazon’s MK30 Releases Packages From About 13 Feet

The MK30 descends to about 13 feet (4 meters) over the drop spot, hovers and lets the box fall, according to the same FAA filing. Shaunese Reese told Spectrum News 1 her package arrived the next morning and looked to be in good condition.

She was excited to try the service, but said the landing was not perfect. “It dropped out, and it did roll,” Reese said. She told WKYC the box rolled down her driveway, which she thinks makes packages easier to steal. In Richmond, Texas, the same release put a customer’s order into her swimming pool on August 17. Zipline lowers its packages on a tether instead.

Amazon’s Own Page Says Its Drones May Record People Near Deliveries

Amazon has said its Prime Air drones use cameras and sensors for navigation, obstacle detection and safe delivery, but don’t track individuals or record their movements, WKYC reported. Amazon’s Prime Air operations page, which DroneXL checked on October 6, says people near a delivery or landing spot may be recorded.

The page lists “people, pets, cars, and objects near the delivery or landing location” as things the cameras may record, and says Amazon uses the images to safely complete deliveries and to improve drone delivery and other Amazon services. In my reading, not recording a person’s movements and not recording the person are different promises. The statement WKYC relayed makes the first, and Amazon’s own page says the second can happen. DroneXL found a wider gap in Texas, where Amazon’s Bailey told Pflugerville’s council on September 22 that the drones can’t take “pictures or images,” as DroneXL reported.

Cities do not control the airspace the drones fly through, the federal government does, and Amazon’s hub sits in North Randall, not Cleveland Heights. Residents can reach Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 or through the customer service chat (“Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery”), and our guide for residents covers the rest of the options. Every Amazon hub DroneXL follows, North Randall included, is on the Prime Air tracker page.

DroneXL’s Take

Petras is asking for the right thing, and I think a meeting is the most direct lever he has. Amazon changed where some Richardson flights go when residents pushed, so a Cleveland Heights route change looks within reach to me. On the east side, Zipline flies prescriptions for Cleveland Clinic over some of the same suburbs, with an aircraft that weighs about 55 pounds empty and carries a parachute. Amazon flies consumer goods in an MK30 that weighs about 83 pounds at takeoff and carries no parachute. I support drone delivery when the cargo is urgent, and a prescription is. A package that could ride in a van does not need to cross a residential street, and in September one MK30 landed itself beside a Baton Rouge road while another made a precautionary landing on a Waco lawn. I’d want Amazon to bring next week’s meeting a plan that keeps Cleveland Heights departures over commercial land wherever it can.

Sources: Spectrum News 1, 19 News, WKYC via Yahoo News, Community Impact, FAA Baton Rouge filing, Amazon Prime Air operations page

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

US Military Counts 378 Border Drone Incursions In 30 Days, And Rising

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:44:00 GMT

Joint Task Force-Southern Border detected at least 378 drones along the US-Mexico border between August 22 and September 22, and the trend is climbing, Air Force Brig. Gen. Brian Filler told reporters at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Filler, the task force’s deputy commander, said most carry surveillance cameras. Army officials said the drones are typically commercial models that criminals use to watch over smuggling and human trafficking operations.

He was speaking at Falcon Peak 26.2, the Pentagon’s counter-drone experiment that put 21 companies’ detection and defeat systems in front of soldiers at Yuma from August 31 to September 25. It was the fourth Falcon Peak, the first at Yuma and the first built around the southern border.

In early September, military officials told CBS News that cartel drone flights over the Rio Grande Valley had fallen about 75% once an Army laser started shooting them down on August 25. Filler now describes the border-wide trend as rising.

Falcon Peak Lined Up 21 Counter-Drone Companies Against DJI Mavics

The Department of War’s participant list named 21 companies, including Anduril, Teledyne FLIR, Powerus and Perennial Autonomy, which holds a Pentagon interceptor contract worth up to $500 million. Yuma tested them in three lanes: sensors, electronic defeat and kinetic. Anduril’s Lattice software was the command-and-control baseline, a series first.

Reuters reported that the demonstrations featured Anduril’s Ghost drone, a Teledyne FLIR radar-and-camera detection system, and Allen Control Systems’ Bullfrog, an automated machine gun. Military photographers caught the Bullfrog firing at drone targets from the bed of a pickup on September 9. On September 22, a Genesis Arms Gen-12 shotgun system knocked a drone out of the sky on the same range.

The targets looked like what Filler described crossing the border. Army photos from the range show a DJI Mavic 3 Classic carrying an add-on radio module as it flies toward the intercept area. “We are seeing largely commercial off-the-shelf available drones,” Filler said.

A DJI Mavic 3 Classic carrying an add-on module flies toward the intercept area at Falcon Peak 26.2, September 7, 2026. Photo credit: Dept. of War / SSgt. Colten Tessness

Powerus brought an interceptor drone. The company went public on Thursday, October 1, by merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings, the Florida golf course company whose deal Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump backed in March. Powerus also had a seat at the White House drone dominance meeting in August, according to the attendee list.

Yuma Keeps Permanent Counter-Drone Lanes After The Exercise

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 is leaving the sensor, electronic-defeat and kinetic lanes in place at Yuma, so vendors can test there without waiting for the next Falcon Peak. Data from every system went into the task force’s central repository to inform buying decisions, its closing release says.

Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who directs Joint Interagency Task Force 401, told reporters the model is Ukraine, where units adapt on a daily or weekly basis. “What we should really do is replicate that process,” he said. Military officials also told Reuters that cartel drones are not comparable to the sophisticated ones flying over Ukraine or the Middle East, but the border gives soldiers a real operating environment to test and train in.

Drone wreckage on Cibola Range Site 17 at Yuma Proving Ground during Falcon Peak 26.2, September 7, 2026. Photo credit: Dept. of War / SSgt. Colten Tessness

Brig. Gen. Jason Rueschhoff, Northern Command’s director of operations, told DefenseScoop that the fifth Falcon Peak will move to an urban area, with no city or date named yet.

Only 15 Of The 378 Border Drones Drew An Engagement

The task force’s commander, Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, broke the 378 down for DefenseScoop: 75 drones turned back, 15 drew an engagement and one was captured. That covers the task force’s mission along all 1,954 miles of the border, from August 22 to September 22.

At about 378 a month, the count is roughly a third of the last public estimate. In March 2024, Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, Northern Command’s commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that incursions probably topped 1,000 a month, while conceding nobody knew the real number.

The 75% drop covered a narrower area. It applied to the Rio Grande Valley sector, where the Army’s laser had destroyed 11 drones by early September, and Army Col. Robert Felicio declined to give CBS the daily counts behind the percentage. When I reported that claim on September 7, the open question was what it was 75% of. Taylor’s figure doesn’t answer it, because his count spans the whole border and the 75% applies to one sector.

DroneXL’s Take

I want Joint Task Force-Southern Border to publish this count every month, by sector, because one month of data can’t show a trend. A detection count depends on the sensors doing the detecting, and sensors were one of the three things Falcon Peak was at Yuma to test. In August, Northcom’s deputy commander acknowledged the command lacks the sensors to see a domestic swarm forming. If radar coverage on the border grows, the count grows with it, whether or not cartels fly more. Filler told DefenseScoop the task force runs an “incredibly involved intelligence process” to characterize each drone, so the data already exists. Until the task force releases it with a note on when new sensors came online, nobody outside the command can check the 75% drop in the Rio Grande Valley against the rising count across the border.

Sources: Reuters, Department of War / DVIDS, DefenseScoop, CBS News, Tucson Sentinel

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

Airspection Drone Skips the Boat on BVLOS Run to UK Wind Farm

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:26:00 GMT

Glasgow drone start-up Airspection has flown a shore-launched aircraft about 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) round trip over Liverpool Bay to a working offshore wind farm and back, entirely beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). The company announced the flights on October 6 as one of six projects in the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s BVLOS sandbox.

Amazon Prime Air, which has since asked the CAA to fly across all of Darlington, is in the same cohort. The pitch is a drone that launches from the beach, so no crewed vessel has to carry people and equipment out to the turbines. Airspection also says that, within limits, its aircraft gets more efficient as the wind picks up.

Airspection Spent Two Years Building the System the CAA Wanted

Airspection’s flights come after two years of work with the CAA’s Innovation and Test and Evaluation teams. The regulator selected its six sandbox projects on August 15, 2024 and runs the program with UK Research and Innovation to gather the safety evidence for routine BVLOS flight.

The other four are the National Police Air Service, air traffic provider NATS over the North Sea, Project SATE in Orkney and Project Lifeline for medical deliveries. Airspection says it built the safety, communications and flight operations system along with the aircraft, and the CAA counted the company among its new sandbox authorizations in the Test and Evaluation report DroneXL covered in June, when the UK had logged 1,672 BVLOS flights.

Ed Clay, Head of Technical Strategy at the CAA, said the company’s data “will help in the development of the UAS-supporting policies” the regulator is writing through its Future of Flight Programme. The Offshore Wind Growth Partnership helped fund the Liverpool Bay work.

Airspection’s CAA Filing Points to the Burbo Bank Wind Farm

Airspection’s announcement names neither the wind farm nor the flight dates. Its airspace change proposal to the CAA, ACP-2025-001, asks for a Temporary Danger Area inside the Burbo Bank Transponder Mandatory Zone in Liverpool Bay, reached from the coast through a separate corridor.

The filing describes a staged plan, launching from a crewed vessel first and then from land. It requested operations between October 2025 and March 2026, with a possible extension of up to 12 months, and scheduled the shore-launched phase for January to March 2026. Local site Wirral Today reported drone trials linked to Burbo Bank launching from Moreton Shore on August 3, 2026, without naming the operator.

An Airspection crew member tracks the aircraft over Liverpool Bay. Photo credit: Airspection

Airspection Says Its Drone Hovers on 40% Less Power in Strong Wind

Airspection designed the aircraft to hover in strong wind the way a kestrel holds its position, working with the wind instead of fighting it. In its testing at 22 to 27 mph (10 to 12 meters per second), hover power dropped about 40%, good for roughly two-thirds more flight time.

The release cites no independent test of the hover figures. The company estimates the shore-launched approach saves up to 50% against standalone inspection campaigns, cuts about a metric ton of CO2 equivalent per turbine and improves site access by up to 25%. A support vessel can burn more than 50 gallons (several hundred liters) of diesel an hour, according to the release.

Airspection says the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult assessed the commercial case on reference UK wind farms and found vessel-free drone inspection could cut costs substantially against conventional rope-access methods. The release quotes no figure from that analysis. Managing Director Matthew McLean, who co-founded the company in 2022 out of his work as an aero-mechanical engineering student at the University of Strathclyde, said: “We proved it around offshore wind, but it applies to any remote infrastructure.” Airspection is now looking at railway route checks after storms and power network surveys.

DroneXL’s Take

Airspection’s own airspace filing asked the CAA for a Temporary Danger Area that is “fully segregated” whenever it is active, and it planned the shore flights inside that area. That is the closed-off airspace the sandbox exists to retire, so I wouldn’t call Liverpool Bay routine BVLOS yet. It does show Airspection can run an offshore operation the regulator will approve, inside a box built for it, and that is real progress for an inspection drone. Range was never the hard part, because Austin-based Skyways flew 50-mile round trips from a German port to the Arkona wind farm with cargo in October 2025. Wind farm owners need to see the same run with the danger area switched off and the drone sharing Liverpool Bay with other aircraft.

Sources: Airspection press release (October 6, 2026), UK Civil Aviation Authority, CAA airspace change proposal ACP-2025-001, Wirral Today.

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