Drone News: Regulatory Freeze, NTSB Prelim on Drone Show, DJI Releases 2025, Ct. Drone Bill

We have four stories for you this week: the NTSB preliminary report on the drone show accident in Orlando, a regulatory freeze – that’s an important thing, a possible DJI release list for 2025, and lastly, a new drone bill in Connecticut. All right, let’s get to it.

NTSB Preliminary Report: Orlando Drone Show Accident

First up, the NTSB released the preliminary report on the drone show accident that happened in Orlando. Now, if you’re not familiar with the story, this is an accident that occurred during the drone show on December 21st, and a drone struck and seriously injured a child who was watching the show.

According to the NTSB, the operator of the show made several errors, including rotating the show position by about 7° and then also misaligning the center, and then not fully uploading the final flight path to the aircraft. The misalignment of the show caused the hard fence, the one that disarms the drone if it leaves the intended area, to be too close to the crowd. Now, in addition, the hard fence outside of the primary fence was said to be 5m rather than to be set to one meter, which is the company standard. Approximately 43 aircraft were recovered and then sent to the NTSB lab in Washington, DC.

Now, at this point, it’s still unclear what actually caused multiple drones to fly away from the show and then towards the bystanders. If you’d like to read the full report, we’ll leave it down in the comments. The NTSB will have a final report, but that’s going to take usually about a year.

White House Regulatory Freeze

Second story this week: the White House released a document highlighting a regulatory freeze, which will likely affect both general aviation and drone regulation that was supposed to be upcoming. Now, in the document, the President said that executive departments and agencies, and I quote, “cannot propose or issue any rule in any manner, including by sending a rule to the office of the Federal Register until a department or agency head, appointed or designated by the President, reviews and approves the rules.”

Now, there are several issues here. More than likely, this means that the upcoming NPRM, including part 108 and then including Mosaic, which is the sport pilot rule change that we’ve been waiting for over a year, is going to be delayed until an appointed department or agency head can Review the proposed rule. And if you remember, of course, the previous FAA administrator resigned a while back, but was effective a few days ago, so we’ll likely have to wait until an upcoming nominee goes through the whole process to become the new FAA administrator. Now, this means that we may have to wait a few more months before the FAA can release the NPRM for BVLOS, which is required by the FAA Reauthorization Act.

We’ll keep you updated on this; this is kind of a story that is changing, so as soon as we hear more, we’ll let you know.

DJI’s 2025 Product Pipeline

Next up, DJI leaker OsitaLV has revealed that DJI supposedly has six more products to be released this year, which gives you something to look forward to, including a new Mavic, as reported by DroneXL. The leaked products include the Mavic 4 Pro, the Mini 5 Pro, the Matrice 400A (not sure what the A stands for), the DJI Action 3, and then the Osmo Nano. There are currently no rumored specs for any of these, including the Mavic 4, but we’ll keep you updated. Obviously, we saw the Mavic 4 Enterprise, which is now called the Matrice 4, released recently. A whole lot like it or close to it, but we’ll let you know when we hear more.

Connecticut Drone Bill

Then, last up, Connecticut has released a bill that would prohibit state agencies from purchasing Chinese drones. This bill includes items other than drone usage, and the full bill text is not currently available. The current text says that neither the state nor any state agency, state contractor, or municipality shall purchase or use any aerial drone manufactured in the People’s Republic of China or the Russian Federation. Now, if you’re in Connecticut and this would affect you, be sure that you reach out to your state legislator.

Community Events

Then, join us later today for happy hour in the community. We also have live Q&A on Monday, and then post-flight on Monday as well in the premium community, so we’ll see you then.