News, deep dives, and analysis — every Virginia story, newest first.
James City County, Virginia will begin dispatching AED-carrying drones to suspected cardiac arrest calls on August 1, starting a five-mile pilot around Fire Station 1 in Toano. The Duke- and VCU-led RESTORe-CARE study is expanding from North Carolina into a second live U.S. county program.
Duke Health researchers are dispatching AED-carrying drones to live 911 cardiac arrest calls in North Carolina, testing whether autonomous delivery can beat ambulances by the minutes that decide survival.
America now has roughly four registered drones for every registered crewed aircraft, and a public safety official is warning that the country has no agreed system for deciding which one moves out of the way. In a piece published June 24 in Homeland Security Today, Charles Werner, director of the DRONERESPONDERS Public Safety Alliance, laid…
When Dominion Energy’s grid operators noticed an unexpected power drop at the Colonial Trail West solar farm in Surry County, Virginia this June, they didn’t send a lineman. They sent a drone. Pilot Aaron Colgrove pulled up the mission from Dominion’s D-ROC, the company’s drone remote operations center, told the unit to head to the…
NASA researchers in Hampton, Virginia, put two human kidneys on a heavy-lift drone and flew them in 7.5-mile loops beyond the operator’s line of sight, then biopsied the organs to check for damage. They found none. The June 5 flights at NASA Langley Research Center reached a peak height of 250 feet across two roughly…
Walmart is moving drone delivery into seven new markets, and Maricopa, Arizona is confirmed on the list. The company announced the expansion in early June 2026, naming Wing as its delivery partner for the greater Phoenix area push. No launch date exists yet. The whole project sits in the pre-application phase right now, working through…
Newport News, Virginia is about to start sending drones to 911 calls before officers or firefighters arrive, with some aircraft reaching a scene in under 90 seconds. The city has eight drones staged at four launch sites, ready to lift off after high-priority calls like a homicide, a shooting, a missing person, or a medical…
NASA, UNOS, and LifeNet Health have successfully completed what they are calling a first-of-its-kind study: transporting human kidneys by drone.
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