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Luke Maximo Bell flew a rebuilt quadcopter for 4 hours, 21 minutes and 39 seconds on a single battery charge, breaking the Guinness World Record for longest flight of a small electric multirotor drone. Independent witnesses observed the attempt on a farm outside Cape Town, South Africa. The result beat the previous certified mark of…
Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl announced a $100,000 prize, $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in Boom stock, for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1. Scholl posted the challenge on X this morning, July 2, quote-tweeting the dorm-built jet drone that DroneXL covered just hours earlier. “Boom will be offering a…
DJI will announce a new enterprise drone on July 8, 2026, at 8 AM EDT. The teaser, published by DJI Enterprise on July 2 under the tagline “For the Priceless Below,” shows a darkened silhouette of a quadcopter with extended landing gear, a gimbal payload slung under the body, and what appears to be a…
An El Paso County Sheriff’s Office drone spotted people fleeing a Colorado Springs-area home and hiding in the backyard before deputies ever arrived on scene, leading to the arrest of a 44-year-old woman wanted on two active warrants. The Sheriff’s Office Regional Communications Center received a disturbance call around 8:00 AM on June 26, 2026,…
Ukrainian Defense Drones (UDD), the U.S. company representing Ukraine’s F-Drones, has chosen the Village of Holland in Northwest Ohio for its first American assembly and manufacturing center. The company plans to invest $18.4 million and create at least 300 jobs in Lucas County by the end of 2029, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Congresswoman Marcy…
The DJI Mini 4K Protection Bundle dropped to $251.99 on Amazon, 26% off its $341.99 list price and, per Amazon’s badge, the lowest price in 30 days. The deal landed right before the July 4th weekend, is Prime-eligible with free delivery by Sunday, July 5, and was in stock when I pulled up the listing…
A college student says he built the world’s fastest RC airplane in his dorm: a 5 kg carbon-fiber jet he claims hits 500 mph. The engineering is real. The legality isn’t.
The DJI Flip just hit $349 on Amazon, down from its $439 list price. That is 21% off and, per Amazon’s own badge, the lowest price in 30 days. This isn’t a single-listing markdown either: all four Flip configurations are discounted at once, every one of them ships with Prime, and all four showed in…
BayCare will build a drone delivery network with Zipline across Florida’s Tampa Bay region, with the first flights scheduled for late 2027. The partnership puts lab samples, medications, and critical supplies in the air between hospitals and straight to patients’ homes. Service starts in the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, then expands. It runs on the same…
Spain’s aviation safety agency AESA issued the country’s first SAIL III authorization for drone cargo transport on June 30, clearing operator CATUAV to fly RigiTech’s Eiger 3 beyond visual line of sight over populated areas. The approval covers transport and delivery of non-hazardous goods, and it lands one week after DroneXL covered the same Eiger…
Wonder and Zipline announced a partnership this week that will put restaurant meals from Bobby Flay, Marcus Samuelsson, Tejas Barbecue, and Di Fara Pizza into the Texas sky. Drone deliveries start in January 2027 in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, the same corridor where DroneXL has tracked Zipline’s Walmart expansion city by city since 2025. Wonder…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum on June 29 creating a single Pentagon office with authority over nearly every unmanned systems program in the U.S. military. The Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, reports straight to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg and absorbs the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group along with the…
DJI pushed version 2.10.10 of its Mimo app to Apple’s App Store on July 1, and the release notes read like a feature list for the Osmo Pocket 4P, the dual-lens pocket gimbal that still has no US launch date. The update adds four Master Filters, full D-Log 2 support in Color Presets, share codes…
DJI Agriculture launched two new spray platforms worldwide on July 1, 2026: the Agras T55, a lighter 50-liter drone built around an upgraded safety stack, and the Agras T100 Dual Battery Spraying System, an endurance-focused revision of the flagship the company shipped last November. Both arrive with the same qualifier DJI has attached to every…
On Monday, Nassau County Police announced a $1 million first-responder drone program that turns emergency response on its head. Instead of waiting for a drone to launch from a headquarters, Nassau is installing eight fully automated pods across the county that can get airborne in under 30 seconds. This is what happens when you stop…
Croatian FPV maker Orqa and Canadian defence firm Remote Robotic Systems signed a five-year, 150 million CAD partnership on June 25, 2026 in Toronto to build drones, artificial intelligence and counter-unmanned aircraft systems on Canadian soil. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic stood in the room while Orqa co-founder Ivan…
An NYPD drone fell out of the sky and caught fire in DUMBO on Tuesday night, June 23, coming down at 1 Water Street near the entrance to the FIFA World Cup Fan Zone in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The lithium-ion battery ignited on impact. Firefighters put it out. Nobody was hurt. But the aircraft dropped…
DJI has started publicly promoting a firmware change that lets its Matrice 4D Series fly compliant European beyond-visual-line-of-sight missions from a handheld controller instead of a fixed docking station. The company’s Enterprise arm laid out the details in a June 12 blog post and pushed it to a wider audience through an X thread on…
A Bavarian wildlife group that once pulled 10 to 15 fawns a year out of meadows before the mowers arrived now saves between 300 and 350, and the difference is a thermal camera in the sky. Rehkitz-Rettung Mangfalltal, a volunteer rescue organization operating in the Mangfall valley south of Munich, has folded the DJI Matrice…
A JetBlue pilot approaching John F. Kennedy International Airport reported hitting a drone at roughly 3,000 feet on Monday, June 29, and within hours the story was everywhere: a plane, a drone, a collision over New York. Then the aircraft landed, mechanics inspected it, and they found no damage. None. No dented leading edge, no…
The University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab flew DRAGON v1.5, a drone that changes its own shape in the air, in a live demonstration on the Komaba Campus in Tokyo. The robot bends and curls to pass through gaps that would stop a fixed-frame drone, and it does it autonomously, using only its onboard sensors. Now…
Secret Service counter-drone teams join the National Mall’s first-ever July 4 NSSE, backed by the same federal buildout funding World Cup security.
Jake Sloan tests the SkyRover X1 against the DJI Mini 4 Pro in Alaska: tracking, obstacle avoidance, log video, wind, battery life, and a Remote ID edge.
DJI has added a third camera to its O4 Air Unit lineup, and the headline number is the field of view. The new DJI O4 Wide Air Unit swaps the standard model’s 117.6-degree lens for a 159-degree ultra-wide one, giving FPV builders the immersive, edge-to-edge perspective they have been buying aftermarket lenses to get. The…
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