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Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. This week I have four stories for you, and they cover a lot of ground: the FAA has published the Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and you should be paying attention, North Dakota has cut its beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) waiver…
U.S. Africa Command ran its CURTAIN CALL drone-swarm defense through a second field test at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California from April 27 to May 1, 2026, and this round added the threat the program was built to stop: a coordinated attack by several drones at once, not a single aircraft. What the command…
U.S. Central Command shot down four Iranian one-way attack drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, then struck Iranian coastal radar sites in response, the latest kinetic exchange to test a ceasefire that has held in name only since April. The drones were headed for the world’s most important oil chokepoint, the same…
North Richland Hills police are launching a Skydio Drone as First Responder trial this month, putting eyes on accident scenes and active emergencies before the first patrol unit arrives. Two docking stations will sit at a strategic central location in the city, letting pilots launch a drone in as little as 20 seconds. The trial…
The radar that can spot a quadcopter the size of a dinner plate at five kilometers is now wired into a $490 million U.S. Air Force counter-drone program. Echodyne, the Kirkland, Washington company behind the laptop-sized EchoShield radar, confirmed in April that its hardware sits at the center of Trust Automation‘s Small-Unmanned Air Defense System,…
A Chinese AI interceptor drone ships to U.S. buyers for $6,999, even though the FCC added new Chinese drone hardware to its Covered List in December 2025.
A New York Post op-ed calls cheap interceptor drones like Russia's $500 Yolka drone a terror risk. Here's what checks out, what doesn't, and the regulatory gap.
EHang shattered the Guinness World Record for drone light shows on February 3, 2026, flying 22,580 drones simultaneously from a single computer over Hefei’s Luogang Park. Of the swarm loaded for launch, only about 25 drones failed to lift off. The performance aired during China Media Group’s Spring Festival Gala on February 16, beaming the…
Hezbollah is now killing Israeli soldiers with the same fiber-optic FPV drones that reshaped the battlefield in Ukraine, and Israel’s main counter-drone tool, electronic jamming, does nothing to stop them. Since April 2026, drones guided by thin optical cables have killed at least ten Israeli soldiers and one civilian in southern Lebanon, according to figures…
The Good Drone Company signs an exclusive deal with ThatcherX to fly 25 kg cargo drones across Kenya, targeting heavier loads than Zipline carries.
China's new "scan-and-fly" WeChat app fast-tracks drone flights in Shanghai and Sichuan, even as Beijing keeps a near-total ban squeezing DJI at home.
The FAA has switched on more than 100 drone-only Temporary Flight Restrictions for FIFA World Cup 2026 team hotels and training camps, and a large share of them sit in cities that are not hosting a single match. Boise, Idaho. Louisville, Kentucky. Indianapolis. Sandy, Utah. None of these places appears on the list of 11…
Westmag emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $11 million in seed funding to manufacture drone motors and robot actuators in South San Francisco, aiming squarely at the one part of the American drone supply chain almost no one has tried to fix. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG,…
The Pentagon is staking the next generation of American combat airpower on a company that once analyzed grass on golf courses, a firm with roots in aerial light shows, and a startup run by a 23-year-old former drone racing world champion. These are not the defense primes that have built U.S. weapons for decades. They…
A consultancy report distributed this week puts a hard number on something drone operators have watched develop for two years: the money flowing into building drones dwarfs the money flowing into stopping them. The report’s author argues that imbalance has left soldiers nearly defenseless against machines that now inflict the majority of battlefield casualties in…
A Ukrainian quadcopter-type FPV drone struck a Russian UAZ “Bukhanka” van at a distance of 102 kilometers (63 miles) from the front, with no carrier aircraft launching it closer to the target. The strike was disclosed on May 26 by Serhii Sternenko, the Ukrainian fundraiser and adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Minister, who has spent the…
Colombia just acquired 3,744 grenades built to fall from drones, and the aircraft doing the dropping are off-the-shelf DJI Matrice 300 RTK quadcopters. The grenades are homemade by the state arms maker Indumil, and they’re already in service with the Army’s drone battalion. It’s the clearest sign yet of where Colombia’s long fight against armed…
Congress wants the Army to put robot boats in the water to protect its manned ones. A new defense bill directs the Army to study using unmanned surface vessels as escorts for its watercraft, the boats that haul troops and cargo into a fight. The timing isn’t subtle. Ukraine has spent two years proving that…
Amazon wants to turn 176 square miles of upstate New York into a drone delivery zone. The company is asking the town of Clay, near Syracuse, for permission to fly Prime Air deliveries out of an existing warehouse. If it clears the FAA and the local planning board, anyone within 7.5 miles could get a…
Walmart wants to park a drone launchpad in a North Carolina lot. More than 200 neighbors signed a petition to stop it. On Monday night, Lincoln County commissioners weighed whether the future of 23-minute delivery is worth the noise over Denver, North Carolina. It’s a small zoning vote, but it’s the exact fight that will…
Five Georgia high schools will soon keep drones waiting on charging pads, ready to fly at an attacker before police can reach the building. The state set aside $550,000 to test the idea this fall. The drones are piloted by people at a company in Texas, and they carry pepper spray, sirens, and strobes, not…
Flock Safety's new Alpha campaign sells the drone's camera: 2,000-foot plate reads, best-in-class thermal, and the most powerful zoom in DFR.
I put the GoPro Mission 1 Pro head-to-head with the DJI Osmo Action 6, comparing 8K image quality, audio, slow motion, battery, and price to find the winner.
Getting a beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver from the FAA has long meant waiting years and hiring lawyers. North Dakota just made it take 23 business days. The state’s Vantis network, the first statewide BVLOS system in the country, has turned the biggest bottleneck in commercial drone work into something close to routine. If you fly drones for…
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