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Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. I have four stories for you this week. First up, the EFF is warning about arming police drones. Then a JetBlue pilot reporting a drone strike at 3,000 feet over JFK. Also, another JFK drone sighting that turns out to be just normal operation. And then lastly, we…
Redmond, Oregon, is replacing its DJI police drones with six Skydio aircraft, and paying for them the way a city buys a fleet of patrol cars: on a five-year financed contract. The city council approved the $410,762 deal with Axon on June 23. The department calls its old fleet obsolete, but the bigger force behind…
Amazon has confirmed that its next drone-delivery market is the Omaha area, with Prime Air aircraft set to fly out of the company’s warehouse in Papillion, Nebraska. The service will carry items under five pounds (2.3 kg) that fit in a shoebox, to homes within a 7 to 8 mile (11 to 13 km) radius…
A London think tank has assembled the fullest picture yet of the drone incursions that rattled European airbases, airports and nuclear sites since late 2024, and its central claim is serious: Russian intelligence ran a coordinated surveillance campaign launched from vessels in Moscow’s sanctions-dodging “shadow fleet.” The 144-incident dataset is real, the pattern is unsettling,…
Santa Maria’s police department is getting its drone-as-first-responder program off the ground with money raised at a charity gala, not a line in the city budget. The Santa Maria Police Council, a nonprofit booster group, pulled in about $95,000 at its annual fundraiser and is handing the department a $97,869 donation to buy the aircraft.…
Two California cities moved to put police drones in the air the same week, and both ran straight into residents who don’t want them there. West Hollywood launches a sheriff-run drone program by the end of July. Berkeley opens bidding on a public safety package that bundles drones with license plate readers and cameras. DroneXL…
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…
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