DroneXL: The Independent Drone Authority — DJI, FAA, Reviews & Deals

SkyFall Sends Its $50,000 StarGate Medevac Drone to the Front Line

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:15:00 GMT

Ukrainian drone maker SkyFall has handed StarGate, a six-rotor drone built to carry a wounded soldier on a stretcher, to a combat brigade for evaluation under front-line conditions. The Associated Press watched a field demonstration on October 14, at a test site in Ukraine it was not allowed to disclose. SkyFall says StarGate lifts up to 330 pounds (150 kilograms), enough for a soldier in body armor with combat gear.

SkyFall builds the P1-SUN interceptors DroneXL covered in June and the Vampire heavy-lift drone that Russian troops call “Baba Yaga.” On the test field, StarGate flew through active jamming and fired a net that knocked an attacking FPV drone off course. SkyFall also says the drone kept flying after losing one of its arms. AP notes the company has not provided data on how reliably it survives damage in combat.

Code 9.2 Asked for StarGate Because Ground Robots Take Hours

StarGate grew out of a request from Flint, commander of the 475th Separate Assault Regiment, known as Code 9.2. For his troops, reaching a wounded soldier can mean going in on foot. KVN, another Code 9.2 commander, says ground robots need two to three hours to reach a position.

In some sectors the kill zone, the strip under constant drone and artillery threat, runs 6 to 9 miles (10 to 15 kilometers) or farther. The Financial Times mapped that zone in February and found that an unmanned ground vehicle is sometimes the only way to get a wounded soldier out. Ground robots struggle through mud and craters, and rivers, mines and drones can stop them outright. KVN told the Associated Press that same-day retrieval is not always possible in his unit’s area. “Covering 10 kilometers in minutes would be a drastic change on the front line,” he said. Both commanders are identified only by call sign, in line with Ukrainian military protocol.

SkyFall Built StarGate to Fly on Starlink and AI When GPS Is Jammed

SkyFall rates StarGate at a 40 mph (65 kph) cruise and a 65 mph (105 kph) top speed. A pilot flies it by hand over Starlink and SkyFall’s own L-Link system, and SkyFall says AI functions keep it navigating when GPS is jammed, spoofed or unavailable.

If both links drop, SkyFall says the drone plots its own route back to a safe area. It carries thermal cameras for night missions and is built to fly in rain and snow. Preparing it for flight takes about 10 minutes. The range is about 9 miles (15 kilometers) one way, and SkyFall gave AP no round-trip figure.

The enclosed stretcher pod sits under StarGate's center frame. Photo credit: SkyFall

The design changed several times over the year of development. The arms now detach for transport, and the cabin is built around a medical-grade stretcher. A Western comparison is the gas-hydraulic Flowcopter FC-100, which U.S. soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment tested with a full-weight dummy at Sabre Strike 2026 in Poland in May. That test was an exercise, while StarGate goes to a unit in combat.

KVN says his unit needs at least a month flying StarGate before it can produce meaningful numbers on its success rate. He calls it a completely new method of evacuation and says it is too early to judge. SkyFall confirmed the evaluation but declined to disclose results.

SkyFall estimates each system will cost at least $50,000, depending on configuration, and wants to build up to 1,000 a month by the end of 2026, about 11 weeks from now.

AP’s headline, as syndicated to member papers, called StarGate Ukraine’s first aerial drone to evacuate wounded soldiers. In May, Militarnyi reported that Ukrainian forces were testing an unnamed heavy multicopter carrying a person playing a casualty, and neither the unit nor the maker was identified. Soldiers who spoke to Euromaidan Press about that test called aerial evacuation a niche option that would need heavy cover from FPV attacks. “How long will this thing survive, with a person on board?” asked Electric, a drone expert with the 93rd Brigade.

DroneXL’s Take

I want this drone built even if the first month goes badly. A wounded soldier in the kill zone can wait weeks for a ride out, and a $50,000 aircraft that brings back even a handful of them has earned its price. But the bar for StarGate is higher than for anything else SkyFall makes, because a shot-down StarGate takes the soldier on the stretcher down with it. In May, Electric put the working life of SkyFall’s own Vampire at about 10 flights. So far StarGate has netted one FPV on a test field with a weighted stretcher aboard, and the lost-arm flight is SkyFall’s own account. KVN’s month of data will be the first combat evidence either way. SkyFall should publish it, good or bad, before it starts building 1,000 of these a month.

Sources: Associated Press, Militarnyi, Euromaidan Press.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FCC Moves to Shut Out Chinese Labs, DroneSense Adds LAANC, DJI Dock 4

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:07:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. The FCC is moving to shut out Chinese test labs, Versaterm is bringing LAANC into DroneSense, and DJI has launched the Dock 4 with automatic battery swaps. Let’s get to it.

The FCC Votes October 29 on Cutting Off Every Lab in Mainland China

First up, the FCC will vote on October 29 on an order that ends recognition of every test lab in mainland China. The cutoff date is December 1, 2028. Every phone, camera, router and other electronic device needs FCC authorization before it can be imported into the US.

Private labs do that testing, and interestingly, Chinese labs tested 82% of the devices that applied in 2025, according to the FCC’s draft order. US labs tested less than 4%. That means out of the 46,402 devices that applied, 38,491 were tested in mainland China.

Now, this doesn’t change the Chinese drone ban. Foreign-made drones went on the Covered List back in December 2025, and no new grants are possible, no matter who tests them. But this is going to hit products that can still get approval, like the DJI Osmo series, chargers, accessories, and really any other brand’s device that performs its testing in China. DroneXL broke down the full draft order when the FCC published it.

DroneSense Users Can Request LAANC Approval Without Leaving the App

Next, Versaterm has built LAANC authorization directly into DroneSense, so public safety agencies can now request airspace approval through the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability without ever leaving the app they already use to manage and dispatch drones. That connection runs through Aloft, which Versaterm acquired back in February.

So, DroneSense is now an FAA-approved Supplemental Data Service Provider (SDSP). The goal here is speed for drone as first responder programs, and that matters in search and rescue and on calls near airports.

Now, it doesn’t appear at this time that this is Special Governmental Interest (SGI) approval through LAANC, just LAANC approval. And as a reminder for those of you in public safety, the integrated workflow does not mean guaranteed approval. You still have to meet the FAA requirements, and you still have to actually get the approval.

Currently, there’s no rollout date for this. So, for those of you using DroneSense, you may need to reach out to see when this is going to go live.

DJI Dock 4 Swaps Batteries in 25 Seconds, but It Won’t Reach the US

On the hardware side, DJI has launched the Dock 4 and the Matrice 5TD. The Dock 4 is the first DJI dock with automatic battery swaps, where earlier docks only charged the pack inside the drone. DJI says the swap takes 25 seconds, and landing to takeoff takes 45 seconds.

So, that’s less than a minute on the ground. The Matrice 5TD flies up to 59 minutes per battery. It has three 50-megapixel cameras, a thermal camera, lidar, and millimeter-wave radar. The dock holds three spare batteries and charges up to two at a time.

With the Covered List in place, though, there’s no path to US sale or use. So, while this may be a great upgrade for some folks who use the Dock 3 or Dock 2, it’s not going to be available in the US.

And the conversation continues on Post Flight, where we’ll discuss these stories uncensored in the premium community. The link’s in the description, and we’ll see you on Monday for the live Q&A. Have a great weekend.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full weekly UAS news update on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Portland Votes 11-0 Toward Drone Hub Pause as Amazon Cancels Meeting

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:46:00 GMT

Portland City Council voted 11-0 on Wednesday, October 14, to start the state process for a possible moratorium on facilities that support commercial delivery drones. The resolution tells the city attorney to notify Oregon’s land-use agency that the council may consider a pause. Councilor Loretta Smith was absent. The resolution names no company, but the project behind the resident outcry it cites is Amazon’s planned Prime Air drone center at its North Schmeer Road warehouse in North Portland, which DroneXL reported in September.

Amazon’s first scheduled meeting with city planners, an October 20 pre-application conference, was canceled at Amazon’s request and has not been rescheduled, Portland Permitting & Development spokesperson Ken Ray confirmed Thursday. In September, Amazon told the Portland Business Journal it planned to start flying in Portland in early 2027. DroneXL’s Portland drone delivery guide has the filings so far.

The city may already have a process that fits. Hoodline reported this week that the permitting office treats Amazon’s drones as helicopters under the zoning code, which would mean a public hearing and a noise board review. Planner correspondence quoted in the council’s own testimony file says the conditional use criteria may not work for a drone facility.

Portland’s Vote Authorizes a 45-Day State Notice and Pauses Nothing Yet

Resolution 37754 authorizes notice to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development under ORS 197.520. The notice must reach the state at least 45 days before the council’s final moratorium hearing. The resolution says the notice starts that clock but adopts no moratorium.

DroneXL has not confirmed when the notice was sent. If it went out October 15, the day after the vote, the 45th day is Sunday, November 29 (16 days left in October plus 29 in November), the earliest a final hearing could be held. Only the full council can adopt a moratorium.

District 2 Councilors Sameer Kanal and Elana Pirtle-Guiney introduced the resolution, and Pirtle-Guiney described it as a “step back from a pause,” OregonLive reported.

The later vote has a high bar. ORS 197.520 lets a city pause land development for reasons other than a shortage of public facilities only on a “demonstration of compelling need.” For urban land, the council must find in writing that existing development rules are “inadequate to prevent irrevocable public harm,” and say why other methods won’t work. A moratorium on those grounds lasts at most 120 days. Each extension needs another hearing and its own findings, and no extension can run longer than six months.

Land use is the route Oregon leaves open. ORS 837.385 reserves the regulation of drone ownership and operation to the Legislative Assembly unless a state statute says otherwise, and bars cities from making their own rules on it. Portland can’t regulate the flights, so it is working on the ground they start from.

Every Written Comment in the Council File Backs the Pause

The council’s written testimony file holds 16 entries from 15 people in Kenton, Arbor Lodge, Roseway, Cathedral Park and other neighborhoods. Every one backs the resolution or a moratorium, including one that leaves the position box blank and ends “Yes on the moratorium.”

They keep returning to noise, privacy and wildlife. Cathedral Park’s neighborhood association adds migrating birds along the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Messages about these facilities have been the single most common topic reaching the District 2 councilors since September 28, the resolution’s impact statement says.

Jessica Marquez, a Kenton resident who testified Wednesday, told the council the facilities are “a new kind of land use,” “closer to a small airport than a warehouse,” according to OregonLive. Kenton’s boundaries reach right up to the Amazon site, the paper noted. Marquez cited reports of “immediate deterioration in livability” where Amazon has started deliveries, without naming a town. The best-documented case DroneXL has covered is Richardson, Texas, where a resident’s tracker logged 52 drones over one yard in a day in September. The FAA’s environmental decision covering that hub analyzed up to 1,000 flights a day.

Amazon has characterized customer response as “overwhelmingly positive,” OregonLive reported, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment from OPB. On the federal side the public record is empty. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, last updated October 14, listed no Portland document when DroneXL checked it on October 16. Under the FAA’s July national assessment a site may never get one, and Amazon’s operating authorization requests are not public. Its only Oregon entries cover Amazon’s Pendleton test range. Oregon is also one of the 15 states suing the FAA over that national clearance.

An Amazon MK30 over a residential neighborhood in Arizona. Residents who wrote to Portland's council asked what repeated flights like this would mean for North Portland. Photo credit: Amazon

Hoodline Reports Portland Treats Amazon’s Drones as Helicopters

Portland Permitting & Development has determined that Amazon’s drones must be treated as helicopters under city zoning rules, Hoodline reported on October 14. The outlet did not name its source. OPB, KATU and OregonLive did not report it, and DroneXL has not seen a city document stating it.

The Cathedral Park Neighborhood Association’s letter in the council file, which opposes the Amazon facility, describes the same classification under Chapter 33.243 and asks planners to keep it there.

That chapter sets a high bar of its own. In Portland’s industrial zones, a helicopter landing facility is a conditional use, and a new one goes through a Type III land-use review, the city’s hearing process. Before the applicant can even file, the chapter requires approval from the city’s Noise Review Board and provisional approval from the state’s aeronautics division.

The planners themselves are not sure the fit is good. Roseway resident Evan Livingston’s testimony quotes correspondence obtained through a public records request in which staff, reviewing a drone delivery proposal this year, wrote: “We aren’t sure that the conditional use approval criteria work well for a drone type of facility.” Kanal made the same point on Wednesday. “There is no specific land-use structure with this type of facility in mind,” he said, according to OregonLive, adding that a moratorium would keep current code from being applied “in an imperfect way, and a way that may be really hard to undo.”

Amazon asked for the October 20 conference to be canceled on Tuesday, the day before the vote, OPB reported. None of the four outlets that reported the cancellation (OPB, OregonLive, KATU and Hoodline) carried a reason from Amazon when DroneXL reviewed them on October 16.

Residents who want to raise a concern with Amazon directly can call 1-888-280-4331 or use Amazon’s customer-service chat, choosing “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do about Amazon drones covers the rest, and the Amazon Prime Air tracker lists the hubs and incidents DroneXL has documented.

DroneXL’s Take

Portland is right to treat a drone hub as an aviation facility and not a warehouse. An MK30 weighs up to 83 pounds at takeoff, flies on six motors and carries no parachute in any of Amazon’s FAA filings. Marquez’s small-airport comparison is closer to the truth than anything in a warehouse permit.

DroneXL supports drone delivery where the payload justifies the flight, like medication or a defibrillator. A phone charger to a backyard in Kenton is a harder sell, and the crane strikes in Tolleson showed what happens when an MK30 without a parachute stops flying.

I think the moratorium is the weaker of Portland’s two tools. ORS 197.520 makes the council prove in writing that its existing rules can’t prevent irrevocable public harm, and if Hoodline’s report holds, the helicopter chapter already puts a hearing and a noise review in front of Amazon. That makes the finding harder to write. I’d spend the next 45 days on a drone section built on the helicopter chapter, one that asks for the flight counts, the noise data and the routes a hearings officer would need to see.

Sources: City of Portland, Resolution 37754, Portland City Council written testimony, Document 2026-374, Portland City Code Chapter 33.243, ORS 197.520, ORS 837.385, OregonLive, OPB, KATU, Hoodline, FAA.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FCC Files Pentagon's Sealed DJI Letters, Says Ban Didn't Rely on Them

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:28:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday placed eight letters from the Pentagon to Congress into the record of DJI’s Covered List proceeding, and the only part anyone outside the government can read is three paragraphs that name DJI and identify no specific threat from it. The classified annex, which the Pentagon says holds its analysis, went in under seal. The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau also wrote that it did not rely on these letters when it added DJI to the Covered List.

Sean Hollister at The Verge spotted the filing on Thursday and wrote that it “sure would be nice if these congresspeople would say why DJI is a threat.” I read all eight pages. They are the same letter eight times, signed by Michael P. Cadenazzi, Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy, and the Pentagon told the FCC in an April 6 memo that the report and its classified annex were submitted to Congress on April 3, 2026. The FCC’s notice points to that memo as the filing in which the Pentagon referenced these letters. The FCC had added DJI to the Covered List on December 22, 2025.

The Public Pages Name DJI And Describe No Specific Threat

Each letter runs three paragraphs. The first paraphrases Section 1709 and names DJI. The second says the government has clear national security concerns that foreign drone producers could harm U.S. persons, and announces a classified annex. The third says identical letters went to the other committees.

The letter to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, as filed in ET Docket 26-22. The block above the letterhead and the signature are redacted on all eight pages. Image credit: Department of War, via FCC ECFS

The second paragraph carries the whole public case. The letter calls itself “a national security agency determination and response,” and the filing offers nothing after that beyond the concern that foreign producers of drones or drone components could do harm, plus a promise that the annex “will be transmitted over secure communications systems.” The public version shows no date. The signature is blacked out, and so is the block above the letterhead.

That one sentence of substance is not new. The December 21 determination that the FCC published as Appendix B to its listing notice contains the same sentence, almost word for word: the government “has clear national security concerns that entities subject to the jurisdiction of foreign countries, including those listed in Sec. 1709 of the FY25 NDAA, could leverage their roles as the producer of a UAS or UAS critical component to directly harm U.S. persons.” The Pentagon’s Section 1709 report repeats it, swaps in the full title of the act, and adds the annex.

The chairs are Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker, Tom Cotton and Rand Paul in the Senate, and Mike Rogers, Rick Crawford, Andrew Garbarino and Brett Guthrie in the House, with Maria Cantwell, Jack Reed, Mark Warner, Gary Peters, Adam Smith, Jim Himes, Bennie Thompson and Frank Pallone copied as ranking members. That is where Hollister’s count of 16 lawmakers comes from. Section 1709 names Autel Robotics in the subparagraph right after DJI. The letters never name Autel, though their second paragraph covers entities “listed in section 1709,” a list that includes Autel, and the FCC filed them in Autel’s docket (ET Docket 26-23) as well as DJI’s (ET Docket 26-22).

Both sides let typos through. Each page spells it “Unties States,” the Crawford letter goes to the “Permenent Select Committee on Intelligence,” and the FCC’s own notice describes Cadenazzi as the “Assistant Security of War.” The PDF’s metadata says it came off a Xerox office copier on October 7, the day the FCC’s system logged it as received from the department.

The Pentagon’s Letters Went To Congress 102 Days After The Ban

Section 1709 gave national security agencies until December 23, 2025 to decide whether DJI and Autel pose an unacceptable risk, then 30 days to report to Congress. The FCC listed DJI on December 22 on a White House interagency determination. The Pentagon says it sent the letters April 3, 2026.

The December 22 public notice rests the listing on a National Security Determination the FCC received on December 21 from “an Executive Branch interagency body” convened by the White House. A footnote says the statute asks for a determination by an appropriate national security agency rather than an interagency body, and that the law is satisfied because several such agencies concurred. The determination’s public summary is about securing the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics and about building a domestic industrial base. It makes no finding about DJI by name and reaches DJI through one sentence that folds in everything Section 1709(a)(1) lists.

The Department of War’s one-page opposition memo of April 6, which DroneXL covered at the time, said the department gave full weight to classified and unclassified information during the determination process, and that this information, including a classified annex, went to the committees under Section 1709(b)(1)(B). That memo is the source of the April 3 date, which is 102 days after the FCC’s listing. If the December 21 interagency paper is the determination Section 1709 describes, the 30-day reporting window closed on January 20, 2026, and the letters arrived 73 days after that. If the Pentagon’s own letter is the determination, as its text says, the determination postdates the ban by more than three months.

The bureau filed the letters on October 14 under Public Notice DA 26-1106 and wrote that it “did not rely upon these materials” when it made the related additions to the Covered List. DJI’s Ninth Circuit petition and its January 21 petition for reconsideration both argue that no appropriate national security agency ever made the specific determination the statute requires. The Ninth Circuit denied the FCC’s motion to dismiss on May 28 and paused the case while the Commission acts on that petition, with DJI’s opening brief due November 2 and the FCC’s answer a month later.

Rick Scott Says He Read The Classified Report And It Covers Autel

Senator Rick Scott told Chairman Carr on October 14 that he objects to DJI’s petition and Autel’s application for review, and the FCC filed the letter Thursday. Scott, who sponsored the bill behind Section 1709, says he has read the classified report and it finds both companies an unacceptable risk.

The four-page letter says Congress spent years on DJI through classified briefings from the intelligence community and the Department of War, plus public hearings, and it walks through the record: a 2017 Immigration and Customs Enforcement bulletin, DJI’s 2020 addition to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, Treasury’s December 2021 listing, the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list from October 2022, and Autel’s Entity List and 1260H designations in 2024 and 2025. Scott also argues that Chinese subsidies since 2015 have driven American drone makers out of business.

On the report itself, Scott confirms the sequence the dates already show. The Department of War transmitted the classified report to the committees after DJI and Autel were added to the Covered List, he writes, and it details the threats posed by both companies. “I have read and agree with the analysis detailed in the classified report,” he adds. The public cover letters name only DJI, and Scott’s letter says in plain words that the sealed material addresses Autel. Autel told the FCC in May that it was listed on classified material it never saw and on complaints originally aimed at DJI.

The FCC entered Scott’s letter in both dockets on October 15 under Public Notice DA 26-1112, one day after the Pentagon’s.

DroneXL’s Take

The FCC’s sentence that it did not rely on these letters is the most useful line the government has put in this docket, because as I read it, it settles what the ban rests on. The ban rests on the December paper, which argues from World Cup and Olympic security, cartel and battlefield drone use, and the domestic industrial base, and which reaches DJI only through Section 1709’s list. The letter the Pentagon calls its Section 1709 determination went to Congress in April, after the fact, and its one public sentence of substance was copied out of that December paper. Nine years after the ICE bulletin Scott cites, a recycled sentence is everything the Pentagon’s Section 1709 report says in public.

The Pentagon says it weighed the same classified material during the December determination, and Scott says he has read the classified report and agrees with it. But the D.C. Circuit ruled in August that the Pentagon’s central blacklist finding against DJI, that it contributes to China’s defense industrial base, has no publicly stated rationale at all, and a listing that blocks every new DJI model from U.S. authorization, Mini and Matrice alike, cannot run on “trust us” indefinitely. If the annex holds something specific, the government has had since April to say so in a sentence that survives declassification, and so far it has published a redaction bar instead.

My read is that the FCC filed the Pentagon’s letters and Scott’s within a day of each other because it is tidying the record before it rules on DJI’s petition, with DJI’s opening brief due in the Ninth Circuit on November 2. Watch whether the Commission rules before that brief lands, and whether DJI’s lawyers put the FCC’s own sentence on the first page of their filing, which is where I would put it.

Sources: FCC ECFS filing 26110081553, Department of War letters to Congress, FCC Public Notice DA 26-1106, FCC Public Notice DA 26-1112, Sen. Rick Scott letter to Chairman Carr, October 14, 2026, Department of War opposition memorandum, April 6, 2026, FCC Public Notice DA 25-1086, Public Law 118-159, Section 1709, The Verge

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

nuWay Ag's Yoder Takes FAA Drone Suspension Over Deer and Sled Lifts

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:16:00 GMT

Mike Yoder, co-owner of Ohio agricultural drone company nuWay Ag, says he has agreed to a 180-day FAA suspension of his remote pilot certificate. He announced the settlement in a video posted October 13 that passed 300,000 views in two days. Yoder also founded Drone Deer Recovery, which lost its 2025 First Amendment challenge to Michigan’s drone hunting law.

The case grew out of three of his own YouTube videos: a heavy-lift drone hauling a deer carcass out of the woods, a drone lifting logs off a tree job, and one pulling a person on a sled. Yoder expects his certificate back around April 2027. Until then he cannot act as remote pilot in command, which rules out flying anything over 55 pounds.

He says he spent about a year asking the FAA for a legal way to fly those lifts before the case turned into enforcement. The FAA inspector who first contacted him in September 2024 said the deer work did not look like agriculture under his exemption, and could not say what would cover it.

Part 137 Covers Dispensing, and the FAA Says Deer and Tree Lifts Don’t Qualify

Drones over 55 pounds can’t fly under Part 107, so ag operators like nuWay fly them under an FAA exemption plus a Part 137 certificate, which covers dispensing pesticides, fertilizer, seed and similar substances. Hauling a deer carcass or a log dispenses nothing.

That is the definition in 14 CFR 137.3, and Yoder plays an FAA official reading it aloud in the video. At a later informal meeting, Yoder’s side argued that moving a generator or cutting a tree can be farm work, pointing to growers who raise Christmas trees. The FAA held to the definition.

The 2024 call was informal. Yoder plays a recording in which the inspector says he found the nuWay channel while looking into a complaint about someone else, and that he would be watching it. Asked what exemption would cover deer lifts, the inspector answered: “I just don’t know what it would land under.”

Yoder’s team then petitioned the FAA for heavy-lift work. Each round took about three months to come back, he says, and each asked for more information about the operation. About a year after the call, Yoder told his partners they would keep moving forward and posted a tree-removal job (he used to work as an arborist). He believes the inspector was still watching, because the formal investigation followed.

Yoder Says FAA Letter Named Him, His Cousin and Both Companies

According to Yoder, a certified FAA letter cited all three videos. It pursued four parties: Yoder, his cousin and business partner Jason Miller, nuWay Ag and Drone Deer Recovery. He recalls proposed civil penalties of around $70,000, and the FAA also proposed suspending his private pilot certificate.

The FAA’s initial proposal targeted that airplane certificate rather than his remote pilot certificate, Yoder says, treating the flights as Part 91 operations and alleging careless or reckless operation. He disputes that, saying every flight was on private land with nobody present who was not part of the job. The sled video, he says, tested whether a large drone could tow a big-wave surfer in a rescue, for a professional lifeguard he was working with.

The informal conference the letter offered stopped before it reached the substance. Yoder was recording the video call, and the FAA’s principal operations inspector said the agency would not accept a recorded meeting, that a response could only come in writing, and that he needed to seek further guidance. The FAA later asked to meet in person at the Cleveland Flight Standards District Office. Yoder hired attorneys, and an informal meeting did take place, which he says didn’t get far.

Yoder Says He Took a Drone Suspension To Protect His Airplane Certificate

Yoder says he accepted the 180-day remote suspension to keep a reckless-operation finding off his private pilot certificate, because he may want a commercial pilot certificate in the future. The FAA had already cut its proposed private certificate suspension from 275 days to 180, he says.

He also says he offered to pay double the proposed penalty against Miller if the FAA left his remote certificate alone, and the FAA declined. The video does not say what became of the proposed penalties against Miller, nuWay Ag or Drone Deer Recovery.

Yoder can still fly smaller drones under 14 CFR 107.12(a)(2), which lets a person without a valid certificate manipulate the controls of a small drone under the direct supervision of a remote pilot in command who can immediately take over. Heavy-lift spraying and demos are out. Yoder says the FAA has 20 days from the video’s posting to show the suspension on his record, and that the video’s release is part of the deal.

nuWay sells a Part 137 Fast Pass program at $800 a month for 55-pound-plus spray drones. It lets qualified custom applicators spray as contractors under nuWay Ag’s existing Part 137 certificate while their own application is processed. The video does not say whether the settlement affects that company certificate.

Yoder says he has hired attorneys to write new exemption petitions for practical farm lifts, such as flying an irrigation pump to a center pivot or a tire to a tractor. Between those petitions and fighting the FAA, he puts his attorney costs at tens of thousands of dollars. “We are nowhere further than we were when we started,” he says.

Rescue Crews Hit the Same 55-Pound Line Unless They Fly as Government

A search and rescue crew flying a heavy-lift drone to a team in the field or a stranded person runs into Yoder’s problem unless it flies as a government agency. Above 55 pounds, a civilian operator needs an exemption written for that operation, and an ag exemption is not one.

Government agencies have the cleanest path. A sheriff’s office, fire department or state agency can fly as a public aircraft operation under an FAA Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA), and 49 U.S.C. 40125 lists search and rescue as a governmental function. The agency certifies its own pilots and aircraft, so a DJI FlyCart 30, rated at 209 pounds (95 kg) maximum takeoff weight, can carry rope, radios or a medical kit to a team if the COA covers it. That status belongs to the operator, not the mission, so a volunteer nonprofit doesn’t get it for doing rescue work.

Civilian teams can fly under Part 107 as long as drone and payload together stay under 55 pounds. Dropping gear is legal if it creates no undue hazard to people or property under 14 CFR 107.23(b), but 107.36 bars hazardous material, which takes in signal flares and compressed-gas cylinders. The Ocean County M300 that dropped a rescue tube into a rip current in July worked inside that weight class.

A civilian spray operator who flies an ag drone over 55 pounds to a rescue is outside Part 137, the same way Yoder’s deer lift was. The FAA’s emergency Special Governmental Interest process can approve search and rescue flights within minutes for operations in visual line of sight, but the FAA describes each approval as an amendment to an existing COA or remote pilot certificate. Its page, checked October 15, says nothing about widening a Section 44807 exemption.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA read its own rule correctly. Part 137 is a dispensing rule, a deer carcass is not a dispensing load, and Yoder posted the tree job after an inspector had told him his deer lifts didn’t look like agriculture under his exemption. I can’t defend how the FAA handled the year between that 2024 call and the letter, though. A farmer who asks the regulator how to legally fly an irrigation pump to a center pivot should get a process, and by his account Yoder got an inspector who didn’t know and a petition queue that came back roughly every three months with more questions. When the only answer to “how do I do this legally” is “I don’t know,” enforcement becomes the policy. Looking at the FAA’s 2025 enforcement report and DETER, its fast track from violation to penalty, I can see which half of that the agency is putting its effort into. If you fly a 55-pound-plus ag drone, read what your exemption actually authorizes before it lifts anything that isn’t being dispensed, a rescue load included, until the FAA writes the rule its inspector couldn’t name in 2024.

Sources: nuWay Ag on YouTube, 14 CFR 137.3, 14 CFR 107.12, 49 U.S.C. 40125, FAA Emergency Situations, DJI FlyCart 30 specs, nuWay Ag Part 137 Fast Pass

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Missouri Fire Drone Caught a 200-Acre Blaze Jumping Its Line

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:42:00 GMT

A drone from the Logan-Rogersville Fire Protection District showed Highlandville firefighters on Monday, October 12, that a 200-acre fire in Stone County, Missouri, had jumped across a river. The fire was burning along Curbow Road, and the wind had picked up to 30 mph.

Highlandville Fire Chief Stephens had never seen a drone at a fire before Monday. The aircraft that impressed him is a DJI Matrice, the airframe visible in KY3’s footage, and Logan-Rogersville now wants a second drone with a longer flight time at an estimated $60,000. Highlandville is looking into getting one of its own.

Logan-Rogersville’s Drone Spotted the River Crossing First

Chris Wescoat, one of the district’s certified pilots, flew the drone over the Curbow Road fire. It found hotspots and tracked the flames on the far bank, which became a second fire for Highlandville and other departments to fight. Stephens says the cause of the original fire is still unknown.

Assistant Fire Chief Grant Peters told KY3 the crew saw quickly that “they had a fire that had jumped their line.” Stephens said the aerial view showed where his structures were and which direction to send engines. “It let us know where we needed to send resources quicker,” he said.

A Water Rescue Drone Now Flies Every Week

KY3 now puts the Logan-Rogersville drone at $30,000, bought with grant money for water rescues. It has flown at least once a week since, adding fires and crash scenes to the job. At the September 2025 launch, Peters priced the full kit at $32,000 to $33,000.

KY3’s launch report listed a 200x zoom camera, night vision, radar, a spotlight, a rangefinder and a drop mechanism that can release a flotation device to a swimmer. The first search went to the Finley River, where Ozark Fire asked for help finding a missing kayaker and the drone located the paddler within minutes. The district shares the drone with mutual aid partners including Ozark, Battlefield, Nixa and Strafford, and every pilot holds an FAA Part 107 certificate. It expects six certified pilots by the end of 2026, up from five at launch.

The DJI controller screen during a Logan-Rogersville flight, showing two battery readouts at 75 and 76 percent. Photo credit: KY3

None of KY3’s three reports names the model, but the footage shows a DJI Matrice 300-series airframe with a cylindrical radar unit on top and a Zenmuse H20-series camera underneath. The 200x zoom and night vision KY3 listed fit the H20T, the version of that camera with a thermal sensor. The controller screen shows two battery readouts, 75 and 76 percent, from the dual-battery setup the airframe uses.

The FCC Wants to Stop Sales of Foreign Thermal Drones

New DJI models have had no path to US sale since the FCC added foreign-made drones to its Covered List on December 22, 2025. Older authorized models can still be sold, and a July 21 notice in FCC Docket 26-189 proposes ending that for “military-grade” drones, including thermal models.

The notice lists seven capabilities that would earn the label, and LiDAR and docking stations are two more of them. Pilot Institute’s Greg Reverdiau walked through all seven for DroneXL in August; Pilot Institute is a DroneXL partner. DJI asked the two FCC bureaus to rescind the notice on September 2, the day comments closed, and the bureaus have not finalized it. KY3’s report does not say which drone the district wants next.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d like the bureaus writing Docket 26-189 to watch KY3’s clip. Finding hotspots on a brush fire is about the most civilian job a thermal camera does, and their definition files that camera under “military-grade.” Logan-Rogersville’s current drone keeps flying whatever they decide, because the notice covers sales and not aircraft already in service. The rule would hit the next purchase instead, the $60,000 drone Logan-Rogersville is waiting to fund and the first one Highlandville is looking into. Rural districts buy on grants and budget lines, and taking foreign thermal drones off the shelf shrinks what that money can buy. The FCC should drop thermal imaging from its list.

Source: KY3

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

CBP Logged 37,000 Border Drone Flights In FY2026, Down From 42,000

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:32:00 GMT

U.S. Customs and Border Protection detected more than 37,000 drone flights near the border in fiscal 2026, down from more than 42,000 the year before, a CBP spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement published Wednesday. CBP presented both numbers as the scale of a cartel threat that includes monitoring law enforcement, scouting crossing points and coordinating smuggling.

The military describes a rising trend. Joint Task Force-Southern Border counted 378 drone incursions in 30 days between August and September and said the number was climbing. CBP’s statement doesn’t say which border its flight counts cover. In February, a CBP official put the fiscal 2025 count for the US-Mexico border alone at 34,682.

Cartels Fly Commercial Drones To Learn Border Agents’ Routines

Most cartels rely on off-the-shelf commercial drones, and at the border their main jobs are surveillance and logistics, says Austin Doctor, who directs strategic initiatives at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Armed attacks are documented more often in Mexico.

Doctor told Fox News Digital that cartels “look to establish a pattern of life for U.S. security personnel.” He said larger agricultural drones are starting to appear, and that cartels keep changing their designs for bigger payloads and better resistance to countermeasures. NCITE research identifies the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) as a major driver of drone adoption, though use has spread across cartels. NCITE’s February report counted 221 weaponized drone incidents in Mexico from 2021 to 2025, with CJNG holding the largest attributed share.

Doctor said Tijuana is among the exceptions to the pattern of attacks farther inside Mexico. A year ago tonight, on October 15, 2025, drones dropped homemade explosives packed with nails and metal fragments on the Baja California attorney general’s anti-kidnapping unit there. Attorney General María Elena Andrade said the blasts damaged vehicles in the courtyard and injured no one.

Mexico Detained An Alleged Tijuana Drone Operator After A CBP Tip

Mexico’s Defense Secretariat says soldiers used CBP information to detect a drone that flew into Tijuana from the United States on September 14. Patrols detained a man the ministry calls its presumed operator in the Nido de las Águilas neighborhood. They seized a handgun, ammunition and the drone’s controller.

He was handed to authorities to determine his legal status, according to the Defense Secretariat’s account, which says the drone was watching routes used to smuggle people into the US. The detection came during Águila Alta, a binational counter-drone operation on the Tijuana-San Diego line, with each country’s forces working its own side, scheduled for September 7 to 21. On September 18, Defense Secretary Ricardo Trevilla said four drones had been disabled so far, all on the Mexican side, and that none carried weapons or explosives, Uno TV reported. Fox News Digital, citing the ministry, puts the operation’s total at five.

Mexico has since moved counter-drone gear east. On September 26, Coast Guard personnel exchanged gunfire with people on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande near Garceno, Texas, the service said. President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexican forces recorded no shots from Mexican territory. About a week later, the Army and National Guard sent 500 troops to five Tamaulipas border towns, backed by UH-60 helicopters and mobile and semi-fixed counter-drone systems, Ruptura 360 reported. Separately, the Navy said on October 3 that its Operation Sable had 159 personnel, 11 vehicles and two drones out of Matamoros.

CBP’s February Numbers Put 7,678 Of 42,360 Flights On The Canadian Border

The 42,000 figure matches the sum of two counts CBP gave for fiscal 2025. A CBP official told Cronkite News in February that the agency detected 34,682 drone flights within 500 meters of the US-Mexico border from October 2024 through September 2025, and 7,678 along the Canadian border, 42,360 combined.

CBP’s statement to Fox doesn’t say whether its “over 42,000” includes the Canadian border, and it gives no split for fiscal 2026. Fox ran both totals in a story about cartels on the southern border, and the same story notes that the number of cartel-operated drones is unknown. Neither CBP’s statement to Fox nor the February figures, as published, say how many of the flights CBP ties to criminal groups. The Mexican-border figure counts flights within 500 meters of the line, a band that takes in parts of El Paso and San Diego.

DroneXL’s Take

When I reported the military’s 378 count on October 6, I said Joint Task Force-Southern Border should publish its numbers monthly and by sector. CBP should do the same. In February a CBP official gave Cronkite News a Mexican-border figure for fiscal 2025, so the agency can release fiscal 2026’s the same way, split by border, with the share it attributes to cartels. A near-border flight count isn’t a cartel drone count. I’d expect a 500-meter band through El Paso to catch hobbyists and real estate shoots along with the drones scouting Border Patrol positions, and CBP’s published figures don’t separate them. By CBP’s own February numbers, the 42,000 it gave Fox appears to include 7,678 flights on the Canadian border. In my view, putting that number in a statement about Mexican cartels blurs the threat it is meant to measure. The 5,000-flight drop could have come from either border or from a change in how CBP counts, and I’d want to know which before anyone sets it next to the 75% decline military officials credited to the Army’s laser in the Rio Grande Valley.

Sources: Fox News Digital, Cronkite News, Mexico’s Defense Secretariat via Zeta Tijuana, Uno TV, Stars and Stripes, Ruptura 360, La Crónica de Hoy, Expansión

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Osmo Pocket 4P In Pearl White Launches October 20, US Gets A 404

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:25:00 GMT

DJI will launch the Osmo Pocket 4P in Pearl White on October 20, 2026, at 12 PM GMT (8 AM EDT). The company posted a 14-second teaser to its main YouTube channel this morning, titled “See More. Tell More.”, that calls the camera a “Dual-Lens Cinematic Pocket Gimbal Camera” and says the white model is “coming soon.” The clip shows a woman holding the white 4P out toward the lens on a city street.

The color is not new. DJI named Pearl White alongside classic black when the 4P launched worldwide on July 30, and outside China, October 20 puts the white model’s launch 82 days behind the black one. The teaser’s “Notify me” link points at DJI’s global teaser page. Opened from the United States this morning, that link redirected to DJI’s US site and stopped on a page reading “Sorry, the page was not found.”

Pearl White Went On Sale In China On September 16 With A Mica Coating

China got the white 4P first. IT Home reported DJI opened Pearl White sales there at 8 PM on September 16, at 3,799 yuan for the Standard Combo, the price DJI set for black in June. The grip and gimbal shell carry a custom pearlescent coating built on mica pigment.

IT Home says it goes on in several coats and bakes, shows no metallic sparkle, and shifts tone with the light and the viewing angle instead of reading as flat white. It also resists fingerprints and stains, according to the same report. Nothing inside changes. The white 4P keeps the 1-inch 20mm wide camera, the 60mm telephoto, the 4K/240fps slow motion and the 103GB of built-in storage DroneXL documented at the China launch on June 15.

The white unit had been in public for months before any of this. Notebookcheck reported it on June 2 from DJI’s “Light and Shadow 12 Years” event in Beijing. On July 30, CineD reported that “only the black version is available from day one,” with Pearl White to follow later. Today’s video is the first global date DJI has given. It carries no price, and the black Standard Combo launched at £529 / €599, with the Vlog Combo at £605 / €689.

DJI’s Notify Me Link Ends On A 404 Page In The United States

The teaser link’s dead end matches the rest of DJI’s US site, which returns the same 404 for the Osmo Pocket 4P and Pocket 4 product pages. The Pocket 3 page loads normally, because that camera kept the FCC authorization it held before DJI landed on the Covered List.

The link in the teaser’s description is tagged for DJI’s global campaign, and DroneXL followed it with a plain request and a full browser this morning. Both ended on the same US error page.

DJI has been on that list since December 22, 2025, which keeps new DJI hardware from the equipment authorization it needs for legal US sale. The Osmo Pocket 4 launched in April with no US price, and the 4P skipped the US again in July. Americans who want either camera have been buying through third-party sellers on Amazon. On July 29 DroneXL found the black 4P listed there at $980 from an importer, with a brand field that read SECUREX and a note that the unit had been activated before export.

DroneXL’s Take

I expect the white Pocket 4P to reach American buyers the way the black one did, through an importer charging a premium with no DJI warranty behind it. Both Pocket 4 models went that route this year, and a new color does nothing to the Covered List math. DJI is also in a Texas courtroom over the same US market. It sued Insta360 on June 11, claiming the Luna Pro and Luna Ultra copy the Osmo Pocket, and the Luna Ultra is the dual-lens pocket gimbal Americans can buy from a US retailer. DJI is paying lawyers to protect a US market it cannot sell its new Pockets into, and the Covered List is the reason.

Sources: DJI on YouTube, IT Home via ifeng, CineD, Notebookcheck

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DeLorean Joins Flying-Car Racing in a Series That Says 'Remote Today'

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:05:00 GMT

DeLorean Motor Company will field the United States team in the Airspeeder International Series, an electric flying-car racing championship, when its 2026-27 season opens in November. The company announced the DeLorean Airspeeder Team on Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and calls itself the first American constructor in flying-car racing.

In its first season the team races the Airspeeder Mk3C in DeLorean colors. A DeLorean aircraft for 2027-28 is to be designed with student engineering teams, including groups at UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech.

The pilot line-up will be named before the opener, the companies say. Airspeeder’s own homepage still describes its racing as “remote today, piloted tomorrow.”

DeLorean’s First Season Puts Its Name on Airspeeder’s Standard Racer

For 2026-27, DeLorean’s constructor role means “leading the design identity” of the Mk3C, the aircraft Airspeeder’s Adelaide-based sister company, Alauda Aeronautics, supplies to its teams. The announcement does not define the phrase or say who builds, owns or maintains the aircraft.

Autoweek describes the Mk3C as standardized and set apart by DeLorean-designed styling and branding. The launch photos show a silver body with the DeLorean and DMC logos, blue stripes and a USA flag behind the canopy. Airspeeder’s race series page says teams get their hardware from Alauda “as a turn-key solution” and are free to set strategy and draft pilots.

A DeLorean DMC-12 beside the team's Mk3C. Photo credit: DeLorean Airspeeder Team / Airspeeder

DeLorean chief brand officer Cameron Wynne pitched the deal as a long game. “People have pictured a DeLorean in the sky for forty years,” he said. In the full release he says DeLorean wants a hand in the regulatory, safety and compliance frameworks flying vehicles will need, and he says widespread use “remains over the horizon.” The release names no rival teams, no venue and no exact date. Airspeeder’s teams page lists Australia and Italia, a September release adds a New Zealand team, and Team Australia’s page says it races in South Australia in October 2026, a month before DeLorean’s November opener.

The Mk3C Comes From a Line Airspeeder Built to Fly With Nobody Aboard

Airspeeder unveiled the Mk3 in February 2021 as a remotely operated eVTOL. It is a 220-pound (100 kg) octocopter with a 96 kW powertrain, rated above 120 km/h (75 mph) and flown by a pilot on the ground. DeLorean’s release does not say whether anyone sits in the Mk3C.

In FAA terms, the 2021 Mk3 weighed four times the 55-pound ceiling of Part 107.

The same 2021 release promised “manned races scheduled in 2022,” and the race series page still promises 10 crewed teams by 2025. The crewed aircraft is the Mk4. Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority gave it an experimental flight certificate in September 2025, and Airspeeder showed it at The Bend Motorsport Park in South Australia in April 2026, where Team Australia and Team Italia flew Mk3C demonstrations, eVTOL Insights reported.

The DeLorean Airspeeder Team crew around the Mk3C. Photo credit: DeLorean Airspeeder Team / Airspeeder

DroneXL first covered Airspeeder in February 2021, when the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch reported on the crash of its Mk II scale model in West Sussex, England, on July 4, 2019. The remote pilot lost control of the 210-pound (95 kg) aircraft, and the kill switch had no effect. It climbed to about 8,000 feet into controlled airspace used by Gatwick arrivals and came down in a field about 130 feet (40 meters) from homes when the battery ran out. The AAIB found it had not been designed, built or tested to recognized standards.

DroneXL’s Take

My read is that DeLorean has put its name on a large racing drone for its first season, and drone pilots should take that as a compliment. Flying a fast multirotor through a course from the ground is our skill set, and the collision avoidance and 55-second battery swaps Airspeeder races with are drone technology. If you want to see a person sitting in a single-seat eVTOL today, look at the Jetson ONE flight along the California coast we covered in March, or the Pivotal BlackFly, with more than 1,000 crewed flights under the FAA’s Part 103 ultralight rules. Airspeeder promised crewed racing for 2022, and four years later its homepage still says remote today. The pilot line-up due before the November opener will show whether DeLorean’s flying car has anyone inside it.

Sources: Airspeeder (DeLorean Airspeeder Team announcement, Mk3 announcement, CASA certificate announcement), Autoweek, eVTOL Insights.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Skydio Says ISR Command Can Send X10D Target Grids to F-16s

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:26:00 GMT

Skydio launched ISR Command on October 13, software that lets one soldier fly two X10D drones from a single controller and share target tracks across the Army’s tactical networks. Skydio says it also lets the X10D pass target locations to platforms ranging from one-way attack drones to F-16s. The company announced it the same day it livestreamed from the Association of the U.S. Army’s AUSA 2026 meeting in Washington, and says it is available now. Neither the launch post nor the product page listed a price as of October 14.

CEO Adam Bry wrote on X the next day that the launch was a big step toward one of two national security objectives he set out for Skydio. He also wrote that ISR Command “breaks the 1:1 pilot:drone ratio to enable scalable 1:many operations.” Skydio’s own launch post puts the number at two aircraft per operator.

Skydio’s Documents Describe One Operator, Two Drones and a Battery Relay

Skydio’s launch post and product page describe one multi-drone workflow step by step: a two-aircraft relay. When the first X10D runs low on battery, ISR Command tells the operator to ready a second one. That drone flies itself out and takes over once both aircraft see the target.

The operator confirms the handoff with one tap on the same controller, and the first X10D flies home. Skydio’s launch post sums it up as “One controller. Two aircraft. Continuous eyes on the objective.” The ISR Command product page says autonomy lets each operator fly more aircraft but gives no number. Both pages say ISR Command orchestrates fleets of X10Ds, and as of October 14 neither describes one operator flying more than two.

The rest of the workflow is built to take work off that soldier. Objectives arrive as TAK markers before the drone is powered on, so the operator can review terrain and assign each aircraft a role without spending battery. The X10D launches in under 40 seconds and navigates with its onboard cameras when GNSS is jammed or spoofed. Subject tracking then locks onto a vehicle or a person, and the clip on Bry’s post shows an X10D following a vehicle down a dirt road with a feature Skydio calls Shadow.

The Army has named a related bottleneck. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Drone Dominance director, said in September that hardware is no longer the gap between the Army and squad-level drone warfare and that trained pilots are, as DroneXL reported at the time.

ISR Command shows two aircraft, Alpha and Bravo, on the same objective. Image credit: Skydio

Skydio Says ISR Command Lets the X10D Pass Target Locations to Strike Platforms

ISR Command embeds the X10D’s target location in live video, using MISB ST 0601 (STANAG 4609) for static targets and MISB ST 0903 for moving ones. Skydio says that makes the 4.72-pound (2.14 kg) X10D the smallest UAS on the market capable of delivering precise target locations to strike platforms.

Once a target is confirmed, the operator passes the grid and the camera stays on the target for battle damage assessment. The product page puts terrain-corrected crosshair coordinates on live video out to 3.1 miles (5 km).

The software is TAK-native and runs on the Skydio Controller, so markers and chat sync with other TAK users without a second device. Skydio also says it shares tracks with the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control system, NGC2. In June the Army picked Anduril to lead the NGC2 common data layer baseline on Anduril’s Lattice and Palantir’s Foundry, Breaking Defense reported. Skydio’s AUSA livestream listing promised one operator managing multiple aircraft while sharing data across TAK and Lattice.

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told senators in May that Ukraine’s Delta puts every drone and shooting platform on one network and that the Army’s does not, as DroneXL reported in August. I read Skydio’s TAK, NGC2 and Lattice language as a pitch aimed at that gap, and Army testing will show how much of it the software closes.

The X10D is the drone the Army ordered more than 2,500 of in March, in a $52 million-plus order Skydio called the largest single-vendor tactical sUAS order in Army history. Bry described the X10D then as a “hunter” that finds targets for one-way attack munitions. ISR Command is the fourth product in Skydio’s Command software line, after DFR Command and the Asset and Security Commands it launched at Ascend on September 23, where it also unveiled the F10 Lightrunner.

DroneXL’s Take

I think ISR Command is a useful product for the Army, and Skydio’s launch post is plain about what it does: it names one-way attack drones and F-16s as the receivers of the X10D’s target data. A small drone that holds a target and puts a precise grid on it is half of any strike, and I’d rather American units get that from an American drone.

Skydio’s principles page is less plain. Its Engagement and Responsible Use Principles, dated July 13, 2020, are still on its website as of October 14 and still say “We will not put weapons on our drones,” alongside a pledge to oppose fully autonomous lethal weapons. Nothing in the ISR Command materials puts a weapon on the X10D, though Army soldiers dropped live grenades from one in 2025 tests. In June Bry told The Verge he had gotten some things wrong on weapons. A company that markets its drone as the targeting half of a strike, with a CEO who says he got that question wrong, should update a 2020 page that still says it will not put weapons on its drones.

Sources: Skydio, Skydio ISR Command product page, Adam Bry on X, Skydio AUSA livestream, Breaking Defense.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon's Westborough Drones Need Own FAA Review, Markey and Warren Say

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:46:00 GMT

Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Jim McGovern and Lori Trahan asked Amazon and the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday, October 14, to put Prime Air’s proposed drone hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, through its own environmental assessment, with a public comment period, before any drone flies from it. One letter went to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and one to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, and both ask for a written answer by October 29.

The letters come 16 days after state lawmakers who represent the area wrote to Amazon. State Sen. Michael Moore and Reps. Hannah Kane and Kate Donaghue asked the company to pause on September 28, as DroneXL reported in Amazon Drone Hub Faces Pause Call From Lawmakers as State Sues FAA. By then, Westborough residents were circulating a phone script that named both senators and McGovern, as DroneXL reported the same day in its story on the resident survey.

The letters say Amazon is moving ahead without a site-specific environmental assessment. Amazon’s own airspace team told a Westborough room on September 23 that the FAA was already reviewing a site-level environmental filing for the hub.

Lawmakers Say No Earlier Drone Review Looked at New England

The lawmakers argue that the FAA’s July 28 nationwide finding rests on 23 earlier site reviews in 11 states, none of them in New England. Westborough’s historic town center, its forests and wetlands, and Massachusetts weather and daylight differ from the places those reviews covered, they write.

Both letters take the 23 from Section 3.9 of the FAA’s December 2025 draft, and the final assessment counts more than 20. The letter to Bedford asks the FAA to require the review, and the letter to Jassy asks Amazon to work with the FAA on one.

The second argument is local opposition. The letters cite the Moore letter, a resident survey with more than 1,200 responses and 92% opposed as of early October (a self-selected count, which DroneXL put at 853 responses on September 28), and Massachusetts’ place among the 15 states that sued the FAA in the Second Circuit on September 28.

For the community meeting on September 23, the letters cite DroneXL’s September 29 article and describe the event as one held “to authorize the zoning changes needed” for Amazon’s drones. The town’s Prime Air page says Amazon hosted it “to present the project, answer questions, and hear from residents,” and I was in that room for Amazon’s community meeting at the DoubleTree. No town board presided and nothing was put to a vote, though the letters are right that residents packed it. No zoning amendment for the pad is before the town. Westborough’s building commissioner ruled on August 26 that the drone operation is an accessory use of the fulfillment center, which sent the pad to the Planning Board for site-plan approval, and that ruling is what residents appealed, as DroneXL reported in Amazon Drone Pad Appeal Set for Nov. 2 as Westborough Drafts Bylaw.

The third argument is fire. The FAA’s final assessment lists hazardous materials among the categories it did not analyze in detail, because the operations are “not expected to include any activities that would use hazardous materials.” The letters answer that drone package delivery depends on lithium-ion batteries and cite the October 2025 collision in Tolleson, Arizona, where two MK30s hit a crane and one caught fire on the ground.

Markey, in a statement to MassLive and Boston.com, said Amazon cannot be allowed to “treat our skies like a testing ground.”

The FAA Is Already Reviewing Westborough Against Its National Study

Amazon files a separate environmental review for every new site, a member of its airspace team told the September 23 meeting. The FAA was reviewing Westborough’s. That review checks a hub’s noise data, delivery count and setbacks against the July 28 study, with no site-specific comment period.

The national analysis covers up to 1,150 average daily deliveries from one hub, with a 600-foot (183-meter) setback from noise-sensitive land at that volume and shorter setbacks for smaller hubs, as DroneXL reported when the FAA signed the nationwide finding. A hub past either limit, or one sharing airspace with hubs whose combined deliveries would pass 1,150, needs a more detailed noise analysis. The setback table counts each delivery between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. as ten. Amazon’s FAA approval allows up to 1,000 flights a day per site, and Tareq Wafaie, who presented the plan, called that ceiling aspirational for Westborough, where Amazon would start with about six drones and several hundred deliveries a day. The letter to Bedford asks for a full review even where a hub stays under those thresholds.

Two site-level consultations survive in the national assessment, and neither letter mentions them. Historic properties still get an individual Section 106 consultation in any state without a signed Programmatic Agreement, and Massachusetts is not among the eight states where the FAA has started negotiating one. Wildlife consultations with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stay site by site until a national agreement is signed.

The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Massachusetts or Westborough document when DroneXL checked it on October 14. The town’s Prime Air page says Amazon is seeking the site-specific FAA approvals it needs to fly from 64 Otis Street. Amazon did not immediately respond to Boston.com or MassLive, and none of Wednesday’s reports from Boston.com, MassLive, WBUR or the Telegram & Gazette carried an FAA response.

The local dates come first: Town Meeting votes on a drone bylaw on October 19, the Zoning Board of Appeals hears the appeal on November 2, and the Planning Board resumes on November 10. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists the hub as in review. Residents can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 or open the customer-service chat and pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery,” and DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what a town can still do once a hub is proposed.

DroneXL’s Take

The most useful answer Bedford could send by October 29, in my view, is the Westborough review the FAA already has open. Amazon’s team described it to a packed room in September, and nobody in Westborough can read it. The lawmakers asked for a new assessment with public comment, and I’d settle for the FAA publishing the noise data, delivery count and setback figures it is checking now, so the town can see whether the hub fits the national study.

The fire argument is narrower than the letters make it. As I read the assessment, its hazardous-materials category is about handling, disposal and contaminated ground, and battery safety on a flying aircraft is a Part 135 question. It is still a fair one. DroneXL’s position is that the MK30 is too heavy to fly consumer orders over homes without a parachute, and Tolleson is the record of what a collision does to one. Drones that carry medicine and lower it on a tether, the way Zipline’s P2 does, make the case for this technology. Five-pound consumer orders across a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) circle that takes in Westborough’s historic town center make the case against it.

Sources: Letter to Andy Jassy, October 14, 2026, Letter to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, October 14, 2026, FAA Final PEA and FONSI/ROD, July 28, 2026, Town of Westborough, Prime Air page, Boston.com, MassLive, Telegram & Gazette, WBUR.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Dock 4 Swaps Batteries in 25 Seconds, but Its Specs Skip the FCC

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:46:00 GMT

DJI Enterprise launched Dock 4 and the Matrice 5TD on October 14, 2026, and the dock is the first DJI has built that swaps the aircraft’s battery automatically. Every earlier DJI dock could only charge the pack inside the landed drone. DJI puts the swap at 25 seconds once the lid closes and the full turnaround, landing to takeoff, at 45 seconds. The Matrice 5TD flies up to 59 minutes on a pack, and DJI is selling the pair as a dock-as-first-responder (DFR) system for police, emergency crews, utilities and overnight security.

The launch confirms the Dock 4 name from a September leak and the Matrice 5TD’s registry weights, both in DroneXL’s October 8 teaser report. DJI published no price and says the dock is sold through its enterprise dealers.

Dock 4’s spec sheet lists transmitter power for Canada, the European Union, China and Japan. Dock 3’s sheet lists the same figures for the FCC.

Dock 4 Holds Three Spare Batteries and Charges Two at Once

Dock 4 has four battery compartments but holds no more than three packs, because the swap mechanism needs one empty slot. It charges two at a time, each from 15% to 95% in 27 minutes. A returning Matrice 5TD gets a fresh pack automatically when it lands below 79%.

The Matrice 5TD on Dock 4's landing pad in the rain. Photo credit: DJI Enterprise

Flight data moves to the dock during the swap. DJI’s launch blog adds two features aimed at DFR dispatch. A compatible third-party dispatch system, which the blog’s own Q&A frames as a 911 or dispatch system, can start a mission in FlightHub 2, but an operator has to confirm before the drone launches. Task Relay alternates two aircraft so one keeps covering a scene while the other turns around.

The Dock 4 FAQ also corrects the count in our teaser coverage: the render looked like a carousel of five or more bays, and the production dock has four. The packs also double as the dock’s backup power. Each one runs the dock for about 4.5 hours after a grid outage, and the dock can keep swapping on battery power as long as at least two packs are loaded. It cannot charge the aircraft until power returns.

Each pack is 260 Wh, against 149.9 Wh for the Matrice 4TD battery that Dock 3 charges in place. Dock 4 works only with the Matrice 5TD, so a 4TD fleet cannot move into the new dock. The new dock uses the same 400 by 400 mm (15.7 by 15.7 inch) mounting pattern as Dock 3, though, and it needs the DJI O4 Ground Station, an optional add-on for Dock 3 that now carries Dock 4’s video link, RTK base station and network connection. The dock weighs 66 kg (146 lb) without batteries and runs from -40°F to 122°F (-40°C to 50°C).

Dock 4 needs the O4 Ground Station on the mast at right for its video link, RTK base and network connection. Photo credit: DJI Enterprise

The Matrice 5TD Builds LiDAR and Radar Into the Airframe

The Matrice 5TD specifications list 2,600 g (5.7 lb) and 3,050 g (6.7 lb) at takeoff, matching the China registry entry DroneXL reported on September 27. The 750 g gain covers a heavier battery plus the rotating LiDAR and mmWave radar the 4TD lacks.

The Matrice 5TD flying beside a transmission tower, the power line inspection job its registry filing names. Photo credit: DJI Enterprise

The thermal camera is the biggest upgrade: 1280 by 1024, four times the pixels of the 4TD’s 640 by 512, with a 2560 by 2048 high-resolution mode. It shares the gimbal with three 50 MP cameras (wide, 70 mm and 252 mm, up to 176x hybrid zoom) and a laser rangefinder that reaches 3,000 m (1.9 miles). The cameras shoot 4K color night video without a spotlight. Onboard AI picks out 17 object types, including cars, boats and animals, and two built-in 4G modules back up the video link. The drone carries up to 450 g (1 lb) of accessories on three mounts, including a new speaker, spotlight and parachute. The spotlight has a catch in the spec notes: switching it on turns off the visual obstacle sensors and leaves only radar and LiDAR. The aircraft cannot be flown with a remote controller at all.

The Matrice 5TD's gimbal carries the wide, medium tele, tele and thermal cameras plus the laser rangefinder. Image credit: DJI Enterprise

DJI’s press release says the drone reaches a scene at up to 21 m/s (47 mph). The spec sheet limits that speed to FlyTo tasks and caps every other mode at 15 m/s (34 mph). The 59-minute flight time was measured at 15 m/s with no payload, and the Matrice 4TD’s 54 minutes was measured at 12 m/s.

Dock 4’s Radio Specs Name Canada, Europe, China and Japan, Not the US

Dock 4 and the Matrice 5TD have no path to US sale. They launched after the FCC put foreign-made drones on its Covered List on December 22, 2025, and no new DJI model has received FCC authorization since. Dock 3, authorized before that date, lists the FCC on every band.

The Covered List action blocks new grants for as long as the designation stands, which is why Dock 4’s sheet gives transmitter power for Canada’s IC, Europe’s CE, China’s SRRC and Japan’s MIC and nothing for the FCC. DJI’s release names no market, and its product page tells buyers to contact a local dealer. The aircraft’s new sub-2 GHz video link includes 902 to 928 MHz, the same band American unlicensed radios use, and the sheet lists that band for Canada and Japan only.

The bigger threat for the US is a proposal that also reaches hardware already on sale. The July 21 notice two FCC bureaus issued in Docket 26-189 defines “military-grade” drones by seven capabilities and proposes barring the import and sale of foreign models that have them. Thermal imaging, LiDAR and a docking station are three of the seven. Dock 4 with the Matrice 5TD has all three, and the Dock 3 and 4TD that US departments can still buy already have two. DJI asked the bureaus to rescind the notice in comments filed September 2, the day the comment period closed, and the proposal has not been finalized.

DroneXL’s Take

I think the swap carousel fixes the weak spot in every DJI dock so far, a box that answers one call and then charges for half an hour. DJI built Dock 4 for the DFR work American police buy docks for, and they can’t buy it.

Canada is on Dock 4’s spec sheet, so a department there running Dock 3 can unbolt the old dock and set a Dock 4 on the same mounting holes. A US department on the same roof keeps its 2025 hardware, and if the FCC adopts the Docket 26-189 definition, it may not be able to buy another Dock 3 either. El Paso’s 22-dock program, the case study DJI still sells to US police, applied this spring for federal money to replace its DJI fleet. The FCC’s case against this hardware rests on where it was made, not on anything a rooftop dock has been shown to do. My read is that provenance alone is a thin reason to leave American departments a generation behind the rest of the DFR world.

Sources: DJI press release, DJI Dock 4 specifications, DJI Dock 4 FAQ, DJI Enterprise launch blog, DJI Dock 3 specifications

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

MI5 Chief: Iran Hasn't Shown the UK Drone Reach That Sent B-1s Home

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:29:00 GMT

MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum said on Tuesday that the Iranian operations Britain has seen in recent years have “not been anywhere near the level of capability” for a sophisticated drone attack on British soil, according to The New York Times. He was asked about that doubt, which British security experts have raised since the US Air Force pulled all 12 of its B-1B bombers out of RAF Fairford this month. The Times reported that the US acted on intelligence about a possible Iranian-led drone attack on the base.

McCallum spoke at his annual threat update at Thames House, MI5’s London headquarters. He said Iran-linked operations had led to more than 50 arrests in Britain in the past 12 months, that Iran now wants to come at harder targets such as military sites, and that live investigations limit what he can say. A day earlier, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons that the Fairford incident was highly likely coordinated in Iran.

Police found petrol and no explosives in the three vans at the center of the September 27 arrests near Fairford. All seven men arrested in the investigation remain on police bail, and police have announced no charges.

Iran’s UK Campaign Has Run on Hired Proxies and Arson

McCallum said Iran subcontracts its violence in Britain, using criminal proxies against dissidents, Iranian media outlets and Israeli sites. A spring wave of arson and sabotage against Jewish communities in Britain and Europe was claimed by a front group, and McCallum said members of the Revolutionary Guards sat behind it.

The attacks claimed by that group did not kill anyone and were generally unsophisticated, The New York Times reported. They were generally carried out by local criminals or teenagers hired online, who often said they did not know who had recruited them. In London, four Hatzola ambulances, which serve mainly Orthodox Jewish communities, were set on fire in late March. In the published text of his speech, McCallum named the front as the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right. Britain has now designated both it and the IRGC under the National Security Act.

Security experts cited by the Times suggested the Fairford incident may have been a botched arson attempt, similar to earlier Iran-linked incidents. In the Commons on Monday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government’s assessment is that it was highly likely coordinated by a known individual based in Iran. Burnham added that it was “almost certainly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.” Iran denies any role.

The Foreign Office sanctioned two men the same day for hostile activity on behalf of the Iranian regime: Ruhollah Bazghandi, head of counterespionage operations in the IRGC, and Shahram Ali Reza Tamarzadeh Jakki, a facilitator of the Zindashti criminal network. Neither government statement links either man to Fairford. Both face an asset freeze, a travel ban and director disqualification, which bars them from running UK companies.

McCallum’s Drone Warnings Named Russia and AI-Enabled Drones

In the published text of the speech, drones come up several times and never in the section on Iran. McCallum cited a Russian attempt to destroy a cargo plane in Germany with an explosive-laden drone. He also named a Swindon drone factory sabotage case and terrorist interest in AI-enabled drones.

The German case is one DroneXL has followed since August. Berlin formally blamed Russia for the explosives-laden quadcopter found beside a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4, and ordered the Russian consulate in Bonn closed over it.

The Swindon case is closer to home. Joshua Cammidge, 31, was charged in September under the National Security Act with assisting a foreign intelligence service and preparing an act of sabotage. The charges state he sent Google Maps screenshots of four drone manufacturing sites in Swindon to a contact believed to be linked to the GRU Volunteer Corps, ITV News reported. Swindon has become a hub for military drone production. Cammidge did not enter a plea at his first hearing.

McCallum told defense suppliers, large or small, to follow MI5’s counter-drone guidance, and Mahmood told MPs the government is tightening security around military bases. British troops still lack a general legal power to bring down drones over their bases. The Armed Forces Bill that would give them one is still in the House of Lords awaiting report stage, according to the Parliament bill tracker on October 13. DroneXL reported 340 drone incidents at UK military sites in a year on September 19, and the Ministry of Defence named no culprit for any of them.

DroneXL’s Take

To me, McCallum’s answer makes the Fairford pullout look like a reaction to a capability Iran hasn’t shown in Britain in recent years, though he can’t say everything. I still think the US was right to go, because a base whose guards lack a general power to bring down a small drone has to treat a credible warning as the attack.

I suspect Iran wouldn’t need a team able to copy Ukraine’s truck-launched Spiderweb raid to exploit that gap. One hired courier with a quadcopter could do it, and McCallum’s own speech says Iran already subcontracts its UK violence to criminal proxies.

I’ll treat the B-1s’ return to Fairford, or their absence, as the clearest signal of whether Washington thinks Mahmood’s tighter base security is enough.

Sources: The New York Times, MI5, Prime Minister’s Office, Home Office, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Euronews, ITV News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Drone Pilots Who Don't Adapt Won't Last Two Years: A 90-Day Plan

Greg Reverdiau — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:33:00 GMT

The drone industry is changing fast, and the drone pilots who don’t adapt will not be here in two years. It’s about strategy. It’s about staying ahead of regulation and making the right decisions. I sat down again with Amy Wiegand, the revenue operations consultant behind Earhart Alden & Associates, to break down what it actually takes to build a successful drone operation in this industry.

If you missed part one of our conversation, go take a look. This time we get into the part most people struggle with: how to handle regulatory obstacles, what actually makes a service provider stand out, and how to build a 30, 60, 90-day plan in order to succeed.

A Circle of What You Control Beats Worrying About the FAA

Amy’s first exercise is a circle. Put everything you can control inside it: pricing, operations, training, service innovation and, above all, your current relationships. Park the rest outside, then build a 90-day plan around what is inside, which takes a lot of the anxiety out of change.

Regulation exists. We know that, and regulation typically gets more restrictive. But we used to not be able to fly at night, and now we can. We could never fly over people, not even with a categorized drone, and then the FAA added categories that allow it. We used to not be able to fly beyond visual line of sight at all, and now there is a pathway. It’s not an easy one, but there’s a pathway. I’m not saying everything is becoming easier, but it seems like the FAA is listening and finding pathways. Part 108, if it comes out the way it should, should help loosen the regulation and make it more achievable. You have to stay on top of that, and it’s pointless to spend time on the things you can’t control.

So go all in on what you can control, and if the drone space is getting tighter, look at what else you can do. The drone is a tool. If tomorrow we couldn’t buy hammers anymore, do you think carpenters would stop building houses? No, they would use a different tool. There are ground robots now that are becoming more and more popular, and there is no regulation on ground robots, at least at the moment.

Diversify. Reinvest some of the money you’re making into making your business more complex, where there is less competition. We said that before the DJI thing and before the FCC thing: a bigger investment and a bigger risk typically lead to more money at the end. Mapping takes investment, learning and more knowledge, but the payouts are higher. NDVI for golf courses or agriculture requires a higher investment, and the payouts are higher too. There are drones available in those niches.

When I started Pilot Institute, I wanted to do drone and airplane training, and that’s it, because that’s what I knew and loved. Now we have helicopter training, and I’m not a helicopter pilot. We figured out how to do it. We added flight attendant training and dispatch training, because other opportunities popped up that are related to what we do, which is aviation in general. And it’s working.

The 30, 60, 90-Day Plan Is One Plan You Keep Repeating

Amy’s 30-day starting point is your operations and your finances, and what you can control in each, so stay focused and don’t hesitate to act. Keep current clients informed, because they are your partners, and use the time to become more of an expert or diversify.

Quite frankly, I don’t know that it’s a different plan going forward. What you learn in the first 30 days, you implement in the next 30, and then in the 30 after that. Don’t niche yourself into just one thing, and when an opportunity knocks, go for it. That means taking a risk, a controlled one, maybe a little money or a lot of extra time. There’s no reward without it. And as Amy said, if you bought a drone, you’ve already taken the risk.

Amy sees a lot of people get intimidated by the words “business plan.” She runs her own consulting company, and her business plans live in a journal, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in pen. As an aviator, she treats them like checklists: here is what I’ll accomplish in the next 30 days. Some items get crossed off, some move to 60 or 90, and some get eliminated altogether.

The business plan doesn’t have to be formal. It needs to make you answer the questions you haven’t thought about. When I taught at the university, students built a business plan for a fictitious business in groups of four or five, and week after week they said, “Oh, I would have never thought of that.” Most people never hand the plan to a bank. It’s for you, so that “I’m going to sell pictures to a client” turns into an answer for how. Then, as Amy says, take micro actions, one step at a time.

Drone Service Providers Doing the Same Thing Will Not Make It

The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Drone service providers who keep doing what isn’t working will not succeed. As our host pointed out, even those that succeeded for years face a year of uncertainty that forces them to change.

If we cannot get these drones, you will either get a drone that does something different, or you will learn different skills. I hate to say it, but it’s almost like AI right now: some people’s jobs may become irrelevant, and they either keep doing the same thing or learn new skills. That’s a very negative way to look at the drone space, but you have to be realistic. If the opportunities aren’t where they are today, you have to go somewhere else.

Amy’s answer to whether it’s time to re-evaluate your niche is that you have to put in the work. Do your market research, understand the market, understand your client’s market and understand their customer. That takes time, especially while you’re building, but it is how you become an authority and a value partner to your client.

Our host’s niche is real estate, so take that one. Say tomorrow you can’t find a consumer drone that does it. People will fly drones not built for the purpose, or buy a very expensive drone that can carry a camera, and the realtor and the client pay for that. A realtor with 30 years in the business will tell you they sold houses without drone photos 10 years ago. The $400,000 and $500,000 houses won’t get them, because it’s not in the marketing budget, and drone photography becomes a high-end service for million-plus listings. Then it’s up to you: serve the $400,000 market from the ground, or invest in a more expensive drone and go after the high-end realtors. I would argue for the high-end.

Our host doesn’t think we’re there yet, and nobody should obsess over it. You plan for it by building your business plan to save money for when it happens. An expensive drone might be $10,000 to $15,000, one you can put your Sony camera on. Put a little of what you make aside, and when that day comes, that’s your out. It’s easier said than done, because it is hard to make a dollar, but that’s the way I would do it.

Sales and Marketing Generate the Revenue, Not the Drone

Amy says hardware and software are tools, while revenue growth comes from sales and marketing, which solopreneurs and larger companies should stop fearing, learn for their niche, and automate. She talks about how solopreneurs can build AI agents, and she sees enterprises scrambling, because that shift has already happened.

Your strategy from six months ago is probably not your strategy today. Amy re-evaluates every six months, like any company: audit the key performance indicators, check whether the campaign, the social post or the blog got engagement, and pivot. Follow-up is huge. Many drone service providers she meets are retired or running a side hustle with little time, so paying a consultant for the initial setup is worth it.

Yes, a consultant costs money. But how much would it cost you to learn all of that yourself? You don’t have to become a marketer either. Pay people who are good at it. The difficulty is that the space has a lot of snake oil salesmen, and I’ll use that term because that’s what it is, selling you the moon when they can’t. Find someone experienced who won’t take advantage of you and who gets results. Amy adds that hiring marketers from outside drones and aviation is a huge mistake: people in the industry speak the language, so you go faster and save money in the long term.

We’re working on marketing campaigns for flight schools right now, and I manage a flight school. When the first draft comes out, I can add what will ring true for flight school owners, because I built this company to solve the problems I was having at a flight school. At conferences I ask owners whether they’re struggling with this and this, and they say yes. When your marketing people know this stuff, it’s a lot easier to sell.

Your Comment on an FAA Rule Gets Read

Advocacy starts with education, Amy says: understand the issue before you comment in a forum or write a letter. She leans on experts like me, Vic Moss and Kyle Nordfors outside her lane. If you’re not the right person to answer, get involved with the associations and people who are.

Once you’re educated, be vocal, because your voice matters. Every time the FAA puts out a new regulation, it goes through a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). I know people say the FAA doesn’t listen, but it does. I saw the NPRM for Remote ID, for those of you who have been in the industry long enough, and it was a show. The final Remote ID rule did not come out perfect, but it was not as bad as the proposal, and that is because there were more than 53,000 comments. The Part 108 proposal came out and drew a lot of comments too, not as many, and we have been told that some changes were made based on them. A lot of those comments came from individuals.

When you comment, make it personal. “I’m a solopreneur. This is my bread and butter, and this rule is going to make my company go bankrupt.” That means something, and if 100,000 of you say it, it means a lot more.

The second avenue is your elected officials. I know how we all feel about this, but there is a pathway to tell them when a local regulation is dumb. We’ve done it here in Arizona. Send it on your company letterhead, because they don’t know you’re a solopreneur, they see a company, and tell them politely but directly how it will affect you.

Amy and I have both done this. She led the charge on a letter package to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. They asked for a meeting and didn’t get one, but they got a letter back saying thank you very much. Amy’s view is that they were heard and that these efforts are cumulative.

The other one is data. Before the FCC did what we were expecting it to do, we ran a survey of drone operators on how losing access to the drone they want would affect their business and their hobby. Reporters still call us for the detail, and we use the data in our NPRM comments because it comes from the industry. We will run a follow-up a year after the first, because it’s not a what-if anymore. It happened, and we want to know how you’re dealing with it. The results are eye-opening and not pretty, but we can’t look at them through pink glasses.

For more on building and marketing a successful drone business, Amy recorded three workshops for our premium community on getting clients, pricing services, and marketing and sales. The link is in the video description.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full video on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Flock Bets on Police Drones as San Francisco Weighs Drone Limits

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:23:00 GMT

Flock Safety, the Atlanta company whose license plate cameras have been banned by cities and blacked out or painted over across the country, now calls police drones its fastest-growing business. CEO Garrett Langley says drones are set to account for nearly half of the company’s future revenue. Flock, valued at $8.4 billion, has roughly 175 Drone as First Responder customers in the United States.

The bet lands in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 14, when the Police Commission takes up a drone policy for the San Francisco Police Department. The commission put off a vote on an earlier version on September 2. The version posted for Wednesday’s meeting still does not define “public safety response,” the broadest of its grounds for sending a drone up.

Flock’s spokesperson says its drones can’t run automated plate scans. Flock’s own marketing says the Alpha’s camera can read a license plate from up to 2,000 feet (610 meters).

Flock says its drones don’t scan plates, but it sells the camera on reading them

Both claims hold at once because a person does the reading. Paris Lewbel, Flock’s public safety manager, told Fast Company the drones can’t do ALPR scans on their own, and conceded that an officer watching the drone feed could simply call in the plate number.

DroneXL reported the 2,000-foot plate-read claim on June 2, when Flock pushed a new Alpha camera campaign, and noted then that Flock’s product pages for its broader Aerodome platform cited 1,000 feet. Others, Fast Company reports, argue that typing a plate seen through a drone camera into an ALPR system is trivial. Fast Company also describes the link already in use: an ALPR camera flags a plate on a hot list, an officer presses a button to launch the drone, and the drone can then track the car.

Flock’s drone business grows as the company cuts staff

Langley told the All-In podcast that drone tech is Flock’s “fastest-growing business unit right now.” Flock moved into drones by buying Aerodome in 2024. It now sells them to private companies and prisons as well as police departments, and plans to open a factory in Georgia by 2027.

The Aerodome deal was worth more than $300 million, and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office has since put a Flock drone over its jail. Flock rates the Alpha at 60 mph (97 km/h) with up to 45 minutes of flight between charges. Fast Company says building at home helps Flock win market share after the FCC added foreign-made drones, DJI included, to its Covered List in December 2025, a move it describes as a Trump ban on DJI sales.

Reuters reported on October 9, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans, that about 270 employees, roughly 18% of Flock’s staff, will leave after a voluntary buyout program. Lewbel told TechCrunch it was “a voluntary program, not a layoff.”

Retired Chief Charles L. Werner, founder of the DRONERESPONDERS group, told Fast Company the FAA now issues about 125 new approvals for DFR programs a month. The FOIA list of more than 1,000 agencies the FAA cleared for waivers between April 2025 and February 2026 works out to at least 100 a month, though the two counts don’t measure exactly the same thing.

San Francisco’s rewritten drone order lets pilots clear calls from the air

The amended General Order 10.12 lets SFPD fly drones for “a public safety response,” to assist an active criminal investigation, or for training, and lets pilots clear a call for service with no officer on scene. Footage with evidentiary value is kept for at least two years.

The order posted for Wednesday requires a warrant, or a recognized warrant exception, before an operator intentionally focuses a drone on the inside of a home or an enclosed yard that can’t be seen from ground level in public. It bans “general surveillance,” defined as sweeping, non-targeted observation with no stated purpose. The program manager may share any footage collected during drone operations with “public safety partners.” Public footage can’t be kept past 30 days unless a captain or higher finds a longer period necessary for an open criminal investigation, a limit taken from the city’s Administrative Code. Among its six definitions, the order includes “general surveillance” and “Drone as First Responder” but not “public safety response.”

Commissioner Kevin Benedicto asked for the September delay after the ACLU and the Public Defender’s Office objected, the SF Standard reported. The Electronic Frontier Foundation flagged the same undefined phrase in an earlier revision in a September 28 post, warning that drones could be sent to every call. Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at EFF, told Fast Company the city’s proposal is a “really atrociously inadequate drone policy.”

The fleet includes Flock models, according to Fast Company, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who puts it at nearly 100 drones, backs the program. SFPD figures cited by Fast Company say its DFR drones responded to 4,000 incidents between March 2024 and August 4, 2026, assisting in more than 1,550 cases and more than 655 arrests. In 2026 alone, drones supported 40 search warrants and more than 70 chases. “We can’t go back to that place out of fear,” Jenkins said.

SFPD’s data handling has a track record. In June, the department disclosed that a May audit found 299 improper inquiries on its Flock plate reader network over about a year, made for out-of-state and federal agencies through two regional information-sharing centers. It cut off their access and said no out-of-state or federal agency ever had direct access. In July, live feeds from five of its Skydio drones turned up on the open internet, where they had been for about six months.

Drone video outlives deletion once it becomes evidence

Flock deletes drone video after seven days by default, but Lewbel told Fast Company that flight records stay in public transparency portals and that drone video often gets classified as evidence and uploaded to agencies’ own evidence systems, where it is kept far longer than any deletion window.

Bryan Cox, head of police accountability at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, and others ask whether the analysis drawn from the video (where cars went, which suspects met, where people gathered) is stored somewhere else, which would make deleting the video a formality. Cox argues that surveil-first policing lets police “collect all the data and figure out what the problem is.”

Jenkins argues the opposite. A drone only sees what is visible in public, she says, so there is no expectation of privacy to violate and no warrant to get.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve backed Drone as First Responder from the start, and SFPD’s numbers show why it works. But San Francisco is weighing rules for nearly 100 police drones, and it has left the broadest reason to launch one undefined. “Public safety response” could cover nearly any call, and a deletion clock means little for footage that is shared with partners or filed as evidence.

My read is that Flock’s plate reader business ran into bans because plate data went places residents never signed up for, and San Francisco’s own audit found inquiries on its Flock network reaching out-of-state and federal agencies. If drones are going to be nearly half of Flock’s future, Flock has as much at stake as anyone in San Francisco defining that phrase on Wednesday.

Sources: Fast Company, San Francisco Police Department General Order 10.12 (amended proposal), SF Standard, Electronic Frontier Foundation, NBC Bay Area, Reuters, TechCrunch

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Curbs Hit Police Budgets: $10,500 Matrice vs. $21,000 US Rival

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 05:29:00 GMT

The drone kit one Ocean County Sheriff’s Office deputy carries in his vehicle costs $29,427.99. It is built around a DJI Matrice 300 RTK carrying a thermal camera. Section 232 tariffs now tax imported drones with integrated thermal imagers at 100%, and a pending Federal Communications Commission proposal would bar foreign thermal drones from import and sale. Chief Warrant Officer Kevin Fennessy, who runs the New Jersey office’s drone program, itemized the kit for NPR in a report published October 12.

It is the same Matrice 300 and Restube setup DroneXL covered in July, when an Ocean County pilot dropped a rescue tube to swimmers caught in a Surf City rip current. NPR priced a comparable American-made drone at about twice DJI’s Matrice 400. The FCC proposal would not apply to imports for federal government use. County sheriffs get no such carve-out.

Ocean County Pays for Its Drones From Forfeiture Money and Its Operating Budget

Fennessy’s list runs $13,699 for the Matrice 300 RTK, $1,400 for two batteries, $11,499 for the thermal camera, $1,600 for the controller, $1,099 for a payload release and $130.99 for the Restube. The office funds its fleet from asset forfeiture proceeds and its municipal operating budget.

NPR counts that fleet at 25 drones. As of October 13, the sheriff’s own drone unit page lists 16 aircraft and 13 FAA-licensed pilots, the figures DroneXL reported in July. Fennessy calls the gear a huge investment that is well worth it, especially in summer, when Ocean County’s population nearly doubles and the office watches big crowds from the air. About three years ago he flew a small camera drone through a shot-out window of a house where, by his account, a murder suspect had fired at officers 41 times. The drone found the man dead in a back bedroom. “No one’s hurt. Everyone’s safe,” Fennessy told NPR.

An Elizabeth, N.J., police officer with the DJI RC Plus controller for the department's Matrice 30 at a DJI Enterprise media event in Elizabeth in March 2022. Photo credit: DroneXL

A Comparable American Drone Costs Twice as Much, and Police Say More

NPR compared two drones with similar features. The DJI Matrice 400 retails for about $10,500, and Inspired Flight’s American-made IF800 TOMCAT was listed at a retailer for $21,000. Fennessy, who says he has flown almost all the American models and likes them, puts their cost at about three times DJI’s.

Jon Beal, head of the Law Enforcement Drone Association, gives a wider range. He told NPR that DJI sells a drone with a high-resolution thermal camera for under $10,000, while American drones usually run $20,000 to $50,000 with worse flight time, thermal imaging and zoom. LEDA estimates that about 6,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies now fly drones and that 80% to 90% of them fly DJI. Weber County Search and Rescue’s Kyle Nordfors put the American premium at three to eight times in The Hill this month.

Beal also says moving the supply chain home is harder than it sounds. “Even the American companies are using Chinese batteries,” he told NPR.

A Phoenix Fire Department firefighter with a DJI controller beside a department van. Fire departments and search teams fly DJI too. Photo credit: Phoenix Fire Department

Florida Already Showed Who Pays for a Forced Switch

NPR reports that agencies in Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Tennessee ended drone programs, or plans for one, after state bans on foreign drones. In 2023, DroneXL reported Florida’s Orange County sheriff was replacing 16 DJI drones with 18 Skydio aircraft, with $25 million in grants toward replacing more than 500.

That 2023 reporting found most of the replacement cost would still fall on taxpayers. Beal says some departments in the ban states were left scrambling when their budgets couldn’t cover the American alternatives. Federal and state grants for American-made drones exist, NPR notes, but agencies compete for them.

Sheriffs Asked the FCC for the Carve-Out It Proposed for Federal Users

The National Sheriffs’ Association, which represents more than 3,000 sheriffs, asked the FCC in Docket 26-189 to confirm that American drones can do the work before restricting drones that meet its military-grade definition, and to exempt state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement until the domestic market can supply them.

Its filing asks the agency to “confirm the adequacy of the domestic market” for public safety drones. The definition comes from the FCC’s July 21 notice, which names thermal imaging among seven “military-grade” capabilities alongside lidar and aerosol spraying, and exempts imports for federal government use. DJI’s lawyers attacked that federal carve-out in their own comments.

Comments closed September 2, the day I filed DroneXL’s own comments in the docket. As of October 13, the Federal Register shows no order from the bureaus, which can issue one without a Commission vote. The tariffs are already in force: the Section 232 proclamation has taxed thermal drones at 100% since September 3, with lower rates for other drones and allied imports.

The administration’s case is security. The December 2025 national security determination, issued by an executive-branch interagency body and published by the FCC, treats foreign-made drones as an unacceptable risk. DJI denies sharing user data with the Chinese government, points to an independent security assessment it commissioned, and denies the forced-labor allegations behind Customs and Border Protection’s 2024 hold on some of its imports. Beal told NPR he has seen no hard evidence that China uses the drones to spy on the communities flying them. The FCC told NPR the American drone industry is “booming with new investment.” DroneXL found in September that the FCC’s own $5 billion tally counted pledges alongside money raised.

DroneXL’s Take

Washington wants local police off DJI, and I’d say it is handing them the bill. The tariff adds a duty equal to a thermal drone’s declared import value. The FCC proposal would end those imports outside federal use, and replacement money comes from competitive grants a sheriff may never win.

If Ocean County has to replace its fleet with American aircraft, I expect forfeiture proceeds and the county operating budget to cover a federal policy goal. Fennessy expects the same: “The taxpayers of Ocean County are going to absorb that.”

Birdstop founder Keith Miao told NPR the restrictions give American manufacturers an opportunity to build out drone manufacturing, and a domestic supply chain for public safety hardware is worth having. My view is that the country should pay for it the way Florida at least tried to, with grant money on the table, and not by sending the difference to a county budget.

The sheriffs asked for something modest: proof that American drones can do the job, or permission to keep buying until they can. I think the bureaus owe them one or the other before any order takes effect.

Sources: NPR, National Sheriffs’ Association comments in PS Docket 26-189, National Security Determination, Ocean County Sheriff’s Office, DJI.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Mini 5 Pro Stays at a Record-Low $679 After Prime Big Deal Days

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:13:00 GMT

The DJI Mini 5 Pro is $679 at Amazon, $80 under its $759 list price and the lowest the standalone drone has sold for. The cut arrived on October 6 with Prime Big Deal Days. That event ended on Wednesday, October 7, and the price was still on the listing when DroneXL checked it at 10:25 p.m. Eastern on Monday, October 12.

For $679 the box holds the drone, the DJI RC-N3 controller, one battery and spare propellers. The listing shows 500 or more sold in the past month, but the price tracker Keepa records no $679 offer from Amazon itself. Its chart last shows Amazon’s own stock at the end of September, at $759.

Get the DJI Mini 5 Pro for $679 at Amazon

The Mini 5 Pro in flight, forward LiDAR and vision sensors facing the lens. Photo credit: Air Photography

DJI’s First 1-Inch Mini Drone Had Never Sold Below $683

The Mini 5 Pro was the first mini drone with a 1-inch CMOS sensor. It shoots 50-megapixel stills, 4K HDR video at 60fps and 4K/120fps slow motion behind an f/1.8 lens. The gimbal rolls 225 degrees, so vertical video uses the full sensor instead of a crop.

Keepa’s price history has the standalone package at $683 from mid-July to August 1, again for the last week of August, and again from September 1 to 9. It went back to $759 after each of those stretches and sat there from September 9 until Prime Big Deal Days opened. DroneXL covered the first $683 drop on July 25 and its return on August 26. Shawn of Air Photography, who took the photos on this page, flew the drone for over a month before his launch-day review.

The RC-N3 Fly More Combo Costs $170 More and Adds Two Batteries

On October 12 the listing showed four configurations. The standalone kit was $679, the Fly More Combo with the RC-N3 $849, the version with the screen-equipped RC 2 $979, and the Fly More Combo Plus with the RC 2 $1,029, against struck-through prices of $959, $1,099 and $1,159.

The Fly More kits add two batteries, for three in total, and a charging hub that fills all three in about 115 minutes. DJI rates the standard battery at 36 minutes. Mihail Svilenov’s long-term review got 20 to 25 minutes depending on the weather. The Plus combo swaps in DJI’s Intelligent Flight Battery Plus, which DJI rates at 52 minutes, for $50 over the standard RC 2 combo.

The RC 2 puts the live feed on a built-in screen, and it is the whole $130 gap between the two standard Fly More combos. Photo credit: Air Photography

O4+ transmission is rated to 20 km (12.4 miles), and 42 GB of internal storage covers a forgotten microSD card. Read the “Sold by” line before you pay. Android pilots should also note the listing’s own warning that DJI Fly is no longer on Google Play and has to be downloaded from DJI’s website.

Production Units Weigh 252 Grams, So FAA Registration Applies

DJI markets the Mini 5 Pro at 249.9 grams, and its Amazon listing allows 4 grams either way. A DroneXL industry source weighed production units at 252 to 253 grams. The FAA allows no tolerance at 250 grams, so Remote ID and registration apply even to recreational flying.

Two late design changes put the aircraft over its printed weight. Europe gives the drone a manufacturing buffer, but US rules count any weight at or over 250 grams. Registration costs $5 at FAADroneZone.

The forward LiDAR also puts the drone inside the FCC’s proposal to end imports and sales of previously authorized foreign drones with LiDAR, where comments closed September 2. The proposal covers importing and marketing, so a drone you already own keeps flying.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d buy at $679. Our deal tracker tells readers to buy at $683 or under, and this price has now held five days past the end of the sale that brought it. I bought one through this same listing on October 21, 2025, and in April I called it the drone I reach for first. Black Friday could go lower. Waiting is a gamble on this listing, though, because every earlier dip ended back at $759 rather than lower. Most buyers should take the $849 RC-N3 combo, since one battery buys you roughly 20 minutes in the air. If the listing reads $759 when you click through, hold off for the next dip rather than pay $80 more for the same box.

Sources: Amazon, Keepa

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Amazon Drone Pad Appeal Set for Nov. 2 as Westborough Drafts Bylaw

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:14:00 GMT

Westborough’s Zoning Board of Appeals will hear the residents’ appeal against Amazon’s Prime Air drone launch pad on Monday, November 2, at 7:05 p.m. in the Forbes Municipal Building, according to an agenda the town posted on Friday, October 9. That is the hearing DroneXL told readers to watch for on October 3 in Amazon’s Westborough Drone Launch Now Hinges on a Zoning Appeal, and it lands eight days before the Planning Board’s November 10 date for the site plan itself.

The town votes on a second front first. A Special Town Meeting on Monday, October 19, takes up a new general bylaw on unmanned aircraft, and the Select Board meets Tuesday, October 13, to decide whether to back it and whether to write to the congressional delegation and the FAA. Worcester, whose council asked for a legal report on its own powers on October 6, is covered in Worcester Asks If It Can Stop Amazon Drones. Shrewsbury Says It Can’t, where Shrewsbury Town Manager Kevin Mizikar said local regulation of the flights is preempted.

The warrant says the bylaw’s draft will be placed on file with the Town Clerk and handed out at the meeting, and the warrant itself carries no text. It also says any bylaw on this topic must be approved by the Massachusetts Attorney General and the MassDOT Aeronautics Division.

Residents Filed the Appeal on the Last Day the Law Allowed

Several residents appealed the building commissioner’s August 26 letter on September 25, the town’s Prime Air page says, the 30th and last day Section 15 of Chapter 40A allows. The ZBA has 65 days from receiving notice to open the hearing, November 29 if notice arrived on the filing day.

The November 2 agenda lists the case as “Rod Jane – Appeals Application – 64 Otis Street,” at 7:05 p.m. in the Great Hall at 45 West Main Street. The meeting opens at 7 with a 10-minute open forum, and the agenda calls all times approximate. The board then has 100 days from the filing to decide, January 3, 2027, unless the appellants and the board agree in writing to extend either clock. The commissioner’s letter classified the pad as an accessory use of the fulfillment center on the same lot, which the zoning bylaw allows as of right as a manufacturing, processing and warehouse use. That ruling is what put the pad in front of the Planning Board for site-plan review instead of a special permit.

If the ZBA finds the commissioner wrong, the town page says Amazon would need the approvals the bylaw then requires, which could include a special permit and site plan through the ZBA rather than the Planning Board. Select Board member Patrick Welch has asked the ZBA to decide whether the drones are “aircraft” under the bylaw, the Community Advocate reported, because, Welch said, a use classed as an “airport” may need a special permit where an accessory use does not. Westborough’s bylaw defines an accessory use as an incidental or insubstantial part of the activity on a lot, and an airport as any area on a lot used for the landing and takeoff of aircraft on a regular or intermittent basis, as DroneXL reported on October 3. Planning Board vice chair John Gelcich said at the September 15 hearing that the board is “almost required to approve it,” as DroneXL reported on October 2.

Amazon Asked for Its Own Delay Three Days After the Appeal Was Filed

Amazon told the town on September 28 that it wanted its Planning Board hearing continued until after the ZBA considers the appeal, the town’s page says. The Planning Board voted on October 6 to continue to November 10. The town expects that date to fall after the ZBA’s decision.

The October 6 agenda had carried the request without a reason when DroneXL reported it in Amazon Asks Westborough to Delay Drone Pad Vote as Board Says No.

September 28 was also the date on the letter from state Sen. Michael Moore and Reps. Hannah Kane and Kate Donaghue asking Amazon to pause, covered in Amazon Drone Hub Faces Pause Call From Lawmakers as State Sues FAA. The town page says Amazon is now seeking the site-specific FAA approvals it needs to fly from 64 Otis Street. The MK30 it would fly weighs 77.9 pounds (35.5 kilograms) empty and carries no parachute, as DroneXL reported in Amazon’s 83-Pound MK30 Heads To 500 Cities.

Town Meeting Votes October 19 on a Drone Bylaw the Warrant Left Blank

Article 8 of the Special Town Meeting warrant, signed October 1 by five Select Board members, asks voters to add Article 34, “Aircraft, Unmanned,” to the bylaws by majority vote. The board was still developing the text, and the bylaw may address privacy, public safety, noise and enforcement.

The Select Board’s October 13 agenda, revised October 9, has the board voting on whether to support Articles 7 and 8 at 7:25 p.m. and taking up a communication to the congressional delegation and the FAA on unmanned aircraft at 8:25 p.m. The Community Advocate says the bylaw follows North Reading’s 2017 example. DroneXL argued on October 2 that such a bylaw would bind the hobbyist next door and not a Part 135 carrier, and a federal judge struck down parts of Newton’s drone bylaw in 2017.

“The risk does not match the want,” Westborough resident Jen Parent said at one of the town’s public meetings, MassLive reported, adding, “We do not need 30-minute deliveries for any reason.” Castle Rock, Colorado, pulled a different lever and froze drone hub applications for six months, as DroneXL covered in Castle Rock Froze Walmart’s Drone Hub 7-0. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists the Westborough hub as in review.

Residents can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 and say it is about drone delivery, or open the customer-service chat and pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what a town can still do once a hub is proposed, and the tracker’s Westborough page carries the local dates.

DroneXL’s Take

In my view the appeal the ZBA opens on November 2 is the only local proceeding that can stop this pad, and as I read the two agendas, most of the town’s energy is going into October 19. A town bylaw on unmanned aircraft has to survive the Attorney General, MassDOT Aeronautics and the same federal preemption argument that beat Newton in 2017, and the warrant asks voters to approve a text it does not contain. The ZBA question is narrower, and I think harder for Amazon to attack in court: whether a fenced lot built to launch aircraft is accessory to a warehouse under Westborough’s own definitions. My read is that it is not, and that a special-permit track gives the town the vote Gelcich says the Planning Board does not have.

I’d want a drone bringing medication flown the way Zipline flies its P2, which lowers the package on a tether from altitude, and I’m against a 77.9-pound aircraft with no parachute carrying consumer orders over Westborough’s homes. Amazon’s own request to wait for the ZBA tells me the company treats this appeal as one that can change its permit path, not as a formality. If the ZBA upholds the commissioner, the Planning Board’s power on November 10 shrinks, as I read Prudential v. Westwood, to attaching conditions, and Westborough’s fight ends where Mizikar said it would.

Sources: Town of Westborough, Prime Air Drone Delivery Service Application page, Zoning Board of Appeals agenda, November 2, 2026, Select Board agenda, October 13, 2026, 2026 Special Town Meeting warrant, M.G.L. c. 40A, § 15, Community Advocate, MassLive.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Drug Traffickers Could Become Africa's Drone Arms Dealers, Paper Warns

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:29:00 GMT

Robi Sen, who has been a senior partner at Department 13, the company behind the MESMER counter-drone system, published a paper on LinkedIn on October 10 warning that drug-trafficking networks could become suppliers of weaponized drones and drone expertise to armed groups in Africa. The paper is titled “Drone Warfare in Africa.”

His argument is about incentives. Sen writes that states often restrict sensitive capabilities to keep a military edge and insurgents may hide their methods from rivals. A profit-driven trafficking network, in his words, may instead sell access to aircraft and technicians when the return beats the risk.

The paper’s verification note says the most specific version of that warning, that African drug markets trade weaponized drones directly for drugs, could not be verified and “remains an investigative lead, not a confirmed finding.”

Armed Drones Killed More Than 940 Civilians in Six African Wars

SIPRI’s 2025 Yearbook says armed drones were confirmed in at least six sub-Saharan conflicts, in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan, killing more than 940 civilians between November 2021 and November 2024, a figure Sen cites with the warning that it is not a running total.

The SIPRI chapter matches the count in Drone Wars UK’s Death on Delivery report from March 2025: more than 943 civilians killed in at least 50 incidents across the same six countries. Five of those six states fly Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2, and the report also names China’s Wing Loong II and Iran’s Mohajer-6. Its Nigeria cases include the December 2023 army strikes on a religious gathering in Tudun Biri, which killed at least 85 people.

Sudan is Sen’s lead case, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have stepped up their strikes there. Reuters reported on September 24 a drone hit a crowded courtroom in government-held Um Ruwaba, North Kordofan, on September 8, killing about 10 people according to the monitor Emergency Lawyers. Another struck a college in al-Obeid the next day. The RSF did not comment to Reuters but says it does not intentionally target civilians. The UN says drone attacks by both sides killed more than 1,000 civilians in the first half of 2026. In May 2025, satellite images showed the RSF had long-range attack drones at Nyala airport.

Sen Builds the Trafficker Case on Mexico, Colombia and a Spanish Workshop

Sen’s evidence for traffickers as drone operators comes from Latin America. NCITE, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, counted 221 weaponized drone incidents attributed to Mexican cartels from 2021 to 2025, and ACLED has logged about 670 weaponized drone events there since 2018.

Sen cites both. The NCITE study at the University of Nebraska Omaha, first covered by DroneXL in February, found 27 of those attacks were fatal and killed 77 people. The attacks were concentrated in Michoacán and Guerrero. The ACLED analysis shows how fast it is spreading: more than 72% of its events happened between January 2025 and August 2026, and the number of armed groups using drones went from 5 in 2024 to 19 this year. Colombia holds 97 of the 182 municipalities where drone attacks were recorded.

The Spanish case is closest to the business model Sen describes. In July 2022, Spain’s Policía Nacional arrested eight people and broke up a workshop in Castellar de la Frontera, Cádiz, that was building underwater drones for other drug gangs. The drones were built to cross the Strait of Gibraltar with drugs aboard. Police seized three of them, each designed to carry up to 200 kg (441 lb), and six large aerial drones. Sen’s paper calls it a business model in which specialist fabricators build uncrewed technology for criminal customers.

The Paper’s Verification Note Sets Aside Its Unsourced Figures

Beyond the barter claim, the paper’s verification note says the draft it reviewed cited UNODC, the Africa Center, AllAfrica, ACLED and Small Wars Journal in brackets without bibliographic entries, so manufacturing figures and 2024 strike counts tied to them were not retained as verified facts.

Sen treats the Latin American record as a mechanism to investigate, not proof of a pipeline to Africa, and he lists the reasons a cartel might not sell. Arming a rival threatens market control, drone attacks bring enforcement, and conspicuous violence disrupts profitable routes. He writes that there is not yet enough evidence to say traffickers are more likely to spread armed drones than states, insurgents or other brokers. His research priorities start with documented transactions rather than claims of affiliation.

Two Documented Cases Link Africa to Iranian and Russian Drone Programs

Two cases with paper trails link Africa to state drone programs. A federal criminal complaint accuses Shamim Mafi of brokering an Iranian drone deal worth more than $70 million for Sudan’s army, and GI-TOC documented Russia recruiting young African women into drone production.

Mafi, a Woodland Hills resident, was arrested at LAX in April. Prosecutors allege she brokered the Mohajer-6 contract with Sudan’s Ministry of Defense through Atlas International Business, an Oman-based company they say she ran. She is charged with one sanctions count and is presumed innocent.

The Russian case is in the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report from May 2025. It found that the Alabuga Start program recruited women aged 18 to 22, first from African countries, for jobs at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan without telling them they would work in weapons production. DroneXL has reported on the Alabuga recruits since October 2024. Sen includes the case in his paper and says it shows the cost of fast drone production landing on vulnerable people far from the war.

DroneXL’s Take

I think the verification note is the most useful part of Sen’s paper. It treats a drugs-for-drones trade in Africa as a lead to chase rather than a trend, and the record in this story backs that call. The criminal drone workshop in his own paper, in Castellar, was building for drug smugglers crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, not for armed groups. The drones Drone Wars UK names in Africa’s civilian toll are Turkish, Chinese and Iranian, and the one drone broker here facing a US courtroom is accused of trafficking arms on behalf of Iran’s government. My read is that cartel supply to African wars is plausible and unproven, while state supply is on paper. Until a named trafficker transaction shows up in a court file, the attention belongs on sanctions cases and the brokers who move state-built drones into African wars.

Sources: Robi Sen, “Drone Warfare in Africa”, SIPRI Yearbook 2025, Drone Wars UK, Reuters via The Star, NCITE, ACLED, Diario Bahía de Cádiz, GI-TOC

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Gastonia Tells Residents Why Walmart Drones Will Be Over Their Homes

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:47:00 GMT

Walmart has finished a drone delivery site at its Supercenter at 223 N. Myrtle School Road in Gastonia, North Carolina, and the City of Gastonia has put out a notice so residents know why delivery drones may be flying over or near their neighborhoods. The aircraft will serve eligible customers within about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) of the store.

Walmart plans to explain the service itself, with information tables at the Myrtle School Road store and at upcoming community events, WSOC-TV reported Sunday. That report gives no start date and no flight count. The FAA review that covers Gastonia clears up to 400 deliveries a day from a single hub.

The FAA Sets Wing’s Ceiling at 400 Deliveries a Day per Hub, Gastonia Included

The 400 figure comes from the FAA’s April 29, 2025 review of Wing’s Charlotte-metro operations. It allows up to 25 Wing hubs, each flying up to 400 deliveries a day, for a metro ceiling of 10,000. The FAA’s map of the operating area runs west past Gastonia to Shelby.

WSOC-TV’s text does not name the operator, though it ran Wing’s expansion video above it. Walmart picked Wing for Charlotte when it announced the metro in June 2025, the FAA approval for the metro is Wing’s, and Wing’s Walmart page lists Charlotte as now serving. Charlotte was one of five metros already flying when the two companies added Denver and Seattle on October 5.

The Charlotte metro operating area from the FAA's April 2025 review of Wing's operations. Gastonia sits west of Charlotte, inside the dashed boundary, which stops at the South Carolina line. Image credit: FAA

The FAA document also says what residents under the flight paths should expect. Wing’s aircraft cruise at an average of 165 feet (50 meters) and 59 mph (95 km/h), and lower packages on a tether while they hover. The approval covers deliveries from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, plus up to 24 checkout flights at the hub between 6 and 7 a.m.

On noise, the FAA cites direct measurements of Wing’s Hummingbird aircraft: a location overflown 800 times stays at or below 40.7 decibels on the day-night average the agency uses. The FAA’s threshold for noise-compatible residential land use is 65. Hubs must sit at least 74 feet (23 meters) from noise-sensitive sites, or 199 feet (61 meters) inside controlled airspace near an airport, and Wing must plan routes to cut down on repeat overflights.

Gastonia Joins Walmart Drone Stores in Kings Mountain and Shelby

Gastonia is not the first Walmart drone stop west of Charlotte. The Kings Mountain store at 1011 Shelby Road started drone delivery in December 2025, and the East Dixon Boulevard store in Shelby followed on February 3, 2026, Wise News Network reported.

Lincoln County, to the north, went through a zoning fight first. Walmart’s store at 7131 N.C. 73 in Denver needed a conditional zoning amendment for its drone site, and more than 200 people signed a petition against it. Commissioners approved it 3 to 1 on June 15, with Chair Jamie Lineberger voting no, the Lincoln Times-News reported.

DroneXL’s Take

Gastonia got the order right by telling residents before the drones started showing up, and Walmart will put people at tables in the store to answer questions. Lincoln County residents met their hub at a zoning hearing with a petition already circulating, which is a worse way to start.

But WSOC’s account of the notice leaves out the two things a neighbor asks first: how many flights, and who to call about the noise. Round Rock, Texas, put a complaint contact on its city page. I’d want Gastonia to put Wing’s contact and the FAA’s numbers in front of residents, because up to 400 deliveries a day from one parking lot is a figure residents should hear from their city instead of digging it out of a federal PDF.

Sources: WSOC-TV, Axios Charlotte, Wing, FAA written re-evaluation, Wing Charlotte metro, April 29, 2025, Lincoln Times-News, Wise News Network

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Harmattan AI's 2,000 km Drone Doesn't Need GPS, and Morocco Wants It

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:17:00 GMT

Harmattan AI, the Paris defense startup that Dassault Aviation backed with $200 million in January, unveiled IRIFI on October 6. It is a one-way attack drone the company says can hit targets up to 2,000 km (1,240 miles) away without relying on GPS and without a human flying it after launch.

The next day, at the Marrakech Air Show, Harmattan signed a letter of intent with the Kingdom of Morocco to develop IRIFI as a Moroccan system, with its critical components produced in the country. The first government publicly attached to the French drone is not France.

Harmattan’s spec sheet for IRIFI has three entries: range, a combustion engine, and a payload listed as “undisclosed.”

IRIFI Navigates Without GNSS and Uses Cameras for the Final Approach

Harmattan says IRIFI navigates with an onboard system that does not rely on GNSS satellite signals and switches to visual terminal guidance for the last stretch to the target. It launches from a mobile canister, and Harmattan calls it an attritable one-way effector: it does not come back.

The company also claims IRIFI can fly under radar and hit within meters. None of that has been shown in a public test. The IRIFI announcement and the product page give no speed, no unit cost, no warhead size and no flight-test footage. The pitch is about where IRIFI sits on price and precision. CEO Mouad M’Ghari called Iran’s Shahed “imprecise and easy to shoot down” and said Tomahawk and Storm Shadow cruise missiles are survivable but expensive and built in small numbers. IRIFI, he said, combines the two.

GNSS independence is the part of the pitch with the most behind it. Russian jamming has pushed Ukrainian builders toward the same answer for years, from drones that fly through jamming to fiber-optic FPV aircraft that carry no radio link at all.

One Commander Can Launch Dozens of IRIFI Strikes After Two Human Approvals

Harmattan describes a two-layer authorization process. Command level approves the targets, launch positions and mission parameters, and a final launch authorization follows at the point of release. From there IRIFI flies the entire mission with no human control, and Harmattan says the choice of target stays human.

Harmattan AI pitches IRIFI for coordinated saturation strikes. Image credit: Harmattan AI

The volume claim is the bigger one. Harmattan says a single commander, informed by an AI system that processes large amounts of satellite imagery, can launch dozens of autonomous strikes at once. That is a saturation attack: enough simultaneous arrivals to overwhelm air defenses, the same logic Russia uses with Shahed waves against Ukraine.

Harmattan’s Shipped Products Are Short-Range Drones, Not Deep Strike

Harmattan’s best-documented deliveries are short-range reconnaissance drones: France’s DGA procurement agency ordered 1,000 Sonora ISR systems in June 2025, received them within six months, and ordered 5,000 more in June 2026. Its Paris-region plant, the company says, can build 10,000 units a month.

The UK Ministry of Defence signed for 3,000 systems in September 2025, as DroneXL reported when Harmattan was chasing a $1 billion valuation. Dassault’s January round then valued it at $1.4 billion. A 2,000 km strike weapon is a different class of aircraft from either program, and IRIFI is the company’s first announced product in it.

Morocco Signs to Develop IRIFI With Critical Parts Made at Home

The October 7 signing took place in front of Abdeltif Loudyi, minister delegate in charge of the National Defense Administration, and Gen. Mohammed Berrid, Inspector General of the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces. The release gives no contract value, no quantity and no delivery schedule.

Harmattan’s press release calls IRIFI “a sovereign Moroccan autonomous deep-strike system” and says critical components will be developed and produced in Morocco, mostly by Moroccan talent, through the local subsidiary Harmattan AI Morocco. It builds on a June 2026 partnership that aims to establish a Harmattan R&D center in Rabat.

Morocco has gone this route before. In 2024 it field-tested the SpyX loitering munition, made in Morocco with BlueBird, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries.

DroneXL’s Take

I think the letter of intent tells you more than the spec sheet does. Washington answered the Shahed by copying it: LUCAS, a $35,000 reverse-engineered Shahed-136 built by Arizona’s SpektreWorks, flew its first combat mission against Iran on February 28. The US builds that drone for its own forces. Harmattan is selling a different product to countries that want long-range strike without depending on someone else’s stockpile: a design they help develop and critical parts made in their own factories. Morocco wanted that badly enough to sign one day after the reveal, before Harmattan had published a single flight test. The question for France now is whether its own DGA buys the drone that Morocco has already put its name on.

Sources: Harmattan AI, Harmattan AI and Kingdom of Morocco press release (via Defense Arabia)

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DJI Ends Phantom 4 Pro V2 Repairs Oct. 31 and Tells Owners to Buy New

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:54:00 GMT

DJI will stop servicing the Phantom 4 Pro V2 on October 31, 2026. From that date the company will no longer answer product inquiries, provide technical support or repair the aircraft and its accessories. Two days later, on November 2, the same end-of-service list cuts off the Agras T16 and Agras T20 spray drones, the MG-1P series and the original Osmo Action.

DJI’s notice closes by recommending that owners “upgrade to an alternative product of a new model.” In the United States, no new DJI model has been able to get FCC authorization since December 22, 2025, when the FCC added all foreign-made drones to its Covered List.

The Phantom 4 Pro V2 Gets Four Years of Service, Three Fewer Than the Original

DJI’s end-of-service table lists August 2022 as the month Phantom 4 Pro V2 production stopped, so service ends about four years and two months later. The original Phantom 4 Pro and Pro+ left production in April 2018 and kept DJI service until June 1, 2025.

That gap is the shortest DJI has given any Phantom since the Phantom 1, which left production in April 2015 and lost service in February 2019. Most products DJI cuts off in 2026 get about five years. The Mavic 2 Pro, the Osmo Action and both Mavic 2 Enterprise models land almost exactly on five.

The V2 outlived its siblings on the production line by more than four years. When DroneXL covered the June 2025 cutoff for the Phantom 4 Pro and Advanced, the V2 was still on DJI’s service books. It also keeps flying legally after October 31. DJI shipped Remote ID broadcast firmware 01.00.70.17 for the V2 and V2+ in November 2023, and end of service does not switch that off.

Agras T20 Owners Lose DJI Service Nov. 2 as the FCC Weighs Barring Spray Drones

DJI names no successor for the Agras T16 and T20, which lose service on November 2, 2026, and every newer Agras is a foreign sprayer. A pending FCC proposal, PS Docket 26-189, would bar the import and sale of those already approved. MG-1S Advanced sprayers lose support then too.

The T16 left production in September 2020 and the T20 in July 2021. Newer models have US paperwork. The Agras T55 cleared FCC equipment authorization on December 19, 2025, three days before the Covered List cutoff, and the base T100 holds its own grant.

The FCC’s July 21 public notice, DA 26-758, would bar the continued import and marketing of any foreign drone on the Covered List that is capable of dispensing “economic poison” under FAA rules, while leaving existing authorizations in place. That is the FAA’s term for pesticides and defoliants, and the category applies at any weight. Drones already in a farmer’s shed would keep flying, because the proposal covers import and marketing.

Comments closed September 2. Pilot Institute’s count of the record found 3,770 of 3,824 readable filings opposed the proposal (Pilot Institute is a DroneXL partner). As of October 12, neither the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau nor the Office of Engineering and Technology, which released the notice, has issued an order in the docket.

DroneXL’s Take

I have no quarrel with DJI retiring a drone that left production four years ago. My problem is the advice to buy new. For an American farmer whose T20 loses DJI service on November 2, buying new means an Agras model that cleared the FCC before December 22. The FCC’s own proposal would stop dealers from importing or selling those, while calling a crop sprayer military-grade. That is protectionism dressed up as security, and farmers are the ones who pay for it. If the FCC adopts the sprayer category as written, losing DJI service on an old T20 will be the smaller problem on that farm.

Sources: DJI Support, Notice of Suspension of Service and Support for Old Product Series; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, PS Docket 26-189.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DroneXL Adds 20 Drone Delivery Town Guides as Local Votes Pile Up

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:50:00 GMT

DroneXL published 20 new resident guides on its Drone Delivery Tracker today, one for each town or metro where Amazon Prime Air, Wing or Zipline is flying, has filed paperwork, or has named the area. With the Belvedere, California guide published Saturday, the town guides section now covers 21 places in 16 states, plus the Kansas side of Kansas City.

Each guide is written for residents who have never thought about drones. Eight of the 21 have a dated step on the calendar before November 10: a council vote or reading, a planning or zoning hearing, a city town hall, a comment deadline, a permit-review deadline or a federal court deadline.

The Guides Separate the FAA’s Flight From the Town’s Ground

Every guide uses the same six parts: the town’s situation, the operators with a map of their delivery circles, who decides what, what residents can do, a survey, and the sources. The who-decides part separates the Federal Aviation Administration’s flight from the town’s ground and the state’s rules.

Where a town has written rules, the guide walks through them section by section. Where it hasn’t, the guide lists the record document by document, and says where DroneXL searched and when for anything it could not find.

The guides also say what no town can do. A federal court struck down Newton, Massachusetts’ overflight, altitude and registration rules in 2017 (Singer v. City of Newton), and the FAA has restated its position since.

Eight Towns Have a Dated Step Before November 10

Belvedere’s council takes its final vote on Marin County’s first drone delivery ordinance Monday, October 12, and Northglenn, Colorado, which Walmart approached about a Wing nest, is scheduled by its staff to hold the first reading of its own hub ordinance that night.

The Northglenn staff memo expects a public hearing and final vote October 26. Comments on the FAA’s request to Connecticut’s environmental department about Amazon’s proposed North Haven hub close October 15.

City reviewers’ comments on Walmart’s building permit application in Tacoma are due October 17, according to The News Tribune. North Myrtle Beach’s Planning Commission is set to take up Amazon’s drone pad application on October 20, per the city’s October 6 staff report. The City of Tracy, California hosts a town hall on Amazon drone delivery on October 22.

Westborough’s Zoning Board of Appeals hears residents’ appeal on November 2 of the ruling that put Amazon’s 64 Otis Street launch pad in site-plan review. Under Massachusetts case law, that review lets the Planning Board attach conditions but deny the plan only if no condition could fix its problems. An independent online survey of Westborough-area residents, which says it is not a scientific poll, counted 853 responses on September 28, 92 percent of them opposed.

In Papillion, Nebraska, the window to challenge the FAA’s Omaha environmental decision in a federal appeals court closes November 9 if the 60 days run from the September 9 signature, or November 23 if they run from the FAA’s September 22 notice.

State Law Decides How Much Room Each Town Has

Eight of the states in the guides, Texas, Illinois (Chicago excepted), Connecticut, Michigan, Louisiana, Florida, Oregon and Arizona, bar cities from regulating drone operations. In those states a town holds zoning, building permits and the conditions on them, and little else that touches the drones.

Florida and Arizona narrowed even that. A Florida county may not refuse a drone port over its location, and Arizona’s June 2026 delivery law bars a city from withholding a permit for a site outside residential zoning.

California, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas have no statute taking drone rules away from towns. Their towns can write ground rules of the kind Belvedere and Northglenn have drafted, as long as the rules stay on the ground. Ohio’s 2025 drone law lists two things cities may regulate, their own drones and hobby flying over public property, and says nothing about delivery; whether that list shuts out other local rules has not been tested in court. South Carolina’s new drone law takes effect January 1, 2027.

The other guides cover Baton Rouge, Cincinnati, Hazel Park, Houston, Kansas City, Maricopa, Matteson, Mesquite, North Randall, Portland, Richardson, Ruskin and Waco.

Every Guide Carries a Local Survey and a Way to Fix Errors

Each guide has the same anonymous two-minute survey, and the guide page shows only its own town’s results. The tracker’s main page adds every town together. Answers are not tied to a name, email or street address, and the results count who answered.

Each guide also has a section on how to report a mistake: the correction form on the page, or an email to contact at dronexl.co. Confirmed errors are fixed on the page and logged with a date.

Residents who already have Amazon drones overhead can find the complaint routes in DroneXL’s general residents’ guide. Amazon takes drone questions at 1-888-280-4331 or through its customer service chat (“Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery”), and the tracker’s Amazon Prime Air page lists every Amazon hub DroneXL has found on the public record.

DroneXL’s Take

I built these guides because too many towns I covered this year had the argument late. In Papillion the drones had been flying for six weeks when the FAA signed its Omaha environmental decision on September 9, and DroneXL found no council vote on the pad in any record it could reach. In Richardson, by the time the complaints came, the zoning was settled and Texas law barred the city from any ordinance on how the drones fly. The FAA decides the flight. In most states, my read is that the town decides more than most councils use: the permit, the hours on the ground, the conditions, and, as Northglenn’s draft would, what the operator has to disclose before the first drone leaves the pad. DroneXL is for drone delivery where it earns the noise, a defibrillator or a prescription first and a toothpaste run last. The people under the route get a say in the second kind, and I want them to have the facts while the vote is still ahead of them.

Sources: the 21 DroneXL town guides and the documents listed in each, FAA drone environmental review index.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Airlogix Seeks $100M At $2B Valuation As Russia Bombs Its Factories

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 17:40:00 GMT

Airlogix, the Kyiv drone maker whose strike aircraft are now built in Germany, is in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation above $2 billion, Forbes reported on October 9, citing two sources familiar with the deal. If it closes, Airlogix becomes the most valuable company to come out of the defense industry Ukraine built after Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Vitalii Kolesnichenko founded Airlogix in 2020 to build cargo drones. The war turned it into a maker of the GOR reconnaissance drone, a catapult-launched aircraft that loiters over a target for up to four hours, and this year into a strike drone supplier under a German government contract for more than 5,000 aircraft. Airlogix declined to comment on the fundraising.

Russian strikes have destroyed Airlogix production sites more than once, Kolesnichenko told the Resilience Conference in London on October 5. The drones behind the $2 billion price are being built in Germany.

Russian strikes pushed Airlogix’s factories into Germany, Canada and the UK

Airlogix spread its manufacturing across several countries after Russian strikes destroyed production sites in Ukraine. Its joint venture with Auterion started serial production of the Seth X and Anubis strike drones in Germany on September 21. A Canadian venture with Hamilton-based Sentinel followed a late May signing in Ottawa.

“We basically were forced to break down our manufacturing cycles [into] many, many small pieces,” Kolesnichenko said in London, according to Forbes. He said he is working on similar production deals in Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United States. Resilience Media reported the next day that Airlogix has also opened production in the United Kingdom, a move disclosed at the same conference by Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s former strategic industries minister.

Auterion and Airlogix formed the joint venture at the Munich Security Conference in February, and Germany signed the cooperation agreement that unlocked its first contract on April 14, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy standing beside an Airlogix airframe at the ceremony. Auterion’s September release puts the order at more than 5,000 mid-range and heavy strike systems, delivered to Ukraine’s armed forces, and its April announcement said production in Germany runs under Ukrainian export permissions. Handelsblatt has put the contract at about 300 million euros ($349 million) and the plant near Munich, and neither company has confirmed either detail. Auterion, the Swiss-founded software company that supplies the Skynode flight computer and Nemyx autonomy stack for those aircraft, raised $130 million in a Bessemer-led Series B in September 2025, and Rheinmetall bought a stake in it two months later.

Airlogix is one of several Ukrainian makers now producing on allied soil. Quantum Systems and Frontline Robotics opened a Munich-area plant for 10,000 Ukrainian drones a year in March, and Zelenskyy’s plan for ten weapons export offices across Europe dates from February.

Uforce’s $5 billion talks set the bar Airlogix is pricing against

Airlogix’s $2 billion ask sits between Ukraine’s two existing drone valuations. Uforce, a London-based group of nine Ukrainian manufacturers including the Magura sea drone’s maker, raised $50 million at just over $1 billion in March. Bloomberg reported on September 7 that it now seeks $500 million at roughly $5 billion.

That round would be led by Valor Equity Partners, the firm run by SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias. Uforce’s March round, led by Shield Capital and Lakestar, was the first time a Ukrainian defense startup crossed $1 billion. Six months later the same company is negotiating at five times that number. Forbes reported the March round as a $50 million seed, with a plan to take proven Ukrainian designs and build them outside the country, the same pitch Airlogix is making in Germany and Canada.

Some Ukrainian companies may be worth more than Airlogix without ever having raised from outside investors. Fire Point, which builds the FP-1 strike drone and the Flamingo cruise missile, says its 2025 revenue was 29.3 billion hryvnia, about $669 million, a figure Ukrainska Pravda reported in May from the company’s own statement. Its revenue comes from Ukrainian state contracts. The one outside bid reported for it, about $760 million from the UAE’s EDGE Group for a 30 percent stake, was filed with Ukraine’s antimonopoly committee in December and returned in January without approval.

Kyiv’s July export resolution has yet to clear a single permit

Ukraine shut off arms exports in February 2022, and drone makers could not get permits for finished aircraft. Cabinet Resolution No. 875, adopted July 1, 2026, lets makers that still fulfil their state contracts sell to countries holding a “Drone Deal” agreement with Kyiv, with approvals capped at 30 days.

The permit carries a fee of 20 percent of the contract value for finished products and technologies, 30 percent for components, and the mechanism lasts as long as martial law does. Partner countries named so far include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Separately, Ukraine’s State Service for Export Control approved a batch of F-Drones F10 strike drones for the US military on July 1, which the company says were the first finished Ukrainian combat drones ever cleared for export.

Ihor Fedirko, who heads the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry, told Militarnyi that no permit has been issued under the resolution and that its conditions make exporting from Ukraine unprofitable or too risky for manufacturers. Private firms have landed up to ten small export contracts, he said on August 26, and only one joint venture abroad is actually operating. Airlogix’s German order is Berlin’s own contract and its Canadian line builds for Ukraine’s army under an arrangement Ottawa signed, so neither waits on that queue. Kolesnichenko’s investor line in London, that funders fear everything a Ukrainian company owns sits inside Ukraine, is the same point from the other side.

DroneXL’s Take

Investors are paying $2 billion for Ukrainian drone designs built where Russia cannot reach them, and Kolesnichenko said as much on stage. Berlin pays for the German contract and the aircraft ship east. The Ukrainian half of the company is the half that keeps getting hit.

I think that is the right bet, and I also think it says something uncomfortable about the companies that stayed home. Fire Point sells to the Ukrainian treasury, and the only outside money reported for it has sat with a regulator since January. Uforce at $5 billion is built on the same move-it-west logic as Airlogix. Ukraine’s battlefield earned these companies their reputation, and the money is going to the ones that can leave it.

Watch which US partner Kolesnichenko names. An American production line would put Airlogix drones inside the Pentagon’s supply chain, and a $2 billion valuation needs that more than it needs the German contract.

Sources: Forbes, Resilience Media, Auterion, Government of Canada, Bloomberg, Ukrainska Pravda, Militarnyi

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Round Rock Says It Has No Zoning Rule for Zipline's Drone Hub

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 16:55:00 GMT

Zipline’s first Austin-area drone hub sits outside Round Rock’s city limits, and the City of Round Rock says its zoning code has no rule for drone hubs at all. The hub at 3000 E. Palm Valley Blvd. is in the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, the ring of land a Texas city influences but does not zone. Zipline opened deliveries from it on Friday, October 9.

The city laid this out on an information page for residents. Drone delivery hubs, where the aircraft are stored, launched and recharged, are “not specifically addressed under the City’s current zoning ordinances,” it says. The same page says the city is working with Zipline on a second hub inside city limits, behind the Renaissance Square shopping center on northbound Interstate 35, and will use that site to work out what the rules for future hubs should be.

Round Rock has not written the rule yet. The Federal Aviation Administration’s draft review of Zipline’s Austin operations closes to public comment today, Sunday, October 11.

Round Rock Can Decide Where a Hub Goes but Not Where the Drones Fly

The city’s page draws its authority at the property line. The FAA certifies the operator, under Part 135 for delivery, and controls airspace and flight paths, and state law backs that preemption. Round Rock keeps land use: where a hub can sit, and whether it sits next to homes.

The city says it can keep delivery hubs away from residential property, and it describes the noise from a delivery drone as similar to a small electric device or lawn equipment heard at a distance. Flights over neighborhoods are the FAA’s call, and the page says plainly that the city cannot regulate them.

Residents with a noise or nuisance complaint are sent to Zipline, whose community contact is community@zipline.com. Safety concerns go to the FAA. For privacy, the page points to Texas Government Code Chapter 423, which makes capturing images of people or private property for surveillance a Class C misdemeanor and carries civil penalties of up to $5,000 per incident for capture and $10,000 for distribution.

A Zipline Platform 2 over the Dallas suburbs, where the company began Texas deliveries in 2025. Rowlett, east of Dallas, wrote drone hubs into its zoning code before Zipline opened there. Photo credit: Zipline

Other Texas cities took the other route. The Rowlett City Council voted 6 to 0 on May 20, 2025, to add unmanned aircraft hubs and kiosks to its zoning code as new uses in nonresidential districts, hubs by special use permit and kiosks by right, according to the council record. Round Rock is doing it in the other order: one hub first, under an agreement with the company, and the ordinance after it has watched the site run.

Twenty-Five Merchants Were on the App a Day After Launch

News 4 San Antonio reporter Brianna Perez counted 25 businesses on the Zipline app in Round Rock in a report published Saturday, October 10, one day into service. Instill Coffee is among them, and co-owner Michelle Bell said the shop joined to help test something new in the city.

Zipline’s own launch announcement had named no Round Rock merchants. Zach Hill, who leads community engagement for Zipline, told the station the company plans more Austin-area sites. “This is just the beginning, and this is our first site,” he said. The aircraft fly at up to 75 mph (121 km/h) and about 300 feet (91 meters), carry about 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) per order, and Zipline told the station it has flown more than 135 million commercial miles without a serious injury. Its Austin launch announcement puts the total at more than 140 million miles (225 million kilometers). Both figures are the company’s own, and the FAA’s Austin review is the only independent document on the operation so far.

Zipline Picked a High School That Teaches Part 107

Zipline’s October 8 demonstration at Stony Point High School went to a campus the company picked for its drone program. Stony Point is one of four Round Rock ISD high schools teaching the district’s Drone Aviation program. Its students can work toward the FAA Part 107 certificate.

The program also runs at Cedar Ridge, McNeil and Round Rock High. The sequence is three courses over four credits: Principles of Aviation and Aerospace, Drone Aviation, and a two-credit Practicum in Drone Aviation. The district says the program covers flight navigation, industry regulations, mission planning and human factors.

Zipline told KXAN the partnership with the district will bring classroom visits, career fairs and facility tours, and Hill told Community Impact it is in its early stages and could extend to the district’s engineering and robotics programs. Neither the district nor Zipline has put a start date or a student count on any of it. Hoodline, which flagged the demonstration, reports the aircraft lowered a pod carrying an order from a nearby business while students and staff watched.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d rather a city write its drone hub rule with a hub running down the road than from a Zipline slide deck, and Round Rock’s page is the most useful page I have seen a Texas city publish on drone delivery. It tells residents in writing that the city cannot stop the flights, that the city can keep a hub away from their backyard, and who to call when the noise bothers them. Westborough, Massachusetts, left all of that to lawyers, and Amazon’s launch there now hangs on a zoning appeal that nobody can schedule. Lincoln County, North Carolina, got a 200-signature petition over a Walmart pad before anyone explained what the county could and could not decide.

The order of operations still bothers me. Zipline’s first Austin hub went into the one ring of land where Texas law gives a city no zoning vote, so the Palm Valley neighbors got a phone number instead of a hearing. That is state law rather than anything Zipline wrote, but the company chose the site. I suspect Round Rock’s ordinance ends up looking like Rowlett’s, hubs by special use permit in commercial districts, and the only question is how many Texas cities adopt it after the drones arrive rather than before.

Sources: City of Round Rock, Round Rock ISD, KXAN, Community Impact, News 4 San Antonio, Hoodline, Citizen Portal, Rowlett City Council, May 20, 2025

Update, October 11, 2026: an earlier version of this article listed a phone number and email address for Zipline that appeared on the City of Round Rock’s page. Zipline says those are emergency lines shared with government and first responders, published by the city in error, and asked DroneXL to remove them. The company’s community contact is community@zipline.com.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Belvedere Votes on Drone Delivery Monday. Here Is the Residents' Guide

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:29:00 GMT

Belvedere, a city of 2,126 people on two islands in Richardson Bay, takes its final vote Monday, October 12, on the first drone delivery ordinance in Marin County. DroneXL has published a plain-language guide for Belvedere residents ahead of that vote: what is coming, who decides what, what the ordinance says section by section, and what a resident can still do before the meeting.

The guide exists because the argument in Belvedere has outgrown the facts. The council voted 3-2 on September 14 to give the rules a first reading, and the only split was over delivery hours. No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep. No company has said one will. Wing said in March it would bring delivery to the Bay Area “in the coming months” and named the region again in June on a Walmart list for 2027, without naming a city either time.

The Guide Separates What Belvedere Controls From What the FAA Owns

The Federal Aviation Administration decides who flies, where, how high and how often. Belvedere decides what happens on the ground: where a drone may land or drop a package, whether a delivery facility is allowed, and in which zone. Chapter 8.34 regulates only the ground.

The ordinance says so in its own text. Section 8.34.010 states that the chapter “does not regulate drone flights,” and section 8.34.100 defers to federal law wherever the two meet. The guide walks through all ten sections of the staff report and draft ordinance: the consent rule for deliveries onto private property, the 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. window (11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday), the 20-deliveries-a-month line that turns a home into a facility, the conditional use permit any facility would need in the mixed-use zone, and the privacy and complaint sections.

It also explains, with the same reasoning as DroneXL’s How approval works page, why the city cannot do the things residents keep asking for. A federal court struck down Newton, Massachusetts’ altitude limit, overflight ban and local drone registration in 2017, and the guide lists which demands fall on that side of the line. Noise limits in the air, a drone-only curfew, a no-fly zone over a school: a council that writes them is writing a lawsuit. The hours in 8.34.030(D) mirror the city’s existing noise code for everyone, not drones alone, which is the version most likely to hold up.

Residents Get a Checklist, Their Representatives and an Anonymous Survey

The guide ends with a checklist for the days before the vote, the City Clerk’s route for written comment, Assemblymember Damon Connolly, Senator Mike McGuire, and a two-minute anonymous survey: your town, where you stand, whether you would use it, what worries you, what would change your mind.

The survey collects no name, email or address. A bot check, a one-time device token and a rate limit keep it to one response per person, and submitting again replaces your earlier answer. An optional free-text line goes to DroneXL and is never published. Results are public and update as answers come in, and they are a count of who answered, not a poll of the town. The questions reach past Belvedere on purpose: a drone base, if one ever comes, would sit in Mill Valley, Corte Madera, Larkspur or another town with the commercial space, and the aircraft would cross Tiburon and Belvedere on the way to a neighbor who ordered. Those neighbors are asked too.

Every claim in the guide traces to a document listed in its sources section. If something in it is wrong, there is a correction form at the bottom of the guide, and DroneXL will fix it the day it hears.

DroneXL’s Take

Belvedere did something I have rarely seen a town do this year. Richardson and Papillion found out about drone delivery after the operator had chosen a site, and both ended up telling residents to call Washington. Belvedere read the preemption map first, found the part it owns, and wrote rules for a drone that has not arrived. I think the council should pass the ordinance Monday, and I think the louder residents should read the guide before they speak, because half the objections I have seen are aimed at a power the city does not have. DroneXL is not against drone delivery. A defibrillator across the bay in four minutes is a flight worth any amount of noise. A toothpaste run at 9 p.m. has to earn it, and the people under it get a say. The guide is built so they can use it.

Source: City of Belvedere, City Council staff report and draft Chapter 8.34, Sept. 14, 2026, DroneXL Belvedere resident guide.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Wingtra Ran 180 Simulations in Six Months to Design the RAY Drone

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:34:00 GMT

Swiss drone maker Wingtra ran 180 aerodynamic computer simulations in six months to get from the WingtraOne to the WingtraRAY, according to a video AirShaper published on October 7, 2026. AirShaper is the Belgian cloud simulation company whose software ran those tests, and the video is its own case study of the project.

The video puts the result at 56% more payload capacity, 12% more aerodynamic efficiency and 20% more of what AirShaper calls fuel efficiency than the WingtraOne, plus a wider operating envelope. Wingtra’s own RAY product page lists none of those three figures. It sells the drone on 59 minutes of flight time and 550 hectares (1,360 acres) covered per flight instead.

Wingtra Traded Wing Span for a Drone That Fits in a Case

Wingtra limited the RAY’s wing span so the drone fits in a standard transport case, even though AirShaper says a glider-sized wing would have been more efficient. A tailsitter takes off on propeller thrust, then tips over so the wing carries the aircraft and the propellers only overcome drag.

The drone assembles on site without a runway, with the GPS modules mounted on magnets for quick access. The RAY carries several interchangeable sensors, and each one moves the center of gravity, so the airframe had to stay stable across a range of weights rather than at one tuned point. AirShaper says a shift of a few centimeters on a drone optimized for a single set point can put it in a dangerous part of its flight envelope.

The RAY from above: the lifting wing, the fin and the two propeller pods that provide forward thrust in cruise. Photo credit: AirShaper

The airfoil thickness sat in the same trade. AirShaper says a thinner wing is slightly more efficient but stalls sooner and loses lift more abruptly, which makes it less predictable in gusts, and that was one of the compromises weighed in the design. The optional parachute, which DroneXL covered at launch as the route to FAA Category 3 operations over people, came out of the safety requirements rather than the aerodynamics.

Wingtra Skipped Prototypes Because the WingtraOne Had Already Been Wind Tunnel Tested

Wingtra modeled all 180 candidates in 3D and simulated them on AirShaper instead of building prototypes. It could do that because it had already checked the same software against a wind tunnel. The finished WingtraOne went into a tunnel, and the video says lift, drag and pitching moment all matched.

The team mapped every candidate against cost, weight, stability, looks and aerodynamic efficiency, picked the strongest and iterated from there. AirShaper’s platform accepts surface models that are not watertight, so sketch-stage geometry could go straight into a simulation. Setting one up took about five minutes: the software detects the propeller axis, the engineer enters the RPM, and the solver builds a moving reference frame around each propeller to compute thrust, power and torque, including the swirl the propwash puts across the wings.

The RAY banking over a haul road. The team simulated flap deflections and propwash across the wing before building a prototype. Photo credit: AirShaper

Wingtra ran quick low-accuracy comparisons across wildly different concepts and detailed runs for the geometries with propellers, panel gaps and flap deflections. AirShaper’s argument is that field and wind tunnel testing belong at the end, where prototypes and tunnel time get expensive, and the video says the RAY has since been validated in use. Wingtra itself has not published the simulation story or the three performance figures. This is the same workflow Luke Bell used on his solar-powered drone and his endurance build, at a hobbyist’s scale.

A surveyor flies the RAY from a tablet at a quarry. The airframe assembles on site without a runway. Photo credit: AirShaper

DroneXL’s Take

The wind tunnel check matters more than the 180 number. Wingtra could iterate that fast because it had spent money earlier on measuring the WingtraOne in real air and comparing the result against the software, and plenty of drone startups skip that step and trust the pretty flow pictures. The performance figures deserve more skepticism than the process does. They come from the vendor whose software is being sold, and Wingtra does not repeat them on its own product page. I believe the direction, because Wingtra’s published 40% faster coverage over the GEN II points the same way, but coverage speed mixes in cruise speed and sensor choice and does not isolate aerodynamics. The 56% payload gain is the figure a surveyor would buy on, and Wingtra should confirm it on its own spec page before anyone does.

Source: AirShaper on YouTube

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FCC Vote Would Shut Out Chinese Labs That Test 82% of US Devices

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 04:16:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on October 29, 2026 on an order that ends FCC recognition of every test lab in mainland China on December 1, 2028. Chairman Brendan Carr announced the item on October 7 and the agency published the draft the next day. Labs in China tested 82% of the devices that applied for FCC authorization in 2025. Labs inside the United States tested less than 4%.

Every phone, camera, router and drone sold in the US needs FCC authorization before it ships, and the testing behind that authorization is done by private labs the FCC recognizes. The draft limits that recognition to labs in the United States and in economies that have a mutual recognition agreement or a reciprocal trade deal with Washington.

Hong Kong is on the reciprocal list. Mainland China, where DJI’s Osmo Pocket 4P was tested, is not.

The Order Gives Mainland Labs 25 Months and Keeps Hong Kong and Taiwan

The draft Third Report and Order in ET Docket 24-136 stops FCC recognition of test labs and certification bodies in non-reciprocal economies on December 1, 2028. Its Appendix D lists more than 60 reciprocal economies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan among them. Mainland China is not on it.

The draft order, circulated as FCC-CIRC2610-05, counts 609 FCC-recognized test labs. It puts 25.1% of them in China, 18.4% in Taiwan and 17.9% in the United States. In 2007, US labs handled about 31% of FCC applications and Chinese labs about 13%. By 2025 those shares stood at 82% and under 4%.

Labs in China keep their recognition until the transition date, and the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology will keep issuing new recognitions to them, all of which expire on December 1, 2028 whatever day they were issued. Grants issued before that date stay valid, and applications filed before it are processed under the old rules. The draft declines to create a waiver process for individual labs, and it declines a broader ban, backed by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on labs anywhere that are owned by non-reciprocal entities.

China’s WTO Technical Barriers to Trade enquiry center filed against the rule and called it discriminatory under Article 5.1.1 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. The Consumer Technology Association, ITI and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation opposed it too, and several industry commenters asked for three to five years. The Commission gave them roughly two years and wrote that the reliance claims “generally lack evidentiary support.” Carr’s own line in the October 7 announcement was that the FCC will “insist on fair and reciprocal treatment in international commerce.”

DJI’s Handheld Cameras Still Get FCC Grants, and a Shenzhen Lab Tests Them

The FCC filing for the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P lists SGS-CSTC as its test firm, reached at a Shenzhen phone number, with SGS North America issuing the grant. Three other SGS-CSTC branches, in Shanghai, Xi’an and Guangzhou, already lost FCC recognition under the 2025 Bad Labs rules.

DJI’s aircraft were cut off on December 22, 2025, when the FCC put every foreign-made drone and UAS critical component on the Covered List, and the draft order cites that notice as background. A Mini 5 Pro cannot get a new grant whoever tests it, so this rule changes nothing for the ban. It reaches the DJI products that can still get a grant, which is the Osmo line DroneXL has been tracking through the FCC database, and every Chinese-made charger, camera and accessory that falls outside the Covered List. It also reaches every American and European brand that ships its hardware to Shenzhen for testing, which one US lab owner, Compliance Testing CEO Michael Schafer, told the FCC happens because mainland labs price 30 to 70% below what a US lab can charge.

The Bad Labs rules adopted in May 2025 have stripped recognition from 29 labs the FCC found to be owned or controlled by a foreign adversary. In June the agency found 33 incorrect or false test reports from SLG-CPC Test Laboratory, some of them identical reports filed for different products, and the draft counts that lab and Shenzhen STS Test Services among the recognitions it has since withdrawn. In August it told every certification body to tighten its screening after one of them approved the HOVERAir Versa, a Chinese flying camera the Covered List prohibits.

The lab item shares the October 29 agenda with the 800 MHz drone spectrum order DroneXL covered on October 9.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the first Carr order aimed at China this year that I would sign. The Covered List ban took hardware away from American pilots on a national security determination the FCC has kept out of the public record, and I have said so since December. This order asks that the lab testing a device sit in a jurisdiction where the FCC can audit it, it gives everyone 25 months, it leaves every existing grant alone, and it keeps Hong Kong and Taiwan in the system. Reciprocity is a trade principle I can defend to a DJI owner, and the SLG-CPC case, 33 grants on copied test reports, is more evidence than the drone ban’s public record ever showed me.

Carr’s release blames offshoring for gutting American labs, but the order’s own figure says US labs hold 17.9% of recognitions and win under 4% of the work. That tells me the capacity exists and the prices don’t compete. Twenty-five months is enough time for Shenzhen to put its hardware on a plane to Taipei or Hong Kong, and I’d bet that is exactly what DJI and every other mainland manufacturer will do. Nothing in the 76 pages explains why a national security rule trusts Hong Kong, a jurisdiction Beijing has run under its National Security Law since 2020, on the strength of a 1999 APEC arrangement. Watch the October 29 vote, then watch the Further Notice that goes out with it, because the question it asks, how to get testing capacity back into the United States, is the one this order does not answer.

Sources: FCC draft Third Report and Order, FCC-CIRC2610-05, Chairman Carr announcement, October 7, 2026, Reuters via The Business Standard

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

FAA Lets Tower Inspection Drones Fly Above LAANC Grids, No Tower Call

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:58:00 GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration has rewritten the internal order that decides what drone pilots get back from FAADroneZone. Order JO 7200.23E, Processing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Requests, is listed on the FAA’s orders page with an October 1 issue date and takes effect October 31. It cancels the April 2023 version and runs to 36 listed policy changes.

The one most Part 107 pilots will feel first: a drone inspecting a cell tower or high-rise inside controlled airspace can now be authorized above the LAANC grid ceiling without any coordination with the control tower. The same order writes down, for the first time, how the FAA handles requests inside the Class E surface area around smaller airports, and it takes multi-day approvals at grid altitude away from everyone except first responders. Every Part 91 drone approval now carries a see-and-avoid waiver.

The order’s own change list says the Class E surface rule exists because “this type of request was not addressed in previous versions of the order.” Those surface areas already carry UAS Facility Map grids on the FAA’s public map.

Tower Inspectors Get 100 Feet Above the Structure With No ATC Coordination

Paragraph 3-5 of the new order says air traffic facility coordination “is not required” above the facility map altitude for a Part 107 line-of-sight inspection of a vertical structure. The pilot stays within a 100-foot (30-meter) radius of the structure and no more than 100 feet above its top.

The drone also stays at least 2 nautical miles (3.7 kilometers) from any runway, heliport, seaplane base or vertiport unless a separate authorization covers it, keeps 500 feet (152 meters) below and 2,000 feet (610 meters) horizontally from clouds, and the pilot needs 3 statute miles (4.8 kilometers) of visibility from the control station. Bridges and power lines do not qualify. The order names cell towers, communications towers and high-rise buildings as examples and excludes “vertical structures with horizontal spans.”

The authorization can be written for a specific site or for the whole country. The order says a Service Center can “write a nationwide authorization for companies that make such a request,” with coordination among the FAA’s Service Centers left to the processing team manager. Tower inspection authorizations under this paragraph can run 24 months, against a single day for an ordinary request at a LAANC-enabled airport.

Requests still go through FAADroneZone, even at LAANC airports, and the order excludes airspace delegated to the Department of War. For a specific-area authorization, paragraph 4-5 says the Service Center is not required to verify that the operator meets the criteria, only that it “can do a cursory check.” The order puts compliance on the pilot: “It is the proponent’s responsibility to ensure they comply with the AA requirements.”

Class E Surface Areas Get a Formula the Order Says Nobody Wrote Down Before

Paragraph 3-3 covers the Class E surface area designated for an airport. On a sectional it is the dashed magenta ring around a field with no tower. The FAA says the facility map grids came from a national safety risk management panel using concentric circles from the airport reference point.

The circles are now policy. Inside 2 nautical miles (3.7 kilometers) of the reference point, a Part 107 pilot gets nothing without prior coordination and approval from the air traffic facility. From 2 to 3 nautical miles the ceiling is 100 feet (30 meters). From 3 to 4 it is 200 feet (61 meters), and beyond 4 nautical miles it is 400 feet (122 meters). Every authorization also requires a 1,000-foot (305-meter) cloud ceiling, a condition the standard facility map grid never carried.

Recreational flyers under Section 44809 get the same rings with a harder edge. Inside 2 nautical miles, requests “are not authorized” at all. Where a facility has built its own map that does not follow the circles, the facility’s map wins.

The order also closes a door on hobbyists. Individuals asking for a fixed flying site under Section 44809 are to be denied with the line “Individuals will not be granted approval for fixed sites,” and fixed sites and aviation events are reserved for community-based organizations. The FAA will issue those as airspace authorizations instead of letters of agreement.

Multi-Day Approvals at Grid Altitude Now Go to First Responders Only

The one-day rule survives for ordinary pilots. A request in airspace managed by a LAANC-enabled facility, at or below the grid altitude, is issued for a single day. Ask for a week and the Service Center issues the first day. It then tells the pilot to use LAANC next time.

The 2023 order let any operator with a defined project, a construction job for example, get a multi-day authorization at grid altitude. The new one reserves that at-grid option for first responders, and only when the approval saves the agency or the FAA paperwork. Above the grid, the rules the 2023 order already carried stay: a multi-day approval needs the facility manager’s sign-off and a project with a start and end date, and first responders get relief from the single-day policy. The one addition there is a buffer of up to 14 days “to address potential flight cancellations or delays due to weather,” with the air traffic facility’s approval.

The public safety demand is on the record. DroneXL reported in August that a FOIA release showed the FAA had cleared more than 1,000 agencies for drone first responder flights in ten months, and departments like Warwick, Rhode Island, which is waiting on zero-foot grids at T.F. Green to fly its Flock drones, are the operators the at-grid exception now serves.

Part 107 operational waivers now move through the FAA’s Aviation Safety Hub instead of FAADroneZone, and the order adds the moving-vehicle waiver under 107.145 to the list, which it says “was missing” from the 2023 version. COA extensions are capped at 60 days and barred once a COA has expired.

Every Part 91 Drone Approval Now Carries a See-and-Avoid Waiver

Chapter 5 was rebuilt around one sentence: all drone operations under Part 91, “whether within VLOS or beyond visual line of sight,” require relief from 14 CFR 91.113(b), the rule that requires a pilot to see and avoid other aircraft. The 2023 order attached that waiver to BVLOS flights only.

The new one attaches it to every Part 91 approval, because a drone has no pilot on board to see anything. The FAA split the work between two offices. A September 3, 2025 memorandum of agreement delegated line-of-sight 91.113(b) waivers to the Air Traffic Organization’s Service Centers, which process them with the COA itself and must list 91.113 on the FAA Form 7711-1. BVLOS waivers moved out of the headquarters UAS policy team, which ran a multi-office technical review and had applicants present their case to a panel, and into Flight Standards office AFS-750, which takes a concept of operations by email and issues the waiver before the pilot applies for airspace in CAPS. Applications and renewals are due 60 business days ahead, and a COA still expires at 24 months.

The 2023 order’s Tactical BVLOS section for first responders is gone from the main text. The FAA’s own public safety FAQ says the expedited public safety COA it introduced in April 2025 replaced the Tactical BVLOS approval, which DroneXL first covered in June 2023. The new order does not list the removal among its 36 changes.

The order also drops a numerical error. The agency agreements that let NASA, the Interior Department, the Forest Service and Customs and Border Protection fly small drones in Class G without a COA cap those flights at 1,199 feet (365 meters) above ground, and the 2023 text had said 1,200. The whole document now refers to the Pentagon as the Department of War, and a new chapter formalizes how the FAA and NAV CANADA handle six border airports, including Bellingham and Sault Ste. Marie, where one country’s controllers manage the other’s airspace.

Trade group NATA posted a short note on the order on October 6, the only coverage DroneXL has found. The order’s PDF carries a September 22 date in its filename, nine days before the issue date on the FAA’s listing.

DroneXL’s Take

I read the tower paragraph twice because it is the most useful thing the FAA has written for working Part 107 pilots in a while. A pilot inspecting a monopole inside Class D used to choose between a grid ceiling that stopped below the antennas and a bespoke authorization that took weeks and a tower’s goodwill.

Now the FAA has said, in its own order, that a drone hugging a tower is not a conflict for the pattern. The facility maps should have carried that rule from the start, and it took until 2026 to say it.

The Class E circles are harder to cheer. The FAA is admitting that the grids around its non-towered Class E airports came from a panel formula rather than from anyone who knows the field, and the fix is to make the formula official, with a cloud ceiling requirement the rest of the map system does not have. A pilot 2.5 nautical miles from a quiet Class E airport gets 100 feet, and a pilot at a busy Class D airport with a tower that bothered to draw its map can get 400 feet. My read is that the circles are a placeholder the FAA never expected to publish, and the order publishing them is the first chance anyone outside the agency has had to argue with them.

The bigger signal is in Chapter 5. The FAA has now put in writing that no drone under Part 91 can comply with see-and-avoid, line of sight or not, and that every approval needs a waiver to say so. It is the same question that stalled Part 108 over who yields in the sky, and the agency answered it for Part 91 with a form field while the civil rule sits at the White House. Watch what the AFS-750 email queue does to BVLOS waiver times between October 31 and whenever Part 108 publishes, because every Part 91 BVLOS request now runs through it.

Sources: FAA Order JO 7200.23E, FAA Order JO 7200.23D, NATA.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

Dallas Drone Pilot Faces 8 Years. The Runway Charge Carries Just One

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:23:00 GMT

A federal grand jury in Dallas has indicted a 24-year-old man on four counts accusing him of flying a drone into the airspace of Dallas Love Field and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on consecutive nights in June 2025. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced the case on Thursday, October 8. Pujan Prashantkumar Gajjar faces up to eight years in federal prison if convicted on all four.

The indictment, returned September 16, alleges Gajjar flew a drone into the runway exclusion zone at Love Field around 11:30 p.m. on June 26, 2025, and that the drone crossed an active runway. The next night, it alleges, he flew the same drone into the restricted airspace around DFW. On both flights, it says, he knowingly and willfully acted as an airman without an airman’s certificate. Agents arrested him on September 22.

Twelve days earlier, DroneXL reported on a Charlotte pilot who pleaded guilty to flying between two live runways. He faces up to a year.

The Airman Counts Carry Three Years Each, the Runway Count One

The press release does not name the statutes, but its wording does. “Runway exclusion zone” is the term 18 U.S.C. § 39B uses, and that offense carries a maximum of one year. Acting as an airman without a certificate, 49 U.S.C. § 46306, carries up to three years per count.

The 2018 law that created the runway offense defines the zone as a rectangle half a mile wide, running one statute mile past each end of an active runway at a Class B, C or D airport. It does not require that any aircraft was put at risk. Crossing the runway, the one operational detail in the release, changes nothing about the statutory maximum.

If the four counts come from those two statutes, eight years adds up one way: the two airport flights at a year apiece, and two three-year counts under § 46306. The DFW count could instead be the one-year national defense airspace offense, 49 U.S.C. § 46307, and the total would not move. The release describes the airman allegation as covering both flights and says nothing about registration, a separate three-year offense under the same section. DroneXL has not seen the indictment, so the count structure is my reading of the arithmetic, not a quote from the charging document. Gajjar made his initial appearance on September 22 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Harris Toliver.

A Hobbyist Can Be Charged as an Airman After Entering Class B Without Approval

The release does not say whether Gajjar flew for fun or for money. For the certificate counts, that may not matter. A recreational pilot needs no FAA certificate only while the flight stays inside the limits of 49 U.S.C. § 44809, one of which is authorization before entering Class B.

Both Dallas airports sit under Class B. Pilots who need to fly near them request that authorization through LAANC before takeoff. A flight that breaks any of the recreational limits falls under the rules that apply to everyone else, and among them is 14 CFR 107.12: nobody flies a small drone without a remote pilot certificate, or a certificated pilot supervising. That certificate is an airman certificate, which is why a hobbyist with no Part 107 card who flies into an airport’s airspace without approval can be charged the way a person flying a Cessna without a license would be.

The FBI Dallas field office and the Federal Air Marshal Service investigated, with help from the Federal Aviation Administration, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney from the office’s National Security Section is prosecuting. FBI Dallas Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock said in the release that drones in restricted airport airspace threaten “pilots, passengers, and crew in the air as well as communities on the ground.” Rothrock is a familiar name on this beat. He was the acting special agent in charge in Baltimore in February 2024, when federal prosecutors charged the pilot who stopped the AFC Championship with the same airman offense.

Neither the release nor FOX 4’s report says how investigators tied the two flights to Gajjar, or what happened in the 15 months between the flights and the indictment. In Charlotte, the airport’s drone-detection system flagged the flight the moment it started, and federal marshals tracked it for seven minutes.

Raybould’s Office Brought the Same Airman Charge at Dallas Stadium in June

U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould’s office brought the certificate count during the World Cup. On June 27, agents traced a drone spotted over Dallas Stadium before Argentina played Jordan to an Arlington man who admitted he lacked the FAA credentials, and charged him with operating without an airman’s certificate.

The sentencing record on that count is thin. Matthew Hebert, whose drone halted the AFC Championship game in Baltimore in January 2024, pleaded guilty in March 2024 to a misdemeanor airspace violation and received one year of probation and a $500 fine. He had told investigators he relied on his drone’s app and did not know the stadium was restricted. Xiaodong He, the Chinese tourist charged with the airspace offense and the airman offense over a 12-minute flight near Kennedy Space Center, pleaded guilty to the airspace count on September 18. What became of his airman count is not yet in the public record.

Charlotte’s Marco Antonio Ochoa pleaded guilty on September 22 to a single § 39B count for a seven-minute client video shot from a park between two active runways. That was the same day federal agents arrested Gajjar in Dallas. Ochoa has no sentencing date yet.

An indictment is an allegation, and Gajjar is presumed innocent.

DroneXL’s Take

The flight the indictment describes, a drone crossing an active runway at Love Field at 11:30 at night and the same drone inside DFW’s airspace the next night, is the flight Congress had in mind when it wrote the runway exclusion zone into law in 2018. If that is what happened, two nights at two airports is a pattern, and the law doesn’t ask whether anyone was on short final at the time.

The eight-year figure is a prosecutor’s ceiling. The one offense that describes the dangerous act is worth a year of it, and in the only airman-certificate case DroneXL has followed to a sentence, Hebert’s, the certificate count produced no prison time: he pleaded to the airspace misdemeanor and got probation. I expect this case to end nearer that outcome than the headline number, and if it doesn’t, I’d expect the second night to be the reason.

Recreational pilots should read the certificate counts as the lesson. The exception that lets you fly without a Part 107 ends the moment you enter Class B airspace without a LAANC approval. Past that line, the government can charge you as an unlicensed airman at three years per flight, whatever you were flying and whoever you were flying for.

Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Texas, FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, The Baltimore Sun, 18 U.S.C. § 39B, 49 U.S.C. § 46306, 49 U.S.C. § 46307, 49 U.S.C. § 44809, 14 CFR 107.12

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.

DroneXL: The Independent Drone Authority — DJI, FAA, Reviews & Deals

SkyFall Sends Its $50,000 StarGate Medevac Drone to the Front Line

Code 9.2 Asked for StarGate Because Ground Robots Take Hours

SkyFall Built StarGate to Fly on Starlink and AI When GPS Is Jammed

StarGate’s Real Test Is a Month of Combat Data SkyFall Won’t Share Yet

DroneXL’s Take

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Every Written Comment in the Council File Backs the Pause

Hoodline Reports Portland Treats Amazon’s Drones as Helicopters

DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

Missouri Fire Drone Caught a 200-Acre Blaze Jumping Its Line

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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Pearl White Went On Sale In China On September 16 With A Mica Coating

DJI’s Notify Me Link Ends On A 404 Page In The United States

DroneXL’s Take

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The Mk3C Comes From a Line Airspeeder Built to Fly With Nobody Aboard

DroneXL’s Take

Skydio Says ISR Command Can Send X10D Target Grids to F-16s

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DroneXL’s Take

Amazon's Westborough Drones Need Own FAA Review, Markey and Warren Say

Lawmakers Say No Earlier Drone Review Looked at New England

The FAA Is Already Reviewing Westborough Against Its National Study

DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

Drone Pilots Who Don't Adapt Won't Last Two Years: A 90-Day Plan

A Circle of What You Control Beats Worrying About the FAA

The 30, 60, 90-Day Plan Is One Plan You Keep Repeating

Drone Service Providers Doing the Same Thing Will Not Make It

Sales and Marketing Generate the Revenue, Not the Drone

Your Comment on an FAA Rule Gets Read

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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