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

Dolomites Parks Ban Hobby Drones, DJI Mini 5 Pro Included

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:14:30 GMT

Denis Barbas published “Climbing the Dolomites,” a film of about three minutes shot on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, to YouTube on September 21. It follows climbers across the range’s limestone towers this summer, and the aerial work is beautiful.

Viewers who want to pack a drone and chase similar shots need to know Italian park law first. Much of the Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2009, sits inside nature parks where flying a drone for fun is banned. In South Tyrol’s parks that ban covers every drone under 25 kilograms (55 pounds), including a sub-250-gram DJI Mini 5 Pro.

Denis Barbas Filmed Climbers in the Dolomites on a Mavic 4 Pro

Barbas, a filmmaker with about 191,000 YouTube subscribers, describes the piece as a cinematic short shot on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro in the Dolomites this summer. His description links to the Mavic 4 Pro color-grading LUTs he sells, which he says he used on all of the footage.

Travel films are his regular beat. He shot “AZORES in 6K” on the Mavic 4 Pro and “MADEIRA 5K” on a DJI Mavic 3, both Atlantic island chains that draw drone pilots for the same reason the Dolomites do.

For anyone planning a trip of their own, where in the range you take off decides whether a flight is legal. DroneXL has run Dolomites drone films before, including an FPV flight through the range in 2022, and the rules have tightened since.

Two climbers on top of a Dolomites rock spire, filmed with a DJI Mavic 4 Pro in summer 2026. Photo credit: Denis Barbas

South Tyrol Bans Drones Under 25 kg in Its Dolomites Parks

Since January 30, 2023, drone flights under 25 kilograms have been banned in 18 protected areas of South Tyrol. The list includes the Tre Cime, Puez-Odle, Fanes-Sennes-Braies and Sciliar-Catinaccio nature parks, plus the Lake Carezza and Città dei Sassi natural monuments.

The province’s nature office spells out the rules: the ban applies to all drones under 25 kilograms, with or without a camera. ENAC, Italy’s civil aviation authority, created the restriction as geographic zone ENV-002 and updated it on April 4, 2023, and it appears on the D-Flight map. Exceptions cover state aircraft and flights made for the park administration or in a clear public interest that fits the parks’ conservation goals. Scientific research and technical surveys can apply for an exemption.

The office also lists what it will not approve. Private and wedding videos are out, and so are promotional films, including influencer projects and social media content. Commercial productions are refused unless they are nature documentaries arranged with the office.

Jagged Dolomites peaks under a sunset sky, filmed with a DJI Mavic 4 Pro. Photo credit: Denis Barbas

The Ampezzo Park Around Cortina Requires Written Permission

On the Veneto side, the Parco Naturale delle Dolomiti d’Ampezzo prohibits drone overflights without written authorization from the park. Its regulation, adopted April 30, 2020, allows that permission for nature documentaries and studies, territorial surveys, and rescue or public-safety operations.

The Ampezzo regulation also requires an ENAC pilot certificate and third-party liability insurance, with requests emailed at least four days ahead. Violations are sanctioned under Veneto regional law 21/1990, and repeat offenders can have the drone confiscated. Land the Regole d’Ampezzo own outside the park is open under national rules.

Lake Sorapis sits inside the park. In August, il Nord Est reported that signs at the lake say drones are banned and many visitors fly anyway. Behind both parks sits Italy’s 1991 protected-areas law, which bans unauthorized aircraft over parks, and ENAC can close the airspace when the managing body asks.

A DJI Mini 5 Pro Skips the Exam, Not the Paperwork

Outside the parks, EU drone rules apply through ENAC, and weight changes the checklist. A Mini 5 Pro pilot needs no competency certificate in Italy. The operator still has to register on D-Flight, put the QR code on the drone, carry liability insurance and check the zone map.

That comes straight from ENAC’s open-category requirements, which drop only the pilot certificate for sub-250-gram drones with a camera. The Mini 5 Pro in the standard Fly More Combo is a C0 drone, and EASA confirmed that status last year even though many units weigh 252 to 253 grams, citing a 3% tolerance in the certification standard. EASA has also accepted a QR code in place of the printed operator number, which is the format D-Flight issues.

The catch is the battery. DJI’s FAQ, as published by UK dealer Heliguy, says the Fly More Combo Plus drone is certified C1, and a C0 unit fitted with the Intelligent Flight Battery Plus loses its C0 status. At that point you need the online A1/A3 certificate, like any C1 pilot.

The Mavic 4 Pro Is a C2 Drone That Needs a Certificate

The Mavic 4 Pro weighs about 1,063 grams and carries a C2 class label in Europe. Its pilot needs the online A1/A3 certificate to fly in subcategory A3, far from people, and the A2 certificate of competency to fly closer to uninvolved bystanders.

DroneXL’s Mavic 4 Pro review noted the C2 label at launch. In A3 the drone must stay 150 meters (492 feet) from residential, commercial, industrial and recreational areas, which a remote ridge usually satisfies. Every class shares the 120-meter (394-foot) ceiling, measured from the closest point of the ground. Over a cliff, that point is the rock face, not the valley floor.

A waterfall runs down a sunlit limestone cliff above a green Dolomites valley, filmed with a DJI Mavic 4 Pro. Photo credit: Denis Barbas

None of this paperwork overrides a park ban. A C2 certificate on a Mavic 4 Pro counts for exactly as much over Tre Cime as a Mini 5 Pro with no certificate at all.

DroneXL’s Take

Barbas made a beautiful film, and he’s an established drone filmmaker. I’d assume he did his homework and got these shots legally. Plenty of the Dolomites sits outside the park boundaries, and a professional knows where those lines are.

The warning here is for the viewer who watches it and thinks: I’ll take my drone to the Dolomites and get that too. That viewer is often flying a smaller mini drone like the DJI Mini 5 Pro or DJI Mini 3 and assuming sub-250 means no rules. In South Tyrol’s parks it doesn’t, and the Sorapis signs show what happens when visitors skip the homework: they fly past the sign anyway. Those pilots are the reason the next restriction lands on everyone else. Don’t be that guy.

Before you book the trip, open D-Flight, work out which park you’d be standing in, and read that park’s rules. Then go find your own shot outside the boundaries.

Sources: Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Parco Naturale delle Dolomiti d’Ampezzo, ENAC, Denis Barbas 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.

DJI Spinoff Livox Halves Point Rate to Cut Robot LiDAR Cost

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:32:27 GMT

Livox, the LiDAR company DJI incubated in 2016 and still sells through the DJI Store, announced the Mid-360L on X on Monday: a cheaper version of the Mid-360, the 360-degree sensor it has shipped by the hundred thousand for robot lawn mowers. The new unit runs at 100,000 points per second, half the rate of the Mid-360, and Livox has not published a price.

The Mid-360L keeps the 360-degree horizontal view and the 10-centimeter (4-inch) minimum detection range. The footprint is the same 65 by 65 millimeters (2.6 by 2.6 inches), 3 millimeters taller, and it weighs 245 grams (8.6 ounces), 20 grams less than the Mid-360. Livox’s X post calls it an “economical solution for large-scale robot deployment,” and its product page says the price is “highly competitive” without saying what it is.

I first wrote about Livox in January 2021, when DJI was hiring engineers to put its LiDAR in cars. Five years on, the volume Livox has put numbers on is in robot mowers, and it pitches the Mid-360L at exactly that kind of large-scale deployment.

Livox Mid-360L Trades Vertical View and Point Density for Lower Cost

The Livox Mid-360L cuts the vertical field of view from 59 degrees to 44 degrees and the point rate from 200,000 to 100,000 points per second. Range precision loosens from 2 centimeters or better to 3 centimeters or better at 10 meters (33 feet).

Livox's launch card for the Mid-360L highlights 360°×44° field of view, 100,000 points per second, 45 meters of range at 10% reflectivity, and a weight of 245 grams. Photo credit: Livox

The vertical cut lands on the top of the view. The Mid-360 sees from 7 degrees below horizontal to 52 degrees above; the Mid-360L sees from 10 degrees below to 34 degrees above, according to the Livox spec sheet. A mower or a floor-cleaning robot looks down and around, not up, so my read is that Livox cut the part of the frame its biggest customers use least.

Not everything got worse. The Mid-360L is rated at 45 meters (148 feet) on a 10-percent-reflectivity target, 5 meters farther than the Mid-360’s 40, and it draws 4.2 watts against 6.5. Its operating ceiling rises from 55°C to 65°C (131°F to 149°F), which matters on a black robot sitting in July sun. Both figures come from Livox’s lab, which the spec page says is a 25°C (77°F) environment, so the range gain is a claim I have not seen tested outside. IP67 sealing, the ICM40609 IMU, Ethernet output and PTP and GPS time sync carry over unchanged.

Livox Ships the Mid-360 by the Hundred Thousand

Livox said in March 2025 that it had delivered 100,000 Mid-360 units under its partnership with Dreame Technology, whose robot mowers sell across Europe and North America, and that the two companies target one million units over three years. Livox lists the Mid-360 at $979 and notes that tariffs can change that price.

Livox credits the cost cut to three things: a sensor chip it now designs itself, algorithms rewritten to run on cheaper processing hardware, and production lines it says now turn out more than three times as many units per hour. The capacity claim is the only one with a number attached. As of Monday afternoon, Livox’s newsroom carried no Mid-360L release; the product page and the X post are the whole announcement.

Dreame, the mower customer, was advertising drone jobs last August in a move to compete with DJI, which puts DJI’s LiDAR offshoot in the position of supplying sensors to a company recruiting to build drones against the company that incubated it.

DroneXL’s Take

Washington ended 2025 by putting foreign-made drones, DJI’s included, on the FCC Covered List on the theory that Chinese hardware in American skies is a security risk. Meanwhile DJI-incubated Livox is working toward a million sensors in Dreame’s mowers alone, a share of them rolling across American back yards, and it has just released a cheaper model. I’d bet the price cut is aimed at the robot makers still on the fence. In April I covered the Wall Street Journal’s finding that Tesla’s and Figure AI’s humanoids depend heavily on Chinese-made components, and that Congress was already reaching for the same playbook. The Mid-360L is what that playbook is up against: a sensor that pipes point clouds over an Ethernet cable to the robot’s own computer, pitched below a predecessor that already lists at $979. A blacklist cannot keep pace with a supplier willing to halve its point rate to reach a lower price. The only thing that can is an American 360-degree LiDAR that sells for a few hundred dollars and ships in volume. If one exists, nobody has sent me the spec sheet.

Source: Livox, Livox on X

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

ABZ Opens Hungary Drone Plant, Its FCC Pass Hinges on a US Factory

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:41:00 GMT

ABZ Innovation opened a €7 million ($8 million) factory extension in Szentendre, Hungary on September 17, 2026, and its CEO told Bloomberg the same day that the company will start building drones in the United States over the course of next year. The Hungarian plant is rated for 2,000 heavy-duty agricultural and industrial drones a year on one shift and 3,500 on two.

The US plan is not a footnote to the Hungarian one. ABZ’s L50 spraying drone holds one of the Department of War Conditional Approvals that exempt it from the FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones, and since July 21 those approvals last only as long as the holder follows the onshoring plan it filed. When I covered ABZ’s funding round in January, the US angle was a distributor deal. Nine months later it is a factory.

ABZ lost 1 billion forint ($3.2 million) in 2025 on the cost of scaling up, and CEO Károly Ludvigh says break-even is a few years out.

ABZ Targets 3,500 Drones a Year From 11,400 Square Feet

The new Szentendre facility is about four times the size of ABZ’s previous site. At 1,060 square meters (11,410 square feet), it is what ABZ calls one of the largest dedicated civilian drone factories in Europe. ABZ targets a threefold production increase in 2026 and a further doubling in 2027.

The €7 million came from the funding round ABZ closed in January, led by Germany’s Vsquared Ventures with Hungary’s Day One Capital and US investor Assembly Ventures. I covered that round the day it closed, 24 hours after Drone Nerds added ABZ’s L10 V2 sprayer to its US catalog. The square-footage figure comes from Ludvigh’s July interview with DroneLife, which put full-capacity staffing at 40 to 45 people.

Ludvigh told Reuters the site matters because “before this there was almost no existing capacity to manufacture these kinds of drones” in Europe. ABZ builds four lines there: L-Series sprayers, S-Series spreaders, C-Series high-pressure cleaning drones, and M-Series cargo platforms, sold through distributors in more than 40 countries. Sales are concentrated in the US and Europe. Gergely Kis, a drone adviser at Hungarian consultancy eNET, told Reuters that slow progress on unmanned traffic management is holding back civilian drone growth in Europe.

Ludvigh told Bloomberg the order backlog is what justifies the second shift, and a company that lost 1 billion forint against a €7 million round needs that backlog converted into deliveries quickly.

A US Factory Is What Keeps ABZ’s L50 Off the Covered List

The FCC exempted ABZ’s L50 from its Covered List on June 12, 2026, in Public Notice DA 26-585, after the Department of War granted the sprayer a Conditional Approval. It originally expired December 31, 2026. A July 21 National Security Determination removed the date and tied every approval to an onshoring plan.

The wording in the FCC’s July 21 notice is specific: approvals remain effective indefinitely so long as the entity abides by the onshoring plan outlined in its application, and terminate, with the equipment restored to the Covered List, if it does not. ABZ’s application is not public, so what it promised the Pentagon is not on the record. What is on the record is Ludvigh telling Bloomberg on September 17 that non-military drone production in the US begins over the course of 2027, and telling Hungarian daily Világgazdaság, as relayed by Hungary Today, that a US plant would also blunt the effect of any tariffs. Nothing published so far names a state, a site, a partner, or which product line moves first.

The exemption covers one aircraft. The FCC’s Conditional Approval list names ABZ’s L50 and nothing else from the company. The L10 V2 that Drone Nerds sells in the US is not on it, and neither are the cleaning, spreading, or cargo lines. That gap got sharper on July 21, when the FCC proposed banning the import and sale of foreign-made aerosol drones that dispense “economic poison” under FAA agricultural rules, along with thermal, LiDAR, docking, swarming, and 55-pound-plus drones, for any buyer outside the federal government. Drones holding a Conditional Approval, a Blue UAS listing, or Buy America status are carved out. A Hungarian-built sprayer without one of those three is exactly what the proposal targets.

A US assembly line solves the second problem as well as the first. Drones assembled in the US with at least 65 percent domestic component value qualify for the Buy America exemption, which the July 21 action extended to January 1, 2028. Whether ABZ can hit 65 percent is the question I put to the company in January, when I asked where its flight controllers, motors, and battery cells come from. “European-sourced” was the answer its investors gave then. A factory in the US will have to answer in percentages.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the FCC drone ban working the way its defenders say it should. A five-year-old Hungarian company with €7 million submitted to a national security review, cleared it, and says it will move production to the US to keep the door open. ABZ is the case the agency will cite when it denies protectionism.

The eight of nine DJI-linked brands that ignored FCC letters of inquiry make the contrast for it.

I still don’t think it settles the argument. The problem with the ban was never that no foreign company would ever qualify. It was scale and price. ABZ’s Hungarian plant tops out at 3,500 drones a year across four product lines and 40 countries, on a double shift it has not yet run. A Michigan State study I covered in November counted roughly 5,500 FAA-registered agricultural drones in the US by mid-2025, in a spray market the same study put at about 80 percent DJI. One US-approved sprayer from a company that lost $3.2 million last year does not replace that fleet, and the only pricing Ludvigh has offered, to DroneLife in July, was “the same or similar level as the Chinese,” with no figure attached. My read is that ABZ wins a real niche, the operator who has to certify country of origin for a government or utility contract, and that the American farmer buying on price is no closer to an Agras substitute than he was in December.

The number to watch is 65 percent. If ABZ’s US line clears the Buy America threshold and ABZ says so, in component percentages rather than in “European-sourced” language, the niche gets a lot bigger. If it opens the plant and stays quiet about the parts, the Szentendre press release will have told us more than the American one.

Sources: Reuters, via Global Banking & Finance, Bloomberg, ABZ Innovation press release via RoboticsTomorrow, FCC DA 26-585, FCC DA 26-761

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

Air Force Loses Shahed Clone Off Eglin, Fishing Charter Reels It In

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:10:57 GMT

A Pensacola fishing charter hauled a US Air Force drone out of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, and the drone is a copy of Iran’s Shahed-136. Hot Spots Charters captain Daniel Arsenault spotted the gray delta-wing airframe floating offshore near Eglin Air Force Base, pulled a mahi-mahi out from under it, and had his passengers help drag it onto the bow.

The airframe matches the FLM-136, the SpektreWorks target drone the Pentagon turned into the LUCAS attack drone that has been flying combat missions against Iran since February. Eglin says a test article went down. It won’t say which one.

Eglin Confirms a Lost Test Article but Won’t Name the Drone

An Eglin Air Force Base spokesperson told The War Zone the base recently lost a drone during a test. The spokesperson would not confirm it was the one Hot Spots Charters recovered, name the type, or say when or where it went down, and referred further questions to the Pentagon.

“I can confirm that we were doing a test and the test article went down,” the spokesperson told The War Zone, which broke the story Sunday. CNN has asked Eglin for comment.

The type is not much of a secret. Photos Hot Spots posted to Facebook show the drone missing its nose cone and rear propeller, both common losses in a water impact, but the delta wing and fuselage match the FLM-136 that Arizona-based SpektreWorks built as a Shahed stand-in for counter-drone training. Local charter captain and aviation photographer Charlie Green told The War Zone that Arsenault notified local agencies and one of them collected the drone. Hot Spots put it more plainly on Facebook: “The black suvs came and got their drone, all is good!”

The recovered drone stands nose-up on a Pensacola dock on September 19, 2026. The nose cone is gone and the fuselage shows exposed fittings where components separated on impact. Photo credit: Hot Spots Charters

Eglin’s 96th Test Wing runs the Eglin Gulf Test Range, about 120,000 square miles of overwater airspace covering the eastern third of the Gulf. The Air Force keeps a handful of 120-foot boats there, crewed by contractor Florida Offshore, to retrieve roughly 100 downed target drones a year. This one got past them and ended up on a dock in Pensacola with a boat-rental phone number on the sign behind it. One commenter on the Hot Spots page had the verdict: “Fun fight but they’re super bony and taste like avgas.”

Hot Spots Charters lines up the day's catch next to the drone at the Pensacola dock on September 19, 2026. Photo credit: Hot Spots Charters

LUCAS Losses Are Priced In at $35,000 an Airframe

A LUCAS attack drone costs about $35,000, the figure CENTCOM gave when it stood up Task Force Scorpion Strike in December 2025. The drone first flew in combat on February 28, opening day of Operation Epic Fury. Within days, one came down almost intact in Iraq.

The Pentagon unveiled the design in July 2025 as an American answer to the Shahed, and CENTCOM announced the first combat use the same day the strikes on Iran began. The drone is 9.8 feet (2.9 meters) long with an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) wingspan and weighs about 70 pounds (32 kilograms), light enough for a charter crew to lift aboard. DroneXL’s comparison of the two airframes in March covered how SpektreWorks reverse-engineered the Shahed and what $35,000 buys against the Iranian original.

Losing airframes is part of the design. Open-source accounts photographed a nearly complete LUCAS on the ground in Iraq on March 2, and The War Zone reported multiple intact losses during the Iran campaign. Florida has seen this before too: in March 2021, beachcombers in Palm Beach County found a BQM-167A target drone washed ashore, another Air Force target drone flown from the Florida ranges.

DroneXL’s Take

The fishing story is the fun part. The useful part is that this weapon works because losing one doesn’t matter. A $35,000 airframe on a fishing boat, or in an Iraqi field, is an accounting line. The target version carries no warhead and the design is Iran’s to begin with. This one did not even keep its nose section. There is nothing on that dock Tehran hasn’t already seen.

Which makes Eglin’s refusal to name the type, after CNN identified it from a photo taken on a public dock, habit rather than security. My read is this won’t be the last one anglers find. The Air Force already fishes about 100 targets a year out of those waters, a BQM-167A washed up in 2021, and LUCAS development has moved on to swarming work that needs ranges like Eglin’s. Some of it is going to float.

Sources: The War Zone, CNN

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

Amazon Wants Drones Over 6 Massachusetts Towns. Not All Have Been Told

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:50:00 GMT

Amazon wants to launch MK30 delivery drones from the parking lot of its warehouse at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts, to homes within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers), an area of about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), and it hopes to be flying by the end of the year. The circle takes in Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Amazon presented the plan to the Westborough Select Board on August 18, opened a Planning Board hearing on September 15 that has been continued to October 6, and is holding a public meet-and-greet at the DoubleTree by Hilton on Computer Drive this Wednesday, September 23, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The towns under the flight paths did not all hear about it from Amazon. Shrewsbury’s town manager told his Select Board on August 12 that the town had been alerted by regional law enforcement. Southborough, which sits almost entirely inside the service area on Amazon’s own map, had not been contacted by the company as of September 16, according to the town’s Select Board chair and administrator.

It is the first Prime Air hub DroneXL has seen proposed in Massachusetts, and the second New England hub to surface in a week, after Connecticut opened a 15-day comment window on Amazon’s North Haven site. Massachusetts is one of the 17 states whose attorneys general told the FAA in January that its national environmental review of drone delivery was a paper exercise. The FAA signed it anyway on July 28, and there is no FAA document of any kind posted for Westborough.

Amazon Wants a 6,800-Square-Foot Drone Pad on a Westborough Parking Lot

Amazon is asking Westborough for a fenced 6,800-square-foot (632-square-meter) launch-and-landing area on the east side of the parking lot at its SMA1 same-day facility, taking out about 27 parking spaces. Jonathan Greeley, Amazon’s head of economic development for New England, made the pitch on August 18.

The pad holds landing circles, with battery vaults and flight monitors beside them. Tareq Wafaie, who leads Amazon’s drone program in the region, described the aircraft the company flies everywhere: a six-rotor MK30 about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across, autonomous and electric, cruising at 60 to 75 mph (97 to 121 km/h) with up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) in a shoebox-sized package, which Amazon says covers about 60% of what its fulfillment centers stock. Customers opt in, pay an extra fee for the one-hour service, and mark a landing spot on their property that Amazon describes as a cylinder 18 feet (5.5 meters) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) tall. The drone scans the spot for anyone or anything in the way, then releases the package from about 13 feet (4 meters). Amazon’s national page puts the fee at nothing for Prime members on orders of $50 or more, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 for everyone else.

On noise, Amazon told Westborough the drone peaks below its own trucks and sits around a delivery van; the Community Advocate reported the pitch as no louder than a toothbrush at arm’s length. Amazon’s own FAA filing for Baton Rouge records the MK30 at 90.5 to 91.8 decibels SEL at takeoff and landing, measured 20 feet from the aircraft, with the delivery hover at 92.1, for an aircraft a Baton Rouge resident said passes about 20 times an hour.

The application sits on the Planning Board’s September 15 agenda as a site-plan review, number 26-02275, filed by engineering firm Kimley-Horn, not as a special permit: the building commissioner and town counsel treat the pad as accessory to the warehouse rather than an airport under the zoning bylaw, a reading a Select Board member questioned on August 18, according to Citizen Portal’s summary of the meeting recording. Residents at the September 15 hearing asked whether the flights were worth the risk and how loud a steady stream of them would be, CBS Boston reported. The same Citizen Portal summary has Amazon and town staff telling the board that an FAA environmental review and a landing-area approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division are also required before any flight, with the FAA filing to follow the local review.

Shrewsbury Learned About the Flights From Police, Not Amazon

Shrewsbury Town Manager Kevin Mizikar briefed his Select Board on August 12 and said the town heard about the plan from regional law enforcement, My Southborough reported. The drones reach almost all of Shrewsbury, he told the board: “We can’t control flight altitude or delivery corridors.”

Select Board member Gregg Richards put it in plainer terms, telling the Community Advocate there will be unlucky residents with a flight path over their house that the town cannot stop, and that it stinks. Mizikar’s answer was the ground: the town keeps authority over the land end of the operation, and it could bar drones from taking off on municipal property. Board member Anand Sharma said the town needs a bylaw; Vice Chair Carlos Garcia wanted a proposal drafted before the flights arrive, not after.

What a flight path over the house looks like is on the record in Richardson, Texas, where a hub sits less than a mile from homes: one resident’s tracker logged 52 Amazon drones over her yard in a single day, the New York Times reported on Monday, and the city concluded in April that it has no legal handle on the flights. Amazon’s Westborough presentation showed a service-area map, not the routes its drones would fly.

The MK30 at Amazon's Prime Air booth at XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit. The aircraft weighs 83 pounds at takeoff and carries a 5-pound package. Photo credit: Haye Kesteloo / DroneXL

Southborough had less than that. Beth Melo, who publishes My Southborough, spotted the town inside Amazon’s service map on the August 18 meeting video and checked with the Select Board chair and town administrator on September 16. Neither the board nor Southborough police had heard from Amazon. Melo notified them herself. Wafaie had told Westborough the map included communities Amazon was still talking to, or would be, and that stakeholder outreach was the main message.

Amazon’s statement to CBS Boston, from spokesperson Jack Stelzner, said the company is working with local officials and “exploring opportunities to expand” in the Westborough area and elsewhere. Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, which named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as the next launches on the way to nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end, did not mention Massachusetts.

Massachusetts Adds a State Landing-Area Permit the FAA Route Does Not

Massachusetts bars anyone from establishing a restricted landing area without a certificate of approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division, under 702 CMR 5.01 and Chapter 90, Section 39B of the General Laws. The division inspects the site first, and the applicant must notify the local police and fire departments in writing.

The regulation exempts private landing areas, but only for non-commercial use, which a Prime Air pad is not. That is a layer most Amazon hubs never see. The Texas, Florida, Kansas City and Detroit hubs each got an FAA environmental assessment with a 30-day comment period and a local site-plan vote, and nothing from the state. Since July 28 the FAA can also skip the site assessment and check a new hub against its national finding inside the agency, the path DroneXL described when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. Tracy, California got a launch date and no document; Portland got a city permit and no document. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, last updated September 11, listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 21.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office signed the January 23 letter from 17 attorneys general asking the FAA for a full environmental impact statement instead of the national assessment. The 60-day window to challenge the July 28 finding in court runs out September 26, three days after Amazon’s Westborough forum.

The towns also have more ground to stand on than Shrewsbury’s briefing suggested. The one federal ruling DroneXL’s 35-state review of drop laws found on point came out of this state: in Singer v. City of Newton, a federal judge in Boston struck four provisions of Newton’s drone ordinance in 2017 but rejected the argument that federal law leaves no room for any local rule. In 2018 the state’s Supreme Judicial Court held in Roma III v. Rockport that the aeronautics code does not wipe out local zoning over a private landing area. Newton is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of the Otis Street lot.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon had this backwards, and Southborough is the proof. The service map went up on August 18 with a town on it whose officials say Amazon had not contacted them, and a local blogger did the outreach the company called its main message. Shrewsbury’s manager found out from the police.

That is not community engagement, it is a land-use application with a 174-square-mile shadow, and the towns in the shadow got the news secondhand. The pro-drone position here is the one I hold on every hub: a 30-minute Motrin run without a van on Route 9 is the industry this site exists to cover, and the hubs Amazon already runs deliver it daily. On the pad itself Amazon holds the stronger hand, because it owns the lot and the FAA’s own page says hub siting is the operator’s call within local zoning.

What Massachusetts has that Texas did not is a state aeronautics permit with written notice to the fire and police chiefs, an attorney general on the record, and a court decision from 20 miles away that says local rules survive. My read is that none of that stops a single flight. It does decide whether anyone outside Westborough gets asked before the first one leaves Otis Street. Anyone who wants to take the July 28 finding to court has five days left, and Massachusetts is the state with the case law to test it. Wednesday at the DoubleTree is where the towns find out whether Amazon has a plan for Southborough or a map with Southborough on it.

Sources: Community Advocate (Westborough), Community Advocate (Shrewsbury), My Southborough, CBS Boston, Citizen Portal, 702 CMR 5.00, FAA NEPA and Drones, Comments of 17 Attorneys General, January 23, 2026, Amazon.

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

Amazon Drones Overwhelm Texas Suburb, NYT Says. FAA Signed Off In July

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:36:53 GMT

The New York Times went to the backyard pools of Richardson, Texas, and published the result Monday under the headline “It’s Raining Boxes.” One resident’s drone tracker logged 52 Amazon Prime Air drones overhead on Friday, three of them between 150 and 170 feet up, and she called it a slow day. Amazon told the paper that fewer than 1% of inquiries about the program this year concern noise.

DroneXL has covered Richardson’s Prime Air hub since an MK30 hit an apartment building there in February, through Amazon’s March altitude change and the city’s April conclusion that it has no legal handle on the flights. The Times account adds what those stories could not: named families, a pool, and a homeowners’ association president who says the Federal Aviation Administration has failed the city. The FAA answered the noise question for the whole country on July 28, and the answer was that it does not count as a “significant impact.”

Richardson Residents Are Counting The Drones Themselves

Stephanie Puri, a video game industry researcher in Richardson, set up a drone tracker and recorded 52 overflights on Friday, September 18, the Times reported. Amazon told the Richardson City Council in March the hub filled about 150 orders a day. Its FAA approval allows 1,000.

The hub sits less than a mile from the Anderson family’s pool, and every package it flies can go anywhere inside a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, so the neighborhoods closest to it sit under every departure. Residents there call the corridor a drone highway. Scott Bratcher, who runs the homeowners’ association in one of them, told the paper: “The government and the F.A.A. have failed us.” City rules allow deliveries from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Nikki Anderson said she asked the city to trim the hours or the days and got nowhere.

Amazon has already pulled the one lever it controls. After residents complained in January, the company raised the average outbound altitude to 225 feet (69 meters) and rerouted some departures over commercial land, changes it presented to the council on March 9 and DroneXL laid out this month when Baton Rouge residents raised the same complaint. Kristi Graham told the Times that after she complained about drones over her backyard, Amazon moved the route to the front of her house.

This is not the first time Richardson has made the news for a Prime Air drone. An MK30 struck an apartment building on Routh Creek Parkway in February, two months after the hub opened, and smoked on the sidewalk until Amazon staff dismantled it.

Richardson Tells Residents The Drones Don’t Record. Amazon Says They Do

Richardson’s own drone delivery FAQ says the Amazon and Walmart drones overhead do not record video or capture images, and navigate with low-resolution sensors only. Amazon’s Prime Air operations page says people, pets, cars and objects near a delivery point may be recorded, and that the images improve Amazon’s services.

Amazon spokeswoman Lindsay Hamilton gave the Times the same account: the drones use multiple cameras and sensors, the images sit on encrypted drives that only authorized staff can access, and the data goes to safety and customer service. That is a defensible policy. It is not what the city is telling the people who ask.

Puri does not take Amazon’s word for it. “But, oh, Amazon can see you,” she told the paper, after saying that what people do in their own backyard is their business.

The FAA Answered The Noise Question Nationwide In July

The FAA signed a national Finding of No Significant Impact for Part 135 drone delivery on July 28. The condition is physical: a hub flying 1,150 deliveries a day must sit 600 feet (183 meters) from homes, a figure derived from the fleet’s loudest aircraft at 78 decibels en route.

That math works on annual day-night averages, which is how federal noise law measures airports. It says nothing about what a single pass sounds like from a pool float. The FAA’s own filing for Amazon’s Baton Rouge hub puts the delivery hover, 13 feet (4 meters) over the drop point, at 92.1 decibels measured from 25 feet, and offers a diesel truck at 50 feet as the comparison. Hamilton told the Times the drones are quieter than a passing car during delivery.

The July finding also ended the market-by-market environmental reviews that gave towns a 30-day comment window, a change DroneXL documented when it landed. Richardson’s FAQ now tells residents that cities cannot set altitude or create airspace limits and points them at their senators. The council dropped a rezoning threat in April on legal advice.

Richardson Is Now Writing To El Paso And Richmond

Richardson residents are emailing officials in El Paso and Richmond, Virginia, calling the drones “a disaster for the City of Richardson,” the Times reported. Both are on Amazon’s map: El Paso is among 22 sites in the FAA’s January Texas assessment, and Richmond’s approvals came through in August.

Amazon said on August 19 that Prime Air will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of the year, up from 11 hubs in seven states. The towns added after July 28 will not get the comment period Richardson’s neighbors used to have.

DroneXL’s Take

The Times did in an afternoon what the FAA’s national finding cannot: it measured the noise the way a person hears it, from the yard. A day-night average under the federal threshold and a 52-drone Friday can both be true. Richardson lives with the second one.

Richardson is a worst case, and Amazon has a point about that. The families in the story live under the departure corridor of a hub less than a mile away. A house at the far end of the 7.5-mile radius hears one drone drop one box, and most of the 500 towns Amazon is counting sit out there, not next to the pad.

What Amazon does not have a point about is the aircraft. I stood next to an MK30 in Dusseldorf this spring, and it comes up to my shoulder: 83 pounds at takeoff to move a 5-pound box, where Zipline’s P2 carries 8 pounds at 55 and Wing’s aircraft carries 2.6 at about 12. Amazon has shown altitude is its lever, because it pulled it in Richardson. In Baton Rouge it told residents that altitude is the FAA’s call, and it has not answered a single one of DroneXL’s written safety questions, sound level included, on a list Zipline has already answered in part. The hover noise in the Baton Rouge filing is Amazon’s number for Amazon’s aircraft, and it follows the MK30 into every one of those 500 towns.

September 26 closes the window to challenge the national finding in court. El Paso already sits inside the FAA’s Texas assessment, so the emails from Richardson are reaching a city with one move left, the one Richardson made: push Amazon to fly a different profile inside the envelope it already has.

Sources: The New York Times, City of Richardson, Amazon Prime Air, FAA.

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

Ben Biggs Built The 626 km/h Blackbird On 14-Cell Packs Few Pilots Use

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:56:54 GMT

Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs has published the full build story of the Blackbird, the quadcopter that took the Guinness World Record for fastest battery-powered RC drone at 626.42 km/h (389 mph) on December 8, 2025. The video, released on his own YouTube channel nine months after the record fell, covers the two years of work behind it, from a June 2024 start to the record day.

The headline choice is the power system. Biggs ran the Blackbird on 14 lithium polymer cells, two custom 7-cell packs in series for more than 60 volts fully charged, against the 6 cells a typical FPV drone uses. His first speed controller went up in smoke. He then soldered four APD 200 F3 controllers side by side with a 3 mm copper rod and gave them no cooling at all, on the logic that 10 seconds at full throttle would not be long enough to cook them.

The Blackbird was designed around a propeller that barely stays subsonic

Biggs built the Blackbird around APC’s 7x15 propeller, a 7-inch blade with 15 inches of pitch, and calculated that 30,000 rpm would give him 617 km/h (383 mph). The blade tips would be at 95 percent of the speed of sound, so he cut the props to about 6 inches.

Custom-wound Amax 2826 motors, rated to 4.6 kW, have their windings soldered straight to the speed controllers. The propellers sit ahead of the arms in a puller layout Biggs says no other high-speed quad used at the time. CNC-machined aluminium spinners double as prop nuts and duct air over the motor windings, a copy of the P-51 Mustang’s Meredith-effect radiator. Biggs says they cooled the motors and cut drag, and doubts they add thrust.

Benjamin Biggs at his desk with the record-breaking Blackbird speed drone. Photo credit: Benjamin Biggs / YouTube

Biggs started after watching Luke and Mike Bell’s 480 km/h record video. His first prototype maxed out at 450 km/h. The Blackbird passed 600 on its second day out. On record day the first pair of runs averaged 604 km/h; for the second pair Biggs charged the packs to 4.3 volts per cell, above the normal 4.2, and flew 599 upwind and 655 downwind for the certified 626.42. Three days later the Bells took the record back at 657.59 km/h.

The video dropout that killed a Blackbird in May was there from the first prototype

Biggs’ video feed cut out almost every time the prototype flew past him in early 2025, once leaving him staring into the sun with no picture. Voltage regulators, a separate transmitter battery and analog video all failed to fix it. The record day ended with two more dropouts.

Benjamin Biggs holds his 3D-printed Blackbird speed drone, the quadcopter that set a 626 km/h Guinness World Record in December 2025. Photo credit: Benjamin Biggs / YouTube

That is the fault that cost the team an airframe at 630 km/h in May 2026, when Biggs offered Doppler shift on the digital link as an unproven theory. In the new video he calls it only a glitch that happens when you fly fast past yourself, and closes by promising a part two on the climb from 626 to “well over 700 km/h.” DroneXL reported the 690 km/h pass in February and the 730 peak in May, neither with Guinness witnesses on site.

DroneXL’s Take

The useful thing here is the date on the dropout, not the spinners. Biggs was losing his picture on close passes in early 2025, a year before it cost him a Blackbird, and every fix he tried was a power fix for what looks like a radio fault.

The Bells hold the record because they turned up with witnesses and four clean passes. Biggs has beaten 657 km/h on his own telemetry twice since. What he has not done is walk into a certified attempt with a spare drone in the case, and I don’t see how he does that while the feed still drops on the fastest pass of the day. The next 15 km/h will come from props. The record will come from the video link.

Source: Benjamin Biggs (YouTube), Guinness World Records.

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

Belvedere Puts Drone Delivery on the Books Before Wing Names a City

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:49:53 GMT

Belvedere, a city of 2,126 people on two islands in San Francisco Bay, voted 3-2 on September 14 to give first-reading approval to Marin County’s first ordinance on commercial drone delivery. No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep yet. The city is writing the rules for the day one does.

The two no votes, from Councilmembers Pat Carapiet and Jane Cooper, were not against regulating drones. They wanted a shorter delivery window than the one the ordinance borrows from the city’s noise code. A second reading is expected in October; the council’s next regular meeting is October 12.

Belvedere Regulates the Ground Because It Cannot Touch the Sky

The ordinance leaves flight paths, altitude and overflight to the Federal Aviation Administration, which preempts local rules in the air. It regulates what happens on the ground instead: where drones may land, stage, load and drop packages, and where a company can put a delivery facility inside city limits.

A commercial drone facility, defined as a site set up to send or receive 20 or more drone deliveries a month, is allowed only in the city’s mixed-use zones and only with a conditional use permit from the Planning Commission. Medical deliveries do not count toward the 20. Deliveries to a home require the resident’s prior consent. Delivery activity is barred from public access areas unless the city authorizes it, and nothing may block emergency access routes. The ordinance adds nuisance rules covering privacy, noise, lights and trash, according to the Marin Independent Journal, which covered the hearing.

Delivery hours track Section 8.10.050 of the Belvedere Municipal Code, which sets quiet time at 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Drones can deliver the rest of the day.

City Manager Robert Zadnik told the council the geography is the argument. “Belvedere is compact with narrow streets, steep hills and constrained emergency access routes,” he said. Staff put the same case in writing in July: routine drone delivery would bring package retrieval, support vehicles, repeated noise, trespass and litter to streets with few emergency alternatives.

That July 13 meeting is why this took two tries. Staff asked the council to waive the first reading and adopt the ordinance in one sitting. Cooper called the language vague enough for delivery companies to exploit, Carapiet asked how it would be enforced, and the city attorney answered that the vagueness was deliberate, to keep the law flexible while the technology settled. The council sent it back to be simplified, The Ark reported. Mayor Sally Wilkinson, who helped staff draft it, made the case for moving anyway: “We want something on the books before this comes to life.”

The Only Fight on September 14 Was Over the Hours

Cooper proposed 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Carapiet backed shorter hours to head off complaints. Wilkinson answered that Amazon and FedEx trucks already run Belvedere’s streets with their lights on until 11 p.m. or midnight, and drones could replace some of that traffic rather than add to it.

Councilmember Peter Mark went further. Cutting drone hours tighter than the noise ordinance would send the community a message about drones, he said, and he called that message fear mongering. The majority held the hours, and the council directed staff to make minor wording changes before the second reading.

Wing Has Named the Bay Area Twice and No City Once

Wing announced on March 23 that delivery would reach the Bay Area “in the coming months,” with no date and no cities. On June 8 it named the region again, as one of seven Walmart markets to come online by 2027. Wing’s newsroom listed no Bay Area launch as of September 21.

The March announcement is what put drones on Belvedere’s agenda, the Press Democrat reported in July, and DroneXL flagged at the time that the Bay Area’s stacked Class B and Class C airspace makes it a harder operating environment than anywhere Wing flies in the US. The June expansion folded the region into a 270-store Walmart network with a 2027 horizon, per Wing.

The Bay Area’s loudest drone-delivery fight so far was over a test site, not a doorstep. DoorDash leased a warehouse at 1960 Folsom Street in San Francisco’s Mission District for drone research, the Teamsters pushed back, and on December 16, 2025 the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to require Planning Commission approval for outdoor laboratory uses in the Mission-area industrial zones for 18 months, Mission Local reported. That was a zoning and jobs fight. Belvedere’s ordinance is aimed at the delivery itself.

DroneXL’s Take

Belvedere did the thing Papillion, Nebraska, never got to do. When a reporter counted about 50 Prime Air drone movements in one hour over that suburb this month, the city council had never voted on any of it. Richardson, Texas, declined to pursue a rezoning of Amazon’s site on legal advice and pointed residents to the FAA. Belvedere read the same preemption map and found the part it owns: the driveway, the sidewalk, the launch pad and the clock. A town of 2,126 with zero drones has more say over drone delivery than a suburb with 50 flights an hour, because it wrote the rules before the first one landed.

Carapiet is right that the complaints will come. Amazon left College Station after two years of noise complaints, announcing the move in 2024. Belvedere’s answer is the consent requirement and the nuisance rules, not a curfew stricter than the one its own residents live under, and that is the right answer. Cooper’s 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. window would have banned the dinner orders DoorDash and Wing actually deliver while the FedEx van kept idling at 10 p.m. A rule that gives a drone a shorter day than a diesel truck is the local overreach that invites the preemption fights cities lose. Belvedere stopped one vote short of it. The October 12 meeting decides whether the second reading holds that line.

Sources: Marin Independent Journal, The Ark, City of Belvedere September 14 agenda, Belvedere Municipal Code, Wing

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

Quadmovr Flies A Drone On 3D Printed Impellers Instead Of Propellers

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:45:22 GMT

FPV builder quadmovr posted a video on Sunday of a quadcopter flying on four 3D printed radial impellers in place of propellers. Each motor spins a centrifugal wheel inside a white PETG housing, and the airframe underneath is a plain carbon X frame with a flight controller and an XT60 lead. The impellers went on the drone exactly as they came off the printer: not balanced, not cleaned up, as quadmovr states in the video description.

The parts are not a one-off. Quadmovr published the files on MakerWorld in May under the name Experimental Radial Impeller for Drones (T-Mount), free under a Creative Commons noncommercial license, with a print profile that runs about seven hours across two plates. The listing counted 82 downloads and 25 logged prints on Sunday. The design has already been raced: a pilot in the comments says quadmovr’s remix convinced him to print the original impellers and fly them on a 5-inch quad at the first MultiGP race of the season.

The Impeller Draws Air In From The Top And Throws It Outward

A radial impeller works like a leaf blower wheel. Air enters through the open center on top, the curved vanes fling it outward as the wheel spins, and the housing catches that flow. Quadmovr’s case has swept vanes that turn the air downward, and that column lifts the drone.

The numbers on the MakerWorld listing show how much housing that takes. The spinning impeller is 60 mm (2.4 inches) across. The complete unit is 90 mm (3.5 inches) in diameter and 28 mm (1.1 inches) tall, and the case bolts in between the motor and the frame arm so the wheel sits inside it. The gap between impeller and case is 0.3 mm, which quadmovr flags as tight enough that some prints will need sanding to spin freely.

Quadmovr tested the set on NewBeeDrone FLOW 2004 1750KV motors on a 6S battery. The impeller mounts with the standard T-mount, two M2 screws and a 1.5 mm center hole, so it goes onto the same motors that normally carry a 3-inch prop. The design assumes a motor height of 12.8 mm; a taller or shorter stator moves the wheel out of position in the case and the model has to be edited to match.

A freshly printed batch of Quadmovr's 3D printed radial impellers and vaned housings sits on the printer bed. Photo credit: quadmovr

The Design Started As Baba’s 2024 MakerWorld Model

Quadmovr’s files are a remix. The original, Drone radial Impeller Propeller, was posted on MakerWorld in August 2024 by a designer named Baba, fitted to Fettec 2004 1800KV motors, with a flight clip on Instagram. Quadmovr reworked it for T-mount motors and changed the mounting, stability and cable routing.

Baba’s listing is the one with the tuning guidance. For the 60 mm wheel it recommends roughly 3000KV motors on 3S, 2400 to 3000KV on 4S and 1700 to 2200KV on 6S, which is where quadmovr’s 1750KV FLOW motors land. Baba also offers a smaller 45 mm impeller for higher-KV motors, and says the top of the 60 mm wheel should sit level with the top of the duct or recessed about 1 mm.

Both designers give the same print advice. Print each impeller on its own plate so the layers come out clean, use PETG rather than PLA for toughness, and go to the finest layer height the printer will do. Quadmovr’s profile uses 0.16 mm layers, five perimeter walls and zero infill. MakerWorld is Bambu Lab’s model library, and the listing carries profiles for the H2S, X1 Carbon and H2D printers. The remix stays under Baba’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike terms, so anyone can print, modify and republish it, but nobody can sell it.

One Racer Already Flew The Impellers At A MultiGP Event

The best evidence on the listing is a comment from a pilot posting as WillpowerFPV. He flew Baba’s original impellers on a 5-inch quad at the first MultiGP race of the season, and says quadmovr’s remix and flight GIF sent him back to a file he had doubted would work.

They flew. He calls the result hilarious, says he will print quadmovr’s T-mount version for a 242 gram ultralight freestyle rig next, and links a YouTube clip of the attempt. That is one pilot’s account and one race, not a benchmark, but it is an independent build of the same rotor design that got airborne on a different frame and different motors. (Quadmovr’s channel describes its author as designing, building and flying high-performance drones since 2008, so the remix did not come from a beginner either.)

Quadmovr's experimental quad flies with four 3D printed radial impellers replacing traditional propellers. Photo credit: quadmovr

3D Printing Keeps Producing Propulsion Experiments Outside The Lab

The impeller quad joins a line of printed propulsion experiments DroneXL has covered. In 2021, a builder flew an FPV racing drone on 64 propeller blades, stacking printed multi-blade props. In April, British engineer Tom Stanton flew a 15.6 gram printed plane on a hand-cranked supercapacitor.

The commercial side has chased the same question of how air leaves a rotor. Delson Aeronautics demonstrated ultra-quiet propellers in 2021, and Zipline’s silent propellers are shaped to cut delivery-drone noise. Printed airframes have moved from novelty to product too: the Lace frame folds a large 3D printed quad into a backpack, and Unusual Machines has used HP’s industrial printers for FPV parts since 2024.

DroneXL’s Take

Quadmovr’s video is titled as a completely new propulsion system, and I’d knock the “completely” off that. Centrifugal blowers are more than a century old, and Baba flew the design this remix is built on in 2024. What is new is the distribution: a flyable rotor design that a stranger downloaded, printed on a desktop machine, bolted to a race quad and flew at a sanctioned event because a second builder’s remix convinced him it would work, with the whole chain documented in a comment thread. No manufacturer ships a propulsion experiment with the sanding instructions and the “it wasn’t balanced” disclaimer attached. The FPV community does, and it is the reason the interesting propeller ideas keep showing up on MakerWorld before they show up in a DJI spec sheet.

An open propeller moves a large volume of air at low speed, which is the efficient way to make lift, and this design turns the flow twice inside a plastic case before it ever points down. My read is that an impeller quad will always hover shorter than the same frame on 3-inch props, and quadmovr labels it experimental for a reason. That does not make it pointless. The 90 mm housing is also a full shroud around every moving part, the flow exits through vanes rather than an open disc, and the whole thing prints in PETG on a desktop machine. If anyone has a noise or a safety application for a rotor whose blades sit inside a case, this is the file to start from, and Baba’s license allows it for anything noncommercial.

The number to watch is the print count on quadmovr’s listing. Twenty-five logged prints in four months is a curiosity. If the racer’s 242 gram build lands and a few more pilots post flights, the remix count is where this either becomes a niche or stays a video.

Sources: quadmovr on YouTube, quadmovr on MakerWorld, Baba on MakerWorld

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

Cleveland Police Drone Policy Bans What Ohio's New Law Still Allows

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:33:20 GMT

Ohio’s first statewide police drone law takes effect October 6, and Cleveland’s own drone policy already outlaws four things the state law leaves legal: facial recognition, gait analysis, surveillance of demonstrations, and any weapon on a police drone. House Bill 251, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine on July 7, requires a warrant when police would need one to enter a building in person and use a drone to look inside instead. Cleveland’s rules, in force since July 11, 2025, go further on nearly every point the state law touches.

The comparison comes from a cleveland.com review of both documents and of a year of Cleveland flight records. The city’s Skydio X10 fleet logged 200 flight entries between September 10, 2025, and September 10, 2026. Most were sports events and call-ups for suspect searches and SWAT support, plus a block of manufacturer training.

DroneXL has followed this policy since Cleveland police flew a drone over a protest in November 2024 while their draft rules were still awaiting Department of Justice review. Nearly two years later, that incident’s fingerprints are all over the final document.

Cleveland Bans Identification Tech and All Weapons on Police Drones

Cleveland’s policy prohibits automated analytics that can identify individuals or groups, naming facial recognition and gait analysis, and bans any weapon system on a police drone. Ohio’s HB 251 bans only lethal weapons on law enforcement drones and says nothing about identification technology.

The city’s general police order, GPO 4.06.17, directs pilots to minimize collecting information on people and places unrelated to a mission. Anything captured anyway must be deleted within 30 days under the city’s retention schedule. HB 251 makes surveillance and flight data a public record but sets no comparable clock on destroying footage of bystanders.

On warrants, the two documents point the same direction with different wording. The state law, codified at Ohio Revised Code 4561.60 through 4561.64, requires a warrant when a drone enters or observes the interior of a house or another place where an in-person search would need one. Cleveland requires a warrant wherever someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy, including yards and enclosures, and bars officers from intentionally recording those places without one.

Cleveland also regulates what the policy calls “Blackout Mode,” a setting that switches off the aircraft’s lights and electronic markers while the cameras keep recording. The city permits it only after police obtain a search warrant. The state law does not mention it.

Cleveland Restricts Drone Flights Over Demonstrations

HB 251 lists nine circumstances in which Ohio police may fly a drone without a warrant, among them a threat assessment before a large event. Cleveland’s policy prohibits using drones to surveil individuals or groups at public demonstrations or other large gatherings, and prohibits any drone use for crowd control.

The city does allow drones in written safety plans for outdoor public events with command-level approval, and it allows some flights over large crowds when police have probable cause that a crime is occurring or when public safety is endangered, provided the circumstances meet Fourth Amendment requirements for a warrantless search.

That carve-out was written after the November 24, 2024, flight over a protest outside Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne’s home, which DroneXL covered in Cleveland Police Deploy Drone at Pro-Palestine Protest Despite Lacking DOJ Approval. The fleet had already been sitting idle pending policy approval, and after the protest flight Police Chief Dorothy Todd committed to keeping it grounded until the policy cleared the Community Police Commission and the federal consent decree monitors. The drones did not fly again on official business until August 10, 2025, more than eight months later, when Cleveland’s Skydio X10 program finally launched.

The broadest state exception drew the most fire in Columbus. HB 251 lets police fly without a warrant in navigable airspace, in a physically nonintrusive manner, to observe what is otherwise visible to the naked eye. Gary Daniels, legislative director of the ACLU of Ohio, told lawmakers the provision “is a blank check for law enforcement,” according to cleveland.com’s report on the signing. Cleveland’s policy contains no naked-eye exception.

Cleveland Logged 200 Drone Flights in Its First Year

Cleveland requires a public map showing the date, time and flight path of every deployment within 48 hours. Ohio’s law requires agencies to document and verify flight data for surveillance flights, and makes those records public unless an exemption applies. It sets no posting deadline and requires no map.

Cleveland.com’s review of the city’s UAS Team Flights dashboard found 200 entries with distinct timestamps over the year to September 10, after removing duplicates created by overlapping dashboard views. The dashboard shows no more than 25 flights at a time, so the count took some assembly.

Three categories covered 190 of the 200 entries: 71 “Event Action Plan” flights, 63 “Assignment Call-Up” flights and 56 training flights. Event flights included sports and other public gatherings. Call-ups included suspect searches and SWAT support.

One operation can produce many entries. The dashboard shows 11 separately timed flights during a Browns event on December 21, 2025, and nine during a Browns detail on August 27, 2026. Training clustered too: 37 of the 56 training entries fell on four days of manufacturer training, September 22 through 25, 2025, right after the program launched with nine aircraft and seven Part 107 pilots.

The policy also requires quarterly reports to the police chief and the Community Police Commission covering all drone use by incident type, and says those reports will be posted on the city website. Asked where they were, the Cleveland Division of Police Office of Public Affairs pointed cleveland.com to the flight dashboard and did not identify a separate report.

HB 251 Delays Its Chinese Drone Purchase Ban Until 2030

HB 251 also bars Ohio public entities from buying drones made or assembled by a foreign adversary, and cleveland.com reported in July that the law gives them four years to comply. The enrolled text is narrower: the ban starts 48 months after October 6 and touches nothing bought before then.

Section 3 of the enrolled act makes the new Ohio Revised Code 5501.84 effective 48 months after the rest of the law, which lands in October 2030. From that date a public entity may not purchase or otherwise acquire a foreign-adversary drone system, no state funds may go toward one, and no public entity may operate one that was purchased on or after that date. Aircraft bought before October 2030 are not mentioned, so nothing already in an Ohio hangar is grounded by this law. The section also stands down entirely if federal law or regulations allow continued purchase and operation of the equipment.

“Foreign adversary” means a country on a registry the Ohio secretary of state must compile every six months from four federal lists, including the Commerce Department’s Executive Order 13873 list, which names China. Cleveland’s all-Skydio fleet is untouched either way. The two Ohio DFR programs DroneXL compared in December went opposite ways on hardware: Dublin chose DJI docks and Columbus chose Skydio. Under the enrolled text, Ohio law lets Dublin keep buying DJI for four more years, and Ohio’s statewide drone as first responder pilot, launched in February, faces no state-level hardware constraint before 2030.

DroneXL’s Take

Cleveland got the hard part right, and it got there the embarrassing way. The demonstration ban, the 48-hour map, the 30-day deletion rule and the Blackout Mode warrant requirement all exist because the department flew a drone over a protest in November 2024 under a policy the Department of Justice had not yet approved.

A civilian commission with real authority then wrote the rules the department had resisted. The Community Police Commission has final say over Cleveland police policy under the consent decree, and that is the only reason this document reads the way it does. Most departments that buy an X10 answer to a chief and a council, not to a commission with veto power over policy.

Ohio’s law is a floor, and a low one. The warrant requirement for looking inside a house is fine. The naked-eye exception swallows most of what a police drone actually does, because a drone at 400 feet (122 meters) sees what a helicopter at 400 feet sees, and the Supreme Court has treated that as public view since Florida v. Riley in 1989. Daniels called it a blank check. My read is that it is a blank check with a public records requirement attached, and that requirement is the only part with teeth. If the flight logs are public, a reporter can do what cleveland.com just did: pull a year of records and count.

Two hundred flights, 190 of them in three routine categories, nine of them during a single Browns game. The 10 entries outside those categories are not described in cleveland.com’s report, and that report, which set out to test the policy against the records, describes none over a demonstration. That is the pro-drone case made with the department’s own data: give police a capable aircraft, publish every flight, ban the uses that poison public trust, and the program runs. The 48-hour map did not stop a single suspect search.

The reports are the loose thread. Cleveland’s own policy promises quarterly reports by incident type on the city website, and when a reporter asked for them, the department pointed at the dashboard. A dashboard that shows 25 flights at a time and needs deduplication is not a quarterly report. The commission wrote that requirement for a reason, and when cleveland.com asked, the department could not point to one. Cleveland.com asked once. The commission should ask next, in public, before October 6.

The foreign-adversary clause is the part most likely to be misread. A four-year window to comply sounds like a replacement mandate. What Ohio passed is a four-year delay before a purchase ban that grandfathers every aircraft bought in the meantime and defers to Washington if federal rules ever loosen. As far as Ohio law is concerned, Dublin can order DJI docks through September 2030 and fly them for the rest of their service life. The FCC Covered List, not Columbus, is the constraint that decides what Ohio agencies fly, and the legislature wrote that deference into the statute. I suspect lawmakers wanted a China clause in the bill without a replacement bill for the counties, and the 48-month fuse is how they got both. Even the registry of adversary countries sits inside the delayed section, so Ohio will not publish its own list until 2030 either. Whether the General Assembly tightens the fuse before then is the thing to watch, and the 137th General Assembly that convenes in January 2027 is the first chance.

Sources: cleveland.com, via GovTech; Ohio General Assembly, House Bill 251 and the enrolled act; Cleveland Division of Police, GPO 4.06.17

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

Amazon Wants 1,000 Drone Flights a Day in CT. Comments Close Oct. 1

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:57:00 GMT

Amazon wants to fly up to 1,000 MK30 delivery flights a day out of its North Haven, Connecticut warehouse, roughly 365,000 a year, to addresses within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) of the building, and Connecticut residents have until October 1 to say what they think of it. The state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection published a notice on September 16 that the Federal Aviation Administration wants its concurrence on the plan, and opened a 15-day comment window on the same day. The New Haven Register reported the notice on Thursday and the Hartford Courant followed with the FAA document on Saturday.

A 7.5-mile circle around the warehouse covers about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers) and takes in Hamden and Wallingford and reaches into New Haven. It is the first federal paperwork DroneXL has seen for any Prime Air hub in the Northeast, and the first comment window DroneXL has seen open on one.

The 1,000 reads like a Connecticut forecast, and it is nothing of the kind. One thousand flights a day, 365,000 a year, 174 square miles: Amazon writes the same ceiling into every MK30 filing it makes, from Chicago to Baton Rouge to Florida. What Connecticut has is the standard envelope, 11 days to comment on it, and a question the FAA has not answered: whether North Haven gets a site review of its own or rides the national finding the agency signed in July.

Amazon’s Connecticut Numbers Are the Same Numbers It Files Everywhere

Every MK30 environmental filing on the FAA’s public review page carries the same proposal: up to 1,000 delivery flights a day, seven days a week, about 365,000 a year, from a 7.5-mile radius covering 174 square miles. Chicago, Baton Rouge, Omaha, Detroit, Kansas City, Florida and Texas all say it.

The one exception is the oldest MK30 hub. Amazon asked the FAA for 469 flights a day at Tolleson, Arizona, in 2024, about 171,000 a year. Every filing since has asked for the round number, and the FAA’s public review page repeats it seven times over. Connecticut’s document carries the operating window the 2026 filings share: 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., with up to 100 of the 1,000 daily flights falling in the first hour and the last half hour.

What the hubs actually fly sits well under that. Sam Bailey, Amazon’s economic development manager, told the Richardson, Texas city council in March that its hub was filling about 150 orders a day against a permitted 1,000. A Baton Rouge resident told a Rotary Club audience this month that the neighborhood hears about 20 drones an hour, the same story where Amazon’s manager called the aircraft quieter than an idling truck. Amazon says it reaches those levels gradually, as demand builds.

The ceiling still matters, because the ceiling is what gets analyzed. The noise model and the FAA’s finding on a site both run at the proposed maximum, and the national environmental document the agency signed on July 28 works the same way: it covers a hub up to 1,150 deliveries a day, provided a hub running that volume sits at least 600 feet (183 meters) from homes. A 1,000-flight North Haven proposal fits inside that number by design.

Connecticut Opened a 15-Day Comment Window the FAA Never Advertised

The FAA asked Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection on August 17 to concur that approving Prime Air’s beyond-visual-line-of-sight deliveries around New Haven is consistent with the state’s Coastal Management Act. DEEP published the notice on September 16, takes comment through October 1, and must decide by October 16.

DEEP spokesperson Bill Flood laid out the timetable for the New Haven Register: 15 days of comment from publication and a 60-day clock from receipt for the department’s decision. The federal Coastal Zone Management Act gives a coastal state that review over federal actions that could affect its coast, and the FAA’s own document says this one will not: the site is inland, outside the coastal boundary, with no construction in the coastal zone, and the drone overflights inside the 7.5-mile radius are transitory. Texas ran the same review for Amazon’s Pasadena hub last fall and gave the public 30 days. Connecticut is giving 15. The Register’s report does not say how comments are to be filed. DEEP’s coastal consistency page says its Land and Water Resources Division runs these reviews and ends each one with a concurrence or an objection, and neither that page nor the department’s public-notices listing showed the Prime Air notice when DroneXL checked both on September 20.

That state notice is the only public trace of the federal side of the project. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Connecticut document of any kind when DroneXL checked it on September 20; the page was last updated September 11. Coastal consistency has appeared on that page before, as an appendix to a site-specific assessment: the Texas, Florida and Chicago filings each carry one. It has never, on that page, appeared on its own.

Which route North Haven takes is the open question. Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha each got a draft assessment with a 30-day federal comment period. Tracy, California got a launch date and no document. Since July 28 the FAA has had the option of checking a new hub against the national finding inside the agency, with no draft published and no comment window, as DroneXL laid out when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. If that is the path New Haven is on, the 15 days DEEP is offering are the only days Connecticut will get, and they are running on a review the FAA itself says has nothing to find.

Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, is one of 17 who told the FAA in January that its national review was a paper exercise and asked for a full impact statement. The FAA signed the finding anyway. The 60-day window to challenge it in court under 49 U.S.C. 46110 closes September 26. Oregon signed the same letter, and Amazon’s Portland hub surfaced this weekend under the same finding. Connecticut joins Oregon and New York among signatory states with a Prime Air hub in the pipeline and no federal document posted for it.

Amazon confirmed the plan without adding to it. Amazon is “always exploring new ways to get customers a wider selection at faster speeds,” spokesperson Mike Murphy told the Courant, and is working with local officials on Connecticut. The company’s website now lists 13 operating locations in nine states and four more coming soon, according to the Register, up from the 11 sites Amazon counted on August 19. Its stated goal is nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, and its August list of next markets named Syracuse, the other Northeast site, and not New Haven.

North Haven Approved the Ground in May, With a Noise Pitch Attached

North Haven’s commissioners approved a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at Amazon’s 409 Washington Avenue warehouse, a 142-acre site cleared for warehouse use in 2019, plus a perimeter fence. Sam Bailey previewed the plan in early May, and the minutes describe preprogrammed flights to fixed points within seven miles.

The commission noted what every planning board eventually notes: the FAA has sole jurisdiction over altitude and flight patterns. The town approved a building. Bailey used the meeting to describe the flights anyway, and the Register Citizen’s account of it, carried by GovTech, has him putting takeoff and landing noise at a little over 60 decibels, a little louder than a dishwasher. He promised a public information session and said Amazon was reaching out to neighboring towns.

Amazon’s own FAA filings put different numbers on the same aircraft. The Baton Rouge noise appendix records takeoff and landing at 90.5 and 91.8 decibels SEL measured 20 feet from the aircraft, about 70 decibels Lmax at 75 feet, and 63.7 decibels SEL for a drone cruising overhead at 200 feet (61 meters). The FAA compares the takeoff figure to a household vacuum cleaner at 10 feet. Bailey’s 60 came with no distance and no metric, and which of the filing’s readings it corresponds to is not something the Register Citizen’s account resolves. The loudest moment in the filing, 92.1 decibels, is the delivery itself: a hover at about 13 feet (4 meters) while the payload doors open and the package falls to the lawn.

Connecticut is one of 21 states with no statute on dropping objects from aircraft beyond the federal hazard standard, as DroneXL’s 35-state review found on Sunday, so the drop raises no state-law issue here of the kind it raises in Arizona or Michigan. What it raises is the same one it raises everywhere: the MK30 releases a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) package in free fall, carries no parachute in any FAA filing DroneXL has read, and Amazon has answered none of DroneXL’s 25 written safety questions about it since the first set went out on September 3.

The FAA’s document describes the aircraft North Haven will host in plain terms: 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty, 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, a 5-pound payload, cruise between 205 and 370 feet (62 to 113 meters), 73 mph (117 km/h) at the top end, and a vertical descent to the drop. The document does not mention Tweed New Haven Airport, which lies south of the site, and whether Amazon’s approved area reaches its airspace depends on boundaries the FAA has not published. Deliveries would cost $5 for Prime members and $10 for everyone else, the pricing Bailey gave the commission in May.

DroneXL’s Take

North Haven is about 55 miles (90 kilometers) from my house, the first Prime Air hub I could drive to in an afternoon. A drone that gets children’s Motrin to a house in Hamden in 30 minutes without a van on the Wilbur Cross is the industry DroneXL exists to cover, and Amazon’s 13 hubs deliver that daily.

The 1,000 is a ceiling and Amazon will fly under it for years, the way Richardson flies at 150 and Baton Rouge at a rate its own manager won’t put a number on. Anyone reading 365,000 as next year’s traffic over Wallingford is reading it wrong. It is also the only number the FAA will ever analyze for this site, and the number the noise model and the finding will be built on. A resident who wants a say gets it on the ceiling or not at all.

The number is Amazon’s boilerplate. The process is the story, and I suspect the reason two Connecticut newspapers found this in a state environmental office and not on an FAA page is that there is nothing on an FAA page to find: the New Haven application is being checked against the July 28 national finding, in which case DEEP’s coastal review is the only public document Connecticut ever gets. I can’t confirm that, and the FAA hasn’t said. The pattern holds, though. Tracy got nothing. Portland got a city permit and nothing. North Haven got a coastal consistency letter for a site the letter itself says is nowhere near the coast, and 15 days to answer it.

Connecticut’s attorney general put his name on the January letter that said this is exactly what would happen. The letter lost. The 60-day clock runs out September 26, and if nobody files, the towns Amazon adds after New Haven inherit whatever process New Haven gets. That makes the next 11 days the ones that count, and Connecticut has more in hand than it thinks. A coastal consistency comment does not have to be about the coast. DEEP is being asked to concur with a federal action, and anything a resident, a first selectman or the attorney general puts in that file before October 1 is on the record when the FAA decides whether New Haven needs a review of its own. The 92.1-decibel delivery hover from Amazon’s Baton Rouge noise appendix belongs in it. So does the question of which environmental path the application is on, and the public session Bailey promised North Haven in May. The town cannot touch the airspace. Connecticut can decide what gets said on the record before the first MK30 leaves Washington Avenue, and right now the record says 60 decibels and 1,000 flights, both Amazon’s numbers, while the one the FAA wrote down, 92.1, sits in an appendix filed in Louisiana.

Sources: New Haven Register, Hartford Courant, The Register Citizen via GovTech, FAA NEPA and Drones, Comments of 17 Attorneys General, January 23, 2026, Texas General Land Office, Amazon.

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

Amazon Drones Drop Packages Where State Law Calls It a Crime

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:05:08 GMT

Amazon’s MK30 releases packages from about 13 feet over customers’ yards in Arizona, where dropping an object from an aircraft over a populated area is a misdemeanor, and in Michigan, where a state rule requires a city’s written permission before anything is dropped in flight. Illinois, where Amazon has named Chicago among its next launches, requires a state permit for every drop, filed 14 days ahead and naming the date, time and place.

DroneXL analyzed the aeronautics codes of 35 states this week, every state with a live or announced drone delivery operation among them. Ten regulate the release of objects from aircraft more strictly than the Federal Aviation Administration does. Of the three operators in DroneXL’s delivery tracker, Amazon is the only one whose aircraft lets go of the package in flight; Wing and Zipline lower theirs on tethers.

The argument available to Amazon is that the FAA owns the airspace and a 1920s state statute cannot reach a federally certificated air carrier. DroneXL found no court ruling that tests that argument against a drone delivery drop, and the FAA’s own guidance points both ways.

Federal law treats a delivery drone as an aircraft

Federal law defines an aircraft as any contrivance invented, used, or designed to navigate or fly in the air, and the U.S. Code defines an unmanned aircraft as an aircraft operated without the possibility of direct human intervention. An 83-pound MK30 is an aircraft wherever a statute uses the word.

The definition sits in 49 U.S.C. § 40102, and Congress removed any doubt about drones in 2018 when it wrote § 44801 into the same title. The National Transportation Safety Board had already settled the point in 2014, reversing an administrative law judge who ruled in Huerta v. Pirker that a small drone was not an aircraft.

The federal government enforces that reading when it suits it. Shooting at a drone is prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 32, the aircraft sabotage statute, and the FAA said during the New Jersey sightings of December 2024 that a person who fires at one can face FAA civil penalties and criminal charges. A 249-gram quadcopter is an aircraft when someone points a shotgun at it. The states’ aeronautics codes use the same word, and they used it first.

The federal rule on releasing things from that aircraft is short. 14 CFR 91.15 bars a pilot from letting anything be dropped that creates a hazard to persons or property, and then says the section does not prohibit dropping an object if reasonable precautions are taken. That is a standard. No federal permit exists for it. Part 107 carries the same language for small drones, and Amazon flies under Part 135 as an air carrier.

Ten states go further than the FAA on dropping objects

Of the 35 state aeronautics codes DroneXL reviewed, three require a state permit before anything is dropped from an aircraft, six make it a misdemeanor over populated areas with no permit available, and one requires written permission from the local government. Twenty-one have no rule beyond careless-or-reckless operation.

The permit states are Illinois, Minnesota and Oregon. Illinois bars dropping any object from an aircraft without a dropping permit from the Department of Transportation, a Class A misdemeanor under the Aeronautics Act’s penalty section, 620 ILCS 5/79, and IDOT’s rule requires the form 14 days before the scheduled drop, specifying the person, the date, the time, the place and the object. Minnesota requires two written consents, from the commissioner of transportation and from the municipality or property owner where objects may land. Oregon requires a permit from its aviation director under ORS 837.085, a statute that came up this weekend in Amazon’s plans for a Portland hub.

The flat-ban states inherited the 1922 Uniform State Law for Aeronautics almost word for word: a misdemeanor for anyone who, over a thickly inhabited area or a public gathering, drops any object except loose water or loose sand ballast. Arizona grades it a class 1 misdemeanor. North Carolina, Hawaii, Delaware, New Jersey and Missouri carry the same clause. South Carolina carried it too, until a 2012 rewrite of its aeronautics chapter deleted the section. None of the six offers a permit. Either the statute does not reach the aircraft, or the flight violates it.

Michigan is its own case. MCL 750.44 makes it a misdemeanor to drop or release any object that may endanger life or injure property, a harm-qualified test Amazon could argue it meets. The Aeronautics Commission’s rule R 259.308 adds that a pilot shall not permit an object to be dropped from an aircraft in flight except upon written permission of the political subdivision having jurisdiction. The rule sits in the commission’s airport field rules, which gives Amazon an argument that it was written for airport grounds, though its text says aircraft in flight and names no airport.

Three states mirror the federal hazard standard and add nothing Amazon does not already meet: New York, Indiana and Nevada, which rewrote its drop clause around reckless disregard. Wisconsin bans drops and then exempts the delivery of packages or mail by dropping from airplanes when done under federal regulations. Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Louisiana, Ohio, Idaho, California, Virginia, Utah, Alabama, Montana, Wyoming, Maryland, Arkansas, South Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Connecticut, where Amazon’s North Haven site awaits FAA sign-off, have no general drop rule at all. Connecticut’s careless-or-reckless statute was amended in 2024 to name unmanned aircraft, and Tennessee’s one drone-specific rule bars dropping items into ticketed open-air events.

Amazon’s drop method is the one the statutes describe

Amazon’s MK30 descends to about 13 feet, checks the ground and releases the package into free fall. Wing lowers its package on a tether from a 23-foot hover and Zipline’s Platform 2 winches a droid down from about 330 feet. Only Amazon’s method matches the word the statutes use: drop.

Amazon describes the method the same way, in a federal filing. The flight profile Amazon supplied for the FAA’s Kansas City environmental assessment shows the MK30 cruising at 205 to 250 feet inbound and 325 to 370 feet outbound at 58 knots, descending vertically over the customer’s yard, and releasing the package at 13 feet during a six-second hover. Its how-it-works page gives the same height, and at XPONENTIAL Europe a Prime Air executive told Inside Unmanned Systems the aircraft descends to about three and a half meters and “releases the package, which drops to the ground.” The figures on DroneXL’s aircraft comparison page come from FAA filings: the MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds at takeoff, 78 pounds empty, and carries five. It has no parachute, a design choice Amazon has not explained since September 3.

Amazon's own flight profile for the MK30, from the FAA's environmental assessment for Kansas City: cruise at 205 to 250 feet inbound and 325 to 370 feet outbound at 58 knots, a vertical descent over the customer's yard, and a package release from 13 feet in a six-second hover. Photo credit: Amazon Prime Air, 2025, via FAA.

A customer’s own footage shows the whole sequence. Tamara Hancock, an Arizona Prime Air customer who posts as Teaching Mrs H, filmed an MK30 hovering over her backyard, opening its cargo bay and letting a box fall to the grass. She had ordered a bottle of syrup to see what a drop does to a breakable item, and the video’s title gives her verdict: it didn’t go well.

Tamara Hancock's video of an Amazon MK30 delivery in her Arizona backyard. Video: Teaching Mrs H / YouTube

Whether a package lowered to the ground on a tether and released there is a “drop” under a 1929 statute is a question for a lawyer. Whether a package released from 13 feet is a drop is not. On the statutes’ plain words the exposure is Amazon’s, and the tether is one reason Zipline’s design keeps winning the comparison.

Illinois, Michigan and Arizona put Amazon’s method against live statutes

Amazon delivers in Tolleson, Arizona, where dropping an object over a densely inhabited area is a class 1 misdemeanor, and in Hazel Park and Pontiac, Michigan, where a state rule requires written permission from the city. Its Chicago launch lands in Illinois, which issues per-drop permits with 14 days’ notice.

Illinois is the sharpest conflict because Illinois has a working permit desk. The statute and the rule were written for a banner plane dropping leaflets on a fair: one pilot, one afternoon. A permit that names the time and place of each drop cannot be issued 14 days ahead for a 30-minute delivery to an address nobody knows yet. Either IDOT reads its own statute as not reaching a Part 135 drone, or Amazon flies Chicago without a permit the rule was never written to issue. Amazon’s August 19 announcement lists Chicago among the next five metros.

Michigan is the live one. Amazon flies from Hazel Park and Pontiac under a state rule that, on its face, requires each city’s written permission before an object is dropped. Whether either city was asked is a public-records question, and DroneXL is asking it.

Arizona is the oldest. Amazon began deliveries in Tolleson in 2024, paused after two MK30s struck a crane in October 2025, and resumed. No prosecution under ARS 28-8279 involving a delivery drone appears in any record DroneXL has found, which tells you either that the statute is a dead letter or that nobody has tried. Minnesota, with the strictest text in the country, has no operator yet and therefore no test.

Amazon's Prime Air MK30 delivery drone flies over a desert suburban neighborhood. Photo credit: Amazon.

The FAA’s preemption guidance points both ways

The FAA says Congress gave it exclusive authority over aviation safety and airspace efficiency, and that laws aimed at delivery drones are likely preempted under the Airline Deregulation Act. The same 2023 fact sheet says states may regulate how aircraft are used, as opposed to where they fly.

The fact sheet, issued in July 2023, is the closest thing to a federal position. It lists state rules that face field preemption, including mandating geofencing and imposing licensing regimes, and says laws affecting commercial delivery drones are “more likely to be preempted under the Airline Deregulation Act,” which bars states from regulating an air carrier’s routes and services. Amazon holds a Part 135 certificate, so that argument is available to it.

The fact sheet then hands the states their ground. Restrictions on how UAS can be used rather than where they operate within airspace, it says, are more likely to survive, and it repeats that municipalities may generally determine the location of aircraft landing sites through their land use powers. A permit to release cargo over a city is a rule about how, or a rule about airspace, depending on who is reading it. Nobody has asked a judge.

A fact sheet is not law, and the 2015 version said the same things without stopping 44 states from passing drone statutes. The states that adopted the 1922 uniform act wrote it, in its own words, to harmonize as far as possible with federal laws and regulations on the subject of aeronautics. In 1922 that meant nothing, because there were no federal aviation regulations. In 2026 it is the sentence Amazon’s lawyers will read first.

DroneXL’s Take

I am for drone delivery and against a state-by-state patchwork for aircraft that cross county lines in minutes. The FAA should own the airspace. The statutes are real and unrepealed, and the company they describe has let two deadlines pass this month without saying whether its aircraft has a parachute.

The record cuts in Amazon’s favor. Seven incidents in the tracker, no injuries, and statutes written when the aircraft in question was a Curtiss Jenny dropping handbills on a county fair. A legislature in 1923 was not thinking about a hexacopter with detect-and-avoid, and reading its words onto one is a stretch a court might refuse.

But the states are not writing new rules. They are finding old ones, and they are finding them because much of the public record of what Amazon’s aircraft does over a neighborhood sits in the tracker DroneXL built after Amazon let two deadlines pass. A town clerk who cannot get an engineer to a meeting reaches for whatever statute the state gave her. Illinois gave her a permit form.

Chicago is the nearest test, because Illinois has a statute that names the process, a rule that names the deadline and an agency that issues the permit. If Amazon applies, the permit itself becomes a written state position on drone delivery drops, the first DroneXL has found. If Amazon launches without one, IDOT either enforces or explains in writing why it will not. Either answer is news.

The court test will come from somewhere else. The 1922 act did not stop at making the drop a crime. It also made the aircraft owner absolutely liable for injuries to persons or property on the land beneath caused by the dropping or falling of any object therefrom, whether such owner was negligent or not. That clause survives in Delaware, Minnesota and South Carolina, which kept its liability section in the 2012 rewrite that dropped the crime, and Hawaii sharpened it so that a commercial operator is absolutely liable while a private owner is only presumed so. Wisconsin presumes liability for anything that falls from an aircraft and puts the burden of proof on the operator. None of that needs a prosecutor or an attorney general. It needs one homeowner under a 5-pound box released from 13 feet and a lawyer who reads the statute book. Amazon has already put a package into a Richmond, Texas swimming pool. None of those five states is on Amazon’s map yet. A 500-city map is how it gets there.

The only federal ruling on point cuts less cleanly than Amazon would like. In Singer v. City of Newton, decided in September 2017, a Massachusetts federal judge struck down four provisions of a city drone ordinance, but he did it on conflict preemption, finding that the federal government had not claimed exclusive regulatory authority over drones. Field preemption, the argument that leaves no room for any state rule at all, lost. A state permit for releasing cargo over a neighborhood is closer to the land-use power the FAA’s own fact sheet concedes than to the altitude limits Newton lost on. My read is that a challenge to Illinois or Michigan is a coin flip. Amazon has not made the preemption argument in any filing DroneXL has read, and neither its August announcement nor its how-it-works page mentions state or local permission for the release.

Zipline, which answered every safety question on the record, lowers its packages, and the statutes’ word does not describe its method. Neither does it describe Wing’s. Amazon’s fix is a tether or a permit, and both cost less than the test case a plaintiff will eventually bring.

The state-by-state table, with the statute, the tier and a source link for every state checked, lives on the Drone Delivery Tracker; the 15 states with no delivery operation follow in the weekly sweep. DroneXL is putting the permit question to Amazon and to the aviation offices of Illinois, Michigan, Arizona and Minnesota this week. Their answers publish when they arrive.

Sources: Illinois Compiled Statutes 620 ILCS 5/43b and 92 Ill. Adm. Code 14.440; Minnesota Statutes 360.075; Oregon Revised Statutes 837.085; Arizona Revised Statutes 28-8279; North Carolina G.S. 63-18; Hawaii Revised Statutes 263-9; Delaware Code Title 2 § 309; Michigan Compiled Laws 750.44; Connecticut General Statutes 15-72; 74 Pa.C.S. ch. 55; Tennessee Code 42-1-202 and 39-13-903; 620 ILCS 5/79; 14 CFR 107.23; Wisconsin Statutes 114.095; Nevada Revised Statutes 493.100; New York General Business Law § 245; Indiana Code 8-21-4-8; 49 U.S.C. §§ 40102 and 44801; 18 U.S.C. § 32; 14 CFR 91.15; FAA, State and Local Regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Fact Sheet (July 2023); Singer v. City of Newton, No. 17-10071-WGY (D. Mass. Sept. 21, 2017); Delaware Code Title 2 § 307; Hawaii Revised Statutes 263-5; Minnesota Statutes 360.012; Wisconsin Statutes 114.05; Amazon, Prime Air expansion announcement (August 19, 2026); FAA, Environmental Assessment for Amazon Prime Air Package Delivery Operations in Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS (May 2026), Figure 2-5; Inside Unmanned Systems; Tamara Hancock (Teaching Mrs H), YouTube.

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

Army Has 40,000 Drones and Too Few Pilots. FAA Data Shows Why

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:06:00 GMT

The U.S. Army says it now has enough small one-way attack drones to put them in every squad, ten days before the Pentagon’s deadline to do exactly that. What it does not have is enough soldiers qualified to fly them. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Drone Dominance director, told reporters on September 17 that 10,000 drones are already fielded and another 30,000 are arriving, and that the remaining gap between the Army and squad-level drone warfare is trained pilots.

The same week, a LinkedIn post by DroneSports president Eric Richard declared the solo drone operator headed for extinction, blaming the FCC’s ban on new DJI models and the new Section 232 tariffs for pricing individuals out of the trade. It drew more than 50 comments from working pilots in three days.

The two stories are the same story. I’ve followed the Drone Dominance program since the Department of War issued its first request for solutions in December, and every one of its early winners came out of the racing and hobby scene. That scene starts with a kid and a model airplane, runs through a first camera drone, and ends in a cockpit, a Part 107 job, or an Army squad. The FAA’s own registration data, published this year, shows the hobby end of that pipeline shrinking since 2023. Washington has now made the hardware that feeds it more expensive and harder to buy.

The Army Says Training Is the Squad-Level Bottleneck

The Army has fielded 10,000 small one-way attack drones under the Drone Dominance program and is receiving 30,000 more, a volume Col. Gregory Merkl called sufficient for every squad. The gap he named is qualified pilots: the capability exists in every platoon, not yet one level down.

“Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained,” Merkl said at a September 17 briefing, reported by Military Times. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 drone dominance memo set the end of fiscal 2026, which is September 30, as the date for every Army squad to carry small attack drones. Merkl said the training push now centers on flying in a contested electromagnetic spectrum, where the enemy is jamming the link.

The Army has already seen where that training comes from. During Project Flytrap at Hohenfels, Germany, in mid-2025, junior soldiers picked up new small drones in under eight hours while senior officers struggled to work the data and software those drones produce, as DroneXL reported at the time. Col. Donald Neal Jr., commander of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, credited the rookies’ STEM-heavy schooling: “they have a lot of these skill sets already.” The pilots the Army needs are the ones who arrive already flying.

The scale behind that training problem keeps growing. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Reuters in November that the service, which had been buying roughly 50,000 drones a year, plans to buy at least one million within two to three years. In February he told Military Times he hoped to be positioned to buy that million within 18 to 24 months. Every one of those aircraft needs someone who can fly it under jamming into a two-foot target box. The Pentagon has bet that skill comes from the hobby world: as DroneXL reported in June, the Drone Dominance field is built on racers, hobbyists, and Ukrainian firms, with Neros founder and former racing champion Soren Monroe-Anderson at the front of it.

FAA Data Shows the Hobbyist Pool Shrinking Before the Ban

The FAA’s Aerospace Forecast for fiscal years 2026 to 2046 records a recreational market in decline through December 2025, before any tariff and with the Covered List nine days old. The registry covers RC models and drones alike. Registrations fell and the active fleet shrank for a second year.

New recreational owner registrations averaged 4,782 per month in 2025, down from 5,810 in 2024 and 6,053 in 2023, according to the FAA forecast document. Cancellations and expirations still outnumber new registrants, so the registry lost 2,907 registrations a month in 2025. The FAA estimates the active recreational fleet fell 11 percent in one year, from 1.79 million aircraft in 2024 to 1.59 million in 2025, and it expects the fleet to keep falling until it bottoms out in 2027.

The FAA’s 2025 operator survey shows who is in that registry. Of recreational respondents who identified themselves, 71 percent flew only drones, 17 percent flew only model aircraft, and 10 percent flew both. The model aircraft crowd is the smaller group and the more serious one: model-only flyers reported 141 flights a year and owned 13.5 aircraft on average, against 25 flights and 1.8 aircraft for drone-only flyers. That is the club field, the same place American aviation has recruited from since before anyone called a quadcopter a drone. It sits inside the same shrinking registry, and DroneXL warned last October that the American drone hobby was heading into an accessibility crisis as bans, Remote ID, and a vanishing consumer market converged.

The commercial side is slowing too. New Part 107 aircraft registrations peaked in 2024 at about 11,300 a month and dropped to roughly 10,500 a month in 2025. The FAA’s language is that new registrations “peaked in 2024 and are now trending downward.” Remote pilot certificates are the one metric still climbing, at 493,396 issued by December 2025, up more than 70,000 in a year. Twenty-two percent of those certificate holders also hold a Part 61 crewed pilot certificate, which is as clean a measure as exists of how often the drone is the on-ramp to the rest of aviation.

The FAA wrote that forecast assuming no rule changes. It got two.

Eric Richard’s Extinction Thesis Uses the Wrong Numbers

Richard’s post argues that centralized fleets are replacing the solo operator and that the labor market was already oversupplied. The direction of his argument holds up better than his figures, which mix stale certificate counts with cumulative registrations and treat one small, loss-making roll-up as proof of an industry shift.

He cites more than 405,000 remote pilot certificates against roughly 966,000 registered commercial drones. The 405,000 figure is the FAA’s December 2024 count; the current number is 493,396. The 966,000 is the cumulative total ever registered in the Part 107 registry, not aircraft in service. The FAA counts about 424,000 active commercial registrations at the end of 2025. There are more certificated pilots than active commercial drones, which is a different problem than the one Richard describes.

The real oversupply is in certificates that never get used. The FAA’s 2025 operator survey found 65.5 percent of Part 107 holders flew at least one nonrecreational flight, 26.7 percent flew only for fun, and 7.8 percent did not fly at all. A third of the people holding the credential are not working with it.

His fleet evidence is thinner still. He credits ZenaTech with buying roughly 27 U.S. surveying firms and running 78 percent of its revenue through drone services. ZenaTech’s own filings put the count at 25 acquisitions and 26 locations, with drone services at about 93 percent of first-quarter 2026 revenue. That revenue was C$8.4 million for the quarter, and the company lost $45.2 million in 2025, $18.1 million of it non-cash charges on the convertible debt that funded the buying spree. A roll-up burning cash is a bet that consolidation will happen. It is no evidence that it has.

Zeitview, his other example, does not own the fleet he describes. Its pilot app tells network pilots to “fly your DJI drone seamlessly” through its DJI integration. The dispatch network runs on solo Part 107 holders bringing their own Mavics. In a reply to Vic Moss in the thread, Richard wrote that Skydio has returned to the consumer market. It has not, and Moss said so. Adam Bry’s position on consumer drones has not changed since DroneXL covered his April interview.

Where Richard is right is the price of admission. “That’s not a price increase. That’s a different business,” he wrote of the jump from a $2,200 DJI kit to an American-made equivalent he puts at $11,000 to $16,000. That number is his, and DroneXL has not priced the comparison, but the direction is not in dispute.

Tariffs and the Covered List Hit the Entry Point Hardest

Both federal actions Richard blames land on the hardware a beginner buys. The FCC’s December 22, 2025, Covered List designation blocks new authorizations for foreign-made drones. The Section 232 tariffs in force since September 3 put 25 percent on drones of 25 kilograms or less, which covers every consumer model.

DroneXL reported the FCC’s decision to sweep all foreign drones onto the Covered List on the day it happened. Previously authorized DJI models remain legal to buy and fly, though the FCC has already shown, with an import cutoff on older Covered List equipment, exactly how DJI’s grandfathering could end. The Section 232 proclamation adds a 100 percent duty on drones over 25 kilograms, on any drone with a thermal camera, and on docking stations, with a further 25 percent on components from February 9, 2027.

None of that touches a Skydio X10 or a Neros Archer. It touches the $759 Mini that a 16-year-old buys with summer-job money, passes the Part 107 test on at the minimum age, and flies for a roofing company the next spring. The Drone Service Providers Alliance made the same point to the FCC ahead of the September 2 comment deadline, and Vic Moss dropped the diplomatic tone doing it. In Richard’s thread, Moss put the blame on elected officials and on companies like Skydio and BRINC, with AUVSI “carrying their water in front of Congress,” and called the result a plan to legislate rather than innovate.

Some states are trying to build the pipeline by other means. Oklahoma runs a four-year high school track that ends in a Part 107 certificate, which DroneXL covered in March. Those programs need aircraft students can afford to crash.

DroneXL’s Take

The Army spent a year and about a billion dollars proving America can build cheap attack drones fast, by recruiting people who learned on a $300 quad in a parking lot. Now the same government calls that kid’s next drone a security threat and taxes its replacement at 25 percent.

Data security on drones flown for the military and police is a real concern, and DroneXL has argued for years that the answer is a security standard any manufacturer has to meet, tested and enforced, whatever country the company sits in. Washington chose the other route and banned by passport. The result is a Covered List that treats a Mini 5 Pro as a national security threat while the law behind Blue UAS, Section 848 of the 2020 NDAA, defines critical components as the flight controller, radios, cameras, gimbal, ground station, software, and data storage. Batteries and motors are not on that list. In October 2024, Beijing ordered Skydio’s sole battery supplier, TDK subsidiary Dongguan Poweramp, to cut the company off, and Skydio rationed batteries for months while it found another source. The most “American” drone on the Pentagon’s approved list could not fly without a Chinese cell, and the rule that put it there did not care. A standard that tested what a drone does with its data would have caught a bad drone from anywhere. A ban by country of origin caught the hobbyist, waved through the battery, and never needed a tariff on a 249-gram camera drone with no thermal sensor. The Covered List and Section 232 treat the hobbyist as collateral, and the FAA’s own data says the hobbyist was already leaving. The recreational registry has shrunk every month for two years. The FAA thinks it bottoms in 2027, and that forecast was written before the tariff.

Richard’s LinkedIn post got the diagnosis half right. The solo operator is not going extinct; there are 493,000 certificate holders and a third of them never fly a paying job. That is a glut of paper. What is disappearing is the cheap first aircraft, the foam RC plane and the $300 quad, and that is the thing that produced Soren Monroe-Anderson, Joshua Bardwell, the Ukrainian FPV pilots the Army is now copying, and a fair share of the 22 percent of remote pilots who also hold a crewed certificate. Nobody decides at 22 to become a fighter pilot. They decide at 14, in a Blue Angels flight suit at a flying field, holding a Blue Angels model they could afford. My read is that the fleet-consolidation story Richard repeats comes from a Nasdaq-listed roll-up’s own press releases; ZenaTech lost $45 million last year to acquire 25 surveying shops, and Zeitview’s “fleet” is a dispatch app for freelancers flying their own DJI gear. The talent-pipeline story is the one with a federal agency’s numbers behind it.

Watch two dates. September 30 is Hegseth’s squad-level deadline, and Merkl has already said the Army will hit the hardware target and miss the training one. February 9, 2027, is when the 25 percent component tariff lands on the props and frames the FPV community builds with. If recreational registrations are still falling in next spring’s FAA forecast, the Pentagon will be buying a million drones for a country that has stopped producing the people who fly them for fun.

Sources: FAA Aerospace Forecast FY 2026–2046, Emerging Aviation Entrants, Military Times, Defense News, ZenaTech, KPMG on the Section 232 proclamation, Eric Richard on LinkedIn.

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

DJI Neo 3 Box Lists Nine Items. The Neo 2's Transceiver Isn't One

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:25:00 GMT

Leaker Igor Bogdanov posted four more DJI Neo 3 photos on Saturday, and one of them is the back of the box. The Fly More Combo’s in-the-box panel lists nine items: the aircraft, three flight batteries, a charging hub, the DJI RC Mini, an RC Mini expansion cover, an RC Mini anti-loosening pad, spare propellers, a screwdriver and a USB-C cable.

Missing from that list is the Digital Transceiver, the clip-on module every DJI Neo 2 needs before it will talk to a controller or a pair of goggles. The same panel prints China’s two new mandatory drone standards, in force since May 1, 2026, next to a 2026 copyright line. Another photo shows the box held up beside a store display of the Neo 2, the drone this one replaces.

DroneXL covered the front of this box on Tuesday, when Bogdanov first showed it.

DJI Neo 3 Fly More Combo Drops the Neo 2’s Transceiver

The Neo 3 Fly More Combo box lists no Digital Transceiver. The Neo 2 combo includes one: a 9-gram module that bolts onto the aircraft and carries DJI’s O4 video link to a controller or goggles. Without it, a Neo 2 streams only over Wi-Fi to a phone.

The back of the DJI Neo 3 retail box lists its contents, including the aircraft, three flight batteries, charging hub and DJI RC Mini controller. Photo: Igor Bogdanov.

The Neo 2’s combo, by comparison, is a 13-item kit on DJI’s contents list. Retail listings for that combo count the aircraft, the RC-N3, two RC-N phone cables, three batteries, the hub, spare props, four spare screws, a screwdriver, a pair of propeller guards, the Digital Transceiver, a gimbal protector and a USB-C cable. DJI’s Neo 2 spec sheet gives the aircraft’s takeoff weight as 151 g without the transceiver and 160 g with it. DroneXL’s Neo 2 FPV guide walks new owners through attaching the module before the drone will pair with a Motion 3 or FPV Remote Controller 3.

Four of those 13 items have no counterpart on the Neo 3 panel, which draws icons rather than printing DJI’s full contents list. The transceiver is gone. So is the gimbal protector. The separate pair of propeller guards is gone too, and the Neo 3’s aircraft icon draws the spoked cages as part of the airframe. The two phone cables are gone as well, which follows from a controller with its own screen.

Two items are new. The box names an “RC Mini Expansion Cover” and an “RC Mini Anti-Loosening Pad,” each with its own icon, and says nothing about what either does. The battery count and the charging hub carry over from the Neo 2 combo unchanged.

Neo 3 Box Prints China’s Registration and Remote ID Standards

The panel lists the Chinese national standards the kit is built to: GB 42590-2023 plus two newer ones, GB 46761-2025 and GB 46750-2025. The 2025 pair are mandatory rules on real-name registration and activation and on operational identification, China’s version of Remote ID. Both took effect May 1, 2026.

China’s market regulator approved both standards in late 2025, and Xinhua reported that the registration standard requires a drone to be incapable of flight before it is activated and after activation is cancelled. GB 42590-2023 is the older safety-requirements standard for civil drones. A Neo 2 box printed in 2025 could not have carried the two new numbers, so this panel dates the packaging to a market where those rules already bind.

The product name reads “DJI Neo 3 畅飞套装 (DJI RC Mini),” which is Fly More Combo (DJI RC Mini), and the service hotline is 400-700-0303, a mainland Chinese number. A separate notice marked for mainland China only cites the country’s interim regulations on unmanned aircraft flight management. The EU contact line names DJI GmbH at Industriestrasse 12 in Niederlauer, Germany. The copyright reads 2026, and a trademark line states that DJI and DJI NEO are marks of DJI.

The rest of the panel is standard DJI. A DJI Care Refresh block promises affordable replacements, flyaway coverage, DJI Care Express and free shipping, with the fine print that the plan is sold separately. A red 16+ age mark sits beside a row of warnings in several languages, including Dutch and Russian. The bottom edge of the front carries CE and UKCA marks and Made for iPhone and Final Cut Pro badges.

Neo 3 Box Photographed Beside a Neo 2 Display Model in a Store

Bogdanov shot the box in a store stocked with DJI products, holding it beside a DJI Neo 2 display model on a stand above an RC-N3 controller. The Neo 2 is the drone the Neo 3 replaces, and the side-by-side shows the change: closed guard rings against spoked cages.

The Neo 2 on the stand is the grey retail unit DJI sells today, with the RC-N3 that ships in its Fly More Combo. The Neo 3 on the box art is white, with a dome on top of the fuselage that the Neo 2 lacks and rows of vent slots along the body. Both put a gimbal camera in the nose. Bogdanov, who posted the four photos on X on Saturday afternoon Eastern time, did not say where the store is.

The RC Mini on the box has its own screen and, as DroneXL reported on Tuesday, a U.S. FCC grant issued December 19, 2025, three days before the FCC put foreign-made drones on its Covered List. The aircraft has no such grant, and DJI never gave the Neo 2 an official U.S. launch either.

The red “Not For Sale” sticker, cropped in Tuesday’s photo, is fully legible this time. The front of the box is otherwise unchanged from the one that surfaced on Tuesday.

DroneXL’s Take

The missing transceiver is the detail I care about. DroneXL’s Neo 2 FPV guide exists partly because of that module: the drone-only box didn’t include it, and the drone won’t pair with a controller or goggles until it’s screwed on. My read of the nine-item panel is that DJI moved the O4 radio inside the airframe, which is where it belonged on a drone marketed to people who have never flown anything. I can’t prove that from a box. A panel that bothers to draw a screwdriver and an anti-loosening pad isn’t skipping a 9-gram module by accident, though.

A retail box with a Not For Sale sticker, photographed in a store that already stocks the Neo 2, is about as close to a launch as a leak gets without a date.

This box is printed for a market where a drone cannot take off until it is registered to a named person and broadcasts its identity in flight, under rules Beijing made mandatory in May. The standards line says DJI built that compliance into a 2026 consumer product, the way it built FAA Remote ID into the ones it sold here. The FCC’s answer, since December, is that no new DJI aircraft gets authorized at all, and so this one, with a controller the FCC already approved, will ship wherever DJI can sell it, and the FCC’s own record says that excludes the United States. American beginners get the year-old Neo 2 with a radio you screw on, or a no-name toy with no sensing. That protects nobody’s airspace.

When DJI announces this drone, expect no U.S. store page for it unless the Covered List changes first, and nothing in the record says it will.

Sources: Igor Bogdanov on X, Xinhua

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

Amazon Plans Portland Drone Hub in a State That Fought FAA Review

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:01:00 GMT

Amazon wants to fly delivery drones out of North Portland. A pre-application conference request filed with the city’s permitting department shows the company proposing a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at its sub-same-day fulfillment center at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with service planned for early 2027. This is Portland, Oregon, not Maine: the address is the former Portland Meadows racetrack beside Interstate 5, in the Delta Park industrial strip a few minutes north of downtown.

It would be the first Prime Air hub serving customers in Oregon, or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. Amazon has flown in the state for years, at the Pendleton UAS Range in Eastern Oregon, where its test program has an FAA environmental assessment of its own. Portland appears in none of Amazon’s published expansion plans, and, as of the Drone Delivery Tracker’s September 16 sweep, in none of the 40 Amazon delivery hubs DroneXL has pulled from FAA filings. A city permit surfaced it, the same way a Tacoma Walmart permit surfaced Wing’s first Washington hub four days ago.

Oregon’s attorney general is one of 17 who told the FAA in January that its national drone delivery review was “a paper exercise.” The FAA signed it anyway in July. If the FAA decides the Portland site fits inside that national review, no Portland-specific federal environmental document and no federal comment period follows. Portland’s own land-use process is separate, and it is the only public step the city controls.

Amazon’s Portland Request Covers a Building, Not the Flights

A pre-application conference is a meeting with city planners that Portland requires before certain land-use applications. It approves nothing. Amazon’s request describes a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center added to the existing warehouse at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with drone delivery from the site planned for early 2027.

The Portland Business Journal reported the filing first, and Amazon confirmed the plan without adding to it. “We are currently working with local officials and exploring opportunities,” spokesperson Farah Jad told the paper, describing Portland as one of several locations the company is looking at.

What a city gets to review in this process is the ground. In Richardson, Texas, the equivalent step covered a fenced launch pad and two modular buildings for battery charging, maintenance and storage, and the city first updated its zoning so applicants could seek a special permit for drone operations. Portland’s conference will sort out the same kind of questions: structures, parking, stormwater, whether the industrial zoning already allows what Amazon wants to build.

The air is federal. Prime Air flies under a Part 135 air carrier certificate, and a new operating area needs FAA approval, typically an amendment to Amazon’s operations specifications plus whatever environmental determination the agency attaches to it. Portland can shape the pad. It cannot decide whether 83-pound (38-kilogram) aircraft cross Kenton and Bridgeton on the way to a customer’s yard.

The same public records show Amazon leased two more Portland warehouses in August, at 4444 S.E. 27th Avenue and 2405 N. Albina Avenue, for Amazon Now, its 30-minute delivery service that runs from small urban sites without drones. The drone center is one piece of a wider Portland build-out.

Portland Appears in None of Amazon’s Public Plans or FAA Filings

Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement listed 11 operating sites in seven states and named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as next. Oregon was absent. DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker holds 40 Amazon hubs drawn from FAA filings, and at its September 16 sweep Portland was not among them.

DroneXL found no Portland document of any kind on the FAA’s drone environmental review page on September 19; the page was last updated September 11. The company says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold jump from the current footprint, with each site covering about 175 square miles (453 square kilometers). An early-2027 Portland launch falls just outside that window, which is consistent with a hub that has not yet reached the FAA paperwork stage.

The permit-before-announcement pattern is becoming the way new hubs get found. Wing’s first Washington hub showed up in a Tacoma Walmart permit on September 15, in a state that had appeared on none of Wing’s announced market lists. Tracy, California got a car show booth and a launch date before any federal document appeared for the site. Portland now has a land-use filing and a launch quarter, and nothing else on the public record.

Oregon is not new ground for Amazon, only Portland is. Prime Air has flown at the Pendleton UAS Range at Eastern Oregon Regional Airport since 2019, and the FAA signed an environmental assessment for those test operations in November 2022, then re-evaluated it in August 2025 to let the MK30 fly there for testing and training. Pendleton is also where the aircraft’s development record was written. OPB and the Northwest News Network counted 10 crashes serious enough to be reported to federal authorities at the range by mid-2022, nearly all of them Amazon’s delivery drone, and Bloomberg reported that spring on current and former employees who said the program had prioritized speed over safety. Amazon said at the time that the move to customer deliveries showed the technology was safe and no longer experimental.

Pendleton is a test range, not a delivery hub, which is why it does not appear in the tracker’s hub count. Portland will be added as an announced hub with no FAA decision found, and the entry gets checked at Monday’s weekly sweep. (The tracker updates the day a story publishes; the sweep catches what the stories miss.)

Oregon Signed the Letter Calling the FAA’s Drone Review a Paper Exercise

On January 23, attorneys general from 17 states, Oregon included, told the FAA its draft national assessment for Part 135 drone delivery could not support a no-impact finding and asked for a full impact statement. The FAA signed the finding on July 28. New hubs are measured against it.

DroneXL covered the nationwide finding when it landed. It holds only if operators implement the noise mitigation written into the assessment, and the core of that is physical: at the analyzed ceiling of 1,150 average daily deliveries, a hub is sited with a 600-foot (183-meter) setback from noise-sensitive uses, and a proposal outside the national envelope tiers off into a narrower supplemental review. Oregon’s signature on the January letter does not change any of that for Portland. The state asked for a bigger process and did not get one.

Whether Portland gets a site document of its own is now an FAA choice made without a public step. Chicago’s draft assessment ran a comment period. Baton Rouge’s did too, and Amazon started commercial service there 15 days before it closed. Tracy has nothing. Under the statute governing review of FAA orders, 49 U.S.C. 46110, a challenge to the July 28 decision has to be filed within 60 days, which runs out on September 26, one week from today. After that the default for the next several hundred towns is settled in the agency’s favor.

Washington’s attorney general fought the same finding, and Wing’s Tacoma hub is arriving under it regardless. Oregon and Washington are the two Pacific Northwest signatories, and both now have a drone delivery hub coming that neither state’s legal position slowed by a day.

The Schmeer Road Site Sits Inside Portland International’s Airspace

The warehouse sits about 4 miles (6.8 kilometers) west of Portland International Airport and 2 miles (3.1 kilometers) south of Pearson Field in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River. PDX’s Class C airspace runs from the surface to 4,000 feet within 5 nautical miles, and Schmeer Road is inside it.

The Class C description in 14 CFR Part 71 carves out only two areas near the site: a low-altitude box over Pearson Field on the north shore of the Columbia, and everything west of the Willamette’s east bank. Delta Park is east of the Willamette and south of the Columbia, so neither exclusion applies. The FAA describes Pearson’s runway 8 threshold as sitting directly under the instrument approach to PDX runway 10L, which is why it wrote Pearson its own special flight rules area. What Class C means for a Part 135 drone operation from this address is set by Amazon’s FAA authorization, and nothing about that authorization is public yet.

Amazon’s MK30 cruises between 180 and 377 feet (55 to 115 meters) above ground in its FAA filings and carries up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), with existing hubs serving a radius of about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers). A circle that size drawn around Schmeer Road would reach most of North and Northeast Portland, part of Vancouver, Washington, and the approach paths into PDX. Whether Portland’s service area looks anything like that circle depends on the routes and boundaries the FAA approves, and none of them are public. The Portland filing describes a building.

The safety record Portland is being asked to host is on the tracker. Seven Amazon incidents in DroneXL’s files, among them the October 2025 crane strikes in Tolleson, a cable strike in Waco, an apartment crash in Richardson, a package dropped into a Richmond, Texas pool in August, and an MK30 that set itself down beside a Baton Rouge road on September 11, two months into service there. The MK30 carries no parachute or ballistic recovery system in any of Amazon’s FAA filings, and it releases packages from about 13 feet (4 meters).

DroneXL sent Amazon 25 written safety questions about the MK30 between September 3 and September 10, including its fleet flight hours and what changed after Tolleson. The final deadline was September 15. Zipline answered its set in part. Amazon has answered none.

DroneXL’s Take

I want Prime Air in Portland. A drone hub that gets a package across North Portland in 30 minutes without a van on I-5 is the kind of drone use DroneXL exists to cover, and Amazon’s 11 sites move thousands of packages a day, most of them without incident. Thirteen years of engineering went into that aircraft, by its own account, and the record of it flying is mostly a record of it working.

The record also has seven entries in it, and Amazon has now let two DroneXL deadlines pass without answering a single written question about any of them. That is the company Portland is dealing with. Not the community team with the static display and the free tacos, who are excellent, but the one that decides which questions get answered on the record, which so far is none.

Portland holds less than it thinks and more than Amazon would like. The city cannot touch the airspace. What it does hold, my read of the process rather than a legal opinion, is the timetable for the ground: the pad, the buildings, the permits Amazon needs before anything flies. A pre-application conference is the one moment when Amazon has to sit across a table from a public body and explain the building, and the planners in that room can ask for the operating documents that go with it: the noise modeling, the delivery area map, the FAA correspondence, and whether the site will get its own environmental assessment or ride the national one. Baton Rouge’s FAA filing had a wildlife appendix a resident could open. Portland should ask for the same before it agrees to anything about a parking lot.

The January letter Oregon signed was right about the review and lost anyway, and the loss is now Portland’s problem to manage locally. I don’t know what weight, if any, the finding carried in Amazon’s site selection, and Amazon has not said. What I can see is the sequence: a signatory state, a finding signed in July, a land-use filing in September, and a launch quarter that lands before any court has ruled on whether the states had a point. Watch September 26. If no challenge is filed by then, the only public process Portland gets is the one its own permitting office runs, and the tracker will show whether Amazon files anything with the FAA before the first MK30 leaves Schmeer Road.

Sources: Portland Business Journal via KGW, Amazon, Community Impact, Federal Register, FAA NEPA and Drones, OPB.

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

DJI Avata 360 After 3 Months: The Best and Worst of Flying 360

Greg Reverdiau — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:20:00 GMT

Is 360-degree footage worth the editing headache, or is it just going to eat up your entire weekend? The DJI Avata 360 is DJI’s first 360-degree drone, and we have spent about the last three months testing it, flying it, and editing footage from it. Today I want to talk about the best and the worst parts of this drone, the pros and the cons. We will cover the editing workflow, the camera quality, and everything else we have tested.

I’m Greg from Pilot Institute. We have trained over 150,000 remote pilots and reviewed dozens of drones already. Joining me for this one is Ben, our head of production. Ben actually bought an Avata 360 himself, has been flying it a lot, and has been editing a ton of footage while getting used to the whole workflow. These are all the things you should know about the Avata 360 before you buy it.

The Worst Part: Editing Is a Bigger Deal Than Most People Expect

Let’s start with the worst, the editing, because it is a bigger part of the experience than most people expect. If you stick with the camera’s default view, you can use the footage right away, just like a regular camera. But if you want to take advantage of everything a 360 camera has to offer, you are going to need to spend some time reframing your shots before exporting them. That takes real time.

Ben’s counterpoint is that the time buys you something a traditional camera drone simply cannot offer. You have full control to decide every angle and change the camera movement after you have already flown. You get extreme flexibility to grab a camera angle anywhere at any time from a single shot. I see that as a pro too. It is one of the biggest elements of this drone and a huge part of the selling package.

There is a catch, though. You still have to fly the shot. Some people think they can fly from a distance and zoom into a place the drone never went. You can’t. If you are flying over a river on the right side and you look over, you cannot turn the camera to the left side of the river if your drone was never there.

The editing does get faster with practice. When Ben started, he had only edited a little bit of 360 footage before, and certainly not to this extent. His learning curve was one to two hours to get basic-level knowledge, and after that the more advanced things came quicker as he picked up the command sets. You can also choose how much time you spend depending on how creative you want to be. You can get a straight shot out of the camera pretty quickly if you just want the kind of shot you would normally get with a drone. The creative stuff is what takes more time. You can do a couple of little keyframes, maybe a flip, or you can go crazy and pull a bunch of shots out of one clip.

Once you have done some editing, you start thinking about your shots differently because you know what you can do in post. When we first started testing, we were flying at Watson Lake next to a paddleboarder wondering what we could do with the shot later. After editing those clips, Ben went back out flying with a plan for exactly what he would do with each clip. It really helps you plan your shots and get the most out of them.

Another pro is that you can film for both horizontal and vertical video in one flight with easy cropping in post. That is a big deal if you are producing for different types of social media. For us, we may film a long-form video in horizontal but want to pull pieces out for short content, and we can crop vertical in post.

DJI Studio: Free, but With Limitations

Ben has been using DJI Studio primarily. There are other options. You can edit in Final Cut, and there is a plugin for Adobe, and we tested both a little, but he really wanted to get familiar with DJI Studio and find out what it is like. It is also free, which is a big deal. People always ask what software they should use to edit their videos. This one comes for free, and if you find it too limiting you can spend the money on something like Final Cut, which is what we use in the office alongside the occasional Adobe product.

Ben found a couple of limitations. There is no histogram, so you cannot check your luma values, and he uses that as a guide more often than not rather than eyeballing it. Copying and pasting attributes is also less flexible. There is an option to copy attributes across all the clips in the project, say if you change a color value or apply a LUT, but it is not a simple command-C, command-V onto one clip. It spreads across everything, so you have less control. Still, it is free and it gets you started.

The power you have in the edit is real, even if it takes more time. We have one clip where we fly over a river and see some people out by the water. We can orbit around them, turn the camera as we come back to get a view of the mountains in the background, and then keep editing that same flight as we go under a bridge and do some creative stuff there. All from one clip. Ben doesn’t think he could have pulled that off with a regular camera in one flight, and if he could, it would have taken several takes. That creative flexibility is just really fun to play with.

Image Quality: Unbeatable on Paper, With Some Buts

On paper, this drone sounds unbeatable. 8K at 60 frames per second. Dual 1/1.1-inch sensors, which is fairly big, almost a 1-inch sensor. 120-megapixel stills. But there are some buts.

That 8K describes the full sphere of footage. The moment you start cropping into a single angle, which is what you want to do for almost every usable shot, the image can start to get soft or a little muddy at times, especially around the edges of the frame, because you are cropping in so much.

We have a tip that might sound counterintuitive but really helps: drop the in-camera sharpening all the way down to -1 or -2. That sounds like it would make your footage worse, but it actually cleans it up, because otherwise the footage is oversharpened and overprocessed, and turning it down makes it easier to work with afterwards. This is not just this drone. It is a common technique with newer cameras that tend to oversharpen, and I personally don’t like the look. The nice thing is you can adjust the sharpening in your editing software later, so you still have that flexibility.

Something to keep in mind: this is not your Air 3S. This is not your Mini 5 Pro. The image quality is not going to look as good as those drones, and we said this when the Avata 360 came out. This is not a drone designed to replace the Air 3S. It is an action camera you are going to fly close to the ground doing crazy maneuvers. It is an FPV drone. It is not designed to be the fixed-frame real estate camera.

And again, you can alter the angle as much as you want in post, but if you didn’t fly close enough to your subject, you are not going to be able to zoom in and scale correctly. You will have to punch in more, and you will lose more image quality. It all comes down to your flight and doing the right thing from the get-go. You are going to do a couple of passes, do some testing, and figure out how close you need to be.

A big pro is the 10-bit D-Log M. That is actually unusual for 360 cameras, and it really helps in post to bring life to the footage. You shoot in D-Log M, apply a LUT, and you have more flexibility. In DJI Studio, when you add a LUT you can dial it back from 100 percent, which is not always an option in editing software, and there is a color recovery slider as well. You have a lot of options for how saturated you make the footage.

One unique feature is the tiny planet view. It is very clear and it is an angle you cannot get with other drones. But I think it is a pro as much as it is a con. That angle gets old pretty quickly. It was really cool when it first came out, and like a lot of things it got overused. Use it sparingly, maybe once per video and that is it. Ben’s suggestion is to use the tiny planet view as a starting point to push into the footage rather than sitting on it.

Tracking Might Be What This Drone Does Best

Just like other DJI drones, you can use Spotlight or ActiveTrack to lock onto a subject while you fly. But with 360 footage, you can also track during your edit, which is a pretty big deal, because tracking a subject is not always easy and doing it in post is a lot easier.

When you use ActiveTrack 360° in flight, it locks onto a subject and keeps it centered no matter which direction the drone turns. And because you are reframing from a full sphere, that same tracking carries into post-production. It is not perfect yet, don’t get us wrong, but it is probably the most advanced tracking we have seen, especially with the ability to track in post. For people who struggle with chasing a subject and predicting where it will go, this solves a lot of that.

One of the cool things is that ActiveTrack comes with a secondary window, a dual view with picture-in-picture, so you can still watch where you are flying while the drone tracks. You can swap the views so the big window shows where you are actually flying, and the small window shows what the drone is tracking, which can be directly behind you. That is exactly what Ben and Jason did when they were tracking the Wildcat, and it is such a cool tool.

Tracking in post through DJI Studio is intuitive and pretty easy. DJI Studio often recognizes subjects like people or cars and gives you the little plus sign, just like ActiveTrack on the controller. Sometimes it struggles, but a lot of the time you can manually draw a box, just like the Spotlight feature, hit go, and it tracks that subject the whole time. You still have the option to track manually as well.

The Flight Experience Is a Matter of Preference

The flight experience might be the best part for some and the worst for others. Flying FPV with the Avata 360 really comes down to personal preference. You can fly with a standard controller and joysticks, or go full FPV with the motion controller and the goggles. Well, not full FPV entirely, because you are not going to flip it around like an FPV quad, but you are steering with your wrist movements instead of the sticks. You can also use the FPV Remote Controller 3 or the RC-N3 with the goggles if you don’t like the motion controller.

There is no manual mode, so it is not real FPV in that sense. I don’t think that is what this drone was designed for. A lot of people probably wanted it, but Ben isn’t missing it personally, and FPV flyers typically don’t buy DJI drones. They build their own. That said, imagine being able to do all those tricks with a 360 camera on top. That is possible if you build your own drone, just not with this one.

A bit of a con is the power. It doesn’t seem to be as strong as it could be. It is heavier than the Avata 2 and heavier than any sub-250-gram drone, obviously. It is rated Level 5 for wind, which is up to 24 miles per hour, so it can struggle in some cases. There is certain weather Ben still won’t take it out in, like light rain. He also put it up in roughly 20 mph wind, without a barometer or windsock to confirm, and it definitely struggled from time to time. When you let go of the sticks in heavy wind, there is some drift and it takes a little bit to settle.

With all the options to fly, my favorite is honestly the DJI RC 2 without the goggles. I know that sounds weird for an FPV drone. But the RC 2 means I can clearly see the footage just like I would with my Air 3S, and I don’t need a visual observer, which means I can go out by myself.

Head tracking is available, but personally it felt a little weird, and as I mentioned in our review, it made me queasy pretty quickly. That is going to depend on you. Be careful with it, too. The drone is moving in one direction while you look around, and even though there is obstacle avoidance, you could still hit something because you are looking elsewhere. It is like driving your car and turning your head to talk to a passenger for five minutes like they do in old movies.

Obstacle Avoidance: Yes, We Crashed a Couple of Times

We want to give you our honest hands-on experience here rather than repeating the spec sheet DJI gave us. Ben crashed a couple of times. He took his daughter up to Mingus Mountain above Jerome, an area with a lot of pine trees, and was flying around with obstacle avoidance set to Bypass. Coming down into the tree line, he was trying to avoid a tree and expecting the drone to shift a little. It absolutely did not. It ran straight into that tree. He took his hands off the sticks right away so it could catch itself and adjust, but there were so many obstacles around it that it had nowhere to go. It hit a few pine needles and fell.

That speaks to the durability of this drone. We got a couple of scratches, but the lenses are still in good shape. And those lenses can be replaced with a kit, though we haven’t had to do that yet. We have put it on the ground a couple of times, and that wasn’t the only time.

With Bypass enabled, we also flew big orbits around trees and around solar panels at a school, and it handled really well and avoided everything. If it had been set to Brake in that tree line, Ben thinks it would have stopped. Because there were so many obstacles, it just didn’t know what to do. I had the same experience with the Neo 2 when I was running fast with it on Bypass. It doesn’t stop, it just bypasses, and when I was going too fast it clipped trees trying to get in front of me. Same thing with this drone. Pick it up, put it back up, and it just flies again, which is amazing. Usually when you hit something you break props or legs, and this doesn’t really have either exposed. The props are there, but they are tucked away.

If you are trying to fly through small gaps, turn obstacle avoidance off, and obviously be careful. It comes down to piloting skill. Ben was trying to fly through a doorway three and a half to four feet wide, and it wouldn’t do it on Brake or Bypass. He had to turn obstacle avoidance off to get through.

Two Lenses Means Twice the Glass Exposed to Everything

Here is an issue you can’t really avoid. With two lenses facing opposite directions, there is more glass exposed to the elements than on any other drone. That means more chances for dirt, moisture, and lens flare, and all of that shows up in your footage like a sore thumb.

That exposure also means the lenses are easier to damage. We have crashed it a couple of times, and a hard landing or even a small bump can crack a lens. You have to protect it more. It has been quite durable in our testing, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way. The replacement lens kit is fairly cheap, so buy a couple and you are good to go. The combo pack we purchased also came with a lens wipe and a little blower bulb. Wiping the lenses and clearing any dirt or debris should be on your checklist before every flight.

On lens flare: you can look around 360 degrees in post, but for the angles pointing directly at the sun, the flares are going to be pretty intense. It is not the nice star flare you sometimes want with a camera. Sometimes it just ruins the angle you are looking for. And if you are flying in person, you may not notice it because you weren’t looking at that angle until you got to the edit.

Also, because the camera is trying to expose for everything in the sphere at once, you have to be careful outdoors. You only have so much dynamic range. If you have bright sun on one side and heavy shadows on the other, the camera eventually has to average them out, and you may not get the best result everywhere. You can play with exposure in post, but keep in mind that this drone handles exposure differently than a traditional camera.

One way to keep dust and debris off those lenses is a landing pad. I cannot recommend it enough. We are in Arizona and we take off from dirt a lot. Pilot Institute sells one, and we spent a lot of time sourcing and testing it, so you can find it linked in the video description.

Night Footage and Where to Put the Strobe

A lot of you have been asking about the strobe light: where to put it and what it looks like in the footage. If you put it on top of the drone, it will show up, which makes sense because the camera records above and below the drone and stitches the body out. So we have been telling people to put it on the back.

Ben tested this in the studio. With the camera facing forward and the strobe on top, it doesn’t really get into the shot, though you will see the light flashing off the studio ceiling, which we couldn’t avoid. But rotate the camera to look behind the drone and you absolutely see the strobe, with no way to get rid of it. With the strobe on the back of the battery, you rotate the camera backward, up, and down and really can’t see it anywhere. That worked. What Ben doesn’t like is that you have to tape it over the battery’s power button, which is not ideal, but if you make it removable you can use it when you need it. You could also find a really tiny one to fit in there, but then it won’t be visible from three statute miles.

Night flying is going to be tougher with this drone, and it is probably not what it was designed for. Unless you are in a very bright city environment, I don’t know what footage you would get. ISO coverage is limited and it gets grainy. We have already had people asking why their footage is so grainy. Limit your maximum ISO when you fly at night.

Price, Batteries, and the Weight Problem

The pricing is actually really good, especially compared to the competitor we haven’t reviewed, the Antigravity, which is almost twice the price. The combo pack on the Avata 360 is somewhere around $900, so you get a lot for the money.

You will want extra batteries. With any drone, Ben never wants a single battery, and with this one, if you are really buzzing around, you are getting maybe about 20 minutes or so. For the fun he wants to have and the shots he wants to play with in post, he swaps batteries every time. He has never taken it out and flown only one.

The last bit is weight. This drone is not under 250 grams. It might look like it is, but it isn’t, which means it is not a Category 1 drone. It has the prop guards, which would help with Category 1 classification for flying over people, but this drone is not approved to fly over people. It is also bigger than it needs to be to get a waiver from the FAA without a parachute, so it will be very difficult to convince the FAA to let you fly it over people. And if you put a parachute on top, it ruins the 360-degree view. If you want to fly over people, I recommend a Mini-type drone right around 250 grams. Under 400 grams, you can apply to the FAA for a waiver to fly over people.

The weight also means you have to register the drone, which has consequences in other areas as well. The nice thing is that it has Remote ID built in, so you don’t need a module strapped to the drone somewhere risking it showing up in the 360 footage.

Who Is the Avata 360 Actually For?

After everything we have covered, you might be asking who this drone is actually for. My honest answer is that this is not a general-purpose drone, and it isn’t trying to be. It is built for people who want to be creative and get some really cool footage. If that is your use case, the tracking, the editing flexibility, and the ability to shoot once and pull multiple angles later make it the perfect tool. DJI has never released anything like this.

But if you want pixel-perfect image quality straight out of the drone, or if you are chasing true manual FPV, this is not the drone for you. And that is fine. It doesn’t have to do everything.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full Avata 360 review on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.

Ukraine's SBU Films First Jet Shahed Kill, Won't Name the Interceptor

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:02:00 GMT

Ukraine’s Security Service has destroyed a jet-powered Russian Shahed with a new interceptor drone, and President Volodymyr Zelensky published the video on September 19, 2026. The SBU told Interfax-Ukraine the clip is the first footage of a jet Shahed being brought down. The drone, Zelensky wrote, has already been used in combat.

What Kyiv has not said is who built it, what it costs, or how many times it has worked. That silence is deliberate. A day earlier, at the Carpathian Eight summit, Zelensky said Ukraine was holding back details on its fast-drone interceptors, that two companies had passed combat tests, and that 67 companies are working on the problem.

DroneXL has followed this race since December, when a Wild Hornets Sting was filmed catching a jet-powered Geran for the first time. Russia answered in May with the Geran-4, which Ukrainian intelligence said was designed to outrun the interceptors. The SBU video is the next move.

Zelensky’s Video Shows the SBU Drone Killing a Geran-5 Class Target

The footage, posted to Zelensky’s Telegram channel and credited to SBU military counterintelligence, shows a gray delta-wing interceptor on a rail launcher in a field, then a jet-powered Shahed being destroyed. LIGA.net identified the target as a Geran-5, the fastest Shahed variant, flying at roughly 373 mph (600 km/h).

Zelensky posted after a briefing from acting SBU head Oleksandr Poklad. “A new interceptor drone has been developed and has already been successfully deployed,” he wrote, and thanked the developers and manufacturers working to scale production. The SBU confirmed to Interfax-Ukraine that no earlier footage of a jet Shahed kill had been released.

The Geran-5 identification is LIGA.net’s, not the SBU’s. Ukraine’s GUR first described the Geran-5 in January, and DroneXL reported then that the airframe runs on Western electronics. Neither Zelensky’s post nor the SBU has named the variant in the video.

The interceptor itself is unidentified. The launcher and the planform in the screengrab do not match the quadcopter-style interceptors that dominated 2025, and Kyiv has released no specifications. Zelensky said on September 18 that Ukraine is “trying not to go into details yet” on interceptors against high-speed Shaheds, per Interfax-Ukraine, and that the goal is to review test results and move to mass production.

Kyiv Is Fielding Four Interceptor Models and Testing Ten More

The Armed Forces of Ukraine are evaluating four interceptor drone models in active combat sectors against Russian turbojet strike drones, the Kyiv Post reported on September 19. Around ten more manufacturers are testing prototypes ahead of military codification. Zelensky put the number of companies working on jet interceptors at 67.

The targets are the Geran-4 and the Banderol, which the Kyiv Post says fly between 249 and 373 mph (400 and 600 km/h) at altitudes of several kilometers. That puts them above mobile gun teams and beyond propeller-driven interceptors. Newsweek rendered the same figure as “up to 400 miles an hour” in its September 19 story; 600 km/h is 373 mph.

The speed problem is the whole story. When DroneXL covered the GUR’s teardown of the Geran-4 in May, the agency’s own phrasing was that Russia introduced the drone as a countermeasure against the effectiveness of Ukrainian interceptors. A $2,100 Sting that could catch a propeller Geran-2 has no business chasing a 373 mph jet, and the industry knows it: Quantum Systems said in July its Apex test aircraft hit 699 km/h with interceptors in mind.

Washington’s $2.68 Billion Package Buys Missiles and Radars, Not Interceptor Drones

The US State Department on September 18 approved a possible $2.68 billion Foreign Military Sale to Ukraine for air defense upgrades. The list runs to S-300 Clone missiles, GAM-67 missiles, laser-guided rockets, ITEL 1.5 launchers, launcher modification kits and RPS 202 counter-drone radars. No interceptor drone appears on it.

Ukraine would pay with European contributions and US Foreign Military Financing appropriated under the prior administration, the State Department said, with the FMF counted as a US capital contribution to the Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund on a 1:1 basis. The department said the sale would not alter the basic military balance in the region and would require no additional US personnel in Ukraine.

The American money buys the sensors and the missile layer. The kill mechanism against jet Shaheds, on the evidence of this week, is Ukrainian-built and Ukrainian-funded.

DroneXL’s Take

The interceptor-versus-jet-Shahed race is the drone story of this war that matters most to Americans, because the US is buying the expensive layer while Ukraine builds the cheap one. The $2.68 billion package is missiles and radars. The drone that caught a Geran on camera cost whatever a workshop charges.

One video is one video. It is Kyiv’s own footage, it shows one intercept, nobody outside the SBU has verified it, and “successfully deployed” is a claim by the government that released the clip. Kyiv is also withholding the maker, the unit cost and the number of kills, and said so on September 18. My read is that the withholding is about denying Russia a target for the next redesign, and the pattern behind the video is documented well enough to take seriously: a Sting caught a jet Geran in December, the GUR said in May that the Geran-4 exists to beat interceptors, and now a state security service has put a jet-Shahed kill on Telegram.

The cost math is what keeps me watching. General Cherry pitched a $900 interceptor against Romania’s $400,000 missile shots last month. Ukraine is launching 67 companies at a problem the S-300 Clone and GAM-67 lines in the State Department notice are meant to solve at a very different price per shot. If even one of the four frontline models reaches codification and scales, the per-kill cost of defending a Ukrainian city against jet Shaheds drops by orders of magnitude, and every air force with a Shahed problem, the US included, will want the drawings.

The open question is the one Kyiv has chosen to leave open: which company built the SBU’s drone, and whether it is one of the four already in frontline evaluation or a fifth. Zelensky said the next step is reviewing test results and moving to mass production. Watch the codification of the four models and any named contract; that is when the price and the maker come out, and that is when this stops being a video and becomes a supply chain.

Sources: Office of the President of Ukraine (Telegram), Interfax-Ukraine, Kyiv Post, LIGA.net, U.S. State Department, Newsweek

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

Neros Makes Both Pentagon Gauntlet II Boards As Skycutter Falls To 4th

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:26:00 GMT

Neros Technologies is the only company on both leaderboards the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program posted this week for Gauntlet II, the second round of the Department of War’s $1.1 billion contest to buy cheap one-way attack drones by the hundred thousand. Neros won the close quarters battle mission outright with 88.1 points and finished third in deep strike with 69.8. Nine other companies placed on one board or the other.

Perennial Autonomy, the company former Google CEO Eric Schmidt started as White Stork to build drone interceptors for Ukraine, topped the deep strike board at 80.1. Skycutter, the British firm that won Gauntlet I in March with 99.3 points, finished fourth in deep strike at 66.6 and did not place in close quarters at all.

The department plans to buy about 60,000 drones from the ten companies, roughly $300 million of orders. Testing ran at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August, and the results went up on the program’s leaderboard on Tuesday, September 15.

Neros Won Close Quarters And Placed Third In Deep Strike

Neros took first in close quarters battle with 88.1 points, ahead of ORQA US, XTEND Reality, Vector and ModalAI. In deep strike it finished third at 69.8, behind Perennial Autonomy and Hyperscale. No other company appears on both leaderboards, so Neros alone is in line for two production orders.

The program’s April Request for Solutions set the order ladder for each mission area at 8,000 drones for first place, then 7,000, 6,000, 5,000 and 4,000 for the next four, Aviation Tech Today reported in July. On that ladder Neros would collect 8,000 close quarters drones and 6,000 deep strike drones, though the program has said quantities are fixed at contract award rather than by leaderboard position.

Neros is also the Gauntlet I winner with the cleanest delivery record. By July it had delivered and secured acceptance of all 2,400 Archer drones from its March order, according to the program’s own status tracking as reported by Aviation Tech Today. The company delivered its first Army PBAS kits ahead of schedule the same month, and I profiled founder Soren Monroe-Anderson’s path from drone racing champion to defense contractor when DroneXL covered the Gauntlet II field in June.

Perennial Autonomy Won Deep Strike Four Months After Its $500 Million Counter-Drone Deal

Perennial Autonomy led the deep strike board with 80.1 points, more than nine ahead of second-place Hyperscale at 70.9. Its Merops interceptor already defends U.S. forces against Iranian Shahed-type drones, and the deep strike win adds the offensive half of the same cheap-drone math to its Pentagon business.

The lineage runs through Ukraine. Schmidt stood the venture up as White Stork in 2023, renamed it Project Eagle in February 2024, and rebranded to Perennial Autonomy this year. In May, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 handed it a three-year counter-drone contract worth up to $500 million, the largest the U.S. military has signed, covering the Merops, the Bumblebee quadcopter and the Hornet midrange strike drone. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told lawmakers in April the service bought 13,000 Merops in the opening days of the Iran war at roughly $15,000 each. Perennial is now positioned to sell the Pentagon both the drone that shoots down cheap attackers and a cheap attacker of its own.

Hyperscale in second is the board’s blank spot. Inside Unmanned Systems could describe it in July only as a newcomer still in stealth mode, and my searches this week found no founder, location or airframe attached to the name. The Pentagon is preparing to order about 7,000 drones from a company that has told the public nothing about itself.

Skycutter Fell From First To Fourth In Six Months

Skycutter won Gauntlet I at Fort Benning in March with 99.3 points, 12 clear of Neros. At Fort Carson it scored 66.6 in deep strike, fourth behind Neros, and its close quarters entry did not make the top five. Swarm Defense Technologies rounded out the deep strike board at 66.0.

The drop comes with a production footnote. As of July, Skycutter and Napatree, the Gauntlet I champion and third-place finisher, were the only two March winners the program listed as neither ramping nor shipping their ordered drones, Aviation Tech Today reported from the program’s status page. The program has said Gauntlet II rankings rest on mission outcomes and operator ratings, and it has not said whether a vendor’s delivery record against an earlier order figures in. So the leaderboard does not answer whether the production stall cost Skycutter anything beyond the order itself.

When I wrote up the March results, I called the 99.3 the story and a real performance signal. Six months and one harder test later, that number reads as a Fort Benning score, not a ranking that travels.

Every Long-Range Drone Reached 15 Kilometers Under Jamming

Operators flew 1,858 sorties across 23 platforms from 19 companies at Fort Carson, the Defense Innovation Unit said, and every one of the 11 platforms evaluated at long distance reached 15 kilometers (9.3 miles). In Gauntlet I, only 24 percent of drones made it to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).

The missions ran at stand-off range and inside confined spaces, repeated at night and against counter-drone systems. To get to Fort Carson, the 19 finalists first survived a qualifier at Camp Grayling, Michigan, from June 8 to 19, where 49 companies flew about 79 drone designs, then each delivered 120 drones fitted with live payloads inside five weeks. The payloads came from five lethality providers the program picked in May: Bravo Ordnance, Kela Defense, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse and Northrop Grumman.

DIU said the Gauntlet II drones are “cheaper, more capable, and sourced from a supply chain more closely tied to the American industrial base” than the Gauntlet I batch, DefenseScoop reported from the unit’s posts on X. That sourcing line is the program rule I flagged in June: Phase II barred motors and batteries from covered countries starting in August, so every drone on these two boards flew on a supply chain that excludes China on paper.

Ukrainian Firms, Red Cat And Ondas Missed Both Boards

None of the four Ukrainian companies placed. UDD and Stellarion flew deep strike and finished outside the top five, and Grim Tech and Wilcox Cherry Defense did the same in close quarters, according to participant lists DefenseScoop pulled from the program site. Two publicly traded U.S. entrants missed too.

Teal Drones, the Red Cat Holdings subsidiary, competed in close quarters and missed the board. Ascent Aerosystems, owned by Ondas Holdings and a tenth-place finisher in Gauntlet I, flew deep strike and missed as well. Benzinga put Red Cat’s stock down 24 percent since August 25, just before Fort Carson testing wrapped. XTEND Reality, third in close quarters and publicly traded since a merger this year, is the only listed company on either board.

UDD’s miss lands three months after it chose Holland, Ohio, for its first U.S. FPV factory on the strength of its Gauntlet I order. Skycutter’s Gauntlet I entry was built with Ukraine’s Skyfall, so Ukrainian engineering did place, under a British flag. The program does not eliminate anyone between rounds, and all four Ukrainian firms can return. Gauntlet 2.5, a separate round for bomber drones, starts next month. Gauntlet 3 follows about six months after Gauntlet 2, and Gauntlet 4 closes the program roughly six months after that, on the way to the department’s target of more than 200,000 small drones by 2027.

DroneXL’s Take

The Skycutter result tells you more about this program than the winners do. A 99.3 at Fort Benning in March became a 66.6 at Fort Carson in August, on a course that added 15-kilometer stand-off, night runs and active jamming. On the program’s own description of the scoring, that means operators and mission results found a less capable drone the second time, from the company that also took a Gauntlet I production order and, by the program’s own tracker, had shipped none of it four months later. Both facts are bad for Skycutter and good for the program. A competition where the champion can lose is a competition, not a catalog.

Neros did the boring thing instead: it delivered all 2,400 drones from March, then showed up with something that placed on both boards. My read is that the delivery record and the double placing are the same story. The Pentagon has said from the start that the Gauntlets buy production capacity as much as they buy airframes. The two companies that have shipped at volume to U.S. forces this year, Neros with 2,400 Archers and Perennial with the 13,000 Merops the Army bought in the Iran war’s first days, are the two at the top of the new boards.

The four Ukrainian companies finishing off both lists is the part I like least. UDD, Grim Tech, Stellarion and Wilcox Cherry Defense, the successor to General Cherry’s Gauntlet I entry, bring Ukraine’s front-line FPV production experience to the field, and every one of them finished outside the top five. The program’s covered-country sourcing rule hit in August, and companies whose supply chains were built for Ukraine’s front line, not for a Buy-American motor list, had five weeks to convert 120 drones. That is a plausible explanation and the program has not given the real one, so I will not pretend to know. The Ohio factory UDD announced in July was premised on Gauntlet orders. If the scores hold through Gauntlet 3 early next year, that premise gets tested.

Hyperscale is the loose end. The Pentagon is about to place roughly 7,000 drones with a company that has not published a founder, an address or a photograph of its airframe. Good drones from unknown vendors are exactly what this program was designed to surface. They are also exactly the kind of vendor whose ownership and capitalization deserve a look before the order lands, and nothing public addresses either.

Gauntlet 2.5, the bomber round, opens next month. Watch whether Skycutter is on the entry list and whether its March order has moved off “not shipping” by then. That tells you whether the fourth-place score was a bad week or a business problem.

Sources: DefenseScoop, Aviation Tech Today, Benzinga, Inside Unmanned Systems, Drone Dominance Program leaderboard.

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

Boston Police Drone Wrecks a Parked Car Six Days Into Its DFR Pilot

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:24:00 GMT

A Boston police drone fell out of the sky and onto a parked Mazda 3 at 11 Hatherly Road in Brighton around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 3, smashing the rear windshield and trunk and leaving the aircraft in pieces in a private driveway. The car’s owner, a 42-year-old Brighton man, was not home. He came back to a wrecked car and a note from a Boston police officer on the windshield.

The crash came six days after the Boston Police Department announced its Drone as First Responder pilot with Motorola Solutions and BRINC, and less than a week after the first launch sites went live. BPD had sold the program on speed and safety. The Boston Herald broke the story on September 9, and the city’s largest police union used it to attack the entire program.

I have covered police drone crashes in New York and Kent since May 2025. This one has a detail the others didn’t: the department that flew the drone had, days earlier, promised to publish the program’s statistics. The first statistic that matters is now a crashed aircraft on a stranger’s car, and BPD has said nothing about it in public.

The Crash Report Says the Drone Was in Pieces on Arrival

The BPD incident report, quoted by the Boston Herald, says the responding officer found the drone in pieces in the driveway and that it appeared to have crashed onto a vehicle. BRINC, which builds the aircraft, collected the wreckage afterward. Neither BPD nor BRINC has said what brought it down.

The Herald’s account, which Hoodline and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism both relayed, is the only public record of the crash so far. The car was damaged at the rear windshield and trunk. The owner was not there. No injuries were reported. The Herald put the word “destroyed” in quotation marks in its own headline, and the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association repeated it, so treat the extent of the damage as the union’s framing until a repair estimate surfaces.

The aircraft is a BRINC Responder. BRINC’s own spec sheet puts it at 7.7 pounds (3.5 kilograms) with 42 minutes of flight time, a 44 mph (71 km/h) top speed, a 40x zoom camera and a 640-pixel thermal imager. The sheet lists forward obstacle avoidance among the safety features. It does not list a parachute. Greg Reverdiau raised the parachute question in this week’s news update for DroneXL partner Pilot Institute, and it is still open: BRINC has not said whether the Boston aircraft carried one.

BPD Announced the Program on August 28 and Promised Statistics

The Boston Police Department announced the pilot on August 28 and said the rollout would begin that weekend. FAA-certified BPD pilots fly the drones. A drone launches within seconds of a 911 call or a ShotSpotter activation, and BPD said key statistics would be posted on BPDnews.com.

Commissioner Michael Cox framed the pitch around getting eyes on a scene faster than a cruiser can drive there. “By putting eyes on a scene in as little as a minute,” he said, dispatchers can send the right resources and officers can approach a dangerous call more safely. The release described privacy guardrails: cameras face the horizon in transit and tilt down only on arrival at the emergency location.

BPD’s news site has kept posting about its drones since. Its Drone Unit page leads with a September 18 release on a motorcycle enforcement sweep in Roxbury that the unit supported. As of September 19, sixteen days after the crash, the site carries nothing about Hatherly Road and none of the promised statistics.

The pilot had a good first few days. Hoodline reported on August 30 that a drone helped BPD find an armed suspect hiding in bushes during a foot chase in Roslindale. Four days later the Responder was in a Brighton driveway.

The Police Union Says It Wants Officers, Not Robots

The Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association turned the crash into a case against the program itself. Union president Larry Calderone told the Herald the drones are invasive surveillance, built in secret instead of hiring officers. The union’s X account headlined the story “BPD Drone Crashes and Burns in Brighton.”

Calderone’s quotes run in two directions at once. “We have a problem with Big Brother,” he told the Herald, before getting to the point the union actually cares about: the BPPA wants more bodies on the street and will not accept a drone in place of a community-policing officer. BINJ’s Chris Faraone, who has covered Boston police surveillance since the license-plate-reader fights of the early 2010s, read the same quotes and concluded the union’s objection is about headcount, not privacy.

Whatever the union’s motive, it does not explain the crash. A staffing dispute does not put a drone on a car. Something in the aircraft, the link, or the pilot’s decisions did, and that is the part nobody has addressed.

The FAA Reporting Clock Ran Out on September 13

Under 14 CFR 107.9, a remote pilot must report to the FAA within 10 calendar days a flight that damages property other than the drone, unless repair cost or value is $500 or less. A smashed Mazda 3 rear windshield clears that bar. That window closed on September 13.

The rule sits in Part 107, and BPD’s own release describes its pilots as FAA-certified, which points to Part 107 operations. Whether the department filed, and what it told the FAA about the cause, is not public. BPD has not said. Hoodline raised the same question on September 10 and had no answer either.

Boston has argued about drones over its streets before, with other people’s aircraft. In October 2024 a CNN-operated drone hit a light pole and fell into the crowd at a Celtics watch party on City Hall Plaza, injuring three people. Draganfly secured a rare FAA waiver in February 2025 to fly over people and moving traffic in the city for a Mass General Brigham delivery pilot. A police DFR fleet flying from fixed launch sites over residential streets is a different scale of exposure than either.

Police Drone Crashes Are Not New, But the Silence Is

New York’s police department has crashed two Skydio X10 drones in 13 months. The contrast with Boston is what happened next. When an NYPD X10 caught fire on the roof of the 71st Precinct in May 2025, Skydio CEO Adam Bry published the cause, a battery connector failure, within days.

When a second X10 fell and burned in DUMBO steps from the World Cup Fan Zone on June 23, the crash was public within days, down to photographs of the wreck from the Mayor’s Office photographer.

BRINC is not a small vendor that can plead inexperience. The company raised $125 million in July in a round led by Motorola Solutions, with the stated goal of a 911 drone on the roof of every one of the roughly 80,000 police and fire stations in the country. Boston is one of its highest-profile deployments. BRINC also sells the Responder on the claim that agencies clear roughly one call in four with the drone alone, a manufacturer figure DroneXL flagged as unaudited when Victorville bought its fleet in April.

DroneXL’s Take

I want Drone as First Responder programs to work. One that reaches a shooting scene in 70 seconds and tells responding officers what they are walking into is one of the best uses of this technology. DroneXL has followed BRINC rollouts in Plano and Reno. Boston should have one.

The union’s argument has a real foundation. BRINC’s own sales pitch is that a quarter of calls get cleared without sending an officer, and Commissioner Cox’s release says the drones will “outpace ground units.” A patrolmen’s union hearing that is not paranoid to conclude the drone is a headcount tool. But the union’s remedy, no drones, would have Boston’s officers arriving at unknown scenes blind, and the crash does not support it either way. A staffing fight is not a safety finding.

The safety finding is what is missing. My read is that BPD and BRINC know what happened to that Responder. BRINC collected the wreckage on September 3, its LiveOps software keeps flight logs, and the company has had 16 days. The NYPD-Skydio precedent shows the alternative: name the failure and say what changed. Skydio did that in May 2025 and came out of it with more credibility. BPD told Boston it would publish the pilot’s statistics. A crash onto a resident’s car in week one is the first one due.

The FAA filing is the simplest question. If BPD flew under Part 107, a report was due by September 13, and a department that launched a program on the word “safety” should be willing to say it filed. Watch two things: whether BPDnews.com ever posts the promised numbers, and what BPD puts in the next Annual Surveillance Report under Boston’s surveillance ordinance, which the Mayor’s office sends to the City Council every year with an account of how each surveillance tool was used, complaints included. A DFR program that cannot survive publishing its first crash was never going to survive a City Council hearing.

The Brighton man got a note on his windshield. Boston deserves a fuller one.

Sources: Boston Herald, Boston Police Department, Hoodline, Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, BRINC, Legal Information Institute (14 CFR 107.9)

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

UK Bases Logged 340 Drone Incidents in a Year. The MoD Names Nobody

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:14:00 GMT

British military sites logged 340 drone security incidents in the year to August 2026, according to Ministry of Defence figures released to the Independent under a Freedom of Information request. That is roughly one a day. The ministry recorded 250 incidents in 2025 and 126 in 2024.

The MoD will not say who flew any of them. Its statement says Russia is constantly probing and testing the UK, that the government does not believe Vladimir Putin wants a direct confrontation with NATO, and that part of the rise reflects better detection equipment and better reporting at bases. Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative former defence minister, told the Independent the government is asleep to the threat and puts Russia and Iran behind many of the incidents.

DroneXL has followed British base incursions since the first drones appeared over RAF Lakenheath in November 2024. The MoD’s response then was that it took threats seriously and maintained security measures at defence sites. Twenty-two months later the language is the same, and the count has close to tripled.

Three MoD Channels Have Given Three Different 2025 Counts

The FOI response puts 2025 at 250 incidents. On February 2, the MoD’s own press release announcing the Armed Forces Bill put the same year at 266. Last autumn, defence minister Lord Coaker told Parliament of 187 sightings near military sites since January 1. Neither later release explains the gap.

The February statement from Defence Secretary John Healey used the 266 figure to justify new shoot-down powers, calling the doubling of rogue drones near military sites evidence of a changing threat. The Coaker answer, given in response to a question from Lord Wigley, counted sightings rather than security incidents, which may account for part of the gap. None of the three documents defines an incident or says what turns a sighting into one.

The ministry’s explanation for the growth, given to the Independent’s Harriette Boucher, is that the numbers reflect improvements in reporting, better counter-drone detection technology and greater awareness among personnel. Ellwood called that explanation shocking, and said the size of the numbers means the activity has been going on for a long time while the UK ignored it.

A count that rises because a base installed a new sensor is a count of what the sensor sees. It says nothing about who is flying. The MoD’s own caveat concedes that, and its own 2024 baseline of 126 was collected with whatever detection existed then.

Ellwood Names Russia and Iran While the Ministry Names Nobody

Ellwood, who chaired the Defence Select Committee from 2020 to 2023, told the Independent that Russia and Iran are behind many of the incidents and that the British military is viewed as a target. The MoD’s statement names no perpetrator and calls national security the first duty of Government.

Ellwood’s case is that the drones flown so far have been passive, and that adding a warhead to one is not a large step. “We are doing nothing about protecting our critical national infrastructure,” he told the paper. He expects intrusions into UK airspace to increase over the coming months and years as Britain steps up arms to Ukraine and Russia looks to retaliate.

He made the same point in August with an aircraft rather than an interview. The News in Portsmouth reported that a light aircraft circled at about 1,000 feet (305 meters) over HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth while both carriers sat alongside at HMNB Portsmouth. Ellwood said he was responsible, and told Forces News he could not think of another country that would allow it and that he knew for a fact there was no air defence at the base.

The diplomatic backdrop moved on Friday. The Russian foreign ministry summoned Danae Dholakia, the UK’s deputy head of mission in Moscow, to protest British supplies of drones and other weapons to Ukraine, and warned of retaliatory measures. The Kremlin has separately said British military facilities in Ukraine would be legitimate targets if used to support long-range strikes on Russia. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said Moscow is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries supporting Kyiv, Poland among them.

That warning lands in a Europe that has already seen the passive-to-kinetic step Ellwood describes. Germany blamed Russia for the Leipzig drone bomb earlier this month, weeks after drones circled a Patriot repair base at Mechernich. In the UK count, by contrast, not one of the 340 incidents has been publicly attributed to anyone.

Troops Still Cannot Legally Bring Down Most of Those Drones

Under UK law, only police and a few named agencies may interfere with a drone to prevent a crime. Soldiers guarding a base can jam or divert one and may shoot only where life is at risk. The Armed Forces Bill would change that. It is not law.

The bill was introduced in the Commons on January 15, 2026, cleared the Commons on June 22 with 81 government amendments at report stage, and had its second reading in the Lords on July 6. It is now at Lords report stage, with amendments tabled through September 16. The drone clauses create a defence authorisation scheme letting personnel use approved equipment to detect and prevent offences committed with drones near defence sites, including land and underwater drones. Louise Sandher-Jones, the Minister for the Armed Forces, told the Independent the bill will be law by the end of the year.

She also gave the government’s fullest answer yet on what it has done in the meantime: restricted airspace over 44 critical defence sites since February, a further 160 sites this autumn, and £750 million for counter-drone systems in the Defence Investment Plan, which she said quadruples the spending the government inherited. Restricted airspace is a line in a flight-planning app. It stops a hobbyist who checks the map; it does not stop, or identify, anyone else.

Britain’s neighbours moved faster. Germany authorized its military to shoot down drones in November 2025, Belgium did the same that month, and Dutch troops fired on drones over Volkel air base days later. The UK, in the same month, sent RAF counter-drone specialists to Belgium to help defend Belgian bases with equipment its own soldiers could not lawfully use to bring down a drone at home.

American Aircraft Sit on Four of the Bases in Question

RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford are Ministry of Defence stations operated by the US Air Force. Drones were spotted over them repeatedly in November 2024, and 60 British troops deployed to investigate. Whatever a British soldier may lawfully do about a drone applies over American aircraft.

DroneXL first reported the Lakenheath sightings on November 24, 2024 and the British government’s response five days later. The US Air Force said at the time that the drones varied in size and configuration and that none of the incursions affected base residents, facilities or assets. The figures released to the Independent carry no per-site breakdown, so the share of the 340 that belongs to the American-run stations is not public.

One British base has already taken the hit Ellwood warns about, outside the UK count. On March 2, a Shahed-type drone struck a hangar at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus during Iran’s regional strikes; the MoD later said the drone had not launched from Iran. The FOI figures cover sites in the UK, so Akrotiri sits in a different column. The kinetic step Ellwood describes is already in use against British forces; the UK count records none of it.

DroneXL’s Take

The 340 figure is a count of what the MoD noticed, and the ministry’s own statement says so. Better sensors, better reporting, more vigilance: each describes the observer. The 2024 baseline of 126 predates that upgrading, so the comparison measures British detection as much as anyone’s intent.

Until shown otherwise, “nearly tripled” is a fact about the UK’s counter-UAS build-out. State-linked drone activity in Europe is real. Germany has attributed the Leipzig bomb to Russia, and a Shahed-type aircraft hit a British hangar in Cyprus. Some of the 340 are almost certainly hostile. The problem is that Britain cannot say which, and after two years of rising counts it has not publicly attributed a single one. Retired Brigadier Ben Barry, a former NATO commander, told the Independent the explanations run from hobbyists to thieves to hostile intelligence services to terrorists doing reconnaissance, and nothing in the released figures separates them. Denmark, at the height of its September 2025 airport closures, quietly walked back some of its own sightings once investigators looked closely. The MoD has confirmed nothing and debunked nothing. Its answer is restricted airspace and money, and neither tells you who is flying.

Some share of those 340 is a hobbyist with a Mini who never checked the map. In 2017 an amateur landed a DJI Phantom on the flight deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth at Invergordon by accident and walked away with photographs. Nine years on, the UK’s answer is a bill that lets soldiers bring down drones they still have no published means of identifying, while the shoot-down powers its neighbours already have wait on the Lords. Ellwood is right that the government has been slow. My read is that speed is the wrong fix: a shoot-down authority applied to unattributed contacts protects nothing and puts a 249-gram camera drone and a Russian reconnaissance platform in the same firing solution.

A per-site, per-classification breakdown of the 340 would change my mind, and the MoD could release one tomorrow without compromising a single security arrangement. So would the final text of the Armed Forces Bill, if it requires an identification step before interference rather than simply authorising it. American aircraft sit on four of the bases that law will govern, so the Pentagon has a stake in the answer as well.

Sources: The Independent, The Telegraph, The News (Portsmouth), Forces News, House of Lords Library, UK Parliament, UK Ministry of Defence.

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

NASA Kennedy Drone Case: Chinese Tourist Pleads Guilty, Faces a Year

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:18:00 GMT

A Chinese tourist pleaded guilty Friday to a federal misdemeanor for flying a drone in restricted airspace over NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, six weeks after Homeland Security agents arrested him at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport. Xiaodong He entered the plea at an arraignment in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Orlando. The charge carries up to one year in prison, one year of supervised release and a $100,000 fine.

The flight ran 12 minutes and 24 seconds on the evening of July 25 and produced four videos. Court filings put the aircraft within 1.56 miles (2.51 km) of Launch Complex 39B, the pad NASA flies Artemis from, and 4.23 miles (6.81 km) of the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility, at a maximum altitude of about 230 feet (70 meters).

The takeoff point was the parking lot at Playalinda Beach Access #8, inside Canaveral National Seashore. That lot sits inside the restricted airspace. The violation started before the drone left the ground.

The Takeoff Point Was Already Inside Restricted Area R-2932

Restricted area R-2932 shields the airspace over Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The affidavit places the Playalinda Beach Access #8 parking lot inside that boundary, which makes the launch point itself restricted airspace. NASA and the FAA both have to approve any drone flight there.

The criminal complaint was filed August 7 in Orlando under case number 6:26-mj-1933 and sworn before U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie Hoffman Price. It carried two counts: violation of national defense airspace under 49 U.S.C. 46307, and operating an aircraft without an airman’s certificate under 49 U.S.C. 46306(b)(7). The supporting affidavit came from NASA Office of Inspector General Special Agent Christine Beers, and The Space Coast Rocket published its detail on September 12.

Kennedy Space Center Security Police answered a drone notification that Saturday evening and found He with three family members. One of them told officers the group was vacationing in the United States and filming scenery, and that nobody had known about any drone restrictions. He showed the officers the footage on the spot, and it was deleted.

The airspace is only the first layer. The National Park Service separately bars launching, landing or operating an unmanned aircraft anywhere in Canaveral National Seashore under 36 CFR 1.5, and the park’s own laws and policies page explains why in one line: “It may be viewed as a threat to national security.” DroneXL covered the surge in national park drone violations in February 2025. This is the version where the park wraps around a spaceport.

The Controller Flagged an Airport, Not a Federal Offense

The affidavit identifies the aircraft as a DJI Mavic 4 Pro, and says the controller displayed the same message at every launch that day: “Aircraft in Warning Zone (Airport). Fly with caution.” That message was the entire intervention standing between a vacationing tourist and a national defense airspace charge.

Investigators confirmed with NASA and the FAA that nothing existed on the paperwork side either. No approved flights in R-2932, no DroneZone authorization or waiver, no LAANC approval, no Part 107 certificate, and no registration for the drone.

DJI switched off its US geofencing in January 2025, trading a system that blocked takeoff in sensitive zones for one that posts advisories. A warning naming a nearby airport is not a warning that the asphalt under your feet is charted restricted airspace with a federal statute attached to it. That answer lives on the sectional chart and in FAA airspace data, never on a controller screen.

Two Earlier Cases Bracket What Sentencing Could Look Like

Federal courts have handled two closely comparable drone cases involving Chinese nationals and restricted military or space airspace. One ended in probation and removal from the country. The other ended in four months the defendant had already served, on a guilty plea to the same airspace statute at issue here.

Xiao Guang Pan, a 71-year-old Chinese-born Canadian on a tourist visa, flew a DJI Mavic 3 Pro near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station across three days in January 2025. DroneXL reported his charges in February and his sentencing that August: 12 months of probation, then deportation and a bar on re-entry.

Yinpiao Zhou flew over Vandenberg Space Force Base during a reconnaissance satellite launch in November 2024 and was arrested at San Francisco International Airport as he tried to board a flight to China. He was sentenced in March 2025 to four months already served, one year of supervised release and $225 in fines. Zhou pleaded guilty to the airspace count on March 10, and prosecutors dropped the second charge as part of the deal.

That plea structure matters here. Florida Today’s account of Friday’s hearing names only the airspace count, and neither the U.S. Attorney’s Office nor the Office of the Federal Public Defender would comment, so the public record does not yet say what became of the airman’s certificate count.

The defense intends to argue for time served at sentencing. He has been living in a hotel at his own expense since the August 8 arrest, and the motion states that he is “running out of funds” and at risk of ending up in a shelter. He surrendered his passport and remains on pretrial supervision.

Congress Raised the Penalty for Repeat Offenders in December

The statute behind Friday’s plea changed nine months ago. Public Law 119-60, enacted December 18, 2025, amended 49 U.S.C. 46307 so that a second or subsequent offense now carries up to five years in prison instead of one. First offenses are untouched.

The amendment does not touch this sentencing. It does mean the next person who does this twice faces felony-length exposure, and it is a fair reading of where Congress’s patience sits on drones over national security sites.

DroneXL’s Take

Fly a drone 1.56 miles from the Artemis pad with no license, no registration and a warning on your screen, and you have earned whatever comes next. Don’t be that guy, in any language, on any visa. He pleaded guilty at the first hearing, which is the correct call.

What deserves defending is what the government actually did. It charged a misdemeanor, not espionage, and it held no press conference about Chinese surveillance of American space infrastructure. The evidence supported an airspace violation, so that is what got charged, and six weeks later there is a plea.

Ignorance earns no automatic credit, and Pan is the reason. He told federal agents he was shooting sunrises and cruise ships. Forensics pulled 243 still images and 13 videos of Space Force infrastructure off his devices, along with Google Maps screenshots showing the base name, and his flight logs carried airspace warnings. “I didn’t know” is a claim investigators test.

The record here reads differently. A family of four at the beach in the evening, footage handed over voluntarily and deleted on the spot, cooperation through the investigation, a plea at the first opportunity. Zhou admitted he flew over Vandenberg deliberately after installing software to defeat his drone’s no-fly limits. Three cases, three sets of facts, three outcomes, and the courts sorted them correctly each time.

I don’t think this case supports the conclusion a lot of people are about to draw from it. DroneXL covered the Chinese graduate student jailed for photographing Navy shipyards, and that one was espionage-shaped from the start. This is a tourist with a camera drone who had never heard of R-2932. Collapsing the two into one story is how you get legislation aimed at the wrong one.

Watch the sentencing hearing for the immigration consequence, because that is the part that bites. Pan was deported and barred from returning. Zhou faced removal after his four months. Prison time is not where this lands. Whether Xiaodong He sees the United States again is.

Sources: Florida Today, The Space Coast Rocket, U.S. Code Title 49, National Park Service

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

NATO-Backed Drone Picked Its Own Target And Dropped A Bomb

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:31:00 GMT

A drone over a Swedish test range in January spotted four objects, ranked an armored engineering vehicle as the one worth hitting, flew to it and dropped an explosive on it. A human had set the mission. No human picked that vehicle.

The AI came from Scaleout Systems, an Uppsala University spin-off working on a low-cost loitering munition project run by BAE Systems Bofors. Scaleout sits inside NATO’s innovation accelerator, which took it on in 2025. Every step of the target work ran on the aircraft’s own computing, with nothing sent back to a server.

Six years covering this beat and the sequence has held: a human designates, then the AI flies the last stretch. Sweden moved the designating onto the drone.

Scaleout’s Onboard AI Ran The Entire Target Chain

Scaleout supplied the onboard AI for ALMA, the Affordable Loitering Modular Ammunition project headed by BAE Systems Bofors. At Winter Demo 2026 in Sweden this January, the drone detected and geolocated threats, then ranked an armored engineering vehicle highest. It flew to that vehicle and struck without direct human commands.

Jeremy Hsu reported the demonstration for Ars Technica on September 17. BAE Systems Bofors had announced Winter Demo 2026 in January, showing ALMA alongside roughly twenty startups and technology companies over three days in Karlskoga, with Swedish defence minister Pål Jonson joining a panel. Scaleout’s own presentation describes the aircraft detecting, identifying and geolocating threats using AI, with all of it handled by dedicated onboard computing and none of it processed externally.

An operator could still take the controls. Nobody needed to.

The Uppsala Test Proved The System Survives A Cut Link

In June, Scaleout ran a second demonstration at a Swedish Air Force base in Uppsala, where the military already licenses its main software platform. A forward computing node kept running inference and active learning after losing contact with the company’s lab, then synced its updates on reconnect.

Electronic warfare and jamming routinely break communication links on a modern battlefield, which is why a growing number of Ukrainian drones now fly with onboard AI. The Ukrainian answer has been the same as Scaleout’s: push the intelligence onto the airframe. DroneXL covered Kolibri, the Ukrainian FPV that flies 25 miles and finishes the strike alone, in July, and Mykhailo Fedorov’s open-source battlefield training dataset in March. Scaleout is chasing the same problem with a formal architecture and a NATO badge.

CEO Andreas Hellander framed the payoff as an alliance-wide one. “In principle, you can unlock collaboration between NATO member states,” he told Ars.

Small Models Beat Frontier AI On Hardware This Size

Scaleout does not run frontier models from OpenAI or Anthropic. It trains smaller computer-vision models sized for what a drone or a forward workstation can carry. Federated learning ties them together: devices share model updates rather than raw sensor footage, keeping reconnaissance data on local hardware.

The specific failure it targets is model drift. A detector trained on desert imagery performs badly over a city, and a war does not pause while somebody retrains it in a data center. Under the federated scheme, headquarters nodes retrain on aggregated battlefield data from several units and push revised models back out to the edge whenever a link opens.

The work runs under a project called FEDAIR, short for Federated Aerial Intelligence for Recon, inside NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. Uppsala University says Scaleout was selected in February 2025 alongside five other Swedish companies. It fits the wider European buildout DroneXL has been tracking, from Sweden’s $440 million commitment to unmanned military systems to Helsing and Stark taking €600 million in German loitering munition contracts away from Rheinmetall.

Geneva Settled For A Diluted Text Two Weeks Before This Landed

States party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons agreed a non-binding autonomy text in Geneva on September 5, after the United States and Russia pushed late changes and Washington sought flexibility on human-judgment language. The Seventh Review Conference in November decides whether treaty negotiations start.

Reuters reported during the session that the US position had hardened over the previous six months, with Washington favoring guidelines over a binding treaty and formally approaching at least six countries to back it. Consensus arrived overnight after talks ran long, and Dutch foreign minister Tom Berendsen announced the deal on the Saturday. The agreed text has not been published. Nicole van Rooijen of Stop Killer Robots told Reuters three years of work had been “substantially diluted in the last hours.”

The US does have a domestic rule. DoD Directive 3000.09, reissued in January 2023, requires that autonomous weapon systems be designed so commanders can exercise “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” and sends systems outside its exemptions through senior review before development and again before fielding. DroneXL covered the Pentagon’s own AI-powered kamikaze drone push in January 2025. The directive governs American programs. It has nothing to say about a Swedish demo.

DroneXL’s Take

The strike is the headline. The learning loop is the story. A drone that picks its own target is not new, and DroneXL has covered several of them. What changed in June is a system that keeps getting better while nobody can reach it.

DroneXL reported in January on the New York Times investigation into Eric Schmidt’s AI attack drones in Ukraine, where autonomous terminal guidance was landing above a 70% hit rate and a human still designated the target first. June is where Scaleout added the other half. The way I read that test, a node that keeps improving while cut off and hands its improvements back on reconnect turns the models from a fixed capability into a compounding one, and compounding capability is what nobody at the CCW has a definition for.

The Swedish case is strong on the merits. Jamming breaks links constantly in Ukraine, and an aircraft that goes stupid the second its link drops is an aircraft you have already lost. Ukraine reached that conclusion from the bottom up, without a NATO accelerator behind it. Designing for a contested link is sound engineering. It still does not answer who is accountable when the model ranks wrong, and that question is the one Geneva spent September sanding down.

Washington spent the past year regulating what a Chinese camera drone might send back to Shenzhen, and spent the first week of September asking for flexibility on whether a machine may choose a target. Same government, same year. Only one of those involves an explosive. DroneXL has argued from the start that the FCC’s foreign-drone ban is protectionism wearing a security jacket, and this is the cost of that misallocation in plain view: the enforcement energy went to the thing that photographs a roof, and the thing that selects an armored vehicle got a footnote.

Scaleout’s DIANA announcement, its Scaleout Vision and defense pages, and BAE’s Winter Demo release all describe what the system does on its own. None of them says where operator veto lives once the link is gone. The whole design premise is that the link will be gone. Whether an abort still reaches the aircraft in that state is the question the November text will be judged on, and neither company has answered it in public.

November 16 to 20, the Review Conference meets in Geneva to decide whether the September text becomes a negotiating mandate, another rolled-over discussion, or nothing. Watch whether the United States runs the same six-country lobbying effort Reuters documented this month. If it does, every rule written after November will be describing something that already flew in January.

Sources: Ars Technica, Scaleout Systems, BAE Systems Bofors, Uppsala University, Reuters, AFP, US Department of Defense, Reaching Critical Will

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

Upstate Medical Hires FAA Veteran Behind The First BVLOS Approvals

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:20:00 GMT

Upstate Medical University has appointed Cliff Sweatte as director of unmanned aircraft systems operations, handing its hospital drone program to the former Federal Aviation Administration official who managed the agency’s first commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight approvals.

Seven months earlier, the FAA granted Upstate a Certificate of Waiver covering a corridor of roughly 50 miles (80 kilometers), from its downtown Syracuse campus out to Utica, with authorization to fly over people, over moving vehicles and at night. The waiver runs through June 2029. Sweatte now owns it.

Air Upstate, the university’s drone unit, has logged more than 7,200 prescription deliveries since 2023, plus lab specimen runs between the Upstate Transplant Center and a pathology lab several blocks away. Running that service across two counties is a different problem, and the hire says which part of it Upstate finds hardest.

Sweatte Ran The FAA Programs That Opened BVLOS Flying

Sweatte served as an FAA aviation safety inspector for air carrier operations and as program manager for the Arctic UAS and Pathfinder 3 programs. Those efforts produced the first commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations and the first type-certified UAS operations in the country, according to the appointment announcement.

He spent two years after that at the International Civil Aviation Organization writing remotely piloted aircraft standards, then served as aviation officer for the United Nations World Food Programme in Rome. He joined Akin Gump as a senior policy adviser in 2019 and later took the same role at aerospace consultancy Crown Innovations. He started out as an Alaska Part 135 pilot in command and flew the Airbus A320 as a captain for USA 3000 Airlines.

The air carrier background is the part hospital administrators tend to undervalue. BVLOS approvals at this scale go to organizations that can build a safety case the way a certificate holder builds one. The aircraft are the commodity.

Upstate’s Waiver Covers 50 Miles And Runs To June 2029

The February waiver, announced by Upstate in April, links the Community Campus, the Downtown Campus, the Pathology Institute and the Upstate Cancer Center in Verona, out to Utica and the locations between. Upstate calls it one of the largest approved BVLOS areas for a regional health system.

Upstate University Hospital CEO Robert Corona put the scale of it plainly: “Approvals of this scale are very uncommon.” The FAA granted the full scope of what the hospital asked for, which is rarer still.

The buildout is already going up. The Upstate Pathology Institute under construction in East Syracuse includes a drone bay for recharging and maintaining the transport aircraft, so a specimen arriving by air lands at the lab instead of at a courier desk. Most hospital drone programs never get that far. Tampa General is working the same idea from the emergency side, flying whole blood to trauma scenes, and NASA, UNOS and LifeNet Health moved human kidneys by BVLOS drone in June.

Air Upstate’s first BVLOS flight ran on May 22, 2024, from the Oneida County test site at Griffiss International Airport in Rome to the state’s Homeland Security Training Center in Oriskany. The 18.6-mile (30-kilometer) round trip took 18 minutes and 20 seconds on a RigiTech Eiger, the Swiss fixed-wing VTOL rated for about 62 miles (100 kilometers) per mission.

Upstate Hired The Consultant Who Helped Build Its Program

Sweatte is not arriving cold. Crown Consulting, since rebranded as Crown Innovations, appears in Upstate’s own 2024 announcement as a partner on that first BVLOS flight, alongside AX Enterprize, the Oneida County UAS Test Site, Causey Aviation Unmanned and RigiTech. Sweatte was Crown’s senior policy adviser throughout that period.

Moving an outside regulatory adviser onto staff says where a program thinks its risk sits: in the waiver renewals and the FAA relationship rather than in the hardware, which RigiTech and its competitors already build to spec.

Upstate’s public releases leave one thing unexplained. In 2023 the university described Causey Aviation Unmanned as its drone operator, the fifth US company to hold a Part 135 certificate for healthcare delivery. The April 2026 release describes Air Upstate itself as the operator, with no mention of what changed. Whether certificate responsibility moved in-house decides how far this program can scale, and Sweatte’s résumé points directly at that work.

Waivers Still Decide Who Flies BVLOS While Part 108 Waits

Every US operator flying past visual line of sight does it on a waiver, negotiated case by case. Part 108, the rule meant to replace that with a standing framework, was proposed in August 2025 and has sat unsigned at the White House regulatory office since July 10.

Until the rule lands, BVLOS access is distributed by regulatory competence. An organization that can hire the person who ran the FAA side of these approvals gets a 50-mile corridor through June 2029. An organization that cannot gets a demo flight and a press release.

DroneXL’s Take

This is what a serious drone program looks like. Upstate did not buy its way to a 50-mile BVLOS corridor with better aircraft. It bought regulatory fluency, first as consulting and now as a salaried director, and the FAA signed off on the full scope of the request.

The system rewarding that is still the wrong system. Waiver-by-waiver access means BVLOS belongs to whoever can staff a regulatory affairs function: a large health system, a venture-backed delivery company, or a county sitting on a state grant. The rural clinic that would gain most from a blood product arriving by air instead of by car has neither that staff nor a realistic path to the same approval. Part 108 was written to fix that. A presidential order set a February deadline for the rule, and September is ending with no signature on it.

Upstate’s waiver came through on merit, and the FAA deserves credit for granting the whole ask instead of half of it. It also took an FAA-designated test site, five named partners on the first long flight, two years of BVLOS operations and, in the end, hiring the FAA’s own BVLOS alumnus. My read is that Upstate cleared a bar the rule was supposed to lower.

Watch the Pathology Institute in East Syracuse. Whether the aircraft flying into that drone bay operate under a renewed Certificate of Waiver or under Part 108 will show what the delay cost. Watch the city too, where lawmakers have repeatedly grounded the police drone-as-first-responder program while the hospital across town assembled one of the region’s most permissive medical BVLOS approvals. Same airspace, opposite receptions. Deliveries that save a patient an afternoon get waivers. Cameras get hearings.

Source: syracuse.com, “From FAA inspector to drone director: Cliff Sweatte brings 2 decades of aviation expertise to Upstate Medical,” by B. Duncan, Sept. 18, 2026; SUNY Upstate Medical University; Crown Innovations; Akin Gump

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

Joby Flew 3,199 Miles With Zero Pilot Input, in a Cessna Caravan

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:56:00 GMT

Joby Aviation flew an aircraft 3,199 miles (5,148 km) across the United States with zero control inputs from the safety pilot sitting on board, the company said Friday. The aircraft taxied, took off, navigated the route and landed on its own, supervised remotely from California and from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, at distances of up to 2,323 miles (3,739 km).

The aircraft was a converted Cessna Caravan, a single-engine turboprop flying on a type certificate the FAA issued in October 1984. Joby’s electric air taxi, the aircraft the company is known for and the one its share price rides on, stayed on the ground.

I spent an afternoon at Blade Lounge East on the Manhattan waterfront in May watching that air taxi work the East River, and shot the photos myself. This flight shares a logo with that program and not much else.

The J208, a converted Cessna Caravan running Joby's autonomy stack, flies over the San Francisco Bay Area at the start of its cross-country tour (N101XW). Photo credit: Joby Aviation

Joby Supervised the Crossing From California and an Air Force Base

Remote operators at Joby’s Autonomy Headquarters in California and at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina supervised the aircraft from as far as 2,323 miles (3,739 km) away. The onboard safety pilot made no control inputs. Taxi, takeoff, route navigation and landing all ran autonomously.

The eastbound leg departed Buchanan Field in Concord, California (KCCR), then worked through Phoenix Deer Valley (KDVT), Fort Worth Alliance (KAFW) and Shaw Air Force Base (KSSC) before landing at Dare County Regional Airport (KMQI) in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. On the way in, the aircraft flew a low pass near the First Flight Monument at Kitty Hawk.

Phoenix is the stop worth rereading. Deer Valley is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country, a place where the radio never stops and the pattern is full of student pilots. Joby says the aircraft slotted into that traffic with no prior familiarity with the field, and rerouted around severe weather and thunderstorms in real time as it went. Autonomous cross-country flying in clear air over empty terrain is a demonstration. Deviating around live convective weather into an unfamiliar, saturated field is the actual problem, and it is the line in the release that carries the engineering.

“Autonomy has an important role to play in the future of flight.”

That is JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s founder and CEO, in Friday’s announcement.

The Already-Certified Airframe Is the Entire Strategy

Joby’s stated logic is that bolting an autonomous system onto an airframe the FAA has already approved gives it a scalable path into air logistics. No new type certificate, no new production line, no decade of flight test to prove a novel configuration. Certification already settled.

The Caravan is an unglamorous choice and a deliberate one. It has been hauling freight into short strips and small fields since FedEx took delivery of its first one in 1985, which means the maintenance base, the parts supply and the operator pool all exist. Joby designated its converted version the J208. Everything new on the aircraft is software and sensors.

The aircraft itself is older than the program flying it. FAA registry records list N101XW as a 1993 Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, serial 208B0382, registered to Joby Aero in July 2024 and carrying an experimental airworthiness certificate for research and development. The type certificate behind it dates to 1984. The airframe is 33 years old. The computer flying it shipped this decade.

That is the opposite of the bet Wisk Aero is making. Wisk is asking the FAA to certify an aircraft where the autonomy stack itself is the safety case, as DroneXL covered when its second Gen 6 airframe flew in May. Joby has taken the cheaper route to operations and, for now, the slower route to an empty cockpit.

Joby Bought This Autonomy Stack From Xwing in 2024

The software flying the Caravan came with Joby’s acquisition of Xwing’s autonomy division in June 2024, a deal built around a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan that had already been flying itself. Joby now counts more than 400 flights and 800 automated flight hours behind the system.

The defense record is the part with customers attached. The system has run in three US military exercises, including the Air Force’s Agile Flag, where Joby says it delivered replacement parts 24 hours faster than conventional logistics, and REFORPAC, where aircraft in Hawaii were flown by operators in Guam nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 km) away. Joby has been building that side of the business steadily, including its military-grade eVTOL work with L3Harris.

The Westbound Leg Adds Seven More Stops

The aircraft now turns around. Joby has published a return route through Raleigh (KRDU), Fredericksburg and Washington, D.C. (KRMN), Louisville (KSDF), Wichita (KICT), Oklahoma City (KOKC), Salt Lake City (KSLC) and Portland (KPDX), continuing the 2026 Electric Skies tour that opened over San Francisco Bay in March.

The flights are tied to state programs rather than pure marketing. In North Carolina, they support NCDOT’s eLIFT-NC initiative for statewide healthcare logistics. Out west, they feed UDOT’s multi-state uFLY coalition, which is evaluating high-altitude and extreme-environment airspace integration on the FAA’s behalf. The Fort Worth stop coincided with Joby’s first air taxi flight under the White House-backed eIPP program, hosted with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Senator Ted Cruz.

DroneXL’s Take

Joby named the Caravan in the second paragraph of its own release, so nobody is hiding the airframe. What gets lost in the headlines is which half of this company is closer to earning money.

The S4 air taxi is the half everyone watches. I covered the first point-to-point eVTOL flights in New York City history in April and stood at the Manhattan demo the week after to watch it land. It is genuinely impressive and it is still in type certification, which means it generates press and no revenue.

The autonomy business flies a 1993 airframe on a type certificate the FAA signed in 1984, into airports that already exist, for customers who already buy air freight and medical logistics. State DOTs and the Air Force are not proofs of concept. They are budgets. I’d argue the Caravan is the more valuable half of Joby today, and that the coverage has it backwards, this publication included.

The westbound route stops at Fredericksburg, Virginia, which is an easy drive from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Back in March we called Joby’s New York stop before it was announced, on the logic that the company flies where the decision-makers are. Watch who turns up at KRMN.

One number is missing from all of this. Joby published flight counts, automated hours, exercise names, airport codes and a seven-city return route, and no date for taking the safety pilot out of the seat. The aircraft is still flying experimental, on a research and development certificate. That date is the whole business case, because a Caravan with a pilot in it is just a Caravan.

Source: Joby Aviation

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

DJI Mic Mini Drops to $79 While DJI's Own US Store Is Empty

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:39:00 GMT

The DJI Mic Mini kit with two transmitters, a receiver and a charging case is $79 at Amazon, $20 off the $99 list price. It is also the newest Mic Mini an American buyer can actually get.

DJI’s own US storefront tells the rest of the story. All six Mic Mini configurations, from the $33 spare transmitter to the $99 two-transmitter kit, read Out of Stock on Friday. Nothing is coming in behind them. DJI launched the Mic Mini 2 globally in April without US availability, and the Mic Mini 2S went worldwide on August 4 with product pages for Canada, the UK, Germany, France and Spain, and none for the United States.

Get the DJI Mic Mini for $79 at Amazon

The DJI Mic Mini kit includes two clip-on transmitters, a receiver, and a compact charging case. Photo credit: DJI

The 10-Gram Transmitter Runs 11.5 Hours and Reaches 400 Meters

Each DJI Mic Mini transmitter weighs 10 grams without the clip magnet and records omnidirectional audio at 48 kHz with 120 dB SPL of headroom. DJI rates the link at 1,312 feet (400 meters) in open air, 11.5 hours per transmitter, and 48 hours total with the charging case.

Automatic limiting pulls gain down before a shout clips, and two levels of noise cancellation cover indoor hum and loud outdoor work. Transmitters connect over OsmoAudio straight to an Osmo Nano, Osmo 360, Osmo Mobile 7P, Osmo Action 5 Pro, Osmo Action 4 or Osmo Pocket 3, with no receiver in the chain. DroneXL’s Mic Mini versus Hollyland Lark M2 comparison covers the alternative.

Amazon Has Touched $79 on This Kit Before

The bundle launched in November 2024 at $169. DroneXL flagged it at $109 last September, DJI has since cut list to $99, and $79 has come around more than once this year. Inventory is the risk now, not price. Discontinued listings vanish rather than get cheaper.

The Covered List Is Why Nothing Replaces It

The FCC added foreign-made drones and drone components to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, blocking new equipment authorizations. DJI told the Ninth Circuit in April that nine non-drone products were already blocked, with 25 more 2026 launches in limbo.

A Mic Mini 2S filing surfaced in the FCC database on January 31 and vanished weeks later. Operators filed 3,770 comments against the ban to 16 in favor in docket 26-189.

DroneXL’s Take

$79 for a two-person wireless kit is a good price. It is also a liquidation price.

The Commission’s authority over radio equipment authorization is real, and a 2.4 GHz transmitter is a radio. The Covered List, though, exists because Congress and the FCC decided foreign-made drones could enable surveillance over US territory. The Mic Mini has no camera, no GPS, and no way to leave the ground. It clips to a collar. Nobody at the agency has explained what it surveils.

I shoot with the Mic 3, and I wrote in August that half a gram now separates DJI’s budget tier from its flagship. For a solo creator or a two-person crew, this $79 kit does the job the $183 one does. Buy it now or buy a Hollyland later. Those are the options American creators have left.

Source: DJI Store

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

Boston Police Drone Crashes on a Car Days After Its DFR Launch

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:39:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have four stories for you this week. A Boston police drone crashes. We have DJI Neo 3 leaks. We also have Wingcopter unveiling a new recon drone. And then lastly, a search and rescue team in Canada is using drones to save a stranded climber. That was awesome. Let’s get to it.

Boston Police Drone Crashes Onto a Parked Car in Brighton

First up, a Boston police drone crashed onto a parked car in Brighton just days after the department launched its new Drone as First Responder program. The crash happened last Thursday around 1:30 p.m. The falling drone landed on a Mazda 3 — they were actually very clear in the article about the Mazda 3, which was kind of weird, but there you go — smashing into the rear windshield and into the trunk, and destroying the aircraft. The owner wasn’t home at the time, and when he came back, he said there was a note on the windshield and then a wrecked car.

Boston Police recently partnered with Motorola Solutions and BRINC in order to bring their new program online, launching it publicly on August 28. The pitch was speed and safety, with drones reaching emergency scenes in as little as one minute. But this crash occurred less than seven days after the program was officially launched.

The Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association was not impressed. Union president Larry Calderone called the program invasive surveillance technology, and they said the department should be hiring more officers instead — which, coming from a union, obviously you would expect them to say that, but still.

Under FAA Part 107, any drone accident causing more than $500 in damage must be reported to the FAA within 10 days. It’s not clear yet if the police department has filed any reports. It’s also unclear if the drone was actually equipped with a parachute recovery system, which would have likely been required for this type of operation.

The DJI Neo 3 Retail Box Leak Reveals a New Controller

Next up, a leaked retail box may have just told us a little bit more about DJI’s plans than DJI actually wanted us to know. The box is for the DJI Neo 3, and it showed up online on September 15. It’s a beginner-friendly drone. We’ve seen the first two versions with fully enclosed propellers and then a gimbal camera.

But the interesting part here is actually the controller. The box is listing a DJI RC Mini, which is a remote that has its own built-in screen, something that we haven’t really seen before. That controller matches a device that has already been approved by the FCC here in the United States, granted back in December 2025. The approval came through just three days before the FCC’s Covered List cutoff blocked any new authorizations for foreign-made drones.

Now, the problem is that the drone itself never got the approval. So without it, the Neo 3 can actually not be sold in the United States. But it’s interesting, because American buyers are going to be able to buy this approved controller and have, well, no approved drone to be able to fly it.

Wingcopter 262 Takes the Delivery Company Into Reconnaissance

Next up, Wingcopter, which is known for delivery drones, just launched something a little bit different — actually, very different. This is the Wingcopter 262, which was unveiled on September 14. It’s a reconnaissance drone. This is a tilt-rotor aircraft that takes off and lands vertically and then flies using a fixed wing horizontally after that.

Wingcopter says that it can stay airborne for up to six hours, which is very much in line for this type of aircraft, fly up to 93 miles, and carry a swappable payload including a thermal camera with 80x zoom on it. It’s built for military and border security customers, as you can imagine, and it’s the first product from Wingcopter’s new division, which is called the Security and Defense division.

Worth noting here, all of these performance numbers come from Wingcopter themselves on their own announcement. There hasn’t been any independent flight testing that we have been able to see. And then there’s no pricing available and no delivery dates either. It’s unclear at this time if future payloads will include anything enterprise, such as LiDAR or mapping cameras, but I guess we’ll keep you posted.

Two Drones and 300 Feet of Rope Save a Stranded Climber

And then finally, some good news. We have a drone that helped save a stranded climber. This was in British Columbia. It happened the night of September 10, at the Stawamus Chief in Squamish. A climber got stuck on a 10-inch ledge, 250 feet up in the air, with no rope left in order to get down.

Squamish Search and Rescue sent up two drones, and one of them lit up the entire cliff face, and then the other flew a pilot line to the climber, who used it in order to pull up a jacket and then a headlamp. Rescuers then used the second drone in order to carry up 300 feet of lightweight rope.

The climber was then able to grab the rope out of the air, tie it to his harness, and then rappel down to safety, to the ground, which was awesome. The team said that it’s two years of training that led to this moment, and it’s a great example, I think, of how far drone-based search and rescue has come, and something that we need to continue doing with affordable drones for these teams.

The conversation continues on Post Flight, where we’re going to discuss all of these stories uncensored in the premium community — the link is in the description. And then also, we’ll see you on Monday for the live Q&A, as always. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you then.

And I heard DJI’s coming up with a new product. It’s a DJI diaper, for all these DJI leaks.

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.

Zipline Seeks $20 Billion Valuation With Part 108 Still Unsigned

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:18:17 GMT

Zipline is in talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation near $20 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, which would price the drone delivery company at nearly three times the $7.6 billion it carried in January. Paradigm, already an investor, is in discussions to lead. Tiger Global Management is weighing whether to come back in. The talks are early and the figures can still move.

Zipline’s website puts its lifetime total at nearly 3 million deliveries across more than 140 million miles (225 million kilometers). At $20 billion, that is roughly $7,000 of valuation riding on every package the company has flown since 2016.

DroneXL sent Zipline 30 written questions on September 8 about how its aircraft fails and what its safety record looks like. The answers came back Wednesday afternoon. The incident count was not in them.

Paradigm Would Lead A Round That Nearly Triples January’s Price

Paradigm is in discussions to lead the roughly $1 billion round, with Tiger Global Management considering participation, Bloomberg reported, in a story carried by Transport Topics on Thursday. Zipline and Paradigm declined to comment. Tiger Global did not respond. A close near $20 billion would price the company at about 2.6 times its January mark.

That January mark is eight months old. Zipline announced more than $600 million on January 20 at a $7.6 billion valuation, with Fidelity Management & Research, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners and Tiger Global in the round, and DroneXL covered it the day it landed. Paradigm came in two months later, when a $200 million extension took the Series H to about $800 million.

Founded in 2014, Zipline has raised roughly $2 billion across its history. Another billion would put close to $1.8 billion of that into 2026 alone, in a year that is not over.

Uber Supplies The Demand The Price Assumes

Uber and Zipline announced a partnership on August 17 that puts drone delivery inside Uber Eats, with Uber taking an undisclosed strategic stake. The two are targeting one million drone deliveries a day by the end of 2029, starting in Texas this year.

One million a day is the number worth sitting with. Zipline’s entire operating history, every blood unit flown in Rwanda and every burrito dropped in Rowlett, adds up to about three days at that rate. The Uber deal hands Zipline demand it does not have to build one restaurant at a time, and hands Uber an autonomous option that does not need a courier. Walmart, Chipotle, Jimmy John’s and the Cleveland Clinic are already on the customer list.

Uber’s own announcement put first deliveries in existing Zipline markets before the end of the year, which means Dallas and Houston. Everything past that is cities Zipline has not opened yet, flying an aircraft that needs permission it does not have.

The Rule That Makes The Number Work Is Still Unpublished

Part 108, the FAA rule that would make routine beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight standard instead of waiver by waiver, has sat at the White House regulatory office since July 10. Its executive order deadline passed in February. Zipline flies today on Part 135 authorizations.

The delay is not a backlog. Pete Meachum, chief of staff to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, told a Commercial Drone Alliance audience in Washington that the department held the draft on purpose while Duffy pushed for an internal debate about writing today’s technology into a rule the industry lives with for decades. That was the end of July. The rule has not moved since.

Zipline’s American ceiling is a draft too. The FAA published an environmental assessment on September 11 that would let the company run up to 220,000 deliveries a day across five Texas metros, against the 30,000 a day its Dallas-Fort Worth authorization allows. Public comments on that document close on October 11. The Fish and Wildlife consultation behind it is still open.

Zipline Has Not Put A Cost Per Delivery On The Record

Zipline publishes delivery counts. It publishes how fast those counts are growing. What it has not published is a cost per delivery, a contribution margin or a revenue figure. Anyone pricing the company at $20 billion is underwriting unit economics nobody outside it can check.

The question DroneXL asked of the January round has not gotten easier: whether delivering a burrito can ever look like delivering blood on a spreadsheet. Zipline’s answer is density. Put enough Chargers in one metro, fly them all day, and the fixed cost of a site spreads across thousands of orders instead of hundreds.

There is real evidence for it. In March the company said existing customers were ordering more items per trip, with average items per order up more than 20 percent over three weeks, which is habit rather than novelty. Habit is what makes density arrive. None of that is the same as a published number.

DroneXL’s Take

Twenty billion dollars is a bet that Washington says yes, on schedule, in five Texas metros and then dozens more. That is a policy bet wearing a hardware company’s clothes.

Zipline has earned more room than its competitors here. It is the only one of the three US delivery operators that answered DroneXL’s written safety questions at all, while Amazon has let three deadlines pass on 25 questions and Wing has said nothing on 30. Both Texas parachute landings this summer ended with nobody hurt. The engineering is doing what it is supposed to do.

The paperwork is the exposure. Part 108 was due in February under a presidential order and sits unsigned in September. The Texas ceiling that takes Zipline from 30,000 deliveries a day to 220,000 is a draft with the comment window open. Investors are treating both as questions of timing. Either one can still come back a no.

I don’t buy the idea that a valuation this size makes the regulatory risk smaller. It makes it larger, because a company priced for one million deliveries a day has to keep growing into a rulebook it does not control, and the pressure to launch a market before the paperwork clears goes up with every dollar raised.

Two dates settle most of this. October 11 closes comments on the Texas assessment, and whether Zipline announces a launch in San Antonio, Amarillo or El Paso before that window shuts will say a lot about how the company reads its own risk. The second is Part 108. Robert Reckert of the FAA told Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas this month that the rule is at the “10-yard line” and that he hopes it publishes before the calendar year is out. If it slips into 2027 instead, a $20 billion round will have been priced on a permission that took three years to sign.

Sources: Bloomberg, Transport Topics, Uber Technologies press release, FAA Draft Environmental Assessment for Zipline International Inc., DroneXL Drone Delivery Tracker

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

DJI Prices SDR Transmission 2 at €349. The US Isn't On The List

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:56:00 GMT

DJI put the SDR Transmission 2 on sale around the world today at £309 in the United Kingdom and from €349 in the eurozone. A Combo with two transceivers costs £559 or from €629. The announcement carries prices in pounds and euros, and no dollar figure anywhere.

DroneXL wrote five days ago that the September 17 event would produce a country list without the United States on it. The list arrived this morning. It does not mention America once.

The hardware itself has been on sale in China since September 1 at 1,999 yuan. It is a 136-gram transceiver that sends DCI 4K at 60 frames per second in 10-bit HDR over H.265 at up to 50 Mbps, rated at 35 milliseconds of latency and a maximum range of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). One box now does the work of the separate transmitter and receiver DJI has sold since 2024.

DJI Sells the Single Unit at £309 and the Combo at £559

DJI set the SDR Transmission 2 at £309 in the UK and from €349 in the eurozone. The Combo pairs two transceivers for £559 or from €629. Sales opened September 17 through store.dji.com, DJI Stores and authorized retailers. No American price was published.

DJI’s launch announcement runs to roughly 900 words on frequency management, monitoring tools and power options, and never names a country. The currencies do that job instead.

The word doing the quiet work there is “from.” Eurozone pricing moves country by country, so €349 is a floor rather than a sticker, and British buyers get the one clean number.

The benchmark for what Americans are losing is the 2024 SDR Transmission, which launched on July 17 that year at $549 for a transmitter and receiver together and $309 for a single unit. That system tops out at 1080p and 20 Mbps. It remains the newest wireless video link DJI can legally sell in the United States, and it will stay that way.

DroneXL covered the September 1 launch date in August, when a leaked retail box carried the words TX/RX SWITCHABLE and a display render reading 4K 60fps HDR. Both survived into shipping hardware.

One Transceiver Now Does the Job of Two Separate Boxes

Every SDR Transmission 2 unit transmits or receives. A switch on the body picks the role, and the unit reboots into it. One transmitter feeds up to eight receivers, each with an uplink for camera control, and larger productions can run five transmitters against 40 receivers at once.

A crew buys a count of units instead of a ratio, and a spare is never the wrong kind of spare. That is the part that changes a rental inventory, more than the resolution jump does.

DJI's SDR Transmission 2 lineup, shown with its six key features and the compact and full-size transceiver units. Photo credit: DJI

Switching between camera feeds no longer means rebooting and re-pairing. A tap on a receiver or a tap in the Ronin app does it. DJI calls the frequency coordination Auto Channel 2.0, and it hands the channel planning that used to be a crew member’s job to the radios themselves, with frequency-scan readouts and channel-conflict diagnostics on the unit. DJI says “a reliable link can be established in various environments” on sets crowded with competing signals.

An optional expansion board adds an SDI port, an HDMI video port and four USB-C ports, and passes SDI metadata from mainstream cinema cameras through to the monitor. An optional cage covers car mounts. Power comes from NP-F batteries at 6.8V to 8.4V, from a PD charger, or from an RS 5, RS 4, RS 4 Pro, RS 3 Pro, Ronin 2 or Master Wheels with the transceiver mounted on the gimbal. The control cables for those gimbals are sold separately, which is the kind of detail that ruins a Friday.

The Covered List Keeps the New Radio Out of American Sets

The Federal Communications Commission added DJI’s communications equipment to its Covered List on December 22, 2025. Listed equipment cannot receive the authorization a new model needs before it is imported or sold in the United States. A wireless video link is a radio, so the ban reaches it.

DroneXL walked through the mechanics when the Covered List expansion landed in December, and the FCC’s public notice is the operative document. DJI’s petition for reconsideration sits in ET Docket 26-22, where oppositions closed on April 6 and replies closed on May 11. The record then reopened: the Office of Engineering and Technology took further comment on a DJI-commissioned security assessment until August 28. That window shut three weeks ago and the Commission has not ruled. DJI’s parallel Ninth Circuit case is in abeyance with an opening brief due November 2, and DJI told that court in April that $1.56 billion in 2026 revenue turns on the outcome.

American crews keep what they already own. The listing does not reach backwards, the 2024 units stay legal to own, use and resell, and the FCC waived the firmware cutoff for pre-listing equipment through at least January 1, 2029. Importing a new transceiver personally is possible and carries no US warranty and no legal path to resale.

DroneXL’s Take

A 136-gram box whose whole purpose is moving a picture from a camera to a director’s monitor is now contraband in the United States on the strength of who assembled it. Nothing about the hardware changed between the 2024 model Americans can buy and the 2026 model they cannot.

The Commission applied a statute Congress passed and did not invent the category it is enforcing. That is the strongest defense available for the December listing, and it is a defense of process. The statute names a company. The people it removes from the market are the small American crews the first SDR Transmission was built and priced for, the ones who bought a $549 combo in 2024 precisely because the alternatives cost thousands.

I don’t read today’s release as DJI punishing anyone. A company that cannot get an equipment authorization does not write a US price, and DJI has stopped pretending there is a conversation to have about it. The silence is the position now. The Osmo 360 II launched from Berlin two weeks ago with a valid FCC ID in hand and no American market, and DJI never explained that one either. This launch at least has a legal reason behind it.

What sits unanswered is at the FCC, not in Shenzhen. DJI’s reconsideration record closed for the second time on August 28, and the Commission has said nothing since, while the products the listing covers keep shipping to every country except this one. An American cinematographer who wants 4K on a wireless monitor feed this week buys Teradek or Hollyland and pays for the privilege. That was the outcome the ban was going to produce, and it is now simply the market.

Sources: DJI, FCC Public Notice DA 25-1086, FCC Public Notice DA 26-592

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

Zipline Answers Safety Questions on the Record. Amazon and Wing Don't

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:12:00 GMT

Zipline sent DroneXL written answers to its drone delivery safety questions at 2 p.m. Eastern on September 16, one day after the deadline and eight days after the questions went out. Amazon Prime Air and Wing received the same questions on the same terms. Neither has sent a word.

The answers, attributed to Zipline at the company’s request, cover the P2’s weight and payload, its two parachutes, what happens when the delivery tether fails, and how its cameras work. They leave the incident count, the decibel figures, the weather limits and the liability question for a safety document Zipline says it will release separately. DroneXL published every line, unedited, on Zipline’s tracker page, next to the questions it does and does not answer.

That makes Zipline the only one of the three US delivery operators with anything on the record, on a set of questions written so that all three could answer them.

Three Operators Got the Same Questions on the Same Deadline

DroneXL sent each operator 15 generic questions on September 8, among them weight and payload, recovery system, collision behavior, single points of failure, delivery method, drop-zone checks, incident record, sound, cameras, liability and weather limits. Wing and Zipline also got 15 questions specific to their aircraft, all due September 15.

Amazon had already been through one round. Eight written questions sent on September 3, after the company declined to put an engineer on the record at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas, went unanswered at their September 5 deadline. Amazon’s communications team replied twice on September 4, about whether the emails had arrived. On September 10, DroneXL sent Amazon two more questions, on MK30 fleet flight hours and the aircraft’s battery, with the same September 15 date, together with an offer to correct DroneXL’s September 8 article on the FAA’s national environmental finding if Amazon could point to an error. Amazon’s total stands at 25 questions across three rounds and no answers.

Wing’s total is 30 questions and no answers. Zipline got on the phone on September 11 and followed up in writing five days later.

Zipline Put Weight, Parachutes and Cameras on the Record

Zipline’s P2 weighs 55 pounds (25 kilograms) empty and 63 pounds (29 kilograms) with its full 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) payload, cruises at 70 mph (113 km/h), and lowers packages on a tether from roughly 300 feet (91 meters). The aircraft carries a parachute, and so does the delivery pod.

The most useful answers describe failure. If a customer pulls on the tether or tangles it, the pod and aircraft separate on their own, the customer keeps the pod and its line, and Zipline’s local team is notified. The pod can deploy its own parachute if something goes wrong while it is unstowed and too high to land safely. If the aircraft decides it has to leave the airspace, it deploys its parachute, stops its propellers and sounds an audible alert. Zipline says its aircraft run more than 500 safety checks a second and have no single points of failure among flight-critical systems.

On cameras, Zipline gave the clearest statement any of the three operators has made. “All cameras are in a fixed position and cannot pan, tilt, or zoom.” There is no live video feed and no joystick piloting on any flight, and retained footage is restricted to trained staff with a defined business purpose, such as investigating an unusual flight. Zipline also says it does not collect patient data on its medical deliveries, only weight, volume and handling requirements.

On the tracker’s reading, five of the 30 questions are answered in full, ten in part, and 15 are not yet addressed. Each question carries its mark on Zipline’s tracker page, with the full statement beneath so readers can check the reading.

Zipline Left the Numbers DroneXL Asked For to a Later Document

The questions Zipline did not answer are the ones with figures in them: how often the P2 has come down in US service, its sound level in decibels, the weather limits that stop flights, and who pays when one lands on a road. A safety document is coming, Zipline says.

On the incident count, Zipline answered with its worldwide record instead: more than 140 million autonomous miles since 2016 without injury, a figure from the company that DroneXL has no way to test. Miles without injury is a different quantity from the number of parachute deployments, and it does not explain the Greenville, Texas landing on July 26 or the Highway 6 landing in Cypress on September 4, both of which DroneXL asked about by name.

Sound came back as a description. Zipline says its 300-foot delivery altitude keeps the aircraft quieter than a lower hover would, that its custom propellers produce a softer, steadier sound, and that the dynamic flight trajectories update DroneXL reported on September 11 cuts noise in cruise. DroneXL asked for decibel levels at 50, 100 and 250 feet. None came.

Weather limits, the liability chain after a parachute landing, and the FAA paperwork behind the Beachwood, Ohio and Houston-area operations were also not addressed. Zipline told DroneXL that some of what was asked is proprietary. Those 15 questions stay marked pending on the tracker until the document arrives.

Amazon and Wing Have Sent Nothing on 55 Questions Between Them

Amazon’s MK30 is the heaviest of the three aircraft at 83 pounds (38 kilograms), drops its package from about 13 feet (4 meters), and carries no parachute. It has seven US incidents in DroneXL’s record, more than the other two combined. Amazon has let three deadlines pass on 25 questions.

The latest of those seven was a precautionary landing on Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge on September 10. Amazon has said nothing to DroneXL about any of them.

Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drones. The 83-pound aircraft carries no parachute and drops its package from about 13 feet. Amazon has not answered any of DroneXL's 25 written questions. Photo credit: Amazon

Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s record and did not use the questions to say so. Wing’s public statements in the same two weeks were about scale: more than one million deliveries worldwide, the largest residential drone network in the US, thousands of deliveries a day. A company with that record and a light airframe had an easy set of questions in front of it. It sent nothing.

A Wing Hummingbird carrying a Walmart order. Wing says it has passed one million deliveries worldwide. It has answered none of DroneXL's 30 questions. Photo credit: Walmart

Both companies’ tracker pages now read the same way: sent, deadline, no answer.

The tracker is a living document. Its pages update the day a story publishes: a new hub or market moves onto the map when DroneXL reports it, an incident lands in the table with its story attached, and the day Amazon or Wing sends answers, those answers go up in full, unedited, marked question by question, exactly as Zipline’s did. The questions stay open, and so does the offer.

DroneXL’s Take

Zipline answered, and that is the news. Not everything, not by the deadline, and with no spokesperson named. But a US drone delivery operator took hard questions from a publication that covered both its parachute landings this summer, and wrote back with specifics about how its aircraft fails.

Those specifics are the ones a town council meeting is supposed to produce, and Zipline produced them in an email. A pod that detaches if a kid yanks the line is a better answer than I got in half an hour off the record at Amazon’s booth in Las Vegas this month.

The questions Zipline skipped are the ones I most want answered. A worldwide mileage figure does not tell Greenville what happened over its yards, and “softer, steadier” is not a decibel reading. If the safety document Zipline has promised carries the incident count and the noise numbers, it will have put more on the public record than any of the three operators has managed so far. If it doesn’t, the pending marks stay pending, and I’ll say so.

Amazon and Wing had the same list. Amazon has let three deadlines pass on 25 questions. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s file and would not put a single sentence about that record on paper. My read is that both companies have decided the questions go away if they wait. They don’t. They sit on the tracker, dated, next to Zipline’s answers, where every town on Amazon’s list of 500 cities can compare the three columns.

The questions go out again to every operator each January. Zipline has set the bar for what a reply looks like, and it is not a high one: a company saying, in its own words, what its drone does when something breaks.

Sources: Zipline written statement to DroneXL, Sept. 16, 2026; DroneXL Drone Delivery Tracker.

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

US Army Axes Drone Battalion Months After Ukrainians Beat Its Troops

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:09:05 GMT

The US Army’s only drone assault battalion is losing its drone mission. After reporting its findings from the Saber Junction 26 exercise in Germany, which ran through September 13, the roughly 600 paratroopers go back to regular airborne infantry work on orders from acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve.

DroneXL reported the phase-out on August 20. What has changed since is who is objecting. Michael C. Horowitz, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who ran the Pentagon’s Emerging Capabilities Policy Office, published an analysis at the Council on Foreign Relations on September 14 asking whether the Army is backing off drones altogether.

His evidence is a summer of bad signs: Ukrainian drone units beating American troops in a spring exercise, the battalion’s cancellation, and the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, the service’s loudest drone advocate.

Ukrainian Drone Operators Outfought US Troops at Hohenfels

In April and May, about 3,500 US soldiers, mostly from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, faced a Ukrainian-reinforced opposing force during Combined Resolve at Hohenfels, Germany. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian drone operators won.

Horowitz calls that result unsurprising. Ukrainian units have spent four and a half years refining drone reconnaissance and strike under fire, and US soldiers have never faced an enemy dropping munitions from the air as persistently as they did at Hohenfels.

It wasn’t the first time. At Hedgehog 2025 in Estonia, roughly 10 Ukrainian operators playing the adversary mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and effectively eliminated two NATO battalions in about half a day.

Horowitz’s broader argument is that wars are won by whoever adopts a technology fastest, and he points to the six-week software update cycles and repair networks Ukraine has built around cheap uncrewed systems. The clearest example is the software. Ukraine’s Delta system has cut the time from spotting a Russian position to hitting it from at least 20 minutes to three to five, and Driscoll told the Senate in May that American systems can’t do the same.

The Army’s Drone Battalion Returns to Airborne Infantry

The drone unit, roughly 600 paratroopers of the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade stood up less than a year ago to absorb Ukraine’s drone lessons, is being returned to its airborne infantry mission after reporting its findings from the Saber Junction 26 exercise, on orders from Gen. Christopher LaNeve.

The timing is awkward. At that same exercise, the resident opposing force turned 1,900 autonomous systems on the 173rd, including Skydio X10 and Neros Archer drones.

LaNeve’s planning document, The Army Azimuth, does mention unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. It also calls for a return to the “fundamentals of Soldiering.” The battalion decision prompted a bipartisan group of lawmakers to write to LaNeve and Driscoll on September 1, noting that LaNeve’s back-to-basics message also told soldiers to learn and adapt faster. Eliminating the battalion, they wrote, “hurts our ability to acquire the critical knowledge and skills” available from working alongside Ukrainian soldiers.

Horowitz offers a less alarming read, too. The battalion was a flagship project of Gen. Randy George, the Army chief Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ousted in April, and LaNeve has been unwinding a string of his predecessor’s decisions. The cancellation may say more about a new chief putting his stamp on the service, and about the Army pulling back from Europe, than about how the service values drones.

Driscoll’s Exit Removes the Army’s Loudest Drone Advocate

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned at the end of August after 18 months in the job. He came from venture capital and pushed the Army to buy drones fast. The White House accepted his resignation on August 31, according to NBC News.

Driscoll is the official who announced last November that the Army would buy at least 1 million drones over two to three years. In his resignation, he raised concerns about Army transformation and about Hegseth firing the generals responsible for it, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

The list of departures is long. George was fired in April. Gen. Christopher Donahue, who led US Army Europe and Africa, stepped down in June. Horowitz writes that the Army Transformation Initiative, launched under Driscoll, is now in doubt.

The Pentagon’s $55 Billion DAWG Request Points the Other Way

Army drone capability does not rest on one battalion. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 request asks for about $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from roughly $225 million in fiscal 2026, and the Drone Dominance Program is a Hegseth priority, not an Army one.

DroneXL covered that request in April, when DAWG drew the largest year-over-year increase of any defense program. Horowitz says it should reshape Army capabilities regardless of who runs the service. His worry is about direction: leaders set the tone for what a service takes seriously, and to him the summer’s moves feel like a step back.

DroneXL’s Take

The Pentagon wants $55 billion for autonomous warfare while the Army strips the drone mission from its only drone assault battalion, and I think that gets the order backwards: Ukraine has shown since 2022 that adoption speed decides drone wars in the field.

I’ve followed Delta since March 2022, when it was a shared map Ukrainian units opened on laptops over Starlink. Four years later it routes thousands of drones to targets in minutes. Ukraine got there by making drones an institution, down to a separate Unmanned Systems Forces branch, and Russia answered with dedicated drone units of its own, such as Rubikon. China builds most of the world’s small drones and the parts inside them. Against that field, the US Army lost a drone fight to Ukrainians this spring and ended its drone learning unit in August.

The 173rd is Europe’s rapid-response airborne brigade, and a battalion busy experimenting with drones is a battalion it can’t send as infantry. It still doesn’t solve the bigger problem. Money buys drones. It doesn’t produce soldiers who know how to fight with and against them, and that knowledge was the job of the one unit tasked with learning it from Ukrainians.

Horowitz ends his piece hoping this isn’t a retreat. I’d go further: on the evidence so far, it is one. The battalion owes the Army its Saber Junction findings. Watch whether those findings end up changing how the rest of the 173rd trains, or end up in a binder.

Sources: Council on Foreign Relations, The Wall Street Journal, Stars and Stripes, NBC News, CNN, US Army.

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