Police DJI M300 Fell 380 Feet. The Force's Checklist Skipped the Arms
A DJI M300 police drone fell 380 feet onto a Nottinghamshire street after a motor arm folded. The AAIB says the force's checklist skipped the arms.
News, deep dives, and analysis — every DJI Matrice 300 story, newest first.
The DJI Matrice 300 RTK is the heavy end of DJI’s enterprise range — long endurance, serious payloads — and it is the platform that shows up when the job is genuinely difficult.
The rescue work is the clearest case for it. Ocean County’s M300 dropped a rescue tube into a rip current, a capability sitting at the edge of what current authorisations contemplate, which is precisely why the FCC took an interest. Another found hidden hotspots in a Clarkson apartment fire — thermal doing what a firefighter on a ladder cannot — and one recovered a stolen telehandler.
There is an uncomfortable half to the story that we report because it is true: Colombia has armed Matrice 300 drones with grenades. Commercial airframes do not stay in the lane their manufacturer intended, and that fact sits underneath a good deal of current export and import policy.
Related: the Matrice 30 and Matrice 4 hubs, DJI Enterprise, and the search and rescue desk. Every Matrice 300 story lands in the feed below.
Last updated November 12, 2026 — the feed below updates with every new story.
A DJI M300 police drone fell 380 feet onto a Nottinghamshire street after a motor arm folded. The AAIB says the force's checklist skipped the arms.

An Ocean County Sheriff's Office pilot dropped a Restube beside two swimmers caught in a Surf City rip current. The aircraft was a DJI M300 RTK, and a July 21 FCC notice proposes cutting off that class of drone.

Emesent has raised $17 million (A$25 million) in new funding to expand manufacturing at its Wacol, Queensland facility and build out two software platforms: Cortex AI, its onboard autonomy engine for GPS-denied flight, and Aura, its cloud platform for processing and visualizing 3D data. The round pairs a $7 million (A$10 million) venture debt facility…

The Matrice 300 RTK spotted hotspots that would have required firefighters to climb to the third floor with handheld thermal cameras

Colombia just acquired 3,744 grenades built to fall from drones, and the aircraft doing the dropping are off-the-shelf DJI Matrice 300 RTK quadcopters. The grenades are homemade by the state arms maker Indumil, and they’re already in service with the Army’s drone battalion. It’s the clearest sign yet of where Colombia’s long fight against armed…

A police drone operator with Nottinghamshire Police located a stolen telehandler hidden under trees near the A46 on May 20, 2026, using a DJI Matrice 300 RTK, five days after the bright-yellow machine had been reported missing from Hawton near Newark on Friday, May 15. Photos from the scene confirm the airframe. The recovered telehandler…

UK's (NHS) is testing a new way to beat that clock: a drone. A new study has shown that drones can deliver life-saving defibrillators

Westfield Police Department advances its capabilities by training officers and transforming a cruiser into a mobile drone station, enabling daily aerial support for community protection. This move integrates advanced technology into routine patrols, as detailed in a recent report from The Westfield News. Officer Training Completes the Setup The department recently trained three patrol officers…
Endurance work with serious payloads: finding hotspots inside a burning building, dropping a rescue tube into a rip current, mapping a site, recovering stolen plant equipment.
The 300 is the larger, longer-endurance platform with more payload capacity; the 30 folds down small enough for a two-person team to carry to an incident. Most buyers decide on how the aircraft reaches the scene.
Ocean County's did — dropping a rescue tube into a rip current. That capability sits at the edge of what current authorisations contemplate, which is why the FCC took an interest in the case.
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