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FCC Drone Ban Comments Counted: 3,770 Against, 16 For

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:03:00 GMT

The Federal Communications Commission received 3,829 comments on its proposal to bar the import and sale of foreign-made drones that carry thermal sensors, LiDAR, docking stations or spray equipment, or that weigh 55 pounds or more, and 16 of them support the plan as written. Pilot Institute read every filing in PS Docket 26-189, including 686 attachments and 22 scanned letters run through OCR, and coded each one against the same rubric. Of the 3,824 with readable text, 3,770 oppose the prohibition as proposed. That is 98.6%.

The record closed at midnight Eastern on September 2. More than a quarter of it, 1,064 filings, arrived in the final three days, after the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau refused to extend the deadline. The sixteen supporters include one trade group, two venture investors, a think tank and a handful of domestic manufacturers that compete with the aircraft it targets.

I have covered this docket since the Bureau opened it on July 21, and DroneXL’s own comments are one of the 3,824 filings in the dataset. Pilot Institute has now published the whole coded record as a free, filterable page where anyone can sort the filings by sector and position, and pull the original from the FCC’s system by docket ID.

Pilot Institute Coded Every Filing In Docket 26-189

Pilot Institute exported the complete docket from the FCC’s comment system and coded each filing for position, filer type, an answer to each of the Bureau’s five question clusters, and up to eight arguments from a closed list of 45. Questions a filing skipped were marked not addressed, never inferred.

That last decision matters for reading the numbers. Most filers answered only the one or two questions that touched their own operation, so each question is scored against the filings that engaged it, and the denominator changes from question to question. The headline 98.6% is scored against all 3,824.

The 202 quotations on the page were string-matched against the filed documents, and any that did not match exactly were dropped. Pilot Institute filed its own comment in the docket, coded as opposing, and it appears in the organization table like every other filer. The Drone Service Providers Alliance leaned on the organization’s January survey of 8,056 operators in its own filing.

The full interactive record is at hub.pilotinstitute.com/fcc-comment-record. DroneXL promised this deeper look on Monday, when Greg Reverdiau told the Commercial UAV Expo audience that roughly 2,600 comments were on file. The final count came in nearly 50% higher.

The Definition Question Drew 1,584 Answers And Nine Defenders

The Bureau’s first question asked whether its seven capability categories adequately capture military-grade aircraft. Of the 1,584 filings that engaged the definition, 1,575 called it overbroad. Five called it adequate and four said it was too narrow. Pilot Institute scores that at 99.4%, the most lopsided answer on the docket.

The arguments cluster. According to Pilot Institute’s coding, 1,148 filings argue that thermal and LiDAR are ordinary commercial sensors, 990 ask the Commission to rewrite the definition around weaponization, electronic warfare or hostile autonomy instead of hardware, and 822 say the categories sweep in ordinary consumer aircraft. DroneXL laid out that overlap on August 16: a short-range LiDAR sensor for obstacle avoidance puts the DJI Air 3S, Mini 5 Pro, Avata 360 and Neo 2 inside the definition.

The 55-pound threshold drew 288 challenges, most of them driven by an Academy of Model Aeronautics letter on behalf of its 150,000 members. Autel Robotics put it in one sentence: “A 55-pound aircraft is not military because of its weight.” Reuters, filing as a news organization, commented only on the LiDAR category, arguing it is the one criterion with no threshold at all.

On the security question itself, 1,055 filings engaged. Thirty agreed the risk is acute as the Commission described it. Another 298 said the risk is real but can be mitigated, 727 said it is overstated, and 415 argued that no documented exploitation has been shown on the record. A further 176 questioned whether the Commission has statutory authority to do this at all, which is the core of DJI’s filing and of Autel’s.

One Filing Agreed The Economic Impact Is Minor

The Bureau tentatively concluded that the economic impact would be relatively minor and contained, and asked whether commenters agreed. It became the docket’s most-answered question. Of 1,701 filings addressing it, 1,686 described severe harm, fourteen argued the rule would produce a net economic benefit, and one agreed with the Bureau.

Direct harm to a small business is the single most common argument in the record, coded in 1,570 filings. Another 988 say no domestic aircraft can do their job, 653 say the rule strands fleets they already bought under valid authorizations, and 502 say the American equivalents cost substantially more. Pilot Institute’s own filing framed the gear at issue this way: “It is the operating base of the American civil drone economy.”

The Bureau asked for dollar figures and 406 filings supplied one. The median firm-level figure is $16,464, typically a fleet that would be grounded or the cost of replacing it. The big numbers are institutional. The American Drone Data Protection Coalition used FAA data obtained under FOIA to put the replacement cost of the 83,972 DJI drones registered in 2023 alone at an additional $1.12 billion. A public-safety filer pointed to Florida’s state-level ban as the natural experiment: roughly $200 million of working equipment grounded against $25 million in replacement funding.

Several filers also flagged the collision with the Section 232 tariffs that took effect today, which raise the price of the same thermal aircraft the FCC proposes to pull from the market. The 180-day implementation window drew 443 responses. Two called it adequate, two wanted the ban immediate, and 439 asked for a longer runway through a phase-in, grandfathering, a sell-through window or a waiver process. Volitant Technologies, which distributes the Talos T60X agricultural drone, put it plainly: “A 30-day marketing cutoff would function as an inventory forfeiture in economic substance.”

Sixteen Filers Back The Ban, And Only One Is A Trade Group

The case for the rule rests on sixteen filings. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies files the fullest defense: capability, not paperwork, is the test, and heavy-lift airframes built by an adversary state are the same class of machine now flying in combat. It wants the Commission to go further.

FDD cites the Mavic 3 Enterprise in Ukrainian reconnaissance and the Agras T100’s 386-pound takeoff weight as evidence the categories track real military function, and it wants the Commission to revisit authorizations already granted to older models.

The Agricultural Drone Initiative, a coalition of American ag-drone manufacturers and the wholesalers and farmers who buy from them, is the only trade association on that side. It frames Chinese software control over spray aircraft as a food-security risk, says PRC dumping of up to $30,000 per unit has already put two American ag-drone makers out of business, and breaks with nearly everyone else on timing: “The 180-day window strikes a sound balance.” Three domestic ag-drone companies, Ceres Air, Elevon Aerial and Exedy Drones, filed near-identical text supporting a ban on named Chinese competitors.

Craft Ventures, an investor in drone and autonomy startups, and HYFIX Spatial Intelligence argue the restriction is what makes a domestic sensor and motor supply chain financeable. Catapult Ventures filed a single sentence. Obsidian Sensors, a San Diego thermal-sensor maker, supports the rule as written and opposes any waivers. Swarm Defense Technologies backs the swarming category and proposes closing evasion loopholes.

Skydio is coded as a supporter, and Pilot Institute’s own note on that coding is worth reading. Skydio’s filing is an ex parte notice describing its SkyForge manufacturing build-out, and it urges the Commission to calibrate any measures and allow reasonable transition periods. That is closer to the opposition’s ask on timing than the label suggests (and closer to what the public-safety agencies on the docket filed).

Small Businesses And First Responders Wrote Most Of The Record

Individual remote pilots filed 1,217 comments and commercial drone-service companies filed 1,068, together nearly 60% of the docket. Public-safety agencies are the third-largest bloc at 298. Media and film account for 215, agriculture for 175, survey and construction for 119, and education for 98. Nineteen government bodies filed.

Manufacturers and dealers filed 85 comments, trade associations 38, and utilities 29. Another 256 could not be attributed to a sector.

The public-safety filings are the ones the Bureau’s own public-interest balancing has to weigh most directly, and they are not subtle. Of the 783 filings that struck the balance between security and cost explicitly, 771 said the harm outweighs the benefit and twelve said the reverse. Among them, 598 raise search-and-rescue or firefighting capability, and 513 argue the rule costs lives in emergency response. Weber County Search and Rescue’s Kyle Nordfors made that case to the FCC in writing, and his filing sits in the dataset alongside those of the New York State Police, the Law Enforcement Drone Association and 64 filers asking for the same carve-out federal agencies already have. The National Sheriffs’ Association, for 3,081 sheriffs, asked the Commission to preserve current inventories or grant a temporary state, local and tribal exemption if domestic alternatives cannot be confirmed adequate.

The 311 filings framing the proposal as protectionism for a small number of incumbents sit in this cluster too. So do the drone light-show operators, who DroneXL reported were swept in by the swarming category and who filed as a bloc through the American Drone Entertainment Coalition.

Late Filings Changed The Mix, Not The Verdict

Three parties moved to extend the comment window. The Bureau denied all three in Order DA 26-892, writing that “extensions of time shall not be routinely granted.” The denial shaped the record. September 1 was the single busiest day, and the last three days carried 28% of everything filed.

That is when the heavyweights arrived: DJI, Autel, the Commercial Drone Alliance, the National Sheriffs’ Association and a joint filing from the Edison Electric Institute, the American Petroleum Institute and five other energy and chemical trade groups. Their arrival moved one number. The share of the record that accepts the security premise while rejecting the scope rose from 17% to 21% over the final four days. Overall opposition held at 98.6%. A further 83 comments arrived after the deadline and are counted in the total.

Pilot Institute is candid about what the analysis cannot support. The line between opposing the ban outright and backing the goal while rejecting the scope is a judgment call, and coding it across 3,824 filings produced visible variance; the organization says to read the 77-to-21 split as a range rather than a measurement, while the overall opposition figure holds up. About 5.7% of filings, 218 of them, reuse template language, chiefly the AMA letter and a set of filings from employees of one drone company. And a docket is not a survey: the 98.6% measures who showed up, not what the country thinks.

DroneXL’s Take

Sixteen filings support this proposal and 3,770 oppose it. I have covered the FCC’s move against foreign drones since last fall and have not seen a record this one-sided from the people it would govern. The Bureau asked whether its economic premise held. The public answered 1,686 to one.

That is not an industry disagreeing with a regulator about degree. That is a premise with no evidentiary support left in the record that was built to test it, and the one filing that backed the premise is outnumbered by the fourteen that argued the ban would produce a net economic benefit.

I will concede the strongest point on the other side, because the record contains it. The Agricultural Drone Initiative says Chinese dumping killed two American ag-drone makers, and the domestic sensor companies filing in support are describing a real problem: you cannot finance a US thermal-core supply chain against a competitor selling below cost. DroneXL’s position has not moved: we oppose unfair competition from Beijing as firmly as we oppose protectionism from Washington. But the remedy for dumping is a dumping case, and the remedy for a data-security risk is a data-security standard applied to every manufacturer. Neither of those is a hardware ban that catches a volunteer fire department’s thermal camera and a fourteen-year-old’s Neo 2 in the same net, which is the argument I made in DroneXL’s own filing, and one that 990 other filers made in some form.

My read on the Skydio coding is that it tells you more about the politics than the label does. The company that stands to gain most from a DJI-free market filed an ex parte asking for calibration and transition time, while public-safety agencies from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Tualatin Valley, Oregon, filed to say the approved alternatives are beyond municipal budgets, and a dealer that sells mostly to those agencies used its own sales quotes to show a Skydio X10 costs two to four times the foreign thermal aircraft it would replace. When your prospective customers are on the docket explaining why they cannot afford you yet, you do not file a cheerful endorsement of the deadline.

What the Bureau does with this is the open question, and it is a precise one. The bureaus are acting on delegated authority, so no Commission vote is required, and nothing in the record forces them to count filings. What they cannot do is repeat “minor and contained” without engaging 1,686 filings that put dollar figures and replacement quotes on the record, because that record now exists in the docket the Bureau itself opened to build it. Whether the eventual order engages the ADDPC’s $1.12 billion figure or the National Sheriffs’ Association’s carve-out request, or restates the July premise as if September never happened, is how we will know whether this docket was a consultation or a formality.

Go read the filings yourself. Pilot Institute built the page so you can filter by your own sector and see what the people who do your job told the government. Then bookmark it, because when the order comes, the argument over what the record said will start immediately, and the record is right there.

Source: Pilot Institute, The 26-189 Comment Record

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

DJI Tells FCC Its 'Military-Grade' Drone Ban Was Invented In-House

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:52:00 GMT

DJI told the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday that the seven “military-grade” categories at the center of its proposed drone sales ban appear in no national security determination, were endorsed by no national security agency, and were invented by the two FCC sub-bureaus that wrote the proposal. The 26-page filing in PS Docket 26-189 landed September 2, the day comments closed, and asks the bureaus to rescind the notice outright.

The comments are signed by Travis LeBlanc, who ran the FCC’s own Enforcement Bureau under President Obama, and Elizabeth Prelogar, the 48th Solicitor General of the United States, both now partners at Cooley LLP. DJI puts its losses from the December 2025 Covered List action and the follow-on set-asides at more than $1.5 billion.

I filed DroneXL’s own comments in the same docket hours before DJI’s arrived, and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday photographing DJI’s booth at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas, where every aircraft on the stand meets the definition this filing attacks.

DJI Says No Security Agency Ever Endorsed The Seven Categories

The FCC’s July 21 notice defines military-grade drones by seven capabilities: 55 pounds or more at takeoff, economic-poison spraying, thermal imaging, LiDAR, docking stations, defense-article integration, and swarming. DJI argues the December 2025 National Security Determination behind the notice mentions none of them and never uses the phrase military-grade.

The determination, as DJI’s comments describe it, runs entirely on provenance. Every drone and every critical component produced in a foreign country poses an unacceptable risk, unless the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security later clears a specific component. Nothing in it separates a drone with a thermal camera from one with a plain RGB sensor. The filing calls the seven categories a post-hoc creation of the bureaus with no foundation in the document they cite.

That gap matters because the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act lets the Commission add equipment to the Covered List only on a “specific determination” that particular equipment from a particular entity poses an unacceptable risk. A determination that covers an entire product category by country of origin is the opposite of specific, DJI argues, and the FCC’s four earlier Covered List updates all named companies. That changed when the Bureau swept every foreign-made drone onto the list on December 22, 2025.

The notice itself says the bureaus built the definitions from other agencies’ rules on high-risk UAS and from discussions with national security partners. DJI’s answer is that none of those partners put a determination on the record. Eleven days after the notice ran in the Federal Register, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security went the other way: its August 14 final rule loosened drone export controls and defined the capabilities adversaries could exploit differently from the FCC’s seven categories.

The Filing Argues Drones Are Not Communications Equipment At All

DJI’s second argument attacks the FCC’s jurisdiction. The Secure Networks Act reaches only equipment “essential to the provision of advanced communications service,” meaning high-speed broadband. A drone connects to the internet the way a laptop does, the filing argues, and a battery is essential to no one’s network.

DJI is running the same argument in the Ninth Circuit, where it sued the FCC in February over the December listing. The filing cites West Virginia v. EPA on the major questions doctrine, and it cites the Supreme Court’s February 20 decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, the ruling that struck down the IEEPA tariffs, for the proposition that an extraordinary assertion of regulatory power needs an explicit statutory hook. It also raises the Appointments Clause: every step from the December listing to this notice was taken by bureau staff under delegated authority, without a vote of the Senate-confirmed commissioners.

Prelogar argued the government’s side in Loper Bright in January 2024 and lost; the filing now cites Loper Bright against the FCC. Lawyers change clients, and the doctrine stays where the Supreme Court left it.

DJI Turns The FCC’s Own Rulebook Against The Notice

Section 2.939(e) of the Commission’s rules lets the bureaus limit an existing authorization only when the notice identifies the affected devices well enough for a manufacturer to know what is covered, and assesses the prohibition’s impact. DJI argues the July notice does neither, and uses its own questions as proof.

The thermal category sets no threshold for sensitivity or resolution. “Specially designed to incorporate a defense article” is never defined. The FCC’s July 17 notice in the companion docket, which named nine DJI-linked brands, identified equipment by company. This one identifies capabilities and leaves manufacturers, and in the end enforcement staff, to work out which products qualify. A notice that asks the public whether its own definition is over- or under-inclusive has by its own admission not identified the devices, the filing says.

On impact, the notice tentatively concludes the ban “would not have substantial economic and supply chain impacts” because recreational pilots are unlikely to fly military-grade drones. It supplies no data, then encourages commenters to provide evidence of economic costs. DJI’s response: “An agency cannot outsource its analytical obligation to the public it proposes to regulate.”

The bureaus denied three requests to extend the comment period on August 28. Fewer than 3,000 comments were in the docket the day before it closed, from an industry of nearly half a million certificated pilots.

Identical American Drones Stay Legal While First Responders Lose Access

Two exemptions in the notice anchor DJI’s arbitrary-and-capricious argument. A domestically produced drone with the same thermal sensor stays on sale while the foreign one comes off. Federal agencies may keep buying the foreign version while a county sheriff may not. The notice explains neither line.

If the risk is the capability, as the military-grade label implies, it should not depend on where the airframe was assembled. If the risk is provenance, as the determination says, thermal and LiDAR are irrelevant and the seven categories collapse into the plain foreign-drone ban the bureaus already have. DJI also argues the notice ignores reliance interests: the authorizations were lawfully granted, the inventory lawfully imported, and the notice would pull those authorizations retroactively without counting how many devices or manufacturers it reaches.

The footnotes cite comments from the Ohio chapter of the Law Enforcement Drone Association, the Blair Police Department, Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, and the Drone Service Providers Alliance. The public safety agencies describe thermal, LiDAR and dock missions flown where visibility is limited; the DSPA covers mapping and surveying. The Matrice 4T and Dock 3 I photographed on Booth 903 this week are the hardware those departments describe.

DJI Asks For Rescission First And An 18-Month Transition Second

The fourth defect is constitutional. DJI says it received no advance notice of the December 22, 2025 listing, no chance to present evidence about its products, and still no statement of the factual basis for the determination. A follow-on limitation built on that listing inherits the flaw, the filing argues.

DJI is pressing the same point in its petition for reconsideration, filed January 21, 2026, and in the Ninth Circuit, where its April opposition brief put 25 unreleased products in regulatory limbo. If the bureaus issue a new notice anyway, the filing lists four minimum conditions: product-specific or class-specific national security determinations, a transition of at least 18 months instead of the proposed 180 days, preserved access for state and local public safety agencies, and capability definitions built on objective, measurable technical thresholds.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the first document in the docket written by people who know what a judge will do with it. Most comments filed before Wednesday, mine included, tell the FCC the proposal hurts. DJI’s tells the FCC it lacks the power, in the language courts use to vacate agency action.

The bureaus did not pull the seven categories from the air. The 55-pound line is the FAA’s own Part 107 boundary, and economic poison is the FAA’s Part 137 term for pesticide. Thermal and LiDAR do make a drone more useful to a military; nobody serious argues otherwise. But the statute does not ask whether a capability has military uses. It asks whether a named agency determined that this equipment poses an unacceptable risk, and the record contains no such determination for thermal cameras, LiDAR, docks or light-show swarms. When a notice asks the public whether its own list adequately captures military-grade drones, the bureaus are telling you they were guessing.

The federal exemption is where the security story falls apart, and I don’t think DJI’s lawyers needed a former Solicitor General to spot it. If a Dock 3 were a threat to the homeland, the last customer you would keep it available to is a federal agency. Exempting Washington while cutting off the Tualatin Valley fire crews is what a market carve-out looks like, and it fits what DroneXL has reported since the first military-grade notice in July: American operators paying for a security theory nobody has written down.

The record closed at midnight Wednesday, and the bureaus can issue an order whenever they choose, with a 180-day wind-down from Federal Register publication. Two processes could pull the floor out first. The Ninth Circuit case, No. 26-1029, and the pending reconsideration petition both attack the December listing the filing calls this notice’s only jurisdictional predicate; if either narrows or vacates the listing, the military-grade proposal has nothing left to stand on. DJI’s 18-month request reads to me as the tell in an otherwise all-or-nothing brief: the company is swinging for rescission and, in the same document, negotiating the length of the runway if it loses. The Section 232 tariffs that took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern this morning already put a 100% duty on the same thermal imagers and docks, so that runway is getting shorter either way.

Sources: SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 (FCC ECFS), Federal Register 91 FR 48870, Federal Register 91 FR 52501, FCC Order of August 28, 2026.

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

Amazon's 83-Pound MK30 Heads To 500 Cities: Parachute Shmarachute

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:23:00 GMT

Amazon Prime Air did not put an engineer on the record about the MK30 while I was at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas this week. A booth representative talked with me about the aircraft for half an hour on Tuesday, off the record, and set up a meeting with Amazon’s communications lead for Wednesday. He offered an engineer for Thursday. I replied in writing at 9:56 a.m. that Wednesday was my last day at the show and asked for ten minutes on the record that afternoon. When we met at 12:30, he said nobody was available that day and offered Thursday again, or a meeting in Seattle at some later date. So here is the conversation Amazon did not have with me while its drone and I were in the same hall.

The MK30 weighs 78 pounds (35.5 kilograms) empty and 83 pounds (37.8 kilograms) at takeoff. It carries a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) box. It has six motors, obstacle avoidance, redundant flight controllers and no parachute. It does not land at your house: it hovers and lets the box fall. And on August 19, Amazon said it intends to fly this aircraft over nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026.

The only public appearance by Amazon I knew of was a Pitch the Press session on Wednesday afternoon, where each company got a two-minute presentation and a one-minute question-and-answer session. Amazon was also listed on a Wednesday panel about BVLOS operations, which nobody at Amazon mentioned to me and which I did not attend. The answer I got at Pitch the Press is the reason this is an opinion piece.

Amazon's MK30 delivery drone on display at the company's Commercial UAV Expo booth in Las Vegas in 2026. Photo credit: DroneXL

The MK30 Carries Less Cargo Per Pound Than Wing Or Zipline

Amazon’s MK30 puts 15.6 pounds of aircraft in the air for every pound it delivers: a 77.9-pound (35.5-kilogram) airframe carrying a 5-pound box, per FAA filings. Wing’s standard aircraft runs about 4.6 pounds of drone per payload pound. Zipline’s Platform 2 runs about 6.9.

The Amazon figures come from the FAA’s August 2025 environmental re-evaluation of Prime Air’s Pendleton, Oregon test site, which lists an 83.2-pound (37.8-kilogram) maximum takeoff weight and a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) range. Amazon’s own operations page puts the airframe at roughly 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 meters) tall and 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide.

Wing’s Hummingbird weighs about 12 pounds (5.4 kilograms) and carries 2.6 pounds (1.2 kilograms), figures Wing CEO Adam Woodworth gave Popular Science in 2022. The larger prototype he showed in the same interview weighed about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) and carried 6.6 pounds (3 kilograms), a ratio of about 3 to 1. Zipline’s P2 Zip weighs 55 pounds (25 kilograms) empty and under 63 pounds (28.6 kilograms) with its full 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) payload, according to the FAA’s February 2026 re-evaluation of Zipline’s Arkansas operation, the same document DroneXL drew on for the Cleveland Clinic prescription program. Zipline lifts 60 percent more cargo than Amazon with 23 pounds less aircraft.

The MK30’s ratio is more than three times Wing’s production aircraft, about five times Wing’s larger prototype and more than double Zipline’s. I stood next to this aircraft in Düsseldorf in March and wrote then that its size was the central tension of the program. In Las Vegas this week, with nobody at the booth cleared to discuss it on the record, the tension has not resolved.

Amazon's MK30 delivery drone on display at the Prime Air booth in Dusseldorf, backed by the company's "Gravity Shmavity" banner. Photo credit: DroneXL

Amazon Says Its Inventory And Range Dictated The Size

Amazon’s explanation for the airframe, given at the Expo’s Pitch the Press session, is that the company’s product inventory and delivery range, among other requirements, produced this design. The same session credited the MK30’s shorter, wider propeller blades with its noise reduction.

I have no reason to doubt the noise work. Amazon says its engineers cut the MK30’s perceived volume by almost half compared with earlier Prime Air drones, and the stubby, wide blades are the visible result.

My question to the spokesperson was whether a smaller and lighter drone with the same propeller design would not have been even quieter. His answer was that once you account for what Amazon sells and how far it needs to fly, this is the design you arrive at. The framing was that a standardized Amazon box, roughly the size and shape of a shoebox, calls for an aircraft this size. (Zipline’s droid carries two 13-inch pizzas.)

The answer tracks what Amazon has said in public for more than a decade, and each leg of it is on the record. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes in December 2013 that a 5-pound limit covered 86 percent of the items Amazon delivered; the August announcement puts it at more than 60 percent of frequently purchased products. The 7.5-mile radius is double what the previous MK27 flew. The propeller work took perceived noise down 25 percent at the 2022 reveal and to almost half by launch. Payload, range and noise are real requirements. None of them says the aircraft carrying the box has to weigh 78 pounds.

I beg to differ. Zipline ships a heavier box with a lighter aircraft that carries a parachute. Wing ships a smaller box with an aircraft roughly one-sixth the weight, and announced a 5-pound carrier in January 2024 that keeps the same tethered delivery. Amazon’s answer describes a requirements process. It does not explain why every other company that ran one for suburban delivery arrived at a smaller aircraft.

Redundant Motors Do Not Replace A Parachute

The MK30 has six motors and, Amazon says, no single point of failure that can cause loss of control. A monitoring computer can hand off to a backup controller and send the drone home. It has no parachute. When the airframe hits something, it falls.

Amazon’s chief project engineer Stephen Wells put the philosophy this way: “We designed it with aerospace levels of reliability and redundancy.” The redundancy is real and it addresses one failure class: a motor or a controller quitting in clean air.

The failures the MK30 has actually had were not that class. On October 1, 2025, two MK30s struck the same construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, within minutes of each other and came down in nearby parking lots. On February 4, 2026, one hit the side of an apartment building in Richardson, Texas, and landed on the sidewalk smoking with its propellers still turning. In between, on November 18, one clipped a residential internet cable in Waco, Texas, 13 days after service launched there. On July 29, an MK30 came down in a garden in Darlington, England, after what Amazon says was contact with an object above the roof of a moving vehicle. A crane boom, an internet cable and an apartment wall are not motor failures, and six motors do nothing for an aircraft that has just hit one.

Obstacle avoidance is the system meant to prevent those collisions, and I do not dispute that Amazon’s Detect-and-Avoid is serious engineering. Every one of those collisions happened with it running. The parachute is the layer for the day the other layers miss, and Zipline builds it in: Zipline’s own account of a P2 Zip that could not complete its docking maneuver ends with the aircraft cutting its motors and parachuting onto the barrier below the dock. When a Zipline Zip landed in a Greenville, Texas street in July, it arrived under canopy slowly enough for a resident to walk out and watch. An 83-pound aircraft without one arrives at the speed gravity chooses.

Amazon Drops Boxes From 13 Feet And Plans 500 Cities

The MK30 does not land at your house. It hovers at 13 feet (4 meters) over the drop zone and releases the box, which is how a Richmond, Texas customer watched her cat food land in her pool on August 17. Amazon plans nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end.

The 13-foot figure is Amazon’s own, and its customer terms put it at four meters. The pool video was the second Prime Air delivery to go swimming in a year, and an Amazon spokesperson called such incidents uncommon. Uncommon is a rate, and the numerator gets multiplied by the map.

That map is the August 19 announcement: Prime Air flies today from 11 sites in seven states, each covering about 175 square miles (453 square kilometers), and Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise are next. Fast Company asked in May what Chicago’s south suburbs should expect when one of these aircraft comes down, and found no specific answer from Amazon or the FAA. “By the end of 2026 we plan to reach customers in nearly 500 cities and towns,” said David Carbon, Amazon’s vice president of Prime Air. As DroneXL noted the day it was announced, the count is every municipality those circles touch, so the fleet is smaller than the headline. The aircraft in every circle is the same 83-pound MK30 with no parachute.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon’s drone is over-engineered in the wrong direction: too big and too heavy, and missing the one safety layer that works after everything else has failed. Obstacle avoidance and motor redundancy are necessary. Neither guarantees a soft landing when a 78-pound airframe meets a crane boom.

The part I cannot get past is the explanation. Amazon told a room of drone professionals and reporters in Las Vegas that its inventory and its range led to this design, as if a shoebox could only be delivered by a machine as tall as a refrigerator. Zipline delivers a bigger box from a lighter aircraft that carries a parachute and never comes below 300 feet (91 meters) over your yard. Wing delivers from an aircraft you could pick up with one hand. Both ran their own requirements processes and both arrived somewhere else. The requirement that seems to have driven Amazon’s answer is the one it did not name: build it in-house and to Amazon’s spec rather than to the neighborhood’s.

I spent time with this aircraft and its booth team in Düsseldorf in March and came away with more questions than answers. In Las Vegas this week I got a booth representative who was not cleared to speak on the record, and an offer of an engineer for the day after I left, repeated to my face three hours after I had told Amazon in writing that Wednesday was my last day. A company that believes in a design usually finds ten minutes for the people who built it to defend it while the reporter and the aircraft are in the same building. That it did not is a data point.

With nearly 500 cities and towns on the map by December, the record from Tolleson, Richardson, Waco and Darlington becomes a rate applied to tens of millions of backyards, set by the physics Amazon joked about on its booth banner. Two dates will show whether regulators agree: the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Darlington permission expires at the end of 2026 with an Air Accidents Investigation Branch inquiry still open, and the FAA and NTSB investigation into the Tolleson crane strikes had published no findings as of DroneXL’s August reporting, eleven months on. If either body attaches an airframe or recovery-system condition to the MK30, the 500-city map gets redrawn around it.

An Amazon Prime Air booth banner in Dusseldorf shows the MK30 delivery drone alongside the company's playful "Gravity Shmavity" slogan. Photo credit: DroneXL

Gravity Shmavity is a fine slogan for a trade-show banner. Parachute Shmarachute is what it looks like from the sidewalk.

Update, September 3, 2026, 5:15 p.m. ET, revised 5:50 p.m. ET: An earlier version of this article said the Pitch the Press session was the only place Amazon spoke at Commercial UAV Expo. Amazon Prime Air was also listed on a Wednesday panel on BVLOS operations, and the article has been corrected. The lead and DroneXL’s Take have been expanded to describe Amazon’s interview offers in full, and the timing of DroneXL’s written request has been corrected: it was sent at 9:56 a.m. Pacific, before the Wednesday meeting, not after. After publication, Amazon Prime Air’s communications team contacted DroneXL by phone to dispute the description of its availability.

Sources: FAA, Amazon, Zipline, CBS 60 Minutes, Popular Science, Fast Company, Commercial UAV Expo program and Pitch the Press session

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

NSW Shark Drones Log 750 Sightings in 8 Weeks as 51 Nets Go Back In

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:30:00 GMT

Surf Life Saving NSW drones recorded 750 shark sighting events and more than 200 interventions between July 1 and August 30, the first two months of a A$34 million expansion that now puts 73 aircraft over 97 New South Wales beaches. On September 1 the state stretched flight hours to 6:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. for spring. The same day, crews began installing 51 shark nets between Newcastle and Wollongong.

That pairing is the story. New South Wales has built the largest aerial shark-surveillance operation anywhere, funded to more than A$120 million over two years, staffed by pilots who clear a beach in two to three minutes after a sighting, and backed by a coastal network of acoustic listening stations tracking 3,010 tagged sharks. It is also keeping the meshing program that marine scientists have spent a decade calling ineffective, and the minister in charge says so out loud.

For American readers the reference point is New York, where the NYPD and state parks now fly drones over Rockaway and Long Island beaches every summer. NSW is running that model at roughly ten times the scale, year round, with a budget line attached.

Surf Life Saving NSW Runs the Largest Aerial Shark Watch on Earth

The A$34 million package, announced June 28 and live since July 1, expanded year-round dawn-to-dusk drone coverage from 26 to all 38 of Sydney’s ocean beaches, Palm Beach to Cronulla, and to around 70 beaches statewide, with at least one in every coastal council area.

It sits inside a A$120 million two-year Shark Management Program. The June ministerial release, from Premier Chris Minns and Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty, called it the largest expansion of aerial shark surveillance in the world. The August 30 follow-up put numbers on it: 73 drones across 97 beaches once school-holiday sites join on September 26, and more than 300,000 scheduled surveillance hours this year, which the release calls a 1,200 percent increase.

Australian UAV Service pilots with Surf Life Saving NSW hold two DJI Matrice 4TD drones, with wide, zoom and thermal cameras, and the DJI RC Plus 2 controller used for beach patrols and shark spotting. Photo credit: Surf Life Saving NSW

Regional beaches get flights every weekend of the year for the first time, plus daily flights from December 1 to April 30 and extended hours to cover dawn to dusk. Coverage is not limited to patrolled beaches. Surf Life Saving NSW CEO Steve Pearce said in the organization’s own announcement that it had already flown more than 100,000 shark surveillance flights this year and prevented more than 2,000 shark interactions with swimmers and surfers before the expansion started. It is now recruiting pilots to staff the new schedule.

DroneXL covered the program’s earlier form in Surf Life Saving NSW’s DJI-based shark patrols in March 2024, when it still ran mostly through school holidays and summer weekends. The state’s own December 2025 top-up funded 50 beaches through the end of March. Nine months later the number is 97, all year.

Surf Life Saving NSW Flies Chinese-Made DJI Matrice Dock Drones

The aircraft in Surf Life Saving NSW’s own photos are two DJI enterprise models: the Matrice 3D, recognizable by its fixed arms angled upward, and the Matrice 4TD, with a multi-sensor gimbal carrying wide, zoom and thermal cameras plus a laser rangefinder. Both are built to live in DJI docks.

That matters for the program’s next phase. The Matrice 3D is the aircraft DJI ships with the Dock 2 and the Matrice 4TD with the Dock 3, the drone-in-a-box systems that let an operator fly from a remote console instead of standing on the sand. Surf Life Saving NSW says the new funding expands exactly that capability, alongside the CASA approvals it wants for autonomous flights from surf club rooftops. The hardware for that future is already in the fleet, wearing red and yellow checkers.

The Matrice 4TD’s thermal camera and onboard AI subject detection are also the features the sharks-versus-seaweed problem calls for. The patrol shots show it fitted with a spotlight and loudspeaker, the payload combination that lets a pilot warn surfers directly. The Matrice 3D carries a wide and telephoto camera pair without thermal, which is enough for daytime shark work at 197 feet.

None of this hardware is available new to a US public safety agency. The FCC added every foreign-made drone to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, blocking authorization for new models, and DroneXL has documented how the grandfathering that still allows older DJI models to be imported could end with a single public notice. The largest aerial shark-surveillance program in the world runs on aircraft an American lifeguard service would struggle to buy today.

One Coogee Pilot Shows What a Shark Drone Shift Actually Looks Like

The Guardian’s Penry Buckley spent a winter morning at Coogee with Taha Kafil-Hussain, a 22-year-old Surf Life Saving NSW pilot, and produced the best public account of the job so far. Each flight runs about 20 minutes at 197 feet (60 meters), raking the bay in overlapping legs.

The pattern leaves a checkerboard on his control screen.

He told the Guardian he is looking for “anything moving against the flow of water, anything that looks a little bit long.” Most zooms end in seaweed or a turtle. When one does not, and he is alone at dawn, he makes the call to clear the water himself; later in the day he passes the sighting to lifeguards, who decide. Either way the beach is empty within two to three minutes. The aircraft carry speakers, so the pilot can talk directly to surfers on the outside break.

Coogee is the beach that changed the program’s politics. Until June, drones were not permitted there at all because it sits under the approach to Sydney Airport’s east-west runway. That ended after the June 13 attack on Sydney teacher Leah Stewart, who lost her left arm to a white shark the Guardian reports at roughly 13 feet (4 meters) while swimming between the flags. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted Surf Life Saving NSW an emergency exemption within days, and as DroneXL reported at the time, the state committed to pushing the regulator for permanent approval. Kafil-Hussain now starts each Coogee shift by checking the radio for which way the airliners are landing.

A Surf Life Saving NSW pilot preps a DJI Matrice 3D, its fixed arms angled upward, on a beach landing pad before a shark surveillance flight. Photo credit: Surf Life Saving NSW

Drone Coverage Still Misses Small Sharks on Windy Days

Everyone involved, the funding government included, says drones are not a complete answer. The June release lists weather, visibility and battery life as limits. University of Sydney shark researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff told the Guardian that on a windy day, or with a small shark, an operator will not see it.

Pepin-Neff called drones the best technology available and, in the same breath, warned that more surveillance means more sightings, and more sightings without a public education campaign will frighten people. “Drones are a great tool but they’re not a perfect solution,” they said. The 750 sightings in eight weeks work out to roughly 12 a day across the network, and 200 of them ended in an intervention.

The state’s answer to the human-eyes problem is automation. The June package funds trials of at least two AI detection systems over the coming summer, with the stated ambition of making them standard, and a joint push with Surf Life Saving NSW and CASA for approvals to run more autonomous flights, eventually from surf club rooftops. Surf Life Saving NSW says the money also expands its drone-in-a-box and BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) capability, which is the hardware side of the same ambition. Kafil-Hussain told the Guardian he has raised the alarm most often for bull and tiger sharks, and once for a bronze whaler he initially took for a target species. That misread is exactly what the AI trial is meant to catch.

Shark Nets Went Back in the Water the Day Drone Hours Grew

On September 1, the day drone hours extended to 6:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., crews began setting 51 shark nets at beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong. They join 305 SMART drumlines from Tweed Heads to Bega and two new tagged-shark listening stations in Sydney Harbour.

The harbour stations sit at Balmoral in Middle Harbour and Lady Bay in the east.

They are the newer, less controversial addition, identical to the 37 already along the coast, which together track 1,698 white sharks, 938 tiger sharks and 374 bull sharks, the three species most often involved in serious bites. When a tagged shark passes within about 1,640 feet (500 meters) of a station, the SharkSmart app pushes an alert.

The nets are the part the science does not support. Pepin-Neff’s verdict to the Guardian on nets and culling was that they do not work. DroneXL made the same case last November in Nets vs. DJI drones for Australian shark spotting. Moriarty did not pretend otherwise. “I acknowledge there are some mixed views on shark nets,” she said in the August 30 release, before confirming they would go in anyway because the government intends to use every tool available. That is a political sentence, not a technical one, and it is at least honest about which kind it is.

A Surf Life Saving NSW DJI Matrice 4TD, carrying a spotlight, loudspeaker and a thermal, zoom and wide-angle camera gimbal, hovers over the sand during a beach patrol. Photo credit: Surf Life Saving NSW

DroneXL’s Take

New South Wales did what no US coastal state has matched: it made drone surveillance the primary shark-mitigation tool, funded as a budget line, not a pilot, with full-time staff. When we covered the drone hunt after the fatal Long Reef attack a year ago, drones were the emergency response.

Now they are the baseline, and the emergency response is what happens when they see something.

The American comparison is not flattering. New York’s program, which DroneXL covered when NYPD drones tracked seven sharks at Rockaway in July, is seasonal, city-by-city, and still treated as a novelty in local coverage. Dutch beach rescue brigades adopted DJI drones for this summer citing the Australian model. Nobody in the US is citing it, and after December 22, 2025, no US agency could build it on new DJI hardware if it wanted to. The people who wrote that rule should look at what NSW is getting for A$34 million and ask what the American alternative costs.

The nets are a fair place to push back on NSW, and Pepin-Neff is right that a drone cannot find a small shark in a chop. That is a real limit, and it is the reason the AI detection trial matters more than the drone count. But the nets stay in for the same reason a lot of bad policy stays in: removing them the summer after a woman lost her arm at Coogee is a headline no minister wants. Moriarty at least said the quiet part.

Here is what I will be watching. The two AI systems go live over the southern summer, and CASA is being asked at the same time for approvals that would let Surf Life Saving NSW fly autonomous patrols from fixed sites. Whether either clears before daily regional flights end on April 30 tells you if this becomes a robotic program or stays a very large human one. My read is that CASA, having already carved out Coogee under an airliner approach in a weekend, has shown it can move when a state government leans on it. The question is whether it will do it again for flights with nobody on the sticks.

Video: shark surveillance drones over Sydney beaches.

Sources: NSW Government ministerial release, August 30, 2026, NSW Government ministerial release, June 28, 2026, The Guardian, Surf Life Saving NSW, ABC News

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

DJI Osmo 360 II Goes Global at IFA, Skips America a Second Time

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:09:00 GMT

DJI launched the Osmo 360 II to the world market on Thursday morning from Berlin, three weeks after the camera went on sale in China, and priced it at €589 in the eurozone and £509 in the United Kingdom for a September 15 release. The United States is not on the list. DJI’s launch release names no American price, no American date, and no American market, for a camera that holds a valid FCC equipment authorization.

Nine days ago I wrote that September 3 would answer a narrow question with no room to fudge it. It did. The answer was no.

The camera itself is the one DJI sold in China on August 13. It records native 8K panoramic video at 60 frames per second and swaps its lenses by hand, in a 183-gram body with 105GB of storage. What Thursday added was European money and a European shelf date.

DJI Charges Europe A Quarter More Than It Charged For The First Osmo 360

The Osmo 360 II Standard Combo lists at £509 in the UK and from €589 in the eurozone, with the Adventure Combo at £639 and €739. That is £99 above the first Osmo 360’s £409.99 UK launch price from July 2025, a 24 percent rise in thirteen months.

China did not take that hit. When DroneXL covered the August 13 launch, the Chinese price had moved from 2,999 to 3,299 yuan, a 10 percent bump. Europe is paying more than twice that rate of increase for the same camera. DJI has not said why. (The original Osmo 360’s UK price has since fallen as low as £292.50 at Amazon, which is where a lot of British buyers will land.)

The comparison DJI wants you to make is a different one. The Insta360 X6 Standard bundle sells for £619.99 in the UK, which leaves the Osmo 360 II £111 under its only flagship rival. That gap is the whole European pitch, and it holds. It does not hold in the one market where the X6 has no DJI beside it.

Cameras ship September 15. DJI’s European store pages carry that date, and the company’s launch release carries none at all, which is its own kind of answer.

The US Store Still Lists Exactly One Osmo 360

DJI’s American storefront had no Osmo 360 II page on Thursday. The product-series filter on the US Handheld shop lists one entry under Osmo 360, the 2025 original, next to five generations of Osmo Action and a dozen Ronin stabilizers. DroneXL checked the filter directly after the Berlin announcement.

Nothing had changed since the 404 page I hit on August 13.

This is not a Covered List story, and that is what makes it uncomfortable. The Osmo 360 II carries FCC equipment authorization 2ANDR-OQ0022512, granted December 21, 2025, one day before the Covered List cutoff ended new approvals for DJI hardware. The Osmo Pocket 4P and the Mic Mini 2S skipped America this summer because they legally had to. The Osmo 360 II skipped America on Thursday because DJI chose to, or because of a reason DJI has not given.

The press release does not mention the United States once. It says DJI “today launches Osmo 360 II to the global market,” and then points to a Berlin trade show and a protection plan. Trump’s Section 232 drone tariffs took effect the same day, and a handheld 360 camera falls outside them as written. On paper, nothing in American law stopped this launch. Nothing in DJI’s launch reached America anyway.

The Berlin Launch Adds Care Refresh And A Lens Price, Not New Hardware

The IFA release restates the Chinese spec sheet with two additions: DJI Care Refresh now covers the camera, and replacement lenses sell as a kit at £35 in the UK and €39 in the eurozone. Every other hardware number is unchanged from the August 13 launch DroneXL already covered.

DJI’s headline claim is a 1-inch square HDR sensor it calls an industry first, rated by DJI’s own lab at 14.5 stops of dynamic range against 13.5 on the first Osmo 360. The battery figure did not move: DJI still quotes 100 minutes of continuous 8K30 recording, the same number the original carried, with a 22-minute charge to 80 percent. DJI’s footnote says every figure was measured on a production unit under controlled conditions. Independent tests from European reviewers started publishing Thursday. DroneXL has not handled the camera.

The lens kit matters more than its price suggests. The original’s fixed lenses were the complaint that followed it for a year, and a €39 pair turns a scratched dome from a repair ticket into a spare in the bag. Care Refresh covers two replacements over one year or four over two.

DJI will show the camera at IFA Berlin from September 4 through 8 at booth H20-129, alongside the Pocket 4P and Mic Mini 2S that Americans also cannot buy.

DroneXL’s Take

On August 25 I suspected DJI was sequencing markets rather than skipping one, and I read the 7 AM Eastern time stamp on the teaser as a signal aimed at American buyers. The first half is still open. The second half was wrong.

Seven in the morning in New York is one in the afternoon in Berlin. The time stamp was pointing at a trade show, not at us.

I am putting that on the record because the pattern I got wrong is the one that matters. For a year, every DJI product that skipped America had a legal reason to. The Covered List made the Pocket 4P and the Mic Mini 2S impossible to sell here, and I have written that the ban does exactly what its critics warned. The Osmo 360 II breaks that pattern. It is cleared. It ships to Europe on a date, and DJI’s US store still does not admit it exists. The FCC is not the obstacle this time.

That leaves two explanations, and DJI has confirmed neither. One is that DJI is holding the US launch for a separate date, the way the first Osmo 360 eventually got its $549.99 American price after launching without one. The other is that DJI has decided the American market is not worth a launch while its Ninth Circuit case and the FCC’s import proceeding are unresolved, and that even a cleared product waits. My read is the second, because a company sequencing markets does not write a global launch release that never uses the words United States. I could be wrong again. I was nine days ago.

What is not in doubt is who pays. The Insta360 X6 sells in the United States at $699.99 with no flagship competitor beside it, while a British buyer gets DJI’s answer for £509 with the X6 sitting £111 higher on the same shelf. American creators have one choice at full price. Europeans have two and a discount. The Covered List’s defenders should notice that this outcome arrived without the Covered List doing anything at all.

September 15 is the date to check. If the Osmo 360 II reaches European shelves and DJI’s US store is still showing one Osmo 360, the silence stops being a launch gap and becomes a decision.

Sources: DJI (press release, PR Newswire, September 3, 2026), DJI Store (US Handheld product listing), FCC ID database (Osmo 360 II equipment authorization), Engadget (European pricing), TechRadar (UK pricing and X6 comparison)

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

Utah SAR Captain To FCC: Your Drone Ban Will Cost American Lives

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:45:00 GMT

Captain Kyle Nordfors, the drone coordinator for Weber County Search and Rescue in Utah and UAS chair of the Mountain Rescue Association, has told the Federal Communications Commission that its proposal to pull import and sales clearance from foreign-made thermal and LiDAR drones will cost American lives, and that no aircraft built in the United States can replace what his team flies today. He filed the comments in PS Docket 26-189 today and shared the full text with DroneXL.

Nordfors is not a lobbyist. He has flown for a major US airline since the early 2000s, has flown drones since 2010, and has run Weber County’s drone program since 2018. I have covered his team’s rescues for years, and his comments read the way he talks on a mountain: short, blunt, and aimed at whoever is making the decision.

The comment window in the docket closes at midnight Eastern tonight. His full text is below, along with how to file your own.

Nordfors Says No American Drone Matches What Rescue Teams Fly Today

Nordfors writes that no American-made drone gives search and rescue teams the capability they fly with today, and that the proposal would set the country back an easy ten years. He names Skydio directly, says he has tested the domestic alternatives, and offers to demonstrate the gap to the Commission.

The comments go after the premise of Public Notice DA 26-758 rather than its details. The Bureau’s economic analysis tentatively concludes that domestic production is more prevalent in the higher-end categories the proposal covers, so the ban will not bite hard. Nordfors answers that the companies positioned to benefit charge three to eight times the price for aircraft he says are less than half as capable, and that volunteer rescue teams cannot afford them at any multiple. He calls the proposal the weaponization of the FCC for political reasons and says the agency has blood on its hands from the December Covered List action that already blocks new DJI and Autel models.

That is a harder register than anything in DroneXL’s own filing today, and he knows it. He signs the letter with an open invitation to any FCC official to come to Utah and watch a search.

Weber County’s Record Is The Evidence Behind The Comments

Weber County Search and Rescue is one of the most documented drone rescue programs in the country. Nordfors has estimated his team’s DJI enterprise aircraft were instrumental in saving 25 to 30 lives, and the program cut average search time from four hours and 35 minutes to 58 minutes.

Those numbers are not new to DroneXL readers. Our December 2025 investigation into DJI drones saving American lives documented the North Fork rescue where a pre-release DJI Matrice 30T thermal camera found a stranded snowboarder within ten minutes of launch, in the dark, with ice forming on his skin. The search-time figure comes from the program data we reported in March, when the DRONERESPONDERS SAR Working Group he helps run took up pilot training.

His standing in the field is not in question either. Nordfors took the Unsung Hero Award at the Global Search and Rescue Excellence Awards in London in May 2025 for the drone work behind those rescues. And he has been on the record against the domestic manufacturers pushing for these restrictions since long before this docket existed; his Drones After Dark appearance in March 2025 went at Skydio and BRINC by name.

The proposal reaches every aircraft his team flies. DroneXL walked through the seven categories on August 16: any drone carrying a thermal sensor, any drone carrying LiDAR, docking stations, spray platforms, and anything at or above 55 pounds. A Matrice 30T is a thermal drone. So is every replacement Weber County would buy.

Comments Close At Midnight Eastern Tonight

Comments in PS Docket 26-189 are due by midnight Eastern tonight, September 2. The FCC denied three extension requests on August 28. Filing takes about ten minutes through the Electronic Comment Filing System, and DroneXL published a step-by-step guide alongside its own comments earlier today.

The short version: open the ECFS Express form, type 26-189 in the Proceeding(s) box and select the docket when it appears, enter your name and address, paste your comment, and submit. If you have cost figures or a document to attach, use the Standard form instead. The FCC’s own guidance puts the electronic cutoff at midnight Eastern on the deadline date.

Nordfors’s letter is a model for what a public safety comment can be when it skips the policy argument. Fewer than 3,000 comments were on file as of Tuesday, against nearly half a million certificated pilots. If you run a rescue drone, the Bureau has never heard from you unless you have filed.

The Full Text Of Nordfors’s Comments

What follows is the complete text of the comments Kyle Nordfors shared with DroneXL, reproduced as written. It runs under 700 words and cites no regulation. What it carries instead is a rescue pilot’s direct account of what the equipment does on a mountain at night.

To whom it may concern

The use of UAS in Search and Rescue has fundamentally transformed the manner in which rescues are conducted. The entire format and schedule of actionable items has changed and due to this technology we are saving more lives, and getting the rescuers home to their families faster and safer. Thanks to these super capable and affordable platforms like DJI and Autel, we are saving countless American lives.

The recent actions taken by the FCC not allowing certain new drones to be certified will cost American lives. The FCC frankly has blood on their hands for this political decision. This new proposal will thicken the amount of blood it currently has by risking even more American lives. This proposal is not needed, it is fueled by unproven political ideology, supported by those seeking monetary gain, and makes the American public less safe.

Let me be as clear as I can as an aviation and search and rescue expert: this proposal will cost American lives. Period. This proposal is the definition of overreach and is the weaponization of the FCC for political reasons. The day will come (if not already) where a public safety official could have saved an American life but couldn’t because of a political decision like this took the most capable tool from his/her hands.

The language in this proposal is overbroad and strips public safety officials of life saving equipment. This proposal is going to do so much harm and provide little to no good for the American public. The only ones who will gain are those companies in position to make money charging 3-8X the price for a less than half as capable aircraft.

The fun term in DC lately has been “American Drone Dominance” which was obviously coined by someone who knows very little about the UAS industry. There is no current American made drone that will provide Search and Rescue practitioners with that which we need to execute our missions as we are doing so today. This proposal will set our country back an easy 10 years in capability and reliability. The American drone company Skydio for example (who is a supporter and has lobbied for this type of action) will not come close to giving us half of our capability, nor can search and rescue volunteers afford it. The other US based companies fall into the same category, I have tested this, I have proven it, and I’m happy to show you. This proposal will only take life saving tools from those that volunteer their time to save lives.

For those of you at the FCC reading these comments, if at any time your loved ones go lost in any one of our many beautiful wilderness areas or mountains, you will want those that are looking for them to have the best and most capable/reliable equipment to bring your loved ones home. This proposal and past actions greatly decrease the odds of success.

I implore you at the FCC and other governmental agencies, do not take these actions, do not risk American lives. This faux act of American superiority or faux patriotism will have deadly consequences.

American lives over American profits. American lives over political agendas. Do the right thing. I leave an open invite to any member of the FCC to come to our mountains in Utah to see exactly why we need these aircraft to save lives.

Sincerely

Captain Kyle Nordfors Weber County Search and Rescue UAS Coordinator Mountain Rescue Association UAS Chair

DroneXL’s Take

Strip the heat out of Nordfors’s language and what remains is a testable claim: no domestic aircraft at a volunteer team’s price does what his DJI fleet does, and he will prove it to anyone from the Bureau who flies to Utah. The Commission’s economic analysis assumes the opposite.

I will say the obvious thing first. “Blood on their hands” is not how you win a regulator over, and a Bureau attorney reading this letter will discount the tone before reaching the substance. Nordfors knows that and wrote it anyway, and I understand why. He is the one who gets the call at 2 a.m. when a snowboarder is missing in North Fork. The staff who drafted DA 26-758 are not.

The substance survives the tone. The notice asks, in its own words, whether domestically produced alternatives exist for the military-grade categories and whether the economic impact is minor and contained. Nordfors is a Part 107 pilot with an airline captain’s certificate and a decade of documented rescues who says he has flown the alternatives and they fall short, and he offers a live demonstration on the record. That is exactly the kind of evidence the Bureau invited. If it wants to conclude that substitutes exist, it now has to explain why it did not take the invitation.

“American lives over American profits. American lives over political agendas,” he writes. My read is that this sentence will be quoted back at the Commission by more than one commenter before the record closes tonight, and that the Bureau’s order, whenever it comes, will have to address the public safety record directly rather than through the tentative finding that recreational users are the only ones affected. Whether anyone from the FCC ever stands on a Utah ridgeline with him is the thing I will be watching for.

If you fly for a rescue team, a fire department, or a sheriff’s office, file your comments today. Nordfors has shown what a filing looks like when it stops arguing policy and starts describing the work. Yours does not need to match his tone. It needs your county, your aircraft, your searches, and what happens to the next one if the equipment cannot be replaced. The docket closes at midnight Eastern. Write it now.

Sources: Comments of Captain Kyle Nordfors, filed in PS Docket No. 26-189, September 2, 2026, shared with DroneXL; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870; FCC Order DA 26-892; FCC guidance on filing comments

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

FCC Drone Ban Comments Close Tonight. Here's What I Filed

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:12:00 GMT

DroneXL filed formal comments with the Federal Communications Commission today in PS Docket 26-189, asking the agency to withdraw its proposed ban on importing and selling foreign-made drones that carry thermal sensors, LiDAR or docking stations, and to replace it with data-security standards that apply to every manufacturer. The comment window closes tonight.

I have covered this docket since the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau opened it on July 21, and the filing below is the argument I have been building in that coverage, put on the record where the Commission is legally required to consider it. The full text follows, unedited, so that any pilot, department or business still writing a comment this evening can see what one looks like and borrow whatever helps.

Disclosure, as in the filing itself: DroneXL has been a partner of the Drone Advocacy Alliance since June 2024. The Alliance receives sponsorship from DJI. DroneXL is not paid by DJI, and these comments are mine.

The Filing Asks The FCC To Narrow Its Definition And Test Every Drone

The filing asks the Commission to decline the prohibition as written and to narrow its seven-category definition of military-grade, which currently reaches any drone carrying a thermal sensor, any drone carrying LiDAR, and every docking station. In place of an origin-based ban, it proposes verifiable data-security requirements for every manufacturer.

The core of the argument is a contradiction inside Public Notice DA 26-758 itself. In its economic analysis the Bureau tentatively concludes the ban will not hurt consumers because recreational pilots are unlikely to fly military-grade aircraft. Under the definition written a few pages earlier, the DJI Air 3S, Mini 5 Pro, Avata 360 and Neo 2 are all military-grade, because each carries a short-range LiDAR sensor for obstacle avoidance. DroneXL laid out that overlap on August 16. The filing asks the Commission to reconcile the two positions before adopting either.

The eight specific requests at the end of the letter cover the rest: carve-outs for public safety agencies and Part 107 operators, an exemption for sub-250 gram and entry-level aircraft, completion of the security review Congress asked for in Section 1709 of the FY2025 NDAA, and, if any restriction survives, grandfathered repair parts and a wind-down of at least 24 months.

Comments Close Tonight And The FCC Already Refused To Extend

Comments in PS Docket 26-189 are due today, September 2, 2026. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau and the Office of Engineering and Technology denied three requests to extend the deadline on August 28, and by Tuesday evening fewer than 3,000 comments had been filed.

The deadline comes from the Federal Register notice published August 3 at 91 FR 48870, which set comments at 30 days from publication. The extension requests came from DRONERESPONDERS, the Commercial Drone Alliance and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the Bureau turned all three down in Order DA 26-892. Electronic comments count as filed on the deadline date if they land by midnight Eastern time, per the FCC’s own filing guidance.

Greg Reverdiau of Pilot Institute told the Commercial UAV Expo keynote audience Tuesday that about 2,600 comments were on file when he last counted, against nearly half a million certificated remote pilots. DroneXL reported that count and his reaction to it last night. One comment for every 180 Part 107 holders is the record the Bureau will read.

How To File Your Own Comment In Docket 26-189

Filing takes about ten minutes. No lawyer is required. The FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System accepts a short typed comment through its Express form, or a longer document with attachments through its Standard form, and both land in the same public docket under proceeding number 26-189.

For a typed comment, open the ECFS Express form. In the Proceeding(s) box, type 26-189 and select the entry for PS Docket No. 26-189 when it appears; the docket must show as selected before you move on. Type your name into Name(s) of Filer(s) and press Enter so it registers. Add your email, which ECFS does not publish, and your mailing address, which it does. Paste your comment into the Brief Comments box, tick the acknowledgment, and submit. Save the confirmation number the system returns.

For anything longer than a few paragraphs, or if you have replacement quotes, invoices, fleet inventories or grant paperwork to put on the record, use the Standard filing form instead. Enter the same proceeding number, choose Comment as the filing type, and upload a PDF. The Bureau asked in the notice for exactly this kind of data: how many aircraft are already in the country, what they cost to replace, and what shipments are en route.

On what to write, Reverdiau’s advice from the Tuesday keynote is the best I heard all week. Describe your own operation: what the drone does, who depends on the work, what losing import clearance for it costs you, in dollars where you have them. A paragraph about your county’s search-and-rescue team carries more weight than a page of policy. The Drone Advocacy Alliance keeps a step-by-step filing page, and the Drone Service Providers Alliance has been walking operators through this for weeks. Everything you file is public, including the name and address you enter.

The Full Text Of DroneXL’s Comments

What follows is the complete text of the comments DroneXL filed on September 2, 2026, reproduced as filed. Readers who want a structure to borrow are welcome to it, though the notice asks for operators’ own cost figures, which no publication can supply on their behalf.

Comments of Haye Kesteloo, Editor-in-Chief, DroneXL

Before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC 20554 In the Matter of: Seeking Comment on Prohibiting the Importation and Marketing of Certain Foreign-Produced UAS and UAS Critical Components PS Docket No. 26-189, Public Notice DA 26-758

Filed: September 2, 2026

Who I am and why I am filing

I am the founder and Editor-in-Chief of DroneXL.co, an independent drone news publication based in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Since April 2020 I have published more than 8,400 articles on drone technology, regulation, public safety programs and the drone industry, reaching roughly 5.5 million readers a year, most of them American pilots, first responders, small business owners and drone service providers. I have covered this docket since the Bureau and OET opened it on July 21, 2026, and I have read Public Notice DA 26-758 in full.

Disclosure: DroneXL has been a partner of the Drone Advocacy Alliance since June 2024. The Alliance receives sponsorship from DJI. DroneXL is not paid by DJI and these comments are my own.

I am not writing to argue that national security is unimportant. I am writing because the Commission has chosen the widest possible reading of the interagency determination it is acting on, and the record should reflect what that choice costs the people who fly this equipment for a living.

1. The proposed “military-grade” definition is written backward from the hardware, not forward from the threat

The notice defines seven categories: aircraft at or above 55 lb (25 kg), aerosol dispensers, thermal imaging sensors, LiDAR sensing, docking stations, aircraft built to carry a defense article, and swarming systems.

Two of these describe genuinely specialized capabilities. The others describe the standard toolkit of American commercial and public-safety aviation:

LiDAR. Category four reaches any drone that integrates LiDAR sensing. That includes the DJI Air 3S, Mini 5 Pro, Avata 360 and the 151-gram Neo 2, each of which carries a short-range, forward-facing sensor with a published range of roughly 0.3 to 25 meters. Its function is low-light obstacle avoidance. It cannot map terrain, penetrate foliage or navigate a GPS-denied environment, which are the justifications the notice cites for including LiDAR at all. A palm-launched selfie drone is not a defense article because it can avoid a tree branch.

The notice also ignores what obstacle-avoidance LiDAR is actually for on working aircraft: it is the sensor that lets a pilot fly safely indoors, inside a burning or collapsed structure, through smoke, and in the low-visibility conditions where cameras alone fail. Firefighters use it to clear a building before sending people in. Inspectors use it inside tanks, culverts and warehouses. Removing it does not make anyone safer. It makes the drone more likely to hit something, and it takes away the tool that keeps a human out of the dangerous space.
Thermal imaging. A thermal sensor on a sub-2 kg aircraft is how volunteer search-and-rescue teams find a lost hiker after dark, how fire departments read hot spots through smoke, and how roofing and solar contractors find moisture and failed panels. It is a life-safety tool before it is anything else.
Docking stations. Docks are the backbone of Drone as First Responder programs across the country. Pulling their import and marketing clearance does not protect those departments; it strands them.
Aerosol dispensers and 55 lb aircraft. These are agricultural spray platforms. American farmers adopted them because they are cheaper, safer and more precise than the alternatives.

The Commission should narrow the definition to capabilities that are actually specialized: exclude short-range obstacle-avoidance sensors from the LiDAR category entirely, and carve out thermal sensors and docking stations used by public safety agencies and Part 107 commercial operators.

2. The notice contradicts itself, and the cost analysis rests on the contradiction

In the economic section, the Commission tentatively concludes the prohibition will not materially harm consumers because recreational users are “unlikely to fly military-grade UAS.” Earlier in the same document it writes a definition under which four of the most popular consumer drones sold in this country are military-grade because they carry obstacle sensors.

Both statements cannot be true. Either the definition is wrong or the cost analysis is. The Commission should reconcile them on the record before adopting either.

3. Domestic fundraising is not domestic replacement capacity

To argue the ban will not bite, the notice points at capital raised by Zipline, BRINC, Skydio, Anduril, Neros, Red Cat and Unusual Machines. Raised capital is not shipped product. None of these companies today offers a sub-250 gram consumer aircraft, a $500 thermal-capable small drone, or a dock-based DFR system at the price and volume American departments and small operators currently buy. Several of them do not sell to consumers at all.

A survey of 885 operators presented at Commercial UAV Expo this week found 45.8% of them frozen in wait-and-see mode on purchasing. Pilot Institute told the same audience it expects a drone hiring cliff within two to three years as training pipelines dry up. That is the economic effect of this proceeding before a single rule has been adopted.

I ask the Commission to require actual evidence of available, price-comparable domestic substitutes for each capability category before removing the imports that category depends on.

4. Affordable small drones are an entry point into aviation. This proposal closes it.

The notice treats a $300 consumer drone as a national security artifact. In practice it is the first aircraft most future aviation professionals ever fly.

I have interviewed hundreds of drone service providers, public safety pilots and industry hires over six years of covering this industry. The pattern is consistent: they started as hobbyists with an affordable drone or an RC model aircraft, earned a Part 107 certificate, took on paying work, and built a business or a career from there. Many went on to manned aviation, aerospace engineering, or public safety flight programs. Nearly half a million Americans now hold a Part 107 certificate. Very few of them started with a $10,000 enterprise platform.

The aircraft that feed that pipeline are precisely the ones this definition sweeps in: sub-250 gram drones and entry-level consumer models whose only “military-grade” feature is a short-range obstacle sensor. Remove them from the American market and there is no affordable domestic substitute for a teenager to learn on. The Academy of Model Aeronautics is asking its members to file in this docket for the same reason: model aviation has been the on-ramp to aviation careers for a century, and this proposal narrows that on-ramp without ever acknowledging it exists.

Pilot Institute told the Commercial UAV Expo keynote audience this week that it expects a drone hiring cliff within two to three years. The damage from this proceeding lands on the next generation of pilots, technicians and small business owners, not on the current one. The Commission’s cost analysis does not account for a single dollar of it.

5. Volunteer fire departments and search-and-rescue teams cannot absorb this

The public agencies with the most to lose here are the ones with the least money. Volunteer fire departments and search-and-rescue organizations across rural America run on donations and small grants. They adopted thermal-equipped small drones because a $5,000 to $7,000 aircraft with a 640×512 radiometric sensor, such as the DJI Mavic 3 Thermal or Autel EVO II Dual 640T, gave them a capability that previously required a helicopter they could never afford. That capability finds a missing child in a cornfield after dark, spots a hiker with a broken leg below a ridgeline, and shows a firefighter where the fire is inside a roof before anyone climbs onto it.

Domestic and Blue UAS thermal platforms with comparable capability run two to four times as much: roughly $7,000 to $9,000 for a Parrot ANAFI USA, $12,000 to $20,000 or more for Skydio X2 and X10 thermal packages before recurring software licensing, and $13,000 to $18,000 for BRINC LEMUR 2 and Teal 2 class aircraft. For a paid metropolitan department that is a budget line. For a volunteer department it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. When the aircraft they own fails and no replacement or repair part can be imported, the capability is gone, and the people it would have found are not found.

The Commission should not adopt a rule whose predictable effect is that fewer Americans are located alive by the volunteers who go looking for them.

6. The security concerns are real. A sales ban is the wrong instrument for them.

The concern with foreign-produced drones is data: where flight logs, imagery and telemetry go, and who can reach the aircraft through its firmware. Those are engineering problems with engineering answers, and the Commission has the authority to demand them as a condition of equipment authorization, for every manufacturer regardless of country of origin:

Mandatory local data mode and no-network operation, verifiable by independent test.
Third-party code and firmware audits, with results filed with the Commission.
Data residency requirements: telemetry and imagery stored on U.S. infrastructure, or not at all.
Flight-log encryption and operator ownership of all data.
Disclosure and independent verification of every remote-command pathway.

Congress asked for exactly this kind of review in Section 1709 of the FY2025 NDAA. No agency completed it, and DJI was added to the Covered List by default in December 2025 rather than by a finding. The Commission is now proposing to build a retroactive sales ban on top of a designation that was never the product of a technical review. Doing the review, and writing performance-based security standards from what it finds, would make every drone sold in America safer. Banning one country’s hardware makes Americans buy less capable equipment, or none, and leaves the security question unanswered for everyone else.

7. Revoking authorizations the Commission already granted destroys regulatory certainty

Every aircraft this proposal reaches passed the Commission’s own equipment authorization process. Operators, dealers and public agencies bought in reliance on that. A 180-day wind-down after Federal Register publication does not come close to covering inventory already inside the country, shipments in transit, or the depreciation schedules on fleets that departments financed over multiple years. If the Commission proceeds at all, it should grandfather all previously authorized models indefinitely for import of repair parts and accessories, allow existing U.S. inventory to be sold through without a deadline, and set any wind-down for new units at no less than 24 months.

8. What I am asking the Commission to do

Decline to adopt the proposed prohibition as written.
Narrow the “military-grade” definition to exclude obstacle-avoidance sensors, and carve out thermal sensors, docking stations and agricultural platforms used by public safety and Part 107 operators.
Reconcile the definition with the economic analysis before taking further action.
Replace an origin-based ban with performance-based, verifiable data-security requirements that apply to every manufacturer seeking equipment authorization.
Complete the security review Congress asked for and put its findings on the public record.
Exempt sub-250 gram aircraft and entry-level consumer models from any prohibition, and account in the cost analysis for the loss of the aviation training pipeline they support.
Exempt public safety agencies, including volunteer fire departments and search-and-rescue organizations, from any restriction on acquiring, repairing or replacing thermal-equipped aircraft and docking stations.
If any restriction proceeds, grandfather repair parts and existing inventory and extend the wind-down to at least 24 months.

The drones in these categories put out fires, find missing people, inspect bridges and power lines, spray crops, and pay the mortgages of thousands of small American businesses. They are also the first aircraft the next generation of American pilots will ever fly. Security concerns about them deserve a serious answer. Taking them away from a volunteer firefighter and a fourteen-year-old in a backyard is not one.

Respectfully submitted,

Haye Kesteloo Founder and Editor-in-Chief, DroneXL.co Croton-on-Hudson, New York haye at dronexl dot co

DroneXL’s Take

The FCC will decide this proceeding on the record it holds at midnight tonight, and that record is thin: a few thousand filings from an industry of nearly half a million certificated pilots. The next few hours decide whether the operators this rule reaches are in the file at all.

I will grant the Bureau this much. The data question behind the Covered List is a real one, and I have never argued otherwise. Where flight logs go and who can reach a drone’s firmware are legitimate things for a regulator to demand answers about. That is why the filing asks for those answers as a condition of authorization for every manufacturer, rather than a ban on one country’s hardware that leaves the question open for everyone else.

What I don’t accept is the way this document was assembled. A definition that makes a 151-gram selfie drone military-grade, sitting a few pages from an economic finding that consumers won’t be affected because they don’t fly military-grade drones, is not a security analysis. It is a list of DJI’s product features with a rationale attached afterward. If the Bureau adopts the rule without fixing that contradiction, the order will say so in its own text, and that is the first thing I will read when it lands.

On timing, I am working from one precedent, so treat this as a bet rather than a forecast. The Bureau’s Huawei-era prohibition went from proposal on March 27 to adoption on June 26, three months, and took effect on July 16. On that pace a decision in this docket before the end of the year is the expectation, and the 180-day wind-down would then run into mid-2027. Anyone counting on this proposal to stall in the file should read that earlier timeline first.

File your comments today. Not this weekend, not after the analysis lands, today, before midnight Eastern. If you fly a thermal drone for a volunteer department, run a dock for a DFR program, or map with LiDAR to pay your bills, the agency has asked you in writing what losing that equipment costs, and the how-to above takes ten minutes. The filing you just read is one entry. Yours is the one the Bureau hasn’t seen. Go write it, then send three other pilots the link.

Sources: FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870; FCC Order DA 26-892 denying extension requests; FCC guidance on filing comments; FCC Electronic Comment Filing System; DroneXL comments as filed, September 2, 2026

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

DJI Fills Its Vegas Booth With Drones The FCC Proposed Banning

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:37:00 GMT

On the day public comments close on the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to pull “military-grade” drones off the American market, DJI Enterprise has filled Booth 903 at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas with hardware that fits the proposed definition item for item.

The Matrice 400 on the front table integrates a rotating LiDAR. The Zenmuse L3 beside it is a LiDAR payload. The Zenmuse H30 series and the Matrice 4T carry thermal imagers. The Dock 3 under the “Dock Solutions” sign is a docking station. The FlyCart 100 on its own plinth weighs up to 330 pounds (149.9 kilograms) at takeoff and carries LiDAR of its own. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 are due tonight. The Section 232 tariffs that put a 100% duty on thermal imagers, docking stations and aircraft over 55 pounds take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern tomorrow, the show’s final day.

I photographed the booth twice: half-built on Tuesday afternoon, before sitting through the afternoon half of DJI’s FlightHub 2 dock-automation workshop, and fully dressed on Wednesday morning. DJI is a Silver sponsor of the show. The stand is a catalog of exactly what the FCC has asked the public whether it should remove.

Every Aircraft On Booth 903 Falls Inside The FCC’s Proposed Definition

Public Notice DA 26-758 opened PS Docket 26-189 on July 21 and defines military-grade drones by capability in seven categories: 55 pounds or more at takeoff, economic-poison spraying, thermal imaging, LiDAR, docking stations, defense-article integration, and swarming. Each item on DJI’s stand meets at least one of them.

The FCC published the proposal in the Federal Register on August 3 at 91 FR 48870, which set the September 2 deadline. It would prohibit the continued importation and marketing of previously authorized foreign-made drones and components that meet the definition, with a 180-day wind-down after any final rule. Marketing, in FCC usage, covers advertising, distribution, sale and lease. DroneXL walked through the seven categories in August, and by Tuesday’s keynote about 2,600 comments had been filed.

The Matrice 400 is the surprise. DJI’s own specification page lists a horizontal rotating LiDAR and an upper LiDAR as part of its obstacle sensing, so the bare airframe qualifies under the LiDAR category before any payload is attached. On the stand it carried a Zenmuse P1, a plain RGB mapping camera, and it still falls inside the definition. The Zenmuse L3 on the next display stand is a 1535-nanometer long-range LiDAR unit. The Zenmuse H30 series placard sells the payload on its infrared performance, which is a thermal imager. The Matrice 4T sat on the table with a speaker and spotlight kit and a Manifold 3 compute module on its back, its thermal gimbal pointed at the aisle. A Matrice 4D-series aircraft sat inside the Dock 3, and the dock itself is the fifth category by name.

DJI Matrice 4 Series aircraft and a Manifold 3 onboard computer on display at the DJI Enterprise booth during Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Photo credit: DroneXL

The FlyCart 100 hits two categories on its own. DJI’s wall graphic puts the aircraft at 330 pounds (149.9 kilograms) with a 187-pound (85-kilogram) payload, six times the FCC’s 55-pound threshold, and lists LiDAR among its sensors.

None of this is banned today. Every product on the stand received its FCC equipment authorization before the December 22, 2025 action that added all foreign-made drones to the Covered List, which is why they can still be imported and sold. Docket 26-189 is the proposal to close that door. As the operators on Tuesday’s Covered List panel spent their opening minutes explaining, the proposal does not ground aircraft already owned. It reaches future import and marketing clearance, which turns a repair queue into a dead fleet over two or three years.

DJI Matrice 4 Series enterprise drones on display at the DJI Enterprise booth at the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Photo credit: DroneXL

The FlyCart 100 Carries An FCC Grant And Still No US Price

DJI’s heavy-lift delivery drone holds FCC grant SS3-T100A2411, shared with the Agras T100 spray platform, so its presence in a US exhibit hall breaks no equipment rule. What it lacks is a US price. DJI’s American product page offers a dealer contact form and nothing to add to a cart.

When DJI launched the FlyCart 100 globally on December 4, the aircraft did not come to the United States. DroneXL’s June 2025 report on the China unveiling noted that US regulatory approval was pending. The FCC grant shows the equipment authorization already existed, so whatever kept the aircraft out of the US in December, it was not a missing FCC approval. Nine months later the aircraft sits under a “DJI Delivery” sign in Las Vegas with an orange winch line coiled beneath it.

Whether a US buyer can place an order is a question the booth does not answer. DJI’s US site takes contact details rather than orders. At least one US dealer lists the aircraft online. What can be said is that DJI chose to make an aircraft it has not sold in America the physical centerpiece of its American show presence, on the day the FCC’s record closes on whether aircraft of exactly that class should be barred from import.

DJI Spent Tuesday Teaching The Dock Automation The FCC Proposes To Cut Off

The show’s official program lists DJI’s Tuesday session as “DJI Enterprise Workflows: L3 LiDAR Data Processing & FlightHub 2 Dock Automation,” a $20 four-hour workshop split into a Terra and Modify block for L3 point clouds and an afternoon block on periodic dock automation with the FlightHub 2 Analyzer module.

A DJI Dock 3 sits open on display at the DJI Enterprise booth during Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Photo credit: DroneXL

I sat in the second half. The workshop listing matches what ran: dated dock flights over a desert mine site, auto-diffed for change, with the software flagging a new excavator, a new loader, added vehicles and a removed haul truck in plain English, then generating a PDF report with aircraft and object coordinates. One button converts every flagged change into a tracked defect with a severity level from one to five. On Wednesday a slide on the booth’s right-hand screen billed the same product as “FlightHub Analyzer: Automating Your Data Pipeline,” credited to Michael Li of DJI Enterprise.

Two of the seven proposed categories describe that workflow. The dock is category five. The L3 that produced the point clouds in the first block is category four. DJI took twenty dollars a head to teach American operators how to run both, at a show where the docket closing that night asks whether either should still be importable. In 2024 DJI’s session at this same show was a four-hour hosted demo included free with a conference pass.

The booth also carries a “Free Trial” QR for FlightHub 2 and DJI Terra. Software is the one part of DJI’s stand that none of the seven categories names.

DJI showed off its Matrice 4 Series enterprise drones, along with FlightHub 2 and DJI Terra, at its booth during the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Photo credit: DroneXL

The 100% Tariff Tier Hits On The Show’s Final Day

President Trump’s August 13 proclamation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act applies to drones entered for consumption from 12:01 a.m. Eastern on September 3, the closing day of Commercial UAV Expo. Aircraft at or under 55 pounds draw 25%. Thermal imagers, docking stations and heavier aircraft draw 100%.

DroneXL covered the proclamation when it was signed and explained on Tuesday why shelf prices will not jump overnight: the duty attaches at import, and inventory already inside the country clears at the old rate. The capability lines match the FCC’s. One proceeding proposes to remove thermal, dock and heavy-lift hardware from the market. The other doubles its landed cost while the first is pending.

Run the booth against the tariff schedule and the result is the same as against the docket. The FlyCart 100, the Dock 3 and the thermal Matrice 4T all sit in the 100% tier, and so does any H30T. The Matrice 400 with the P1 sits at 25%, but nobody buys an M400 to fly an RGB camera. Its buyers fly the H30T and the L3.

A stack of Drone Advocacy Alliance flyers sat on the front table beside the Matrice 400 brochures, pointing visitors to the group’s filing guide for 26-189. Disclosure: DroneXL has been a Drone Advocacy Alliance partner since June 2024, and the Alliance receives sponsorship from DJI. DJI told its own customers on August 7 that the proposal could amount to a ban on future sales of currently available products, calling it “a total reversal from the FCC’s previous position.”

DroneXL’s Take

I walked into Caesars Forum on Tuesday expecting a diminished DJI, and I said so before the booth was finished. Silver sponsor, one stand, a paid workshop. That read was wrong, and the corrected version is more interesting than the one I went in with.

DJI did not shrink its American presence. It curated it. Every object on that stand is something the FCC has proposed to bar from import, and DJI put them under lit signage at the industry’s largest US show in the final hours the public record was open. I don’t read that as an accident of inventory. The FlyCart 100 alone had to be brought to a market where it has no list price. You do not ship a 330-pound aircraft to Las Vegas to fill a corner.

My read is that DJI is making the argument the FCC asked for, in three dimensions. The Public Notice explicitly requests data on whether comparable domestic alternatives exist and what removal would cost. Booth 903 is the exhibit: a 59-minute-endurance airframe with power-line-grade obstacle sensing, a 1535-nanometer LiDAR rated to map 39 square miles (100 square kilometers) a day, a dock that runs a first-responder program without a pilot on site, and a cargo drone lifting 187 pounds. Walk the rest of the hall and price the domestic equivalents. That is the comment DJI cannot file in words.

Yes, the FCC’s concern is real in one narrow sense. Docks and heavy-lift airframes are the platforms a hostile actor would want, and the December National Security Determination does not become false because the hardware is useful. But the proposal does not distinguish a dock at a Texas police department from a dock anywhere else, and a rule that reaches a roof-inspection LiDAR and a fire department’s thermal camera by category reads as industrial policy with a security label. DroneXL made that argument on August 10, and nothing filed since has changed it.

The number that matters tonight is not on the booth. It is the comment count. Pilot Institute’s Greg Reverdiau told the Tuesday keynote that roughly 2,600 comments had been filed against close to half a million Part 107 holders, one in every 180, and that the figure should be 100,000. “Not doing anything doesn’t do anything,” he said. DJI has built its US show presence out of proposed contraband. The operators who fly that equipment for a living have until midnight to say what losing it costs, and most of them have said nothing. Watch the final tally when the FCC’s system closes; whether it lands nearer 3,000 or 30,000 will tell you how seriously the Commission can afford to take the industry’s objection when it drafts the final rule.

Sources: Federal Register 91 FR 48870, FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, Commercial UAV Expo workshop program, DJI Enterprise Matrice 400 specifications, FCC equipment authorization SS3-T100A2411, DJI Viewpoints

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

GoPro Calls The $700 ILS 'Available' A Day After Selling 90% Of Itself

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:58:00 GMT

GoPro declared the MISSION 1 PRO ILS available Wednesday morning, one day after agreeing to sell 90% of the company to Starman Optical. The 6.95-ounce (197-gram) camera pairs an 8K 1-inch sensor with a Micro Four Thirds lens mount and sells for $699.99, or $599.99 for yearly GoPro subscribers at renewal.

The announcement came in a post on X that opened with the line that this is not an action camera but a compact cinema camera. GoPro’s own store told a slower story. As of Wednesday morning, the ILS product page still carried a Pre-Order button under a banner reading “now available to pre-order,” and B&H’s listing has been showing an estimated ship date of September 6.

Last week’s pre-order piece argued GoPro had built a cinema camera and left drone pilots to notice it on their own. GoPro’s product page says otherwise, and the first independent review says the camera’s stabilization has a problem at exactly the shutter speeds filmmakers use.

GoPro Lists FPV Drones First Among The ILS Mounting Use Cases

GoPro’s product page for the MISSION 1 PRO ILS leads its mounting section with FPV drones, ahead of vehicle mounts, cable cams and handheld work. The copy sells the body’s size and weight as flight time and agility, a direct appeal to cinelifter pilots flying RED and Blackmagic brains today.

The page calls the ILS “the size and weight sweet spot for longer flight times and tighter maneuvers.” The last GoPro built around an aircraft was the Hero10 Black Bones in April 2022, a 54-gram stripped body that ran off the flight pack. The ILS is a different animal: it has a battery, two screens, a weatherproof shell and a lens mount, and it weighs more than three Bones.

A manual cine lens going onto the MISSION 1 PRO ILS mount. There are no electronic contacts, so focus and aperture are set by hand on every lens. Photo credit: GoPro

The rest of the offer is unchanged from the pre-order announcement DroneXL covered on August 26. The mount has no electronic contacts, so it takes only manual-focus lenses with manual or fixed apertures no wider than f/4.5. The GP3 processor and 50MP sensor carry over from the MISSION 1 PRO, with 8K60, 4K240 and a 10-second 1080p960 burst, Open Gate up to 8K30, and a 2150mAh Enduro 2 battery rated for more than three hours of 4K30. Micro Four Thirds lenses are sold separately. GoPro’s spec sheet lists the crop factor at about 2.7x without stabilization and 3x with it, so a 17mm MFT lens frames like a 50mm on full frame.

PetaPixel Found HyperSmooth Blurs Footage At Cinema Shutter Speeds

PetaPixel’s launch-day review reports that HyperSmooth, the digital stabilization that let naked GoPros replace gimbals on FPV aircraft, produces constant blurring at 24 frames per second with a 1/48-second shutter. The reviewer recommends switching stabilization off below 1/120 of a second and using a gimbal for moving shots.

That finding matters more for aircraft than for anything else on GoPro’s use-case list. FPV cinema work typically runs at 24 or 25 frames per second with a 180-degree shutter, the exact setting PetaPixel’s review says breaks the stabilization. The workaround, a faster shutter, gives up the motion blur that separates cinema footage from action-camera footage in the first place. PetaPixel also puts the stabilization crop at 10% and the body weight at 7.3 ounces (207 grams), 10 grams above the 197 on GoPro’s spec sheet. DroneXL has not weighed one; the two figures stand as published.

The review’s verdict lands on a narrow audience of Super 16 lens owners and slow-motion specialists, calls the ILS “more of a curiosity than a compelling product” for everyone else, and notes that once a cage, phone and lens are attached, the rig is no smaller than a Panasonic GH7 or Sony FX30. Image quality is identical to the MISSION 1 PRO that DC Rainmaker reviewed for DroneXL in June, and PetaPixel calls it very good, with cleaner shadows at 4K than at 8K.

The ILS Ships Into A Company That Just Agreed To Sell 90% Of Itself

GoPro announced a definitive merger agreement with Starman Optical on Tuesday. Starman pays GoPro shareholders $285 million, or $1.14 per share, retires about $92 million of GoPro debt, and leaves existing holders with roughly 10% of a combined company aimed at defense, government, aerospace and AI data center markets.

DroneXL covered the deal terms Tuesday night. GoPro says it will keep fully supporting existing consumer products and its subscription platform. It has not committed to another Hero generation or a MISSION 2, and the company warned in June that there was substantial doubt it could keep operating for twelve months. Closing is expected by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and a stockholder vote.

The title card from GoPro's MISSION 1 PRO ILS launch video. The camera is the last one GoPro brought to market before agreeing to the Starman merger. Photo credit: GoPro

The ILS is the last camera GoPro launched before agreeing to the merger. Anyone buying one this week is buying into a product line whose majority owner changes by New Year’s, if the vote and the regulators go Starman’s way.

DroneXL’s Take

I said last week that GoPro built this camera and left the drone people to find it. I was wrong. GoPro’s own product page puts FPV drones at the top of the list, in exactly the language a cinelifter builder would use. That is the company reading the room correctly, and it is the most direct pitch GoPro has made to pilots since the Bones.

Now read PetaPixel’s stabilization finding against that pitch. HyperSmooth is why a GoPro works on a quad without a gimbal. If it blurs at 24p and a 180-degree shutter, then the one feature that made GoPro the default FPV camera does not survive the move to cinema settings, and a cinelifter pilot who buys the ILS for cinema settings is back to a gimbal or a fast shutter. Neither is the promise. I have not flown one, so I am reporting PetaPixel’s test rather than my own, and I would want to see the same test run at 6mm and 7.5mm, the focal lengths GoPro actually profiled, before calling it settled. A set of 12mm to 35mm primes is not how anyone flies.

The availability announcement itself is thin. Pre-order units were due to start shipping this week on GoPro’s own August 26 timeline, and Wednesday’s post says “now available” while the store button still says pre-order. That is a marketing calendar, not a shipping event. What is real is the date: GoPro pushed its newest camera to market the morning after it agreed to sell 90% of the company to a photonics firm chasing defense contracts. GoPro’s promise covers existing products. The ILS became an existing product about 24 hours after the promise was made.

The $699.99 body with a real lens mount is still the cheapest way to get interchangeable glass onto an FPV airframe, roughly a tenth of a Komodo brain. That argument held last week and holds today. Whether it survives the year is now a question for a proxy statement.

Sources: GoPro, GoPro on X, PetaPixel.

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

DJI Mavic 4 Pro Shot Out of Alabama Sky, Shooter Risks 20 Years

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:59:00 GMT

A real estate photographer in Athens, Alabama, says someone shot his DJI Mavic 4 Pro camera drone out of the sky in the middle of a paid job. Michael Gardner was photographing a house off Lindsay Lane on Saturday, August 29, when he heard a gunshot, watched his video feed go haywire, and saw the $5,000 aircraft fall. He got it back two days later, after someone else found it.

Nobody has been identified as the shooter. Gardner is putting together a police report and says he is contacting the FAA office in Birmingham, which puts this case on a path DroneXL has documented for six years now: a camera drone gets shot, and the person holding the gun learns, usually too late, that federal law treats the act like firing at any other aircraft.

Gunshot Ends a Routine Real Estate Shoot in Athens

Michael Gardner was photographing a home for a client off Lindsay Lane in Athens, Alabama, on Saturday when a single gunshot ended the flight. His video feed scrambled, the DJI Mavic 4 Pro dropped, and the $5,000 camera drone stayed missing for two days until someone else found it.

Gardner told WAFF 48 the flight was routine work for a listing client until the shot rang out. He watched the crash happen through his controller.

The recovered DJI Mavic 4 Pro sits on a truck bed cover in Athens, Alabama, after it was shot out of the sky. Photo credit: Michael Gardner / WAFF

The Mavic 4 Pro is DJI’s flagship camera drone, built around a 100-megapixel Hasselblad main camera, and it is exactly the kind of tool a working real estate photography business puts in the air every day. The hostility Gardner ran into is not new to him either. He says property owners have threatened to shoot down his drone before for flying over their land. Aerial photography is baked into residential listings at this point, and agents expect it on every property, which means working photographers spend their days over exactly the kind of neighborhoods where someone might reach for a gun instead of a phone.

Federal Law Puts a Drone in the Same Category as a Jetliner

Shooting at a drone is a federal crime. Title 18, Section 32 makes it a felony to willfully damage, destroy, or disable an aircraft, and the FAA counts a camera drone like the Mavic 4 Pro as an aircraft. The maximum penalty runs to 20 years in prison.

That is not a technicality dreamed up by drone lawyers. The statute is the same one that protects airliners, it carries fines on top of prison time, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said publicly for years that firing at any aircraft, crewed or not, is illegal and dangerous. State charges tend to stack on top. A Florida man got four years in prison for shooting down a sheriff’s drone, and another Florida shooter paid $5,000 in restitution after blasting a Walmart delivery drone out of the sky. Last September, a search-and-rescue drone took a bullet in Maine while looking for two missing beagles, and that case drew a federal investigation. Courts have not been sympathetic to the shooters who get caught.

Gardner also pointed at a danger most trigger-pullers never consider: the drone itself. A bullet through a lithium battery can ignite it, he warned, turning the falling aircraft into a fire hazard. If a burning drone lands on a roof and the house goes up, he noted, the person who fired the shot owns that outcome too.

The Airspace Myth That Keeps Getting Drones Shot

Gardner says property owners have threatened him before, convinced they own the sky over their land. They own less of it than they think. The Supreme Court settled in 1946 that navigable airspace is a public highway, though landowners keep rights in the immediate reaches.

Gardner put it his own way: “they don’t own the airspace above the tallest blade of grass in their yard,” he told the station. He is mostly right. United States v. Causby, the 1946 Supreme Court decision that still governs the question, gives a landowner the airspace immediately above the property that they can reasonably use, and it made everything above that a public route. What no court has ever granted a property owner is the right to fire a weapon at an aircraft passing overhead.

Pilots on the receiving end have options that do not involve becoming a headline themselves. DroneXL keeps a standing guide on what to do when someone shoots at your drone: document everything, land safely, and get law enforcement and the FAA involved. Gardner is following that script almost exactly.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered drone shootings for six years, and the pattern never changes: an annoyed property owner, a gun, and a felony nobody seems to know exists. If Gardner’s account holds, whoever fired in Athens committed a federal crime over a real estate listing.

The property owners have a point, up to a point. Causby does protect the space right above your land, and a camera drone loitering low over a backyard is a legitimate grievance. The answer to that grievance is a police report or an FAA complaint. It is never a trigger.

What happens next in Athens is genuinely open. No shooter has been named, and small local cases like this often die quietly unless investigators find the person who fired. When they do find one, the record says prosecutors move: four years in a Florida prison for one shooter, court-ordered restitution for another. If a name surfaces in Limestone County, expect charges to follow that same track.

Gardner told WAFF the whole episode could have been avoided with a conversation. He is right, and it cuts both ways. A real estate photography pilot knocking on a door before a shoot costs nothing. A neighbor asking a question instead of shouldering a rifle costs even less, and it keeps everyone, and every DJI Mavic 4 Pro, out of the line of fire.

Source: WAFF 48

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

Germany Blames Russia For Leipzig Drone Bomb, Closes Consulate

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:11:00 GMT

Germany formally blamed Russia on Tuesday for the attempted drone bomb attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, four weeks after an explosives-laden quadcopter was found beside a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 on the apron and defused. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters in Berlin that police work, the pattern of the offense, and intelligence findings together establish Russian responsibility.

The response is diplomatic. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said the Russian consulate general in Bonn will close on September 18, the Russian House cultural center in Berlin will follow, and the Russian ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry. Germany will also push for new European Union sanctions, tighten entry controls for Russian nationals, and increase pressure on the shadow fleet moving Russian oil.

It is the attribution Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised a week ago, and the answer DroneXL’s reporting on this case has pointed toward since mid-August.

Dobrindt Says The Drone’s Components Match Known Russian Operations

Investigators tied the Leipzig device to Moscow through its hardware. Dobrindt said the drone’s configuration, components, explosives, and detonator are “known to us from other Russian hybrid operations and its war against Ukraine.” He raised Germany’s threat assessment from general to high the same day.

The device showed a high degree of technical expertise and careful planning, Dobrindt said, while the execution appears to have been left to low-level agents. Intelligence points to people acting on behalf of Russian state entities, the Associated Press reports, though the minister did not specify which ones (the GRU has been the working answer since a US intelligence assessment reached ABC News in August). CNN reports that a US defense official in Europe said the US had assessed the drone belonged to a Russian intelligence service.

The physical case had been building toward this for a month. What began as a single armed drone found beside the An-124 on August 4 grew into three drones and two different explosives, including roughly 50 grams of suspected hexogen recovered from a field beside the airfield, plus a DNA trace matching the July 2024 parcel-fire plot at the same airport.

Berlin Closes The Bonn Consulate And Goes After The Shadow Fleet

Germany’s countermeasures reach Russian state presence on German soil and Russian revenue at sea. The Bonn consulate closes September 18, the Russian House in Berlin loses its operating contract, and Berlin will propose new EU sanctions over hybrid attacks while stepping up checks on Russians entering the country.

Wadephul framed the package as deliberate restraint rather than a ceiling. “Germany can at any time show a stronger reaction,” he told ARD television, adding that a stronger one is not needed at this point. The Russian embassy in Berlin stays open.

The shadow fleet pressure lands on familiar ground. The EU has already sanctioned hundreds of tankers suspected of moving Russian oil outside Western restrictions, and a July report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies tied shadow fleet vessels to drone incidents off Sweden and Belgium. EU foreign ministers meet in Ireland on Wednesday, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said they will prepare a joint response. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte wrote on X that “NATO stands in full solidarity with Germany after the Russian hybrid attack in Leipzig.”

Moscow Denies The Attack As Poland Reports Fresh Sabotage

Russia rejected the attribution within hours. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova dismissed the accusation as a pretext invented to escalate tensions and promised a “fitting response” to the closures, per state agency Tass. President Vladimir Putin went further in Kyrgyzstan: “Well, the proof has been planted.” He offered no evidence.

The denial arrives against a long ledger. The Associated Press has tracked around 200 incidents of sabotage and malign activity across Europe that Western officials blame on Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, from warehouse arson to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Leipzig/Halle itself was hit in 2024, when an incendiary device ignited in a freight container before it could be loaded onto a cargo plane. The airport hosts NATO’s Strategic Airlift International Solution and the Antonov freighters that move equipment for Ukraine, which is why a drone bomb on its apron read as an attack on the alliance’s logistics rather than on a German airfield.

Hours before Berlin’s announcement, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland had been hit by new sabotage within the past dozens of hours, one day after a fire destroyed warehouse facilities at drone maker WB Electronics in Skarżysko-Kamienna, causing at least $4 million (15 million zlotys) in damage. Polish prosecutors opened an investigation into foreign intelligence involvement.

DroneXL’s Take

Three days ago I wrote that when Merz’s promised attribution came, the interesting number would be how many launch sites investigators could place. The attribution came Tuesday and that number didn’t. Germany named a state and zero people. No arrests, no indictments, not even which Russian entity.

Dobrindt did not specify which. What Berlin announced instead is a list of things Germany can reach: a consulate, a cultural center, visa desks, tankers. You close a consulate when the people who flew the drone are somewhere you can’t get to.

To be fair to the investigators, the case is live at the federal prosecutor general, naming operatives can burn sources, and the public backbone of the attribution, the DNA match to the 2024 parcel plot and the US signature analysis, has been on the record for weeks. The trust Berlin is asking for is smaller than a bare “intelligence findings” line suggests.

Here is what I think this day actually changes for our industry. September 1, 2026 is the date a NATO government formally attributed an explosive drone attack on a civilian airport to a state. Not sightings, not incursions, not a mystery over Munich. A bomb on an apron, pinned on Moscow in a government statement. Every airport security budget in Europe just got its justification document, and so did every legislator who wants broader counter-drone powers. Germany’s own intelligence-powers reform, approved by cabinet in mid-August, still needs the Bundestag, and it will now move through parliament with Leipzig attached to it. The risk I keep flagging holds: rules written in the week after an attack tend to land on the pilots who didn’t carry it out.

Watch Wednesday’s EU foreign ministers meeting in Ireland for whether the sanctions package names GRU units and officers or stays at tankers and visa lists. That is the tell for whether “Russian state entities” ever becomes people with names, or whether Leipzig joins the roughly 200 incidents on the AP’s ledger that everyone attributes and nobody answers for.

Sources: Associated Press, CNN

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

GoPro Sells 90% Of Itself For $285 Million And Pivots To Defense

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:10:00 GMT

GoPro is selling 90% of itself. The action camera maker announced a definitive merger agreement Tuesday with Starman Optical, a privately held US optical-photonics company. The deal pays GoPro shareholders $285 million, or $1.14 per share, and repays roughly $92 million of GoPro debt at closing. It also points the 24-year-old brand at AI data center, government, defense, and aerospace markets.

Shareholders keep about 10% of the combined company, which stays publicly listed on Nasdaq. Both boards have approved the transaction, and closing is expected by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals and a GoPro stockholder vote.

For the pilots who have been strapping GoPros to quads since before HyperSmooth existed, the share price is a side plot. The real question is whether the company that opened pre-orders on a 197-gram cinema camera last week still plans to be building cameras five years from now.

GoPro shareholders receive an aggregate cash payment of $285 million, or $1.14 per share, subject to adjustment for net working capital at closing. They keep roughly 10% of the outstanding shares, GoPro’s $92 million in debt is repaid in full, and the company remains listed on Nasdaq.

The terms come from GoPro’s announcement, which says Houlihan Lokey delivered a fairness opinion to GoPro’s board and that a proxy statement will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of the stockholder vote.

The rescue arrives late in a long slide. GoPro was worth $4 billion on its first day of trading in 2014 and has since lost about 96% of that value, with quarterly revenue down more than 80% from its late-2014 peak of $633.91 million, according to CNBC, which points at competition from DJI and Insta360 along with a surge in memory chip prices tied to the AI buildout. In June, GoPro warned there was substantial doubt it could keep operating for another twelve months. In July, founder Nick Woodman said he would put in $20 million of his own money to keep the company going while it hunted for a buyer.

GoPro Promises Support For Existing Cameras As The Roadmap Turns To Defense

GoPro says it will keep fully supporting its existing consumer products and its subscription and cloud platform. Starman’s US-made optical transceivers, components that move data as light, join the portfolio. After closing, the combined company plans to push its optics into defense, government, robotics, and aerospace markets.

The asset underneath the deal is intellectual property. GoPro has accumulated more than 2,500 US patents across 24 years of optics and imaging work, and it has sold from that pile before: Skydio bought 114 GoPro patents in November 2024, stocking up on imaging IP for its own government-focused business. Starman Holding chief executive Charles Tebele says the plan now is to bring production of critical optical components back to the United States.

Woodman framed the merger as a way for GoPro to grow into a leading American imaging supplier, “addressing important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure.” (In 2026, that is the sentence an American hardware company says when it needs capital.)

For pilots, the near-term lineup holds. The Mission 1 series GoPro introduced in April keeps shipping, the interchangeable-lens ILS model opened pre-orders last week at $699.99, and the verdict from DC Rainmaker’s Mission 1 Pro review in June stands until the hardware changes.

Markiplier Bought 8.5% Of GoPro Weeks Before The Deal Landed

Bloomberg reported on August 30 that YouTuber Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, had become GoPro’s largest single shareholder with an 8.5% stake. Two days later, the merger handed every GoPro holder $1.14 per share in cash plus a small piece of the combined company.

Fischbach is not a professional investor and not an activist. He is a GoPro user who filmed behind-the-scenes footage for his $51 million indie hit Iron Lung on the cameras. He looked at the stock price and decided the market had it wrong. “I want the company to succeed,” he told Bloomberg, which put GoPro’s entire stock market value at about $110 million that same Sunday. Two days later, Starman agreed to pay $285 million in cash for 90% of it.

The deal math implies roughly 250 million shares outstanding, which would put about $24 million in cash on an 8.5% position, plus a residual stake near 0.85% of the combined company if the retained 10% is spread evenly across existing holders.

DroneXL’s Take

GoPro built the camera that made modern FPV cinema possible. Its endgame, apparently, is selling optics into AI data centers and defense programs.

It beats the alternative. A company that warns of substantial doubt about surviving twelve months, with its founder writing a $20 million personal check to buy time, is usually headed for a delisting and a bankruptcy filing. Against that, $1.14 per share in cash with the debt cleared is a soft landing. Most going-concern stories end worse.

Look at what Starman is actually paying for, though: 2,500 patents and 24 years of optics engineering, wrapped in national-security language, because retail action cameras are the reason the stock sat under a dollar in the first place. Skydio quit consumer drones in 2023 to chase government work, then picked up a stack of GoPro’s imaging patents a year later. Now GoPro takes the same exit. That is two American companies inside three years that competed with Chinese consumer hardware at retail, lost, and rebranded as national-security assets. My read: the defense wrapper is where American consumer hardware goes when the retail fight is over, and no merger has ever produced a better camera.

The word I will be watching is “existing.” GoPro promises to support existing consumer products, which is not the same sentence as a commitment to another Hero generation or a Mission 2. This audience has been dropped before: the Karma drone was recalled weeks after its 2016 launch, and GoPro shut the whole drone program down by January 2018. The timing stings now because GoPro just shipped its most drone-relevant hardware since the Hero10 Black Bones in April 2022, a 197-gram interchangeable-lens body aimed straight at the payload problem cinelifter pilots have been solving with camera brains that cost ten times as much. The proxy statement headed to the SEC before the stockholder vote, with closing slated by year-end, is where we learn whether cameras are still the business or just the branding.

Source: GoPro, Bloomberg, CNBC.

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

Drone Tariffs Hit September 3. Here's Why Prices Won't Jump 25% Overnight

Russ 51 Drones — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:34:00 GMT

Let’s talk about the drone tariffs that kick in on September 3rd, because I think there is still some confusion out there about how this is going to affect those of you looking to purchase a drone soon. Starting on September 3rd, the United States is imposing a new tariff on foreign-made drones entering the country. For most consumer drones, we’re talking about a 25% tariff. For certain types of drones, that tariff jumps all the way to 100%. So does that mean on September 3rd you’re going to open up Amazon, look at a DJI drone that cost $1,000 the day before, and suddenly see a price of $1,250? Not necessarily. And that’s what I want to explain, because there’s an important difference between when this tariff officially takes effect and when we may actually start seeing higher prices.

What The Section 232 Proclamation Actually Does

On August 13th of this year, President Trump signed a proclamation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act dealing specifically with drones and drone components. The administration says that America’s dependence on foreign drones and components represents a national security concern, and that the United States needs to substantially increase its own drone manufacturing capability. Is that ever going to happen? I certainly hope so.

Beginning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on September 3rd, certain foreign-made drones entering the United States become subject to these new tariffs. DroneXL published a full breakdown of the proclamation when it was signed.

25% For Consumer Drones, 100% For Thermal And Heavy Aircraft

For drones weighing 25 kilograms — about 55 pounds — or less, the new tariff is generally 25%. Obviously that includes practically every consumer drone that most of us fly. Your Mini series drones, the Mavic series, the Air series, FPV drones, and so on are nowhere near 55 pounds. There are some exceptions depending on the country of origin, but when we’re talking about something like a Chinese-manufactured DJI drone, the important number is 25%.

There’s another category that’s much more significant. Drones weighing more than 55 pounds are subject to a 100% tariff. And here’s something particularly important for commercial and enterprise operators: drones that integrate thermal imagers are also in that 100% category. So you don’t necessarily need a giant 55-pound drone to get hit with the higher rate. That’s potentially a very big deal for enterprise users, inspection pilots, and public safety drone operators.

The Biggest Misconception About September 3rd

Now let’s get to what I think is probably the biggest misconception about all of this. The government isn’t adding a 25% drone tax to your Amazon shopping cart on September 3rd. The tariff applies when the drone is imported. The presidential proclamation says these tariffs apply to goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on September 3rd.

So imagine there are thousands of DJI drones already sitting in warehouses around the United States. Those drones may have already entered the country and cleared customs before the new tariff became effective. The government doesn’t suddenly go back on September 3rd and apply this new import tariff to those already-imported drones simply because they’re still sitting on a shelf. That means retailers can potentially continue selling existing inventory at their current prices. I would not expect every drone on Amazon to suddenly jump exactly 25% at midnight on September 3rd.

What Happens When Retailers Restock

The more interesting question is what happens when retailers and distributors replenish their inventory. Let’s use a simplified example. Suppose an importer brings in a drone after September 3rd with a customs value of $1,000. A 25% tariff would represent another $250 in import duties. But that doesn’t automatically mean the retail price goes from $1,000 to $1,250.

The manufacturer could absorb some of that cost. The importer or the distributor could also absorb some of it. Retailers could adjust their margins, or they could pass most or all of that additional cost along to us. Granted, that is usually the case — it gets passed on to the consumer. But not always. Sometimes they absorb a little bit of it. It’s really going to depend on the manufacturer, the retailer, inventory levels, and the competition.

So instead of thinking of September 3rd as a giant switch where every drone price changes overnight, think of it as the beginning of a transition. Existing pre-tariff inventory gets sold, new post-tariff inventory starts arriving, and that is where we’re going to find out how much these tariffs ultimately show up in retail prices. For popular drones with limited inventory, that could happen relatively quickly. For models where retailers already have a lot of inventory inside the United States, it could take considerably longer.

This Tariff Stacks On Top Of Existing Duties

Also — and this is very important — this new tariff doesn’t necessarily replace every other tariff or import duty already being charged. The proclamation specifically says these duties apply in addition to other applicable duties, taxes, fees, and charges, except where otherwise specified.

So saying DJI drones are just going to cost 25% more is oversimplifying what’s happening. The actual import cost can depend on where the product was manufactured, how it’s classified, and what other duties already apply. And again, the retail price ultimately depends on how much of those costs are passed on to us.

The National Security Argument And The Onshoring Question

According to the White House, this is about national security and rebuilding America’s domestic drone industry. The administration argues that the United States is too dependent on foreign sources for both complete drones and critical drone components. The goal of these tariffs is to encourage more drones — and eventually more of the components inside these drones — to be manufactured here in the United States. It remains to be seen if anybody’s going to step up to the plate. Whether tariffs actually result in a competitive American consumer drone industry is a much bigger question, and that’s something we’re going to have to watch over the next few years.

Component Tariffs Arrive February 9, 2027

Another thing: these tariffs don’t apply just to whole drones. They’re also going to apply to components. But that doesn’t kick in until February 9th of 2027. Here’s the thing, though — that’s going to apply to all components coming from foreign countries. So even if we have an American manufacturer, they still have to source their parts from somewhere. Those costs get passed on to the American drone maker, and then those increase our costs as well.

So we not only need somebody to step up to the plate and start making American drones, we also need someone to start making drone components here in the United States. We’re talking about a long time, you guys. We’re at least five, six, or seven years away from anything happening where we have an American drone on the shelf that we can buy. It’s very, very frustrating for consumers everywhere, but in particular for people whose livelihoods rely on these drones. It’s a tough situation.

My Takeaway If You’re Buying A Drone Right Now

Here’s my takeaway. If you’re already planning to purchase a foreign-made drone, I would definitely pay attention to pricing over the next few weeks. If you buy in the next couple of days, you’re going to be totally safe — prices are still fine for a couple more days. There are some drones that I think are going to last longer than others, and I think those are the ones we should be focusing on, because if we buy a long-lasting drone now that’s going to go at least five or six years, then we might be okay.

There could still be a substantial amount of inventory already in the US that entered before these tariffs took effect. I have no idea how many drones are sitting on shelves, but my guess is it’s not very many, because of the customs and border situation that’s been going on over the past year. I’m going to be watching these prices closely, especially DJI’s prices, to see if and when we start seeing noticeable increases. And I’ll keep all of you updated, because between the tariffs, the FCC restrictions, the Covered List, and everything else happening in the drone industry right now, buying a drone in the United States has become considerably more complicated than it used to be.

So here’s something for you to comment on, and we can have a discussion about it: do you think these tariffs will actually help create a competitive American drone industry, or are they simply going to make drones more expensive for American consumers?

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Russ. Watch the full video on the 51 Drones YouTube channel, and find more of Russ’s work on his DroneXL author page.

DRONERESPONDERS Honors The Texas Program Behind 100,000 Sorties

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:28:00 GMT

A drone program that did not exist four years ago flew its 100,000th sortie last Monday. On Tuesday afternoon the man who built it collected the highest honor in American public safety aviation.

DRONERESPONDERS presented the Eric Talley Public Safety UAS Excellence Award to Greg Whiting, technology integration cell director and sUAS program manager for the Texas Military Department, on the opening day of Commercial UAV Expo at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Roughly 80 full-time pilots now fly for the program he stood up from nothing.

The number that should interest anyone running a drone unit is not the 100,000. It is the rate underneath it. Whiting told the room that about one sortie in every 30,000 involves pilot error.

Matt Rowland, last year's recipient, presents the award as the slide names Greg Whiting of the Texas Military Department. Photo credit: DroneXL

A General Asked For A Drone Program By The End Of The Month

Whiting’s account of the founding was the best story told on that stage all day. In March 2022 the commanding general of the Texas National Guard walked into his office and asked him to start a drone program.

Whiting asked when it needed to be operational. The answer was that there was no rush, but the end of the month would be great. The timing lines up with the record: Major General Thomas Suelzer became the 53rd adjutant general of Texas on March 14, 2022.

His first move was to call for help rather than to buy hardware. He went to the Texas Department of Public Safety, to Texas Parks and Wildlife, and to the Austin Fire Department, and once they finished laughing at the timeline they handed over their curricula, sat him in on their classes and walked him through their failures as well as their successes.

There is a neat circle in that. The Texas DPS drone program was being run at the time by Jason Day, who has since built it into the largest public safety UAS operation in the country at roughly 400 aircraft and 400 operators, and who now serves as deputy director of DRONERESPONDERS. Day opened Tuesday’s ceremony from the podium before Rowland presented the award Whiting accepted.

The One-Week Course Became Three Weeks

Whiting took the roughly one-week public safety course he had been given and, in his words, militarized it. That meant stretching it to three weeks and adding to it until graduates could fly at night in congested airspace, work a radio, and talk ground teams onto a target.

The first class graduated in under a year. Within that same year the Texas Military Department had one of the largest drone programs in the state.

The course now draws instructors from state, local and military partners, and it is the mechanism behind the safety numbers rather than a separate achievement. Whiting was direct about the culture he wanted. These are not, he said, little plastic things you buy on Amazon. They are aircraft in the national airspace, flown by pilots who are treated as pilots. He accepted the award in a Technology Integration Cell polo rather than a suit, which felt about right for the point he was making.

Greg Whiting, in the Technology Integration Cell polo, takes the award from Matt Rowland on the Commercial UAV Expo stage. Photo credit: DroneXL

The Mission Numbers Sit Alongside The Safety Numbers

The program’s primary work is supporting border operations, and Whiting gave the audience the figures behind the 100,000 sorties. About 47,000 of those flights produced an interaction with some form of illegal activity. He put the share of detected activity that gets away at roughly 1%, and said the program has contributed to the seizure of close to $10 million in narcotics.

The other half of the mission is disaster response. When catastrophic flooding hit central Texas, the Texas Military Department was part of the aviation response, and DRONERESPONDERS credited Whiting with coordinating crewed and uncrewed aircraft over the same ground while keeping responders separated in the air. Airspace deconfliction during a flood is the least glamorous work in this field and the fastest way to kill someone if it goes wrong.

Those figures come from Whiting and the award citation rather than an audited public record. The safety rate is the one an outside program manager would most want confirmed independently.

The Award Carries A Boulder Officer’s Name

Officer Eric Talley was killed on March 22, 2021, responding to the King Soopers shooting in Boulder, Colorado, one of ten people who died that day. He was 51 and the father of seven, and he had joined the Boulder Police Department in 2010 after a career in information technology.

He joined the department’s newly formed drone program in 2017 and took part in more than 100 drone operations, and his chief later described him as the technical guru of the department. DRONERESPONDERS, which runs under the Airborne International Response Team, describes him as Boulder PD’s UAS program manager and presents the award each year in his name.

Last year’s recipient handled this year’s presentation. Matt Rowland, a 20-year Fort Wayne Police Department veteran who helped found its Air Support Unit in 2017 and worked with DRONERESPONDERS and the FAA to secure the first Part 107 waiver permitting drone-as-first-responder flights without a visual observer, retired last month and took the award to Whiting on stage. Sponsors including Axon, BRINC, DroneSense, Esri and Pilot Institute funded the award package.

Whiting told the room the program has flown 100,000 sorties with roughly one pilot error in every 30,000. Photo credit: DroneXL

DroneXL’s Take

I have watched this award go to a city cop, a fire captain and now a National Guard officer, and the through-line is the same every time. None of them won it for buying drones.

Whiting won it for the boring part. A three-week course when a one-week course was on offer. A safety management system in a program that scaled fast enough to justify skipping one. Pilots assigned and treated as pilots. The 100,000 number will get the headlines, and the 1-in-30,000 is the one that should get the phone calls from other program managers.

The border mission is going to make some readers uncomfortable, and I am not going to pretend the politics are not there. What I will say is that the award is for how the flying gets done, and a program that puts 80 full-time pilots in the air every day without a serious accident record is a public safety achievement regardless of what you think of Operation Lone Star. DroneXL covered the Texas floods response and the same aircraft and the same crews did that work too.

The part I keep returning to is the phone call. Faced with an impossible deadline, Whiting did not issue an RFP. He called three agencies that had already made the mistakes and asked them what went wrong, and they told him. That is the thing this industry does better than almost any other, and it is exactly what DRONERESPONDERS built its search and rescue working group to do at a national scale.

Watch what happens to that three-week curriculum next. DRONERESPONDERS launched a two-day Program Managers Course at this week’s show after its own 2025 survey found training to be the biggest gap in public safety UAS, and the agencies now holding more than a thousand drone-as-first-responder waivers need a syllabus more than they need another airframe. Whiting has one that has survived 100,000 flights. Somebody should ask him for it.

Sources: DRONERESPONDERS award presentation, Commercial UAV Expo, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; DRONERESPONDERS Eric Talley Award; Texas Military Department Office of the Adjutant General

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

FCC Drone Deadline Is Tomorrow. Fewer Than 3,000 Comments Are In.

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:14:00 GMT

American drone pilots have until Wednesday to tell the Federal Communications Commission what pulling thermal imaging, LiDAR and docking stations off the market would cost them. Greg Reverdiau told the Commercial UAV Expo keynote audience on Tuesday that about 2,600 comments had been filed when he last counted, and that the total was probably near 2,800 by the time he took the stage. There are close to half a million certificated remote pilots in the United States.

At 2,800 that is one comment for every 180 people holding a Part 107 certificate. Reverdiau said the number should be 100,000, and he is right that the gap is the whole problem.

The agency builds its record from what gets filed. Domestic manufacturers with a commercial interest in removing foreign competition are filing. If working operators do not, the FCC will reasonably conclude that its proposed definition of military-grade drew no serious objection from the people who fly this equipment for a living.

The Filing Window Closes Wednesday At Docket 26-189

Public Notice DA 26-758 opened PS Docket No. 26-189 on July 21 and was published in the Federal Register on August 3 at 91 FR 48870, which set the September 2 deadline. DroneXL walked through the seven capability categories in August. They reach any drone carrying a thermal sensor, any drone carrying LiDAR, docking stations, agricultural spray platforms, and aircraft at or above 55 pounds.

Filing takes minutes. Go to the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System at fcc.gov/ecfs, choose Express Filing, enter proceeding number 26-189, select the docket when it appears, and write. A standard filing accepts an attachment if you have cost figures, invoices or inventory records to put on the record.

One correction worth carrying into your comment: this proposal does not ground the aircraft you already own. The operators on the Covered List panel Tuesday morning spent their opening minutes killing that misconception. What it reaches is import and marketing clearance going forward, which is what turns a repair queue into a dead fleet over two or three years.

Personal Detail Is What Actually Moves A Regulator

Reverdiau’s advice on how to write the thing was the most practical guidance anyone gave at the show. Describe your own operation. How you use the drone, what the restriction costs you, who depends on the work, what happens to your employees and your bills. Not a policy argument. Your situation, with numbers.

That matches what the notice itself asks for. The Commission requested data on fleet counts, replacement costs, inventory already inside the country and shipments en route. It is asking a question that only operators can answer, and most of them are not answering it.

Two organizations will help you write one. The Drone Advocacy Alliance has a step-by-step filing page, and the Drone Service Providers Alliance, led by Vic Moss and Kenji Sugahara, has been pushing operators toward this deadline for weeks. DJI pointed its own customers at the docket on August 7. Disclosure: DroneXL has been a Drone Advocacy Alliance partner since June 2024, and the Alliance receives sponsorship from DJI.

There is a second deadline behind this one. ET Docket No. 21-232, covering changes to the FCC’s equipment authorization process, closes September 8, and the Academy of Model Aeronautics is asking members to file in both.

Pilot Institute Has Already Read The Filed Comments

Reverdiau said Pilot Institute analyzed the roughly 2,600 comments on file at the time and found the industry standing squarely against what the Commission has proposed. He plans to update that analysis once the window closes. His wider argument from the same keynote is that the damage from these restrictions lands on the next generation of pilots rather than this one.

DroneXL will do a deeper dive into that analysis when Pilot Institute shares the full data next week. A structured read of who filed, what they said and which arguments recur is exactly the kind of thing the record needs and nobody else is producing.

DroneXL’s Take

One in 180. That is the participation rate of an industry that spent all of Tuesday telling itself this is the most important fight it has.

I understand the fatalism. Nearly half of the operators surveyed for this week’s keynote are in wait-and-see mode, and a comment feels like shouting into a filing cabinet. “Not doing anything doesn’t do anything,” Reverdiau said, and that is the entire argument.

Here is the part people miss. The FCC is legally obliged to consider the record in front of it. Not the mood of the industry, not what got posted in a Facebook group, not how many people are annoyed. The record. Comments filed by the deadline are the only thing that exists in a legal sense, and everything filed after tomorrow night exists nowhere.

If a thermal camera finds missing people in your county, if a dock runs your department’s first-responder program, if LiDAR is how you pay for your truck, the agency has asked you in writing what losing it costs. You have one evening. Answer it, and then go tell three other pilots to do the same.

Sources: FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870; Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; Academy of Model Aeronautics

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

Pilot Institute Warns Of A Drone Hiring Cliff In Two To Three Years

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:59:00 GMT

The people who will staff American drone companies in three years are supposed to be buying their first aircraft right now, and Greg Reverdiau does not think they can. The Pilot Institute co-founder spent the second half of the Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote on Tuesday, in conversation with Commercial UAV News content manager Matt Collins, arguing that restricting cheap foreign drones has quietly closed the door that every working pilot in the room walked through.

He put the question to the audience directly. Anyone planning to hire in the next two or three years should ask where those candidates are going to come from, because the affordable aircraft that produced the current generation is getting harder to buy and the parts to build one are getting harder to find.

Reverdiau spent 17 years managing flight schools before drones, part of 24 years in aviation. He has watched a regulator constrict a training pipeline once already.

Availability Is The Barrier Nobody Ranked High Enough

Asked which obstacle the industry is underrating, Reverdiau went straight past cost to supply. His reading of the policy history is that the move away from foreign-made drones was supposed to come with a ramp-up period for domestic manufacturing. That ramp never really happened, and the schedule has since accelerated. What follows, in his view, is a stretch where the aircraft are not there at all, or are there in quantities too small for the people who need them.

The scale is the part that gets lost. Roughly half a million people hold remote pilot certificates in the United States, a figure in line with the FAA’s own forecast of 472,269 by 2028. Part 107 turned 10 last week. A large share of the aircraft those pilots bought in the early years are reaching the end of their service lives at the same moment replacements are hardest to source, and the domestic component gap DroneXL documented in August explains why a fast substitution is not available.

He does not expect the policy to reverse, and said anyone waiting for that should look harder at the data.

The Wait-And-See Group Is Caught In A Loop With No Exit

The survey Commercial UAV News presented earlier in the same hour found 45.8% of respondents taking a wait-and-see approach to fleet procurement. Reverdiau declined to call that a mistake, and instead described the trap it sits inside.

Take what he calls the 95% of users, the individual Part 107 operators flying relatively affordable aircraft precisely because they are affordable and available. Tell them to wait, and they risk being caught without a working platform. Tell them to buy now, and the compliant option may cost several times more while doing less of the job. Meanwhile the manufacturers who would build the cheaper replacement cannot justify the production line until the orders exist.

“It’s a snake eating its tail,” he said, and then admitted he does not know the answer. An industry figure with a training company to sell could have offered a tidy five-step plan. He said instead that the loop is real and nobody has broken it.

More Than 80% Of Today’s Pilots Started On A Cheap Foreign Drone

Reverdiau cited a Pilot Institute survey from last year in which more than 80% of respondents said they entered the field on an affordable foreign-made drone. Most of the rest built their own. Both of those doors are narrowing at once, since the components for a home build are now as hard to source as a finished aircraft.

The organization has surveyed this ground before. Its survey of 8,056 operators, first reported in December, found 70% running fleets that were entirely DJI, with 23.8% saying they would shut down their drone business outright if the restrictions held.

This is the part of the policy debate that gets almost no airtime. Argument over the Covered List has centered on the operators working today, which is where the immediate damage lands. Reverdiau’s point is that the same action removes the cheap first purchase that turns a curious teenager into a repair technician a decade later. States now building drone programs into their schools are training people who will need something to fly.

Aviation Already Ran This Experiment With The 1,500-Hour Rule

The comparison Reverdiau reached for comes from his own career. After the 2009 Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, Congress mandated higher qualification standards, and in August 2013 the minimum flight time for an airline first officer rose from 250 hours to 1,500. Regional carriers that had hired at 250 to 500 hours lost their intake overnight.

He watched the result from inside the flight schools. By his account it took roughly a decade for the pipeline to refill, and the shortage that followed reshaped hiring across the industry.

The causation is contested. The Air Line Pilots Association has argued for years that the rule made flying measurably safer and that talk of a lasting shortage was overstated by carriers who wanted the standard lowered. What nobody disputes is the mechanism Reverdiau is pointing at: raise the cost of entry and the effect surfaces years later, in who is available to hire.

A Part 107 Certificate Is Only The Starting Line

Reverdiau was blunt about what the certificate is worth on its own. He called Part 107 the license to be dangerous, a regulatory minimum rather than a qualification, and said educators including his own company have to teach well past it.

The gap is data. He pointed to Jared Janacek, president of Texas Drone Company, who teaches Pilot Institute’s mapping and surveying course and sat on the Covered List panel earlier the same morning, and described how Janacek runs two teams, one capturing data and one processing it, each trained in the other’s work. That cross-training is what the survey’s skills gap actually looks like when somebody solves it.

Part 108 Asks The Industry To Run Before It Can Walk

Reverdiau’s skepticism about autonomy is not about the technology, which he thinks largely exists. He pointed to a rail operator he saw present at this show a few years back, flying a drone from a dock over a closed yard to locate rolling stock, as the shape of the job where autonomy fits cleanly. The obstacle he named is the FAA, and specifically a risk management case nobody has finished building.

Under the proposed rule the work itself changes more than most operators realize. The person on shift is not a pilot but a supervisor of software, expected to stay alert through long stretches where nothing happens. He compared it to airport screening, where an operator spends nearly all of a shift finding nothing and the brain stops registering what it sees. Screeners rotate on short cycles for that reason, and nobody has designed the equivalent for a drone operations center.

His structural objection is that the rule skips a step. The agency’s own history moved incrementally, from waivers for every flight to Part 107, then night operations by waiver and later by regulation, then flights over people the same way. Beyond visual line of sight should follow that path, starting with manual BVLOS with a human in the loop rather than jumping to full autonomy.

That position is on the record. Pilot Institute filed a 28-page comment on the Part 108 proposal in October, opposing the elimination of non-autonomous BVLOS under Part 107 and recommending that flight coordinators hold a remote pilot certificate with an added autonomous BVLOS rating, backed by a certification standard and a written exam. Reverdiau expects the final rule in the first quarter of 2027, and said he is not frustrated by the delay because it suggests the comments are being read. The Department of Transportation has said the wait is deliberate rather than backlog.

DroneXL’s Take

The strongest argument against the Covered List got made on stage today, and it had nothing to do with DJI.

Every version of this debate I have covered since December has been about the operators flying now. That is the visible damage and it deserves the coverage. Reverdiau put his finger on the invisible part: this policy is dismantling the on-ramp. Almost everyone I know in this industry started with a cheap camera drone and a bad idea about what to do with it. Take that away and the loss shows up in 2031, when somebody is trying to staff a program and the applicants are not there.

I want to be careful with the aviation parallel, because ALPA has a real case that the 1,500-hour rule made flying safer and that the shortage was talked up by airlines who wanted cheaper labor. Fine. The safety benefit and the pipeline damage are separate accounts, and the second one came due about a decade later. Nobody in Washington in 2013 was thinking about 2023 hiring, and nobody writing drone policy now appears to be thinking about 2036.

What I keep coming back to is that the loop Reverdiau described has an obvious exit and nobody is walking through it. Somebody has to build an affordable American drone. Not a $12,000 enterprise platform with a Blue UAS listing, an actual sub-$1,000 aircraft that a 17-year-old can buy with summer job money. Until that exists, every argument about transition timelines is theater. I have been to enough of these shows to know what is on the floor, and I did not see it this morning.

Reverdiau’s Q1 2027 estimate for Part 108 is the most concrete forecast anyone gave today, and it is worth holding him to. The rule was due as a final in February 2026 under an executive order and never arrived. If it slips past March 2027, the agency will have missed its own deadline by more than a year on the rule the entire American BVLOS industry is waiting on. His walk-before-you-run argument looks better every month that happens.

Sources: Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote, Greg Reverdiau and Matt Collins, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; Pilot Institute; FAA Aerospace Forecast; Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010

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

FCC Covered List Has 45.8% Of Operators Frozen, Expo Survey Finds

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:38:00 GMT

A survey of 885 drone professionals presented on the opening day of Commercial UAV Expo found that 45.8% of them have answered the FCC’s Covered List decision by waiting. Only 13.8% have started moving to NDAA-compliant hardware, and 8.6% have a plan to do it inside two years.

Matt Collins, content manager at Commercial UAV News, walked through the findings at the 12:30 p.m. keynote at Caesars Forum on Tuesday. His publication ran the survey with Pilot Institute earlier this year. I was in the room, hours after sitting through the morning panel where three operators described what the same decision is already doing to their repair queues.

The date on the fieldwork matters as much as any percentage on the slides. It closed before the FCC opened the proceeding that would pull import clearance from drones the agency has already approved, and before Section 232 tariffs on imported drones were signed. Every frozen number below is the optimistic version.

Commercial UAV Expo survey findings show 45.8% of drone operators taking a wait-and-see approach to the FCC Covered List, while 13.8% have begun transitioning to NDAA-compliant fleets. Photo credit: DroneXL

Foreign Hardware Fills Three Quarters Or More Of Most Fleets

Nearly two thirds of respondents, 62.8%, said that 76% to 100% of their active fleet is DJI or other foreign-manufactured hardware. Just 13.1% fly an all-domestic fleet. The middle of the distribution is thin: 6.7% sit in the 1% to 25% band and 6.5% in the 26% to 50% band.

That shape says something the headline number does not. There is barely any partial adoption. Operators are either almost entirely on foreign hardware or entirely off it, which means the transition the Covered List assumes has not been happening gradually in the background. It squares with the Associated Builders and Contractors survey that found DJI is the primary drone for 97.1% of its members who fly, fielded in May, more than four months after the December designation.

The sample skews toward the operators with the least room to absorb a fleet replacement. Solo operators and independents made up 56.6% of the 885 respondents Commercial UAV News and Pilot Institute collected, small businesses of two to 10 people another 22.8%. Companies with more than 50 employees accounted for 8.5%.

That composition is a limit on the findings as much as a finding. This is a survey of a trade publication’s readership rather than a revenue-weighted picture of the industry, and it over-represents exactly the operators for whom a price increase is fatal.

Commercial UAV Expo survey findings show 62.8% of operators fly fleets that are 76% to 100% foreign-made. Photo credit: DroneXL

Cost Of The Alternatives Beat Every Other Reason To Stay Put

Asked to name the biggest obstacle to transitioning away from foreign-manufactured drones, 46.5% picked the cost of the alternatives. Capability gaps came second at 24.1%. Everything else finished in single digits: 8.8% reported no obstacle at all, availability and regulatory uncertainty tied at 7.1%, workflow disruption drew 3.9%, and software lock-in 2.6%.

Add the first two and just over 70% of the industry is describing a product problem rather than a policy problem. The replacement either costs too much or cannot do the job. Collins made the point that the other barriers are real and get disproportionate airtime among people who cover this beat, then put the emphasis back where the data put it.

Cost, not regulation, is the biggest obstacle to moving away from foreign-manufactured drones, cited by 46.5% of respondents. Photo credit: DroneXL

He was careful not to grade the wait-and-see group, and he was direct about the stakes. “It’s the most important conversation happening in this industry right now,” he told the room.

Clients Have Not Started Requiring NDAA Compliance

Only 7.1% of respondents said most or all of their clients require NDAA-compliant platforms as a condition of contract today. A third, 33.8%, said clients have not raised it at all. Another 20% expect the question soon without having fielded it yet, and 16.6% have some clients asking.

This is the pressure valve that explains the wait-and-see figure. An operator whose customers have never mentioned the Covered List has no commercial reason to spend on replacement hardware ahead of a rule that has not taken effect. The market signal that would normally force the change is not arriving, so the regulatory clock is running alone.

Collins noted that the operators whose clients are asking tend to work in verticals where the question has been live for years, and those firms started preparing well before December.

Part 108 Preparation Has Not Started At 43% Of Organizations

On the FAA’s pending beyond visual line of sight rule, 43% said their organization has not begun preparing. Another 21.5% called themselves somewhat prepared and 14.3% said they are worried they will not be able to comply. Just 3.5% described themselves as very prepared.

The most revealing number is the sentiment one. Asked what Part 108 will mean for them, 39.9% answered neutral or unclear, the single largest response in the set. The rule that is supposed to open routine BVLOS operations to American industry has not yet registered as either an opportunity or a threat for four in 10 respondents.

Some of that is reasonable. The final rule was due in February 2026 under an executive order and has not appeared, and preparing for a document nobody has read has limits. Plenty of the work respondents do today will never need Part 108 at all.

On workforce, 34.6% reported no meaningful challenge. Among those who did, the top answer at 31.6% was skill gaps in data and software handling rather than a shortage of bodies. Regulatory fluency followed at 25.8%, Part 108 organizational preparation at 19.1%, and recruiting qualified pilots at 18%. Pilot Institute sells training into that first gap, which is worth knowing when reading a survey it co-designed.

The 2025 Growth Went To The Largest Companies

Across all size tiers, 28.7% of businesses reported higher drone revenue or contract volume in 2025 than in 2024. Split by size, the number stops looking like an industry average. Large companies with 50 or more employees reported growth at 70.6%. Mid-size firms hit 45.4%, small businesses 30.5%, and solo operators 20.9%.

Growth is running better than three to one in favor of the largest firms over the smallest. The segment that makes up 56.6% of this sample is the segment least likely to have grown, and it is the same segment that named cost as the reason it cannot replace its fleet.

Optimism survived all of it. Two-year outlook came back 68.5% optimistic against 15.3% pessimistic, with 43% choosing cautiously optimistic and 25.5% very optimistic. Collins said Commercial UAV News and Pilot Institute will publish the full report later this year.

Two-year business outlook came back 68.5% cautiously or very optimistic against 15.3% pessimistic. Photo credit: DroneXL

DroneXL’s Take

Wait and see is not a strategy. It is what people call it when there is nothing on the shelf to buy.

Give the 45.8% their due first, because the data defends them. Just over 70% of respondents named cost or capability as the blocker, and they are describing something I cannot argue with from the floor of this show. There is no American DJI Air 3S. There is no American Mavic 4 Pro. I have been looking for one since the Covered List landed in December, and the component gap DroneXL documented in August explains why: the motors, the gimbals and the flight controllers are not sitting in a US warehouse waiting for someone to assemble them. Telling a sole proprietor to replace a $1,100 aircraft with a $12,000 one is not a transition plan.

That is exactly what makes the number so bad. Everyone is being individually rational and the collective result is an industry standing still while the deadline walks toward it. Nobody outside the United States is waiting for us to work this out. Chinese manufacturers ship on their own schedule and Ukrainian builders iterate in weeks. Two years from now the gap this policy was meant to close will be wider, not narrower, and the people who paid for it will be the drone service providers whose survival I wrote about last month.

The client-demand number is the one that should worry anyone selling American hardware. At 7.1%, buyers are not asking for NDAA compliance. That is not a market pulling domestic manufacturers forward, it is a regulator pushing operators toward products their customers have not requested and cannot yet get. Regulation can outrun a supply chain. It cannot conjure one. The operators on stage this morning were living the same arithmetic from the maintenance end, watching repair turnaround stretch from days to three months while they waited.

Two dates decide how much worse this gets before the full report lands. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 close Wednesday, September 2, the middle day of this show, and Section 232 tariffs on imported drones and components take effect Thursday, the day the expo closes. If Collins runs this survey again in twelve months, the cost-of-alternatives bar will be taller, not shorter. The tariffs guarantee it.

Anyone in that 45.8% has one night left to put their own numbers on the record. The agency asked what this costs. Answer it.

Sources: Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote presentation by Matt Collins, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; Commercial UAV News / Pilot Institute industry survey, 885 responses; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870

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

DARPA Doubles Lift Challenge Payload After 5 Of 76 Teams Scored

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:25:00 GMT

DARPA announced Tuesday that the Lift Challenge returns in summer 2028 with the minimum qualifying payload raised from 110 pounds (49.9 kg) to 220 pounds (99.8 kg) and the course stretched from 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) to 10 (18.5 km). The aircraft weight cap stays at 55 pounds (24.9 kg).

Those three numbers turn the old target into the new entry fee. A 55-pound aircraft carrying 220 pounds scores exactly 4:1, which means no qualifying run in 2028 can land below the ratio that the entire 2026 field failed to reach. Seventy-six teams checked in at Dayton last month. Five of them completed a scored run.

DroneXL has followed this competition since DARPA’s special notice in October 2025 and reported the half-prize clause in the rulebook before the first weigh-in, the clause that ended up cutting every podium check in two. DARPA Public Affairs sent the 2028 announcement out Tuesday morning.

DARPA Doubled Both Numbers That Stopped The 4:1 Runs

The 2028 rules keep the 55-pound aircraft cap and change everything around it. The minimum payload goes from 110 pounds to 220. The course doubles from 5 nautical miles to 10, with 8 flown loaded instead of 4. Loaded payload-miles per run therefore quadruple.

That combination lands directly on the constraint that decided the 2026 competition. Lift was never the problem in Dayton. Four teams started runs configured at 4.1:1 or better and none of them finished, with one aircraft going quiet three miles into a five-nautical-mile course on drained packs. DroneXL’s reporting from the competition put the wall in watt-hours per kilogram, not in thrust.

Now the payload doubles and the loaded distance doubles with it. A 2028 competitor has to move twice the iron twice as far on an energy budget still capped by a 55-pound airframe that has to carry its own batteries or fuel. Teams also fly two unloaded nautical miles at the end instead of one, and DARPA’s 2026 rules barred any recharging or refueling after the payload drop.

No Scored Run From Dayton Would Qualify In 2028

Every scored run at the 2026 competition finished under 4:1, and no aircraft could weigh more than 55 pounds. That arithmetic caps the heaviest payload any of those runs could have carried at 211 pounds. The 2028 minimum is 220. All nine scored runs fall short.

AVIDrone, Inc. won Dayton with the Katana, a single-main-rotor helicopter weighing 29.3 pounds (13.3 kg) that carried 112.4 pounds (51 kg) around the course for a 3.84:1 ratio. MTech Operations took second at 3.64:1 and Xtreme Aerial Concepts third at 3.45:1. Because nobody crossed 4:1, DARPA’s rules paid half: $1.25 million, $750,000 and $500,000 instead of double each. DroneXL flagged that clause a week before the first aircraft went on the scale.

For scale outside the competition tent, production heavy-lift aircraft sit at or below 1:1. DroneXL’s look at the DJI FlyCart 100 put that platform at roughly 0.53:1.

DARPA Calls 4:1 Possible After Nobody Officially Reached It

DARPA’s announcement describes the 4:1 ratio as achievable and likely only a starting point. The best officially scored run reached 3.84:1. The highest ratio measured anywhere that week, 9.63:1, came from a DefendTex aircraft that never completed a scored course, and DARPA handed it $500,000 for Most Promising Technology anyway.

Program manager Phillip “Donna” Smith made the same distinction at the awards ceremony. “Even though we didn’t hit it in an official score, we saw the path,” Smith said. DefendTex’s design uses string-based support for individual motors to strip weight out of the hub structure, which is the kind of result DARPA runs these competitions to surface.

Two numbers are missing from Tuesday’s announcement. DARPA did not publish a 2028 target ratio, ending its bullet list by asking what the ratio is and promising more in the coming weeks. It also did not publish a prize purse to replace the $6.5 million advertised for 2026, of which $4 million was actually paid.

Two Years Of Build Time Replaces A Nine-Month Sprint

Teams get roughly two years to build for 2028, against the nine months DLC-1 allowed between DARPA’s October 2025 special notice and the August 2026 flight windows. Participation in the first challenge is not a prerequisite for the second. DARPA also says it wants more collaboration across the competitor community.

The 2026 funnel explains why the calendar moved. DARPA counted 489 applications, 225 teams clearing technical benchmarks, 132 invited, 76 checked in, and 62 cleared through safety. Seventy official runs produced nine scored results from five teams.

One constraint hanging over the 2028 build is not DARPA’s. The FCC added uncrewed aircraft systems and UAS critical components produced in a foreign country to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, and the determination names batteries, battery management systems and motors as critical components. DARPA’s own competitor FAQ acknowledges the notice and says the agency is “investigating how this might impact team designs for this challenge.” The current version of that FAQ still says the same thing.

DroneXL’s Take

I have argued through eight months of Covered List coverage that paying for performance builds better American aircraft and banning the competition does not, and Tuesday’s announcement is DARPA reaching for the same lever twice. An open call, iron plates on a certified scale and $4 million in checks produced a near fourfold jump past anything shipping. That is the cheapest capability the federal government bought in drones all year.

The concession is real, and the 2026 scoreboard is where I would look for it. Five teams out of 76 posted a score. One wrecked its remaining aircraft chasing 6.11:1 on the final day. Doubling the payload and doubling the loaded distance could easily produce a 2028 leaderboard shorter than the 2026 one, and a competition that pays nothing because nobody qualifies teaches the community less than a competition that pays out. DARPA has two years to publish a ratio and a purse that avoid that outcome.

My read on the timing is that DARPA is asking American garage inventors to double their energy budget inside a rule that just narrowed their parts bin. The wall in Dayton was stored energy. The FCC’s December determination put foreign-produced batteries and motors on the Covered List, which is the exact shelf a 55-pound airframe chasing 220 pounds gets built from. DARPA noticed, wrote it into its FAQ, and has not published an answer since. That gap belongs to the FCC and to Congress, not to the teams, and it sits on top of the component supply problem American commercial operators are already living with.

Watch what DARPA posts in the coming weeks. The target ratio and the prize purse are the two numbers that decide whether DLC-2 draws 489 applications again or a fraction of that, and the agency has committed to publishing both. If the ratio lands above 5:1 with the purse held flat, the 2028 field will be smaller and stranger than the 2026 one. That may be exactly what DARPA wants.

Sources: DARPA Lift Challenge, DARPA Lift Challenge results, DARPA competitor rules and FAQs, FCC Public Notice DA 25-1086, DARPA Public Affairs

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

FCC Covered List Doesn't Ground Your Drone. Repair Waits Do.

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:25:00 GMT

Three panelists spent the 9 a.m. hour in Room 409-412 at Commercial UAV Expo this morning telling a full room that the FCC has not banned the drones they already own. The word ban came up often enough that Ben Hance, who runs transactions and legal at DroneDeploy, stopped the conversation to say it is the wrong word.

I sat through the session on the opening day of the show, one day before the comment window closes on the FCC proposal that would pull import clearance from foreign drones the agency has already approved. What the panel described is not a ban on flying. It is a slow tightening on the parts, the repair queues and the lead times that keep a working fleet in the air. Will Dawson of The Agricultural Drone Initiative and Jared Janacek of Texas Drone Company filled out the panel, Erin Williams of Commercial UAV News moderated, and the Dallas operator among them put numbers on all of it.

The title slide for the Commercial UAV Expo panel on what the FCC's Covered List decision means for commercial drone operators, featuring moderator Erin Williams of Commercial UAV News alongside Will Dawson of The Agricultural Drone Initiative, Ben Hance of DroneDeploy and Jared Janacek of Texas Drone Company. Photo credit: DroneXL

The Covered List Leaves Drones Already In The Field Alone

Hance gave the clearest answer of the session. Operators can keep flying aircraft built by manufacturers added to the Covered List last December. They can buy replacement parts for those aircraft, and they can buy new units of models the FCC had already authorized before the designation landed.

That reading comes straight from the agency. On December 22, 2025, the Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau added all foreign-produced uncrewed aircraft systems and UAS critical components to the Covered List as a category, and separately added DJI and Autel equipment under Section 1709(a)(1) of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. The FCC’s own announcement that day states that the decision does not affect a consumer’s ability to keep using drones already purchased, and does not stop retailers from selling, importing or marketing device models approved earlier. The restrictions apply to new device models.

Hance said the misconception survives well past the hobbyist forums, inside companies running mature drone programs with legal departments of their own. That squares with the ABC survey last week that found DJI hardware in 97% of US contractor fleets eight months after the designation.

The asterisk is Public Notice DA 26-758. Filed July 21 under PS Docket No. 26-189, it proposes prohibiting continued importation and marketing of previously authorized foreign drones meeting a proposed definition of military-grade, across seven capability categories that reach thermal imaging and LiDAR. Comments close Wednesday, September 2. Three organizations asked for more time and the Commission denied all three on August 28, so a docket about commercial operators shuts while 3,700 of them walk an exhibit hall in Nevada.

A Dallas Operator Watched Repair Turnaround Slide From Weeks To Months

Janacek runs Texas Drone Company and has crews flying every day. His fleet used to cycle an aircraft or two through maintenance as routine housekeeping: send one in, get one back, keep working. That loop has stretched badly.

First came a six-week turnaround where a swap used to take days. Then three months. Janacek said his team now treats every fault as a triage decision rather than a repair ticket, asking whether an airframe can be fixed at all and whether it can be demoted to a lesser job while still clearing the company’s own safety bar. He keeps flight records tightly for that reason, because a pilot comes back most days reporting something odd.

None of that is an FCC rule. It is what a supply chain does when the market around it turns uncertain, and it arrived ahead of any proposal now pending.

Compliant Replacements Arrive Six To Nine Weeks After The Order

Janacek put current lead times on alternative hardware at roughly six to nine weeks from order to delivery. His clients do not wait that long for a truck roll, so the gap becomes his problem rather than the manufacturer’s. He described the hunt for one airframe that covers every job a small operator gets asked to fly as “looking for the unicorn.”

The math he laid out is the part worth repeating. Three jobs landed in a single week recently, each requiring a different aircraft, and buying all three would have run about $150,000. For a company that has to earn that back before the next capital decision, the question stops being which drone is best and becomes which job pays for its own hardware.

Hance framed the same problem from the software side of the market. Even large enterprises need a budget cycle or more to absorb a pricing change, and for a small provider a $5,000 or $10,000 airframe is a serious commitment. He put a realistic transition for the industry in “years and not months.” Hance also said a written transition plan is worth having on paper, because enterprise customers increasingly ask to see one.

Training is the cost nobody prices. Janacek said his onboarding is built around one manufacturer’s interface, and new pilots reach productive speed fast because the muscle memory transfers. Move a pilot between platforms and the controller layout changes along with the battery handling, and inspection work that depends on knowing a menu without looking gets slower. His team assigns a pilot to an aircraft and keeps them there.

The Industry Brought The Wrong Arguments To Washington

Dawson has spent the last decade advising trade groups on policy, and his read on how the industry got here was the least comfortable thing said on stage. He was careful to say operators did engage. His criticism was about what they engaged with.

They arrived on Capitol Hill with half a dozen points they cared about, in a building where the competing files are the entire military budget and federal research funding. Worse, Dawson said, those points had often already been worked through in committee on the bill that became Section 1709, and the notes were public. What a staffer hears in that room, he said, is “I didn’t do my homework.”

He also warned against hunting for a single memo that announced the policy. The direction had been building for years, from restrictions on Chinese drones at military installations through the Countering CCP Drones Act, the Stefanik bill that supplied the language behind Section 1709. Dawson called it a momentum question rather than a signpost question.

His answer for what works now is numbers. Quantified costs move regulators in a way adjectives never have, he said, pointing to agricultural spray work where operators document input savings of 20% to 30%. DroneXL heard the same argument from the Texas Farm Bureau when the ban first reached agricultural operations in January.

The FCC’s Next Proceeding Reaches Into Drone Software

Dawson used his last minutes to flag the proceeding operators are not watching. The Commission adopted its Third Report and Order and Third Further Notice on July 22 and released it the next day. Where the earlier orders went after hardware, this one goes after components and code.

The adopted rules close what the agency calls the component part loophole, barring authorization of devices carrying logic-bearing hardware components made by Covered List entities, and requiring full certification when a Covered List entity makes any permissive change to an existing product. The further notice asks whether equipment containing software or firmware from a Covered List entity should be refused authorization outright, and floats hardware and software bills of materials as a disclosure requirement. Dawson described the direction as examination down to the kernel, and said re-badged aircraft running rewritten firmware should expect far more scrutiny. Comments there are due September 8, with replies September 21.

Dawson’s practical advice followed from it. Treat the FCC’s findings against DJI as a template rather than a one-off, and test any replacement manufacturer against the same questions about where data lives. Janacek’s version was blunter: ask how sophisticated a vendor’s compliance work really is, because every vendor says it is compliant.

DroneXL’s Take

The most useful hour of the show so far was the one that took a word away from us.

I have written the phrase FCC drone ban more times than I can count, and every time it lands in a headline it teaches somebody that their Mavic is about to become a paperweight. That is not what happened in December, it is not what DA 26-758 proposes, and the panel was right to spend its opening minutes killing the idea. My position on the policy has not moved. Being precise about what it does is the price of arguing against it credibly.

Give Dawson his point, because it lands on our side of the table. The industry did show up in Washington with arguments already answered in a committee report anyone could read. That is a real failure, and being right about protectionism does not make it a smaller one.

What the panel put on the record is that the damage arrives through the loading dock rather than the rulebook. A three-month repair queue takes a working aircraft out of service exactly as effectively as a prohibition would, and it does it without anyone voting on anything or any operator getting a hearing. Janacek’s fleet is already living there, and the component gap DroneXL documented in August is the same story told from the manufacturing end.

Hance named the open question precisely, and nobody on stage could answer it. If the military-grade proposal is adopted as written and it reaches critical components, an operator could hold a perfectly lawful thermal aircraft and be unable to import the battery that keeps it flying. The stated intent is to leave existing systems alone. Whether the text does that is what he is taking to the Commission, and it is the strongest thing a filed comment can put in front of it.

Two dates now, not one. Docket 26-189 closes Wednesday, September 2, and the software and component questions in the Third Further Notice close September 8. Behind both sits the Ninth Circuit, where DJI’s opposition brief put $1.56 billion on the table in April in Case 26-1029. If the court narrows the Covered List designation, the rest of this loses its footing. If it does not, the record filed this week is what the agency has to answer.

Janacek is back on stage Wednesday afternoon, and DJI is taking meetings at Booth 903 in the same building. Anybody with a fleet and a repair backlog has a laptop in a hotel room and until Wednesday night. Fifteen minutes there beats every conversation on the exhibit floor.

Sources: Commercial UAV Expo session, “What the FCC’s Covered List Decision Means for Commercial Drone Operators”, Room 409-412, September 1, 2026; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870; FCC Third Report and Order, FCC 26-50; FCC Covered List

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

Alteon Raises $2.5M To Fly A Drone For A Year On Ocean Wind

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:16:00 GMT

Bengaluru startup Alteon has raised $2.5 million to build a fixed-wing drone that stays in the air for more than a year without carrying the energy to do it. The pre-seed round was led by Lachy Groom, the San Francisco solo investor and former early Stripe employee, with Together Fund also participating. Founder Samay Sanghvi is 20 years old and started building aircraft straight out of high school in 2023.

The plan runs on dynamic soaring, the technique albatrosses use to cross oceans at almost no metabolic cost. Alteon says it will point the aircraft at maritime surveillance first, selling governments continuous visibility over their own waters.

For scale: the longest continuous flight ever recorded by an aircraft is 67 days, set in April 2025 by Zephyr, the stratospheric solar aircraft flown by Airbus subsidiary AALTO. Alteon is aiming for more than five times that, on an airframe with a wingspan of roughly 10 feet.

Dynamic Soaring Pulls Energy Out Of The Wind Gradient

Dynamic soaring extracts energy from wind shear, the layering of air moving at different speeds above the ocean surface. An aircraft dives into the slow layer near the water, turns, and climbs back into the faster layer. Each loop banks a little more energy than the maneuver costs.

Alteon's fixed-wing aircraft in flight, designed to use dynamic soaring inspired by albatrosses. Photo credit: Alteon

Conventional aircraft carry their whole flight in a tank or a battery pack, which is why endurance and payload trade against each other so brutally. Alteon is building a small fixed-wing autonomous aircraft with a wingspan of about 10 feet (three meters) that flies close to the water, climbs and turns through faster-moving air, and repeats the cycle. Sanghvi told TechCrunch the company eventually wants to run the propellers backward as turbines, converting some of the harvested energy into electricity and pushing it back into the onboard batteries.

Sanghvi’s pitch for why this is worth doing at all is blunt. Once aircraft can stay up for more than a year, he said, “there are millions of things you can do with them”.

Alteon Has Flown The Maneuver Without Proving The Endurance

Alteon recently flew its autonomous flight system over the Bay of Bengal, completing seven O-shaped cycles at more than 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour) while staying within about three feet (one meter) of the water. It has not yet sustained flight on harvested energy alone.

That distinction is the entire company. The next milestone Sanghvi named is energy-neutral dynamic soaring, meaning the aircraft holds altitude with its propulsion switched off, living on what it pulls out of the wind. What Alteon has shown so far is a very tight autonomous maneuver near a moving surface, which is hard, and which is not the same thing as staying up.

The company has a team of 20 in Bengaluru, a 10,000-square-foot facility, and a build rate of four to five aircraft a week. Sanghvi says it has flown more than 200 test flights in the past 30 days.

Researchers Call The First Result Promising And The Next Step Much Harder

Gabriel Bousquet, who studied dynamic soaring for his MIT doctorate, called the low-altitude flight over water a “promising first result”. Bharath Swaminathan, whose IIT Madras PhD covered the stability of dynamic soaring, said the underlying physics is well established. Both located the difficulty in real winds rather than in theory.

Bousquet told TechCrunch that flying low enough to harvest the energy safely is the hard part, because the aircraft has to handle turbulence, waves, spray, rain, and shifting light while sensing and reacting to a surface that will not hold still. Swaminathan added that large-scale wind patterns may be predictable while local shear and turbulence are not, and that some of those problems only surface in flight test.

He was generous about the attempt anyway. Keeping an aircraft up for several days on dynamic soaring alone would be “a very big step, and a big achievement”, he said.

American Money Is Funding A Capability The US Navy Has Chased Since 2020

Groom led the round, and Alteon’s earlier backers were Emergent Ventures, run from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and 1517 Fund, started by the team behind the Thiel Fellowship. American capital is paying for a capability the US Navy has been working on since 2020.

That work has been expensive. DroneXL reported in August 2025 on the Navy flying Skydweller, a solar aircraft with a 236-foot wingspan, for 73 hours nonstop out of Stennis, Mississippi, as part of the Autonomous Maritime Patrol Aircraft effort. That same aircraft departed Stennis on April 26, 2026, logged 8 days and 14 minutes flying the Navy’s FLEX 26 exercise and waiting out weather afterward, then ditched in the Gulf on May 4 after meeting conditions worse than forecast on the transit home. Skydweller’s own account says the airframe and autonomy were nominal and the batteries were the constraint.

Groom did not pretend the Alteon bet is safe. “Ambitious problems are always going to come with risks,” he told TechCrunch, adding that he backed the team rather than the odds.

The round lands in a market that has started attracting real money. Indian defense drone maker Raphe mPhibr raised $100 million in June 2025, and Bengaluru has been building the sensor side of this for years, including ideaForge’s stake in GalaxEye in 2024. Sanghvi is also not the first twenty-something to raise serious capital against a hard aerospace problem, as DroneXL reported in November 2025. Alteon’s $2.5 million is small next to those numbers, which is part of the point.

DroneXL’s Take

I have watched this category lose airframes for years, so my reflex on a year-aloft claim is to discount it hard. What stops me discounting Alteon is the size of the thing. The programs chasing persistence have been built around enormous aircraft. Alteon’s is not.

The aircraft that went into the Gulf in May was the converted Solar Impulse 2, a 236-foot solar plane that once carried a human around the planet, and it sank because the batteries ran flat on the way home. Alteon wants the same job done by something closer in size to a hobby glider, and it is building four or five of them a week. Cheap airframes fail cheaply, and you learn faster when a crash costs a weekend instead of a program.

The strongest case against my interest here is Bousquet’s, and it is a good one. The distance between one clean demonstration over the Bay of Bengal and reliable energy extraction in weather nobody chose is exactly where this category keeps dying. Swaminathan can be right that the physics is settled and Alteon can still spend three years failing to build a machine that survives a monsoon at three feet off the water. Correct physics did not keep Skydweller out of the Gulf.

One number Alteon has not given: its longest single flight. The funding announcement offers 200 test flights in 30 days and a seven-cycle demonstration, and the company’s website leads with aircraft that fly “months, not hours” rather than with a figure. Endurance is the whole product. Until there is a duration attached to it, this is a maneuver with a funding round stapled to it.

Watch the milestone Alteon set for itself, because it is falsifiable in a way a press release is not: energy-neutral dynamic soaring, with the propulsion switched off and the aircraft holding station on wind alone. That flight either happens or it does not. Watch the Navy and Skydweller investigation into the May ditching too, which has issued no findings yet. If it lands on energy margin rather than structure, the argument for small wind-harvesting aircraft over enormous solar ones gets much easier to make, and $2.5 million starts to look less like a moonshot and more like a cheap option on a problem the incumbents have not solved.

Source: TechCrunch, Alteon, Skydweller Aero

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

DJI Sets Up At Booth 903 With $1.56 Billion Stuck At The FCC

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:55:00 GMT

Commercial UAV Expo opens Tuesday at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, and the first item on the conference program is a 9 a.m. panel on what the FCC’s Covered List decision means for commercial fleets. More than 3,700 professionals and 240-plus exhibitors are here for three days. Two federal deadlines fall inside them.

DJI has booth 903 and a $20 afternoon workshop. It has no keynote slot. It is also carrying a projected $1.56 billion loss for 2026 from the same Federal Communications Commission action the opening panel is built around, a number that comes from DJI’s own filing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

DroneXL is on the floor Tuesday and Wednesday, and I have tracked every Covered List public notice since the Commission issued the first one on December 22, 2025. The panel that opens this show covers that decision. The proceeding that could actually strand American fleets closes for comment tomorrow.

The exhibit hall entrance at Caesars Forum on the morning of day one. The hall itself opens for two hours Tuesday evening. Photo credit: Haye Kesteloo / DroneXL

The Covered List Blocks New Models And Leaves Existing Fleets Alone

The FCC added foreign-made drones and critical components to its Covered List on December 22, 2025. The Commission’s own public notice said the action applies to new device models, leaves existing owners alone, and lets retailers keep selling models authorized before that date.

That is the ruling Tuesday morning’s panel takes apart. Will Dawson of The Agricultural Drone Initiative and Ben Hance of DroneDeploy join Jared Janacek of Texas Drone Company, moderated by Commercial UAV News’ Erin Williams, to work through what December means for fleet procurement. It is a fair question. It is also last year’s question. DroneXL walked through the December order and what it did and did not touch the week it landed.

This year’s question is Public Notice DA 26-758, docketed as PS Docket 26-189. It proposes pulling import and marketing clearance from foreign drones the Commission has already authorized, across seven capability categories that reach thermal sensors and dock-equipped aircraft on sale today. Comments close Wednesday, September 2, the middle day of this show.

That machinery is not hypothetical. On June 26 the FCC used exactly this tool against previously authorized telecom equipment from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua, closing a four-year window in which pre-approved models could still legally enter the country. Drones were left out of that order. They are the subject of this one.

DJI Booked A Booth, A Paid Workshop And No Stage Time

DJI Enterprise announced booth 903 for the three-day show and is running a two-part workshop Tuesday afternoon on L3 LiDAR processing in Terra and FlightHub 2 dock automation. Registration costs $20. Neither of the expo’s two 2026 keynotes includes anyone from DJI.

The workshop runs 1 to 5 p.m. with a half-hour break in the middle, and it is the whole of DJI’s stage presence this week. The same expo page still carries the company’s 2024 entry, a four-hour Precision Surveying demonstration led by a named DJI solutions engineer and included with any conference or exhibitor pass. Two years on, the listing is a $20 add-on.

The reason is in the court record. DJI filed its petition for review on February 20 as Case 26-1029, and brought in former FCC enforcement chief Travis LeBlanc to argue it. An April 15 opposition brief, signed by LeBlanc and former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, put figures on the damage for the first time. The FCC has set aside authorizations for 14 DJI products, five of them aircraft, which DJI projects at $700 million. Another 25 planned 2026 launches cannot receive authorization at all, which DJI puts at $860 million. That is the $1.56 billion.

American Contractors Fly DJI At 97 Percent With No Domestic Backup

DJI builds the primary drone for 97.1% of Associated Builders and Contractors members who fly, according to a survey the trade association released on August 17. Autel Robotics takes the remaining 2.9%. Not one respondent named Skydio, the only American manufacturer on the ballot.

Most of those programs are small. 61.9% of the drone-flying respondents have spent between $1,000 and $10,000 on hardware and related equipment, and four in five use the aircraft for site progress monitoring. Few of them have a procurement department. They bought a Mavic because it worked.

Agriculture got there first. A year ago DroneXL reported on farmers pricing American-made spray options as the Covered List deadline approached, which is roughly the constituency Dawson represents on that panel. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in December that the agency would work with US drone makers to “unleash American drone dominance.” ABC’s ballot is what that looks like nine months on.

Section 232 Tariffs Take Effect On The Show’s Closing Day

Section 232 tariffs on imported drones and components take effect Thursday, September 3, the final day of the expo. President Trump signed the proclamation on August 13. Drones over 25 kilograms (55 pounds) at maximum takeoff weight, thermal-equipped aircraft and docking stations pay 100%. Nearly everything else pays 25%.

The duty applies to declared import value rather than retail price, so what a buyer actually pays depends on how much of it importers swallow. The proclamation adopts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s finding that the country relies too heavily on foreign sources for uncrewed systems and their components. Exhibitors will spend Thursday morning selling hardware that gets more expensive before the hall closes.

DroneXL’s Take

The scheduling here is almost too neat. A room full of operators spends Tuesday morning working out what a December ruling did to their fleets. The proceeding that could take those fleets away closes its comment window Wednesday, one floor and one day from that room. Most of the people it affects will be standing in a convention center in Nevada rather than typing into a docket.

Give the government its strongest point first. The Commission did not invent this. Congress wrote Section 1709 into the FY25 defense bill, and under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act the FCC cannot update that list on its own initiative. The national security determination behind December came from the executive branch. The FCC’s own motion to dismiss argues the statutes leave it no discretion to skip an update once the conditions are met. December’s version also drew a real line: your drone stayed legal, your dealer kept selling. Two days after that order I wrote that the Commission could close that door whenever it chose, and in June it showed exactly how.

What is on the table now is different. Pulling import and marketing clearance from aircraft that 97.1% of American contractors already standardized on would be a demolition with nothing built to replace it. Skydio was on ABC’s ballot. It scored zero. You do not fix a supply chain by removing the only tools that work and hoping a domestic industry materializes to fill the hole. That is the part I keep waiting for someone at the Commission to answer.

One question sits under all of this, and it is a narrow one. The FCC built the legacy-equipment tool in its October 2025 equipment authorization order, used it for the first time on June 26 against five Chinese telecom brands, and has not said whether it will point the same tool at drones. PS Docket 26-189 is where that question is being asked. Wednesday is when the asking stops.

None of what decides this is on the exhibit floor. What lands in PS Docket 26-189 by Wednesday night will matter more than anything said at a booth, and so will the Ninth Circuit. DJI asked that court in April to deny the FCC’s motion to dismiss and hold the case for six months, with a status report due in November. The court has not ruled. DroneXL is here through Wednesday, and the readout from the panel follows.

If you have a press release, or you want to grab me at the show for a quick interview or a product demo, I am at Caesars Forum through Wednesday. Reach me at haye [at] dronexl [dot] co.

Sources: Commercial UAV News, Commercial UAV Expo, FCC Public Notice DOC-416839A1, DJI Enterprise

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

XTEND Hits the NYSE Friday Before the Pentagon Scores It

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:02:00 GMT

XTEND AI Robotics expects to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker XTND on Friday, September 4, one day after closing its all-stock combination with Florida contractor JFB Construction Holdings. JFB’s Class A shares stop trading on Nasdaq after Thursday’s close.

The listing finishes a conversion that began in February: an Israeli-founded drone maker becomes a Delaware-incorporated U.S. public company headquartered in Tampa, with an American factory footprint and a Pentagon-facing sales pitch. DroneXL has tracked the deal since Rafael Suárez covered the merger announcement in February, through the S-4 amendments, and past three separate closing dates the companies have now set and moved.

What has not moved is the thing the valuation actually rests on. XTEND is one of 19 companies invited to Fort Carson, Colorado, in August to compete for a share of 60,000 attack drones. Nobody outside the Department of War knows yet how it did.

JFB’s Thursday Close Decides the Exchange Ratio

Each JFB share converts into one share of XTEND AI Robotics, and each XTEND ordinary share into roughly 1.36 shares. That holds only if JFB closes at or above $4.00 on Thursday, September 3. Below that line, the companies said on August 31, both ratios halve.

The halving exists to satisfy the NYSE’s minimum initial listing price. Cut both sides by the same factor and the relative ownership stays identical, which is exactly what the companies say happens: former JFB and former XTEND holders end up with the same proportion either way. The effect is a reverse split in everything but name, applied on one day’s closing print.

JFB closed at $4.78 on Friday, August 28, according to consolidated tape data. That is 78 cents of headroom on a stock whose 52-week range runs from $2.45 to $17.55, with the high set on February 17, the day the merger was announced. A stock that volatile has covered 78 cents in an afternoon more than once this year.

JFB shareholders have been diluted twice while the deal waited. February’s announcement put the split at 70/30 fully diluted. The Form S-4 filed in June moved it to 73.87% of voting power and 66.09% of economic interest for XTEND holders. Measured on the July 24 capitalization, the final information statement puts former XTEND shareholders at 89.65% of voting power and 80.80% of economic interest, and former JFB stockholders at 10.35% and 19.20%. The S-4 attributes the shifting allocation to subsequent investors in XTEND, meaning every dollar raised into the Israeli side before closing came out of the construction company’s share.

Closing also requires JFB to hold at least $60 million in cash, per the information statement mailed to stockholders.

XTEND Competed in Gauntlet I and Missed the Top 11

XTEND Reality Inc. appeared on the Department of War’s published roster of 25 companies invited to the first Drone Dominance Gauntlet at Fort Benning, Georgia. When the scores came out in March, 11 companies took orders for 30,000 one-way attack drones worth up to $150 million. XTEND was not among them.

It re-entered. At the qualifier held June 8 to 19 at Camp Grayling, Michigan, 49 companies flew roughly 79 drone designs across two mission areas, Long Range Strike and Tactical Assault in Confined Environments. Nineteen advanced. XTEND made the cut with STRIKER, its XOS-powered indoor platform built for tactical work in GNSS-denied spaces, and to stay eligible had to build and deliver 120 drones with lethality payloads inside about five weeks.

Gauntlet II ran at Fort Carson in August. The program’s public leaderboard still shows Gauntlet I results only. The Department of War has said it intends to buy 60,000 small one-way attack systems from the top performers once Gauntlet II is scored, roughly double the Gauntlet I order.

That is the sequence a buyer of XTND shares is underwriting on Friday: a company that lost the first round, requalified for the second, and goes public with the second round scored but unpublished.

The Order Book Grew While the Closing Date Slipped

Commercial news kept arriving through the delay. XTEND announced a multi-year contract worth up to roughly $15 million with a European NATO member’s defence ministry in August, about $4.5 million of it secured for year one, and more than $12 million across two separate defense programs in June. The company reports more than 12,500 systems fielded in over 30 countries and validated in five combat zones.

Manufacturing is the part that matters most for U.S. procurement. XTEND runs XFAB facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Israel, and Latvia, and opened the Swindon site in England earlier this year. Phase II of the Drone Dominance Program bars motors and batteries from covered countries, which is a supply-chain problem for a large share of the American FPV industry and not one for a company that has been building outside China from the start. The Section 232 drone tariffs of up to 100% point the same direction.

The company also picked up two U.S. patents this year, No. 12,461,522 on precise UAV maneuvering under communication latency and No. 12,222,735 on continuing to steer an unmanned vehicle toward a marked destination when landmarks shift and GPS drops out. Both describe the degraded-link problem that has defined Ukrainian and Russian FPV operations for three years.

Against all of that, the closing date has moved from mid-2026 to Q3, then to September 1, then to September 8, then back to September 3.

Eric Trump’s Investment Follows XTEND to the Big Board

The February combination was backed by Eric Trump, alongside Unusual Machines, American Ventures, Protego Ventures, and Aliya Capital. Those names travel with the company to the NYSE. Aviv Shapira, XTEND’s co-founder, becomes chief executive and board chair. Joseph F. Basile III, JFB’s chief executive, becomes executive vice president of construction operations.

Bloomberg valued the Trump family’s drone holdings at close to $750 million in March, assembled largely through American Ventures and spread across XTEND, Powerus, and Unusual Machines, all three chasing Department of War contracts. The White House and the Trump Organization have denied wrongdoing and say all activity complies with applicable law.

Shapira frames the construction pairing as an industrial one. “Becoming a public company will give us the capital, scale, and U.S. manufacturing foundation,” he said in the announcement. Basile described JFB’s contribution as execution, infrastructure, and buildout expertise applied to scaling domestic production.

DroneXL’s Take

I have watched a lot of drone companies promise American manufacturing over the past six years and then quietly ship rebadged hardware. XTEND is not that. It has systems in the field, combat validation, patents that address the actual failure mode of modern FPV warfare, and factories in five countries that were built before the tariffs made them fashionable. When the Pentagon bought its AI-guided attack drones in January 2025, that was a real contract for a real product.

So the concession is easy: this is a better company than most of what has gone public through a reverse merger in this sector.

My read is that the price still runs ahead of the record. The $1.5 billion figure comes from the price per share in the concurrent private placement, not from anything the public market has paid; the shell it is arriving through carries a $97 million market cap. That gap is a bet on future Pentagon volume, not on the announced defense orders to date, which stood above $27 million in late July and gained the $15 million NATO contract in August. And the Pentagon volume is not decided. XTEND competed at Fort Benning and did not finish in the top 11. That is not disqualifying, and the Camp Grayling requalification says something real about how fast the company iterates. It is still the most important number in the story, and it is a number that says the company has already been measured against this field once and came up short.

What bothers me more is the sequencing. The listing lands after Gauntlet II was flown and before the results are public. Anyone who saw how STRIKER performed at Fort Carson in August knows something the market opening Friday morning does not. I am not alleging anything improper, and the schedule slipped enough times that this looks like coincidence rather than design. It is still an uncomfortable window, and it exists because the Department of War publishes its leaderboard on its own clock while the NYSE runs on the calendar.

Watch the Drone Dominance leaderboard for the Gauntlet II results. Orders go to the top performers, and the program has published every previous leaderboard in full. If XTEND is on that list, the valuation starts making sense on fundamentals rather than on policy tailwinds and a famous last name. If it is not, XTND becomes a test of whether an Israeli-founded robotics company can build an American defense business on allied contracts alone, with $15 million from a NATO ministry as the template instead of 60,000 units from Fort Carson.

Either way, Friday tells us nothing. September’s opening print is a story about capital markets. The story about drones gets written at Fort Carson, and it has already been written. We just have not been allowed to read it.

Source: JFB Construction Holdings and XTEND, August 31, 2026

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

Poland Probes Sabotage After Fire At Drone Plant Supplying Ukraine

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:22:00 GMT

Poland’s ABW counterintelligence service is investigating whether an overnight fire at a WB Electronics plant that makes drone parts for the Polish and Ukrainian militaries was set on purpose. The fire started at roughly 12:23 a.m. Monday in a warehouse and production building in Skarzysko-Kamienna, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of Warsaw. Firefighters had it out inside two hours. The building was closed and nobody was hurt.

An intrusion alarm went off at the site around the same time, and a monitoring operator at an outside security company called police. ABW officers arrived after the fire crews. The district prosecutor’s office in Skarzysko-Kamienna is supervising the case, and police have not ruled out arson.

WB Group, the plant’s owner and Poland’s largest private defense company, called the fire minor and said the site will restart once formalities are finished. Jacek Dobrzynski, spokesman for Poland’s special services coordinator, took a different tone, telling broadcaster TVN24 that officers are working out whether this counts as sabotage and cautioning the public against disinformation while they do it. In March, DroneXL covered a near-identical case in Czechia, where masked attackers burned a plant making thermal sights for Ukrainian troops.

The Fire Began In A Warehouse Building With Nobody Inside

The blaze broke out around 12:23 a.m. local time on Monday, August 31, in a warehouse and production building at the Skarzysko-Kamienna site. Five fire crews answered the call, per Radio Kielce. Firefighters cut power to the building and had the fire out inside two hours, then ventilated the smoke and swept the structure with detectors for hazardous substances.

State Fire Service spokesman Rafal Maciejczak described the fire as relatively small, per Polish Radio. WB Group said much the same in its own statement, quoted by TVP Info: “All procedures and safety systems worked as they should.” The company said damage to its infrastructure is still being tallied and gave no date for the restart.

The detail that pulled the special services in came from elsewhere. Onet reported, without official confirmation, that a surveillance camera caught an unidentified person, masked in Polish accounts of the footage, coming through the fence, with the intrusion alarm tripping a few minutes after the fire started. Dobrzynski would not discuss what investigators have, saying only that ABW officers are “working to determine whether this could be considered an act of sabotage”. Polish police say they are looking into the circumstances of the overnight fire at a private company in the town.

The Plant Feeds Drone Programs In Two Countries

WB Group is Poland’s largest privately owned defense company, and its unmanned systems fly on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Skarzysko-Kamienna facility builds composite structures and control systems for aerial and ground drones, and Polish Radio identified the affected plant as the one producing drone pumps.

By the group’s own account, its FlyEye reconnaissance aircraft has been in Ukrainian service since 2015 and the Warmate loitering munition since 2017. WB Ukraine, the local subsidiary set up in 2019, moved from repairs and spares to building complete FlyEye systems inside Ukraine in early 2025. Warsaw has leaned harder on that relationship since, and asked Ukrainian designers to help build a Polish drone armada in April. In July, WB Group joined the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance as one of its founding industry members.

So the building that burned sits where Polish manufacturing meets Ukrainian combat experience, and it supplies both.

European Defense Plants Have Been Burning All Year

Counting Skarzysko-Kamienna, at least six European defense manufacturing sites have burned or exploded in 2026, by The Defence Blog’s tally. The run starts in Czechia in March and had reached Estonia by mid-August, with Bulgaria and Italy hit in between.

The Czech case is the one worth reading next to this one. On the night of March 19, masked individuals set fire to the Archer-LPP plant in Pardubice, destroying most of its production capacity along with finished thermal sights meant for Ukrainian soldiers, with damage put at roughly $1.1 million. Czech authorities investigated it as a terrorist act and charged suspects with terrorism, detaining a fifth person by the end of March. An obscure group claimed the attack as a strike on Israeli weapons production, which the company suggested was cover for an operation aimed at its Ukraine work.

Then August. A fire and explosion hit an ammunition store at EMCO in Bulgaria on the 10th, a KNDS ammunition plant in Italy on the 13th, and on the 15th a building used by Milrem Robotics in Tallinn, maker of the THeMIS ground vehicles Ukraine fields. Estonian prosecutors called that one deliberate and premeditated. Three suspects were picked up in Latvia. Two weeks earlier an explosive drone had landed beside a Ukrainian Antonov at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a case where investigators have since found a third drone and a second explosive.

The closest precedent is six days old. On August 25, Slovak police said they had stopped a planned arson attack on a plant in eastern Slovakia belonging to Skyeton, the Ukrainian maker of the Raybird reconnaissance drone. Prosecutors in Presov charged three men, two Latvians and a Ukrainian, with preparing the attack on commission. Two were picked up in Slovakia and the third, a 26-year-old, in Hamburg. Officers seized a gasoline and polystyrene mixture that police compared to napalm, along with a hand-drawn plan of the facility.

Poland has been here before. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in May 2025 that the fire which gutted the Marywilska shopping center in Warsaw a year earlier had been arson ordered by Russian services, coordinated by a handler sitting in Russia.

WB Group Runs An American Arm In Alexandria, Virginia

WB Group America LLC operates out of Alexandria, Virginia as the group’s US strategic arm. Its site says FONET, WB’s digital vehicle communications platform, is in active service with US Armed Forces, and it pitches FlyEye and Warmate to American program offices and allied procurement frameworks.

That is worth holding onto, because the European drone industry is not a foreign curiosity to Washington right now. The CIA’s venture arm put money into Quantum Systems to open a US door for the German manufacturer, and the Pentagon is spending $820 million through the Office of Strategic Capital to stand up a domestic drone parts base the country does not yet have. The plants that already build those parts at scale for a shooting war are in Poland, Czechia and Estonia. This year they keep catching fire.

DroneXL’s Take

Give the Polish services their due. Dobrzynski warned against disinformation before he warned against anything else, and he was right to. A fire in an industrial building at midnight is a fire until an investigator says otherwise, WB Group says the damage was small, and the plant is going back to work. DroneXL spends a lot of column inches telling readers that not every light in the sky is a drone. The same discipline applies to fires. Not every one is Moscow.

The pattern is still the pattern. Six sites in eight months, four of them in August alone, and every case that has produced arrests so far, from Czechia in March to Slovakia last week, has turned up recruited foreign nationals working on commission rather than a lone crank. Whoever is doing this has stopped bothering with the marquee targets and started working the cheap end of the supply chain, the pump shop and the optics bench, where a small fire at midnight buys weeks of delay and costs almost nothing to arrange.

What nobody has said is what the camera actually recorded. Onet’s account is unofficial and the ABW will not discuss it. WB Group’s own statement, as TVP Info quoted it, does not mention an intruder at all. Until that footage is in front of a prosecutor, this is a fire with an alarm log and a rumor attached, and the space between those two things is where the next 48 hours of coverage will live.

On timing, I would not hold my breath for an attribution. Poland took a year to name Russia over Marywilska, and that was a case with people already in custody. Estonia’s August fire already has three suspects detained in Latvia, so it can move fast when the perpetrators are amateurs working on the ground. Which of those two clocks this case runs on will tell you more about the network behind it than any statement out of Warsaw.

There is a harder point here for American readers. US drone policy energy is going into which foreign radios can be sold at retail, an argument DroneXL has covered to exhaustion, while the factories that actually arm NATO’s eastern flank get lit up one warehouse at a time. Only one of those two problems has an arsonist in it.

Sources: Anadolu Agency, Kyiv Independent, Ukrinform, The Defence Blog, TVP Info

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

SwissDrones CEO Exits On LinkedIn As Leadership Splits Three Ways

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:12:00 GMT

Ulrich Amberg is stepping down as chief executive of SwissDrones after more than six years, and the Swiss uncrewed helicopter maker is not replacing him with one person. It is dividing the job among three.

Amberg announced his own departure on LinkedIn over the weekend, not in a company press release. He wrote that he is leaving to take on a new challenge and said more would follow, without naming where he is going. Lukas Obrist, already chief technology officer, takes the manufacturing side. Larry Berkin leads a newly formed entity called Xplorate Group, Inc. Ronnie Fahy keeps running Xplorate Pacific, the Australian operator that flies the aircraft.

The timing is the part worth sitting with. The announcement lands three weeks after SwissDrones and its Australian subsidiary announced a US market entry, and one day before Commercial UAV Expo opens in Las Vegas, where Berkin is on the program. I will be at that show this week.

Amberg Spent Six Years Turning BVLOS Approvals Into A Business

Amberg first engaged SwissDrones as a strategy consultant in 2018, then took the chief executive job the following year alongside a personal equity investment. He came from KPMG, where he had been a partner leading consulting and IT advisory work, with a computer science degree behind that.

In his post he describes what changed on his watch: long-range BVLOS flight with large uncrewed helicopters in regulated airspace was, in his words, “science fiction” when he started. That is a fair description of 2019. Flying a turbine-powered 191-pound (87-kilogram) rotorcraft beyond visual line of sight, over other people’s infrastructure, with a civil aviation authority’s blessing, was a demonstration project almost everywhere. It is now a repeat commercial service in Australia, where CASA has moved faster than the FAA on broad-area BVLOS approvals.

He also says the team grew five times over during that period. SwissDrones was founded in 2013, is headquartered in Zurich and manufactures in Buchs.

Three Executives Divide The Job Amberg Held Alone

Three names carry the company forward. Lukas Obrist, already chief technology officer, oversees the OEM side that builds the aircraft. Larry Berkin leads the newly formed Xplorate Group, Inc. Ronnie Fahy stays in charge of Xplorate Pacific, the Australian flight operator.

Obrist is not a caretaker appointment. He has been at SwissDrones since 2018, served as interim CEO before Amberg arrived, and is the company’s public voice on the SD120, the next-generation uncrewed helicopter now in development. That aircraft is being engineered toward SAIL IV under Europe’s Specific Operations Risk Assessment framework, which is an operational risk classification rather than a type certificate.

Berkin’s title is worth a second look. Amberg calls Xplorate Group “newly formed,” but Berkin was already being quoted as Group CEO in the August 7 announcement, and his Commercial UAV Expo speaker page describes Xplorate Group, Inc. as an industrial infrastructure intelligence company backed by SwissDrones engineering and Xplorate Pacific operations. The structure was in the open before the CEO transition was.

What nobody has said is whether the SwissDrones AG chief executive seat now sits empty, is held on an interim basis, or has been folded into the group. Amberg’s post assigns Obrist “the OEM part of the business” and stops there. SwissDrones has published no statement on the change, and I found no filing or release naming a successor. For a company selling aviation-grade hardware into regulated markets, where organizational accountability is part of the safety case, that gap is not cosmetic.

The Exit Lands Three Weeks Into A US Market Push

SwissDrones and Xplorate Pacific announced their US expansion on August 7, three weeks before Amberg’s post. The plan targets pipelines and powerlines across long linear corridors, run program by program under whatever Federal Aviation Administration approvals each mission can get today. There is no blanket authorization behind it.

The August 7 release was datelined San Francisco, Zurich and Perth, which tells you where the center of gravity is heading. Berkin’s pitch is that hardware alone does not sell: “Industrial customers need more than an aircraft.” The package on offer is the SDO 50 plus trained flight crews, safety cases, sensor integration and data delivery, sold as a service rather than a fleet purchase.

The proof point is Queensland, where Xplorate Pacific runs recurring commercial BVLOS inspection flights along a corridor of roughly 340 miles (550 kilometers). Investors behind the group include Chevron Technology Ventures, DiamondStream Partners, Longbow Capital and Ingleside Investors, which is an energy-heavy cap table pointed at exactly the customers the US expansion is chasing.

Calling August 7 a US entry undersells what was already there. SwissDrones aircraft have been flying American infrastructure since early 2025, when Southern Company became the first US utility to win an FAA Part 91 exemption for BVLOS operations, flying the SDO 50 through a partnership with Phoenix Air Unmanned. The second-largest energy provider in the country was using this hardware on its grid while the FAA rule was still a proposal. What changed this month is the sales structure, not the airspace access.

There is real money moving in the same direction. The US Department of Transportation has forecast $9 million in drone infrastructure inspection grants for fiscal 2026, with applications due in November. Large uncrewed rotorcraft are also no longer exotic in defense and public safety procurement, as the Royal Navy’s Proteus program shows.

Part 108 Delay Caps What Xplorate Group Can Sell In America

The final Part 108 rule has sat at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs since July 10, 2026, its last stop before publication. Until it lands, long-range uncrewed inspection in the United States runs on waivers and exemptions, one approval at a time.

OIRA’s own page carried a July target, and that came and went. Review there can run 90 days, which pushes realistic publication into late 2026 or into 2027. The FAA has now missed the January 2026 statutory deadline set by the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 and the 240-day clock from the June 2025 executive order. DroneXL has covered the right-of-way fight that helped stall it and the argument that the delay is a policy choice rather than a backlog.

For a company whose entire value proposition is regulatory competence, that delay is not only an obstacle. It is also the moat. If routine BVLOS were already legal, an American operator with a fleet of quadcopters could go after some of this work. It is not, so the buyer needs somebody who can build a safety case, and that is what Xplorate Group is selling.

DroneXL’s Take

A company that splits one CEO job into three roles at the moment it enters the biggest market in the world is telling you something, and I do not think it is weakness. I think it is a holding company forming around an aircraft manufacturer.

Look at what each piece now does. Obrist builds airframes in Switzerland. Fahy flies them in Australia. Berkin sells outcomes to American energy companies from San Francisco. That is not one business with three managers, it is three businesses that happen to share a rotor. Amberg’s departure reads less like a chief executive being pushed and more like a man who finished the job he was hired for in 2019, which was turning a promising Swiss airframe into a company with global approvals, and handing over to people who will do something structurally different with it.

The Southern Company exemption is the tell. SwissDrones did not need Part 108 to get its aircraft over an American grid, it needed a utility willing to petition the FAA and a US operating partner willing to hold the certificate. That is a services problem wearing a hardware costume, and you do not solve it from Zurich.

I will concede the obvious counterpoint. Leadership churn three weeks into a market entry is the kind of thing that spooks a utility procurement team, and “more on that soon” is a phrase that usually means the next role was not signed when the post went up. If the SwissDrones CEO seat stays visibly vacant through the fall, that concern gets legitimate.

What I keep coming back to is how much of this hinges on a rule sitting in a review office. Xplorate Group’s entire American pitch is that it can navigate a system nobody else wants to navigate. That is a good business while Part 108 sits at OIRA and a much more crowded one the day it publishes. Berkin speaks Wednesday morning at Commercial UAV Expo on building drone programs that hold up in energy and utilities. That session is the first chance to ask what a group structure means for a customer signing a multi-year inspection contract, and whether anyone is running SwissDrones AG itself. I intend to ask.

Sources: Ulrich Amberg on LinkedIn, GlobeNewswire, Commercial UAV Expo, Commercial UAV News, Utility Dive

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

Fedorov Offers The US A Drone Fleet For Patriot Missiles

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:38:00 GMT

Mykhailo Fedorov has offered to help the United States build a fleet of attack drones if Washington releases the Patriot interceptor missiles Ukraine needs to get through winter. He made the offer in Washington, in an interview published Sunday, six weeks after President Volodymyr Zelensky fired him as defense minister. He holds no government position that would let him negotiate anything on Kyiv’s behalf.

Two days earlier, Fedorov accepted an unpaid advisory role with Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto.

When DroneXL covered his removal on July 16, the open question was what the architect of Ukraine’s drone war does once the ministry is gone. The answer, so far, is foreign defense policy without a portfolio, in two capitals, inside a single week.

Fedorov Put A Price On Ukraine’s Drone Expertise

The proposal is a straight swap. Fedorov would help the United States build attack drones at scale, and Washington would send Ukraine the Patriot interceptors it is short of. This is his own idea rather than a deal between governments, and nobody in Kyiv authorized it.

“I’m ready to make that trade,” he told the Financial Times in an interview published Sunday.

The interceptor shortage is the reason the offer has teeth. Russia is hitting Ukrainian factories and warehouses with dozens of ballistic missiles a month, and Ukraine mostly cannot stop them because its Patriot batteries are running low on rounds.

Fedorov is in Washington mainly to raise American capital for an investment fund that would back Ukrainian defense technology companies and start new ones around three gaps: battlefield robots to replace infantry in the worst positions, jet-powered interceptors fast enough to catch Russia’s newer attack drones, and cheap missiles guided by artificial intelligence. He has not said what his own role in the fund would be, or whether he would profit from it. He also declined to say whether he would meet anyone from the Trump administration.

Rome Signed Him First, And Pays Him Nothing

Crosetto called Fedorov the day after his dismissal and offered him the job. Fedorov accepted on August 28, and will serve without salary, outside the Italian ministry’s staff, and without leaving Kyiv. His press office says the role gives him no access to state secrets or technical documentation.

Announcing the appointment, Fedorov said “Ukraine’s experience can become the foundation for a new European defense model,” according to the Kyiv Post. The two men discussed drones, air defense, autonomous systems and defense technology investment.

His press office addressed the legal question directly: his former post imposes no restriction on advising another government, the role involves no disclosure of state secrets or technical documentation, and hiring former senior officials as advisers is ordinary international practice.

Rome supplied a title but not a job description. The Italian defense ministry called the appointment an important opportunity, named Fedorov its Innovation Advisor, and said Italy welcomed partners experienced in autonomous systems and air defense. So both governments have now described the subject matter. Neither has said what Fedorov is actually permitted to hand over. Gregory Alegi, a historian at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, framed that gap for The New York Times as whether Fedorov is “at liberty to share actual technology, or just broad philosophical insights.”

Italy Needs Up To 18 Months To Clear A Drone For Military Use

Authorizing a drone for Italian military use takes between nine and 18 months. That figure comes from Lieutenant General Pietro Serino, a former chief of staff of the Italian Army, who told The New York Times he hopes Fedorov can speed up how the ministry buys equipment.

Ukraine’s answer to the same problem is Brave1 Market, the state marketplace Fedorov built as digital minister and then institutionalized after taking over the defense ministry in January. It has processed more than $235 million in orders. In August, Ukraine’s defense ministry added a tool that lets a unit specify a drone across more than 17 characteristics, hides which unit is asking, and runs an automatic auction so the cheapest matching offer wins.

Nine to 18 months against a marketplace where a brigade defines its own airframe and manufacturers bid on it. Crosetto is not buying drones from Fedorov. He is buying the clock.

Whether Italy can act on any of it is a separate matter, and one Italian voters will settle. Elections are due next year, which caps how much of this Crosetto can push through his own bureaucracy. Europe’s record here is not encouraging: ten months after Ursula von der Leyen promised it, the EU drone wall still did not exist.

The Pentagon Already Decided Speed Was The Problem

Washington reached Serino’s conclusion more than a year ago. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 directive reclassified small drones as consumable commodities, pushed purchasing authority down to combat units, and set a target of putting cheap attack drones in every squad by the end of fiscal 2026.

Execution followed. The Blue List of approved systems moved to the Defense Contract Management Agency, the services ran competitive fly-offs, and the department began taking delivery against roughly $1 billion of planned drone buying across two years. DroneXL covered how far down the supply chain that search went, reaching racing pilots, hobbyist builders and two Ukrainian firms.

What the Pentagon has been assembling is a vetted list of things units are allowed to buy. What Fedorov built is the other half: the mechanism by which a unit says what it actually wants, and the manufacturer gets paid fast enough to build it. That second half is the part he is now marketing in two countries at once.

DroneXL’s Take

Ukraine’s most valuable export right now is not a drone. It is the machinery for buying one quickly, and Fedorov is handing that machinery to Rome for nothing while asking Washington to pay for it in Patriots.

When DroneXL wrote about his firing in July, I named one thing to watch: whether the 70% advance payments to manufacturers and the Drone Line’s funding survived a handover to people who had no hand in building them. They survived. Brave1 has since cleared $235 million and added made-to-order procurement. The architecture outlived the architect, and that is a stronger sales pitch for the Ukrainian model than anything Fedorov could say about himself.

The case against him is real, so here it is. He promised to fix recruitment and mobilization and he did not. Zelensky’s office says his front-loaded spending left a $27 billion hole in the ministry’s budget, a number Fedorov disputes and puts nearer $5 billion. The presidential office also noted that he was upbeat about the war right up until his own status changed, which is a fair thing to raise about a man who told Reuters last week that Ukraine looks to be “gradually, slowly losing”. None of that touches the procurement record. A ministry is judged on whether the front line gets what it asked for, and on that measure his six months are what every Western defense ministry is currently shopping for.

I read the Patriot offer as aimed at two audiences. Washington is one. Kyiv is the other, and the message there is that the man Zelensky removed can still open doors his successor cannot. That is politics, and Fedorov became the first senior Ukrainian figure to demand wartime elections less than a fortnight ago, so nobody should pretend otherwise.

Italians vote next year, and that vote ends Crosetto’s mandate along with this experiment. The measurable test is simple: is that nine-to-18-month authorization clock shorter on election day than it is today. On the American side, watch for a term sheet rather than a headline. An offer reported in the FT costs Fedorov nothing. Money closing into his fund would cost someone a great deal, and that is the point at which any of this becomes real.

Sources: Financial Times, Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukrainska Pravda, The Local (AFP), Euromaidan Press, Defense News, Breaking Defense, The New York Times

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

Cleveland Clinic's Drone Pharmacy Runs 20 Deliveries A Week

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:31:00 GMT

Cleveland Clinic’s prescription drone program is flying about 20 deliveries a week from four Zipline aircraft at its Beachwood campus, the first operational figures to come out of the country’s first long-term prescription drug drone service. The charging hardware on site is built for 12.

Patients qualify if they live within five miles (8 km) of the campus, in a single-family home with a yard that is not obstructed. The aircraft cannot carry refrigerated products, controlled substances, specialty medications, or anything that needs large packaging. Inside those limits, a delivery that used to mean calling a courier and waiting hours now takes about 15 minutes.

DroneXL has covered this program twice: in July, when the launch pads in Beachwood were still going up, and on August 7, when the first packages reached patients’ lawns. The Akron Beacon Journal visited the campus and came back with the numbers nobody had published.

Four Aircraft Handle Twenty Deliveries A Week

Four Zipline aircraft operate out of Beachwood today, with charging hardware sized for 12, and together they fly roughly 20 prescription deliveries a week. Home delivery pharmacy manager Bri Robinson and pharmacy executive director Matt Soder gave those figures to the Akron Beacon Journal, which visited the campus.

That works out to five flights per aircraft per week in a service that only went live in early August. Soder expects the count to climb as the program widens.

The five-mile circle is half of what the aircraft can do. The drone flying these runs is Zipline’s Platform 2, the P2 Zip, which has a 10-mile (16 km) service radius and can move 24 miles (39 km) dock to dock. Nothing else in the fleet matches the Beachwood description: the older P1 is catapult-launched and drops packages under a parachute, while everything the Clinic and the paper describe, the winch, the droid, the self-docking charger, is Platform 2 hardware. Cleveland Clinic is flying it at half radius, which is what a first phase looks like when the cargo is medication.

The FAA’s own paperwork fills in the specs and corrects part of the local account. A February environmental reevaluation of Zipline’s Arkansas operation describes the P2 Zip as an electric vertical takeoff aircraft with five propellers that weighs 55 pounds empty and 63 pounds with a full eight-pound (3.6 kg) payload, spans 7.8 feet (2.4 m) wingtip to wingtip, transits at 330 feet (101 m) and about 47 mph (76 km/h), and never exceeds 76 mph. Each delivery hover runs roughly 75 seconds while the droid goes down and comes back up. So the five propellers in the Beacon Journal’s list belong to the aircraft. The five pounds and the 10-inch box do not, and that pairing is closer to the size of the package than the drone carrying it.

Photo credit: Zipline

The Availability Number Matters More Than The Delivery Count

Zipline’s aircraft stayed available more than 90 percent of the time through several weeks of heavy rain and wind in Northeast Ohio, according to Robinson. The drones carry their own weather sensing and stand down for thunderstorms and blizzards. For a hospital pharmacy, that reliability figure is the whole argument.

Robinson told the paper that through the recent weather, “the drones have consistently been up greater than 90% of the time.”

A pharmacy cannot offer patients a delivery option that vanishes when the forecast turns, which is why availability, not speed, is the number that gets a service approved internally. Speed is the part patients notice. Soder’s comparison is a courier run measured in hours or days against a drone that covers the five-mile radius in about 15 minutes. Ten percent downtime is a rounding error on a burrito. On a rush antibiotic it decides whether the service is real.

Geomarking And Motion Sensing Decide Where The Package Lands

Zipline geomarks every address in the service area before the first flight, and each patient picks a landing spot from two or three the company approves on the property. If the droid sees movement underneath it, the package does not come off the tether.

The failure behavior is the part worth knowing. The droid flashes red, makes noise, and either diverts to an alternate spot or returns to the drop box, with a notification going to both the patient and the pharmacy. When it does deliver, it sets the package down from about an inch and a quarter above the ground.

The aircraft is not silent. Staff at Beachwood compared it to a faint lawnmower somewhere in the distance, which is a long way from the rustling-leaves comparison Zipline has leaned on since Platform 2 was announced. DroneXL’s 2023 breakdown of Zipline’s uneven blade spacing explains the gap. Staggering the blades pushes propeller noise into lower frequencies the ear discounts, and that trick works best for a listener in the plane of the blades and worst for one standing directly below. The patient in the backyard is standing directly below.

Rebecca Wolkoff, a Pepper Pike resident who has taken two deliveries, told the paper it “definitely felt very futuristic.”

The Exclusion List Sets The Program’s Ceiling

Refrigerated products, controlled substances, specialty medications and anything needing large packaging stay off the aircraft. Specialty drugs sit on that list even though Cleveland Clinic named them as an expansion target when the program was announced, and that gap explains why the weekly count reads 20 instead of 200.

When DroneXL covered the construction phase in July, the published roadmap ran to specialty and rush medications, lab samples, prescription meals, and surgical supplies. Each of those categories multiplies volume. None of them has a date. Soder says the program expands over the next several months and that he wants charging hardware at more Cleveland Clinic facilities, and he told the Beacon Journal there is no timeline for bringing the service to Akron. Conventional carriers keep the work they have.

Zipline’s operating record is what buys the health system its confidence here. The company told the Beacon Journal it has flown about 140 million autonomous miles with no injuries or safety accidents, and its public fact sheet puts the number above 135 million.

DroneXL’s Take

Twenty deliveries a week is a small number and I am not going to dress it up. Four aircraft, five flights each, in a metro area of two million people, while Zipline talks publicly about reaching a million deliveries a day.

Small is also the right answer for month one of a service that drops prescription drugs on a lawn. Fine. What I would tell a pharmacy director to watch is not the delivery count. It is Robinson’s 90 percent. A courier that shows up hours later is still a courier, but a drone that cannot fly in a Cleveland October is a press release with rotors.

When DroneXL dug into Zipline’s $7.6 billion valuation in January, the conclusion was that healthcare partnerships would carry the margins rather than restaurant runs. Beachwood is the first place in this country where someone is actually counting.

Zipline is not the constraint here. In February the FAA cleared the company to run up to 400 delivery trips a day, around the clock, out of a single dock in Pea Ridge, Arkansas. Beachwood does 20 in a week. The aircraft is not what is holding this program back. The formulary is.

The gap in the record is dates. Cleveland Clinic has named every category it wants to add and attached a date to none of them, and the one expansion question the Beacon Journal put directly to Soder, whether Akron gets the service, came back with no timeline. Those categories are where the volume lives. Until one of them gets a date, 20 a week is not a ramp, it is a ceiling.

Zipline and BayCare do not fly in Tampa until late 2027, which leaves Beachwood as the only US hospital system producing real utilization data for more than a year. Watch what Cleveland Clinic loads onto the aircraft between now and then. If refrigerated or specialty medications go on before BayCare’s first flight, drone delivery stops being a pharmacy experiment and starts being a line item in somebody’s budget.

A prescription landing softly in a backyard is still the best advertisement this industry gets. It just has to land every time it rains.

Sources: Akron Beacon Journal, FAA environmental reevaluation, Zipline Pea Ridge, February 20, 2026, Zipline fact sheet

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

Quantum Systems Says CIA-Backed Fund Opened Its US Doors

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:37:00 GMT

One of Europe’s biggest defense startups got its start in the American market with help from the CIA’s venture capital arm. Co-CEO Sven Kruck told Reuters that US investors including In-Q-Tel opened doors in Washington for Quantum Systems and helped the company win work with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kruck said the reconnaissance contract with US intelligence agencies was small in revenue terms but established the company’s credibility. Quantum Systems sells reconnaissance, attack, and interceptor drones to customers including Ukraine and Germany, and Reuters puts its valuation at roughly $8 billion.

I have been covering this company since 2024, back when it was a Bavarian VTOL specialist most American readers had never heard of. The part of Kruck’s account that will travel furthest is not the intelligence contract. It is the admission that one of Europe’s biggest defense startups found its footing in Washington before it found it in Berlin.

In-Q-Tel Sells Access More Than It Sells Capital

In-Q-Tel is the venture firm US intelligence officials created to find technology relevant to national security. Its checks are usually small, often under $3 million. The real value, one person familiar with its operations told Reuters, is the introduction to American defense buyers, the sector’s biggest spenders.

The name nods to James Bond’s gadget maker Q, and the portfolio history includes Palantir and Anduril. In-Q-Tel also holds a stake in Stark, the German strike-drone company founded by Quantum Systems co-founder Florian Seibel after investors blocked the parent company from arming its surveillance platforms. Jennifer Nelson, the fund’s executive vice president international, described Germany to Reuters as an important innovation partner and strategic ally, and said In-Q-Tel keeps expanding its investments in German dual-use companies.

Kruck was blunt about how that works in practice. “It made it easier to get started in the U.S.,” he said, naming the CIA and FBI as the clients. He also volunteered that In-Q-Tel has not sent him an unprompted email in two years, a fair reminder that this is a network story rather than a control story.

Quantum Systems Already Builds Inside the United States

The company is not a foreign vendor shipping boxes across the Atlantic. Quantum Systems runs a 135,000-square-foot (12,500-square-meter) integration and production site in Moorpark, California, opened in June 2025, and its Vector eVTOL reconnaissance aircraft joined the Pentagon’s Blue UAS Cleared List that August.

Kruck tied the physical presence directly to Washington’s rules for foreign defense suppliers, telling Reuters that the local-operations requirement is why the company runs factories and staffs them in the United States. The arrangement carries a cost European governments are only starting to price in. Like any defense supplier, Quantum Systems cannot sell technology developed on American soil to other countries without American approval.

For US drone buyers, this is the supply chain the FCC Covered List action left standing when it swept foreign drones out of the import market. Blue UAS listing is the pathway onto federal buying schedules, and Moorpark is a large part of why Quantum Systems qualifies for it.

European Lawmakers Are Watching the Investor, Not the Check

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament’s security and defense committee, argues that a fund tied to US intelligence should not be judged like an ordinary shareholder. She told Reuters that In-Q-Tel carries a mandate to secure technology for American intelligence services.

Strack-Zimmermann pointed to observation rights and access to government contracts as channels of influence that run past equity. Germany’s defense ministry said it takes investor influence in the sector seriously and that shareholders should not interfere with a company’s operations or research. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said earlier this year that the agency was refining how it works with the private sector. The CIA declined to comment.

The gap Reuters leaves open is the one that decides the argument. Kruck groups In-Q-Tel among “US investors,” but the story does not say how large the fund’s position in Quantum Systems is or what rights came attached to it, and Nelson’s statement addressed Europe broadly rather than this company. Those are the numbers a strategic-influence claim turns on. Quantum Systems is preparing an initial public offering as early as 2027, and a prospectus is where holdings and export-control constraints stop being optional disclosures.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the American drone-independence story running backwards, and it deserves a straight look.

Washington spent four years telling US operators to stop buying Chinese and built the Blue UAS list to tell them what to buy instead. One of the strongest non-Chinese platforms on that list belongs to a German company that says it got through the door partly because a CIA-funded venture arm made introductions. That is not a scandal. It is how the trusted-supplier system was designed to work. But nobody should pretend a trusted supply chain is a neutral engineering standard. It is a supply chain Washington can constrain, and the export-approval requirement Kruck described is that constraint written down.

The counterpoint is real and I will grant it. In-Q-Tel’s checks are tiny next to the $246 million German Army contract Quantum Systems booked in December, and a fund that has not emailed the co-CEO in two years is not steering anything. Strack-Zimmermann’s concern is about structure, not about a hand on the tiller.

Structure is the point, though. Europe has no In-Q-Tel. It has ministers who want sovereign capability and a capital market that keeps outsourcing the introduction problem to American funds. Until that changes, every European drone company that wants the US market walks the same path Quantum Systems walked, and signs the same approval clause on the way in. My read is that the interceptor work Quantum Systems is pushing with Ukrainian partners is where this gets tested first, because that is the one program where Europe cannot afford to wait on anyone’s sign-off.

Sources: Reuters (John O’Donnell and Maria Rugamer), Seeking Alpha, Quantum Systems

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

Skyrover S1 Drops to $236 as the FCC Moves to Halt Its Sales

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:07:00 GMT

The Skyrover S1 is selling for $236 at Amazon, 18% under the $289 list price on the listing and the lowest price DroneXL has logged on this aircraft. The Fly More Combo, with three batteries and a charging hub, is $318.99 against a $399 list. Both ship free with Prime, sold by Skyrover Direct and fulfilled by Amazon, with overnight delivery offered to my zip code in Croton-on-Hudson when I checked Sunday at 12:54 pm.

Two federal dates sit next to that price. On Monday, August 31, comments close in the Federal Communications Commission proceeding that would end the import and marketing of this drone under the exact FCC ID printed on its label. On September 3, a 25% Section 232 tariff on imported drones takes effect.

For $236 the box holds the aircraft, the controller and one battery.

Get the Skyrover S1 for $236 at Amazon

The Skyrover S1 (left) next to the X1. Photo credit: DroneXL

The $236 Price Sits Below Every Number DroneXL Has Logged for the S1

The Skyrover S1 arrived on Amazon in October 2025 with a $349 list price, sold for $269 in December, and reached $296.65 last November only by stacking an Amazon coupon on a DroneXL discount code. At $236 the standalone drone sits $33 below its previous floor and $113 below launch.

The combo history runs the same direction. The Fly More Combo listed at $499, dropped to $389 in December, and went for $399 during Skyrover’s Best Buy spring sale in March. At $318.99 it is $70 under the lowest combo price DroneXL had recorded.

Amazon’s “Limited time deal” badge carries no end date. Skyrover’s own store shows the S1 from $236 against a $349 regular price and is running its August promotions through August 31, and that calendar is the best signal I have for how long the Amazon price holds. The listing shows 4.4 stars from 294 ratings and more than 300 units bought in the past month.

One other configuration is worth a look. The two-battery bundle with a 256GB microSD card is $256, a $20 step up from the bare drone for a second battery and the card most buyers would order anyway.

Forty Minutes and Forward Sensing Separate the S1 From the DJI Mini 4K

The Skyrover S1 weighs 242 grams and carries a 1/2-inch Sony sensor behind a 3-axis gimbal, shooting 4K/60 video and 48-megapixel stills. Skyrover rates the battery at 40 minutes and the video link at 39,000 feet (12 km). Forward and downward sensors detect obstacles; the sides and rear are blind.

The 48-megapixel mode arrived by firmware. Version V01.0000.010, covered by DroneXL in December, added the high-resolution stills to a drone that shipped with 12-megapixel photos. The same release brought 1080p slow motion at 120fps and 2.7K vertical video. The “8K photo” line in Amazon’s listing is that same 48-megapixel file upscaled, the marketing stretch DroneXL called out on the X1 in May.

The comparison that matters at this price is the DJI Mini 4K, the drone DroneXL points first-time pilots to more than any other. It hit $209 in April and its Fly More Combo fell to $255 in June. For roughly $27 more, the S1 adds 4K at 60 frames instead of 30, a rated 40 minutes against 31, forward obstacle sensing where the Mini 4K senses only downward, and a slightly larger sensor. The Mini 4K keeps DJI’s transmission and DJI’s support network, and that second item is where this article is headed.

Flight time is Skyrover’s number, and DroneXL has not run the S1 through a timed battery test. The one field result on record is Marcus from Idaho Quadcopter landing with 47% remaining after a long session at 38°F (3°C) in December, which is a good sign for a 40-minute rating but not a measurement of it.

At 242 grams the S1 sits under the FAA’s 250-gram line, so recreational pilots skip registration and Remote ID. Fly it for money under Part 107 and registration applies at any weight. Every other drone under 250 grams DroneXL recommends carries the same footnote.

The FCC’s Proposed Sales Ban Lists the S1’s Own FCC ID

The FCC’s July 17 Public Notice in PS Docket 26-184 proposes to prohibit the continued importation and marketing of drones from nine companies, and it lists FCC ID 2BPFE-DD001 under WaveGo Tech LLC. That is the Skyrover S1’s aircraft authorization, granted July 2, 2025. Comments close August 31.

The Federal Register version of the notice also names the S1’s controller, 2BPFE-RC001, and the two SZ Knowact IDs behind the Skyrover X1. DroneXL covered the nine-company list when it dropped, and Russ from 51 Drones told S1 and X1 shoppers to buy now or not at all. What neither piece spelled out is that the S1’s ID is on the page by number.

A week earlier the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau had already proposed a $25,000 fine against WaveGo. The bureau’s July 10 notice describes WaveGo as a Delaware LLC formed on December 30, 2024, that markets the S1 and X1, and says the company ignored a May 8 letter of inquiry and a May 29 deficiency letter, both delivered by certified mail and by email to the addresses on its FCC filings. SZ Knowact, the X1’s grantee and the developer of the Skyrover app, received a matching $25,000 notice the same day. The FCC’s account of its own investigation opens with a DroneXL article from September 2025 that linked to Konrad Iturbe’s automated fingerprinting of DJI’s transmission protocol.

Buyers should read the scope carefully. The proposal reaches importation and marketing, and the notice says the continued use of equipment already purchased would remain permitted. If adopted as written, sellers would have to stop importing and marketing within 30 days of the final action appearing in the Federal Register. When the FCC ran the same procedure against legacy Huawei-era gear this year, it adopted the prohibition in June and it took effect July 16, a timeline DroneXL flagged as the template for everything that followed.

The FCC’s economic case rests on the claim that none of the nine companies “appear in major industry market analyses or rankings.” Amazon’s own counter says more than 300 people bought this one drone in the past month. Anyone who wants that number in the record has until Monday to put it there.

The tariff runs on a separate clock. Trump’s Section 232 proclamation puts a 25% duty on imported consumer drones from September 3, and the S1’s FCC filing labels the aircraft as made in Malaysia, so it is an import like everything else on the shelf. The duty applies to declared import value, and how much of it reaches a $236 sticker is the importer’s decision.

Skyrover’s answer to all of this so far is the “We’re Here to Stay” letter it posted in April, promising FCC compliance and a replacement-based support operation in the US. That letter did not name who makes the hardware. The FCC’s July notices did.

Filing a Comment Takes Ten Minutes, and the Docket Is 26-184, Not 26-189

Two FCC comment windows close this week and only one of them covers the S1. PS Docket 26-184, the nine-company notice that names the S1’s FCC ID, closes Monday, August 31. PS Docket 26-189, the thermal and LiDAR proposal closing September 2, does not reach a drone with neither sensor.

The mechanics are the same for both. Go to the FCC’s express filing page and enter the proceeding number, then select the docket title when it appears in the dropdown. Type the comment into the box and submit it with a name and address. Use standard filing instead if you want to attach a PDF, and pick “COMMENT” as the filing type. The address is required and is not published.

The Drone Advocacy Alliance’s step-by-step guide was written for 26-189 and walks through every screen; swap in 26-184 and the rest applies. Vic Moss at the Drone Service Providers Alliance published his own filing advice earlier this month, and his rule is the one to follow: specifics move a record, so say what you fly and what replacing it would cost. DroneXL has been a Drone Advocacy Alliance partner since June 2024, and DJI helps fund the Alliance.

The FCC asked, in its own words, whether the economic impact of this prohibition is minor and whether other equipment could fill the gap. An S1 owner who bought it because the Mini 4K could not sense a tree in front of it is the person qualified to answer that. If you own one, or you buy one this weekend, that is the comment worth filing before Monday ends.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL has been pricing this drone and reporting on the company behind it for ten months, and I have never seen those two jobs pull against each other as hard as they do this weekend. The aircraft at $236 is the best sub-250-gram value on Amazon by a clear margin: forward sensing and 4K/60 for Mini 4K money. The company selling it is a Delaware shell that would not answer certified mail from the FCC.

The commission’s suspicion is not a stretch, and I helped build it. The FCC’s fine notice against WaveGo cites the DroneXL story that opened this whole thread, and the FCC’s nine-company list reads like a subset of the repository Iturbe published a year ago. DroneXL opposes protectionism dressed as security, and the December Covered List sweep still reads that way to me. Laundering DJI hardware through a registered-agent address in Lewes, Delaware is a different thing, and it is the unfair competition this publication has argued against from the other side for years.

So here is my read for a buyer, and it comes in two halves. If you want a first drone, or a beater for the shots you would not risk a $700 aircraft on, buy this one at $236 and buy it now. The drone in your hand stays legal, and the FCC has said so in writing. Nothing at this price flies as long or sees as well. Buy the Fly More Combo if you buy at all, because the three batteries you get on Monday may be the only three you ever own.

If you need a drone that will still be supported in 2028, walk away. Everything after the sale is exposed: the replacement policy Skyrover advertised in April depends on a company that has, on the FCC’s account, gone silent, and the parts that keep a $236 drone flying for two years move through the same import channel the notice would close. A Mini 4K costs less and comes with a manufacturer that answers its mail. That is the whole trade, and I am not going to pretend the FCC half of it away to sell a drone.

Watch the docket after August 31. The Huawei precedent says a final notice can follow a comment deadline by weeks, and a 30-day sell-off after that is the whole runway. If WaveGo or SZ Knowact finally files something, that will be news. If neither does, the outcome is the one Russ warned about in July, and the S1 becomes the drone that was cheapest in the week before it disappeared.

Sources: Amazon, Federal Register, FCC PS Docket 26-184, FCC DA 26-700, Skyrover

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

FCC Wants To Ban The Lost-Pet Drone CBS News Just Celebrated

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:40:55 GMT

CBS Evening News aired a two-minute segment on August 29 about a thermal drone that finds lost pets for the city of Mission Viejo, California, and the same drone class sits in the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed ban on foreign-made “military-grade” aircraft. The Mission Viejo drone cost almost $17,000, paid for with private donations. On camera it tracked a terrier in the carpool lane of an Orange County freeway and guided ground units to it in minutes.

The FCC’s proposal, open for public comment until September 2, lists any drone carrying a thermal imaging sensor among seven categories it wants pulled from import and sale. Owners keep flying what they already have. Cities that want their own copy of the Mission Viejo program, and Kyle Werner told CBS other agencies are already calling him, would be shopping in a market the FCC intends to close.

I have covered Mission Viejo’s pet rescues since the first one in November, and I have watched pilots in New York run the same searches for years. This is the first time a network newscast has put the technique in front of a national audience, three days before the docket shuts.

CBS Put A Freeway Dog Rescue On The Evening News

Correspondent Carter Evans’ report for CBS News opens with a small terrier loose on an Orange County freeway. Mission Viejo Animal Services put its drone overhead, spotted the dog in the carpool lane, and talked officers to it over the radio. The whole rescue took minutes, according to Werner.

Werner is Mission Viejo’s Animal Services Manager and Chief of Field Services. He told CBS that lost-pet searches used to run days or weeks, and that the drone changed the department’s posture. “We went from a very passive search, just waiting for something to happen, to actively searching,” he said.

The drone uses lasers and thermal imaging to pick out animal heat signatures across large areas, per CBS. Senior animal control officer JR Stewart described a search for a dog named Lana in brush that rose above his head. He said there was no way he would have seen her with the naked eye. The drone found her and guided him in. That was the January canyon rescue DroneXL covered at the time, the department’s third find in about two months.

CBS also revisited Josie, the German Shepherd mix the drone tracked for close to a mile last November before Werner coached her owner into position. Werner told CBS the owner sat down, stayed calm, and let the dog come to her.

Private Donors Paid For The Drone And Other Agencies Want One

The Dedicated Animal Welfare Group, a nonprofit that funds veterinary care for sick and injured animals, donated the drone to Mission Viejo last fall. CBS put the price at almost $17,000. No city money bought it, and Werner told the network other agencies are already asking him about the technology.

Asked whether the drone is worth the money, Werner put it at 100 percent. He framed the return in family terms rather than budget terms, calling a reunited pet someone’s family member coming home.

The city has never named the drone’s manufacturer. Its November release called it a newly donated thermal imaging unmanned aerial system and left it there. That omission mattered little in November. It matters now, because the FCC’s proposal turns on where the aircraft was built.

New York Pet Searchers Have Run This Playbook For Years

Mission Viejo is the newest municipal example of a technique New York State pilots have refined since at least 2024. The search runs the same way in both places: launch, find the heat signature, then talk the owner into a spot where a scared dog walks to a familiar voice.

Chad Tavernia, a retired New York State Police investigator, runs North Country Drone Search & Recovery across a territory that stretches from Syracuse to the Vermont line and south to Albany. When DroneXL covered his operation in February 2025 he had located 42 dogs and 11 other animals in just over a year. He puts his overall success rate at 40 percent, rising to 90 percent when he can launch in the area where the pet went missing. One golden retriever turned up on Christmas Eve, 1,000 feet (305 meters) from home, trapped in eight inches of snow with 20 feet of leash still attached.

The Catskills search for Annie in April 2024: the circled dot in Justin Vickers' thermal feed was the dog. Photo courtesy of Justin Vickers / News 10

In the Catskills, Justin Vickers of Upstate Thermal Drone Services drove more than an hour in April 2024 to search for Annie, a dog stranded on a cliff after her owner slipped on ice during a 14-mile (22.5-kilometer) hike near Round Top. After a couple of hours in the air he spotted a small dark shape beside a stream. He warned the family it could be the dog or a black bear. It was Annie. Across the river in New Jersey, a volunteer known as the Drone Ranger passed 122 recovered pets in January.

The New York searches and the Mission Viejo searches share one more thing. Every one of them ran on a thermal camera.

The FCC Proposal Puts Thermal Drones In The Military-Grade Column

On July 21 the FCC released Public Notice DA 26-758, opening PS Docket 26-189. It proposes to prohibit continued importation and marketing of previously authorized foreign-made drones on the Covered List that the agency defines as military-grade. Any drone carrying a thermal imaging sensor is one of seven categories.

The other six are aircraft with LiDAR, docking stations, spray drones covered by the FAA’s economic-poison rules, aircraft at or above 25 kilograms (55 pounds), designs built to carry a defense article, and swarming systems. DroneXL broke down the full proposal the day after it dropped. Marketing in FCC usage covers advertising, sale, lease, and distribution, so the proposal reaches the shelf, not the hangar: drones already purchased keep flying, and the agency proposes a 180-day wind-down after any final order.

Blue UAS and Buy American aircraft are exempt, as are imports for federal government use. A city animal shelter buying with donated money is none of those. Federal Register publication on August 3 started the 30-day clock, and comments in Docket 26-189 close on September 2. A day later, the Section 232 tariff proclamation takes effect, with a 100 percent duty on any imported drone that carries a thermal imager.

DroneXL’s Take

Werner’s “100%” is the number the FCC should be reading this weekend. The agency’s notice tentatively concludes that pulling this hardware from the market would not have substantial economic or supply-chain impacts, then asks operators to send in fleet counts and replacement costs. A city that found three dogs with one donated aircraft, on national television, is exactly the kind of record that either lands in that docket by Tuesday or does not exist as far as the Commission is concerned.

The city has never said who built the drone. My read, and the city can correct me, is that a laser-plus-thermal package at that price is a DJI enterprise aircraft. If so, Mission Viejo can keep flying it under the proposal, and the department in the next county that called Werner after the broadcast cannot buy one. That is the shape of this rule: the people who already have the tool are fine, and the people CBS just inspired are the ones who lose.

The security questions behind the Covered List are real, and DJI’s data practices have earned the scrutiny they get. None of that reaches a thermal sensor pointed at a canyon for a lost Australian Shepherd. Calling that camera military-grade does not make it one. The label does the work an actual finding would otherwise have to do.

From where I sit in Westchester, I have watched New York pilots like Tavernia and Vickers turn this into a service people call on the worst day of their year. Mission Viejo made it a municipal function. Whether the record in Docket 26-189 reflects any of that by September 2 depends on whether animal services departments, most of which have never filed an FCC comment, understand that the deadline applies to them. Werner’s phone is already ringing. The FCC’s inbox should be too.

Sources: CBS News, FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, City of Mission Viejo

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

Nepal Asks Abroad For Cargo Drones As China Flies 47 Next Door

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:26:00 GMT

Nepal flew its first heavy-lift cargo drone test across the Trishuli River on Saturday, four days after a glacier collapse sent a wall of mud through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys. The same day, the country’s foreign minister asked other governments for cargo drones. Across the border in Tibet, China had 47 drones on the ground and a Wing Loong aircraft overhead serving as a flying cell tower by Thursday evening.

The gap between those two responses is the story. Nepal has some of the most experienced high-altitude cargo drone pilots anywhere, the crews that fly supplies and haul trash on Everest, and it still took until the weekend to stage a single 130-pound (59 kg) delivery flight in a schoolyard in Bidur. The vest on one of Saturday’s pilots carried the name of the company I have covered since its first Everest season in 2024.

The disaster killed at least 669 people in Nepal and seven in Tibet as of Saturday, with about 2,426 still missing in Nepal and 554 in Tibet’s Gyirong County, according to Reuters figures reported by CNBC. The United Nations counts roughly 10,000 affected households.

Nepal Tests A 220-Pound Cargo Drone Four Days After The Flood

On Saturday afternoon, about a dozen drone operators, army volunteers and police officers gathered in Devighat, in Bidur, to test whether a heavy-lift drone could carry supplies across the Trishuli River. The aircraft was rated for 220 pounds (100 kg). The first flight carried 130 pounds (59 kg).

That is how The New York Times described the scene from Bidur, where reporter Anupreeta Das and photographer Atul Loke watched the test. The packages held rice, instant noodles, clothing and sanitary pads, tied under the airframe with ropes and carabiners while light rain slowed the work. The drone crossed the river low, hovered while testers on the far bank unloaded the cargo, and came back. Round trip: about three minutes.

Some of the pilots had already dropped packages high in the Himalayas. One wore a vest reading “Airlift Drone Pilot,” the mark of Airlift Technology, the Nepali operator DroneXL has followed since it replaced Sherpa porters on the Khumbu Icefall with a DJI FlyCart 30 in 2024 and hauled trash off Everest this spring. The gray multirotor in Loke’s photographs, roughly the size of a dining table with its arms extended, carries Airlift branding and a DJI harness strap. The Times did not name the model.

The group ran the test several more times and now plans to take the results to the authorities, who will decide whether drone delivery gets folded into the official relief effort. Nepal’s Armed Police Force was already flying drone deliveries of food rations, drinking water, medicines and other supplies to stranded residents in the Devighat area on Saturday, according to a video posted on X by India TV correspondent Manish Prasad.

The country needed it faster. The flood destroyed more than 35 bridges and damaged around 25 miles (40 km) of road, including sections of the main highways, per the Times. On Aug. 26, the day of the disaster, the government publicly asked helicopter and drone operators, including the Nepal Drone Association, to coordinate with district offices, Nepal News reported. Nepal Police told reporters the next morning that its own contribution was modest. “Four drones have also been mobilized for search and rescue operations,” Deputy Inspector General Abhi Narayan Kapale said, per ANI.

By Saturday, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal was asking abroad. Nepal has requested heavy-lift cargo drones from international partners to reach cut-off mountain settlements, Khanal told a Kathmandu news conference, according to the Kathmandu Post. Steep gorges and unpredictable weather limit where large helicopters can go, he said.

China Puts 47 Drones And A Flying Cell Tower Over Gyirong

China’s National Fire and Rescue Administration had 681 firefighters, 13 rescue dogs, 113 vehicles and 47 drones in Gyirong County by Thursday evening, a day and a half after the mudslide buried the border port. A Wing Loong aircraft carrying cellular base stations was orbiting overhead by 2 a.m.

The numbers come from CCTV via CNN and from Xinhua. The Wing Loong, a civilian version of AVIC’s armed reconnaissance drone, took off from Sichuan and reached the disaster zone at 2 a.m. Thursday with cameras and cellular base stations aboard. AVIC told the Global Times the aircraft logged about 6,069 user connections and 661 calls in that first stretch, and that its anti-icing system kept it flying in the weather. A second Wing Loong joined it by Saturday, per Xinhua, and on Sunday the agency reported that signal had reached the core rescue site at the port.

The same ministry ran this playbook over flooded Guangxi in July, when two Wing Loongs restored mobile coverage more than 8,000 times while 300 volunteer pilots flew agricultural drones as an improvised cargo airline, Xinhua reported at the time. Seven weeks later it ran again in the Himalayas. That is what a rehearsed system looks like.

Nepal’s side of the border had no airborne base station. Nepal Telecom and Ncell lost 87 towers between them in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading, OnlineKhabar reported, and restored them the slow way, flying generators and technicians in by helicopter and carrying gear on porters’ backs where the roads were gone, according to Nepal Telecom’s updates.

Drones Carry Rescuers And Supplies Where The Roads Ended

At Gyirong Port, Chinese advance teams reached the buried border gate by three routes: rubber boats, on foot through the mountains, and heavy-lift drone transport. On Saturday, cargo drones launched from a supply zone 1.9 miles (3 km) away were resupplying the 21 rescuers already at the gate.

That account is Xinhua’s, from an Aug. 29 briefing by a Ministry of Emergency Management official, and it lists heavy-lift drone transport alongside land and water routes as a way advance personnel moved toward the core zone. CGTN reported eleven drone pilots with seven reconnaissance drones and two heavy-lift aircraft assigned to surveys and area searches by civil rescue groups. Xinhua’s own framing is worth keeping: drones remain a supplement to the 2,141 rescuers on the ground.

A video circulating under Nepal hashtags this weekend shows a person dangling from a heavy-lift drone over a flooded road. That footage is from Yunbiao in Guangxi on July 6, not Nepal, and the account that reposted it said so in its own caption. I covered that rescue when it happened: a firefighter crew hoisted a truck driver off the roof of a fuel tanker as the water rose around him. A second widely shared clip, a night flight in which a drone carries a figure past a rescuer in a China Fire and Rescue uniform, shows drone-borne transport of some kind. The post that spread it claims drones are ferrying people across rivers in Nepal; the uniform is Chinese, the clip carries a third-party watermark, and no news outlet has placed it in Nepal or tied it to this disaster. Treat it as unconfirmed.

The View From 23,600 Feet Shows Where The Flood Began

Drone footage shot at more than 23,600 feet (7,200 m) and shared on Chinese social media shows a slab of glacier breaking off at about 17,000 feet (5,200 m) and falling roughly 3,300 feet (1 km) into the valley below. A BBC analysis matched the location to the Trishuli watershed.

The collapse released the seismic energy of a magnitude-5.2 earthquake and sent a slurry of ice and rock down the Lende Khola at around 110 mph (180 km/h) for more than 12 miles (20 km), according to the reconstruction Ynetnews compiled from Chinese and Nepali sources. The Trishuli rose about 30 feet (9 m) in half an hour.

Lower down, drones have done the work cameras always do after a disaster and something more. CNN drone footage from Nuwakot showed half a bridge left standing in a mud-caked valley. Chinese teams flew reconnaissance drones ahead of every foot patrol into Gyirong Port so crews would know where the ground was too soft to stand on. Both countries are watching two new barrier lakes by satellite and drone; one was 99,000 square meters (24 acres) and draining on Saturday morning, the other still growing, per the Mappr summary of official figures. If either breaches, the drone crews in Bidur will be delivering supplies into a second flood.

DroneXL’s Take

Nepal’s problem this week was never hardware. Its private operators fly DJI FlyCart aircraft to 19,685 feet on Everest and flew a U.S.-built Freefly Alta X on Ama Dablam in June. Its government spent four days on helicopters, ran one schoolyard test, then asked abroad for aircraft its citizens fly.

I don’t think that is an accident. In April the Home Ministry refused Freefly a test permit on Everest and suspended Airlift’s FlyCart 100 permit in the same stroke, citing its UAV regulations and the need for “wider stakeholder consultation.” The DJI permit came back in five days and the aircraft went on to move 22,207 pounds (10,073 kg) of cargo on Everest this season. What never got written, as far as I can find, is the page that tells a district officer in Nuwakot how to call that aircraft in when a bridge is gone. The regulator that treated cargo drones as an expedition permit question in April is learning in August that they are disaster infrastructure.

China wrote that page after the Henan floods in 2021 and ran it in Guangxi in July and Gyirong this week. Its Wing Loong deployment is the single most useful thing any drone did in this disaster: 6,069 phone connections from a place where every tower was under mud. Nothing comparable flew over Rasuwa; the Nepali carriers rebuilt tower by tower. Airborne base stations need a state that owns long-endurance aircraft and carriers willing to hang their equipment underneath. That is a policy gap, and it is the strongest argument I have seen for Western governments to stop treating cargo and communications drones as someone else’s experiment.

Helicopters still did most of the saving here, and they should have. More than 3,200 people came out by air, and no 100-kilogram drone lifts a family off a roof. The Guangxi tanker rescue was a one-off that I called usually illegal for good reason. Where drones win is the last mile after the helicopter leaves: the three-minute round trip across a river that used to have a bridge, and the phone signal that lets a survivor tell someone she is alive.

Whether Nepal’s request for heavy-lift drones gets answered, and by whom, is the thing to watch this week. Volunteers on X are already offering Indian-built BonV Aero and Marut cargo aircraft. DJI sells the FlyCart 100 and the 200-kilogram FlyCart 200, and Nepal knows the paperwork for both. The country that grounded two cargo drones over a permit question in April has the chance to write its drone doctrine in mud, in real time, while the barrier lakes hold.

Sources: The New York Times, Xinhua, CNN, ANI, Kathmandu Post, Nepal News, OnlineKhabar, Global Times, CGTN, CNBC/Reuters, Ynetnews, Mappr

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

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

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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