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Amazon's Connecticut Drone Briefing Left No Trace in the Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 03:33:00 GMT

Amazon’s North Haven drone hub was described to the board of the Connecticut Airport Authority by its executive director, Michael Shea, who told members the aircraft weigh about 80 pounds (36 kilograms), carry packages up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), drop them from about 13 feet (4 meters) and fly about seven miles (11 kilometers) from Amazon’s warehouse at 409 Washington Avenue. NBC Connecticut, by its own account the only news organization in the room, reported the briefing on September 24 without dating the meeting.

Shea told the board that Amazon “coordinated extensively with the FAA to control the airspace,” and that CAA staff have been in touch with the company about its plans. The only meeting on the authority’s public calendar between DEEP’s September 16 notice and NBC’s report was the September 23 board meeting. The draft minutes, posted on ctairports.org, record the executive director’s report in one sentence, “Mr. Shea provided a general update to the board,” and note under the economic development report that he described “several business development initiatives,” none of them named. Amazon, North Haven, drones and the FAA appear nowhere in them.

Connecticut’s Airport Authority Runs Six Airports and No Airspace

The Connecticut Airport Authority is the quasi-public agency created in 2011 to run Bradley International and five general aviation airports: Hartford-Brainard, Waterbury-Oxford, Groton-New London, Danielson and Windham. NBC Connecticut said the authority has a stake because drone deliveries use Connecticut airspace. Airspace is federal.

Tweed New Haven, the airport nearest the North Haven site, is not on the CAA’s list. What the authority got was a briefing its own draft minutes do not record, and Shea’s account of it names no document. The one federal paper Connecticut has published on the hub, the coastal consistency request, is not an approval of anything. The FAA’s own drone environmental review page listed no Connecticut filing when DroneXL checked it again on September 26, six days after the first check, and the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is still taking comment on the FAA’s coastal consistency request through October 1, with a decision due by October 16. Whether the North Haven hub gets a site review of its own or rides the national finding the FAA signed on July 28 is the question that request does not answer, and “all necessary approvals” does not either.

The numbers Shea gave the board are close to the FAA’s. The document DEEP is reviewing puts the MK30 at 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty and 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, with a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius and up to 1,000 flights a day. The 13-foot drop matches.

North Haven Approved the Ground in May, Not This Month

North Haven’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved Amazon’s drone delivery building at the Washington Avenue warehouse, application P26-17, by a 5-0 vote on May 4, according to the town’s minutes. NBC Connecticut’s September 24 report says officials approved part of the proposal, and dates nothing.

The perimeter fence and guardhouses passed the same night. The only action since was a 5-0 vote on August 3 accepting revised fence plans, and the commission’s September 14 agenda carries no Prime Air item. Amazon’s Sam Bailey told the commission in May that the FAA has sole jurisdiction over altitude and flight patterns, described the aircraft as 70-pound drones, and promised a public information session; none had been announced when DroneXL searched for one on September 26. Amazon’s stated goal is nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, and its August list of next markets named Syracuse, not New Haven.

DroneXL’s Take

The only public record of Connecticut’s airport agency being told what Amazon wants to fly over Hamden and Wallingford is a TV reporter’s notes from a meeting whose own minutes say “general update.” Shea’s assurance that Amazon has worked with the FAA on every approval it needs is the kind of sentence that closes a question for a board and opens one for everyone else: which approvals, under which review, on what document. My read is that the CAA was briefed because it is the aviation body the state has, not because it approves anything in this, and the airport nearest the hub is not even one of its own. The people who do have standing are the residents with five days left. A comment filed with DEEP before October 1 goes on the federal record, and here is how to file one. A briefing that leaves no trace in the minutes does not.

Sources: NBC Connecticut, Connecticut Airport Authority draft minutes, September 23, 2026, The Register Citizen via GovTech, FAA NEPA and Drones, Amazon.

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

Fedorov Wants A Humanoid Robot Killing Russians Within Six Months

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:57:01 GMT

Mykhailo Fedorov, the man who built Ukraine’s Army of Drones and was fired as its defense minister ten weeks ago, launched an “Army of Robots” on Saturday, September 26, 2026. He announced it on X and in a presentation at the IT Arena conference in Lviv, with a one-minute video and a website that opens with the line “We are here to replace people with robots on the battlefield and save lives.”

The first target is specific: a humanoid robot kills a Russian soldier within six months of launch. The second is an assault on a Russian position within 12 months with no infantry involved, robots and drones talking to each other over shared protocols. The site is recruiting robotics companies, engineers and a chief technology officer, plus funds, angels and corporations willing to co-invest.

Fedorov says the Army of Robots is not a single company. On September 1 he announced a defense-tech company of his own, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as first lead investor. Saturday’s announcement named no company at all.

Operators watch drone and thermal feeds in a frame from the Army of Robots launch video. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

The Robots In The Video Do Not Exist Yet

Every machine in the launch video is an AI-generated render, the Kyiv Independent reported. The humanoid numbered 0427, the crab-legged walkers, the tracked snake and the six-wheeled gun cart are concept art, not product shots, and Fedorov’s own post makes no hardware claim beyond the goals.

An AI-rendered humanoid combat robot, numbered 0427, walks through a trench in this concept art video, not real hardware. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

The pitch rests on the record instead. In his X post, Fedorov says drones now account for over 95% of battlefield strikes and that Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers, both figures from him and neither independently published. The robotization case does not need those numbers to stand up. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense reported more than 9,000 armed ground-robot missions in a single month this spring, up from 2,900 in November 2025, and the K2 Brigade has been running the first dedicated UGV battalion, as DroneXL reported in March. Wheeled and tracked robots already fight. What Ukraine does not have is a walking one that shoots.

An AI-rendered acoustic sensor array marks the detection step in Fedorov's battlefield sequence. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

Fedorov’s stated job for humanoids is narrower than the video suggests. Per dev.ua’s account of the Lviv presentation, the first tasks are mechanical: reloading machine guns, swapping batteries, placing sensors. “Robots should take on the most dangerous missions,” he wrote, listing casualty evacuation, ammunition runs, mining and demining, reconnaissance and holding positions.

Fedorov Is Building Outside The Government That Fired Him

President Volodymyr Zelensky removed Fedorov on July 15, 2026, after six months as defense minister. Street protests followed. Six days later Zelensky dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, the man Fedorov had been fighting, a sequence DroneXL covered in Fedorov Ousted: Ukraine Removes The Architect Of Its Drone War After Six Months.

Since then Fedorov has courted U.S. money. He spent late August in the United States meeting donors and tech executives, and on September 1 said Karp would be the first major investor in his new company. CNBC reported the investment is Karp’s personally, not Palantir’s, with no size disclosed and no product named. The Financial Times reported he is also seeking U.S. backing for a separate fund covering battlefield robotics, interceptors and AI-enabled missiles.

Which of those vehicles owns the Army of Robots is the gap in Saturday’s announcement. Ukrainska Pravda reported the project will be run by a “large private technology company” whose name comes later. Fedorov’s post says only that the team will invest in defense-tech companies, launch its own projects, test with the military and scale what works. The Army of Drones, launched in 2022, was a government program with United24 fundraising behind it. This one has a recruiting form and a promise.

An AI-rendered column of humanoids, quadrupeds and armed UGVs from the launch video. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / X

DroneXL’s Take

I’d bet on Fedorov before I’d bet on the video. The renders are a recruiting poster, and I doubt anyone at IT Arena mistook the crab-walkers for a roadmap. The record underneath is what makes this worth taking seriously: the Army of Drones started in 2022 as a fundraising slogan and produced the 9,000-missions-a-month ground-robot war I saw the makers of in the Brave1 pavilion in Düsseldorf this March. Fedorov has done the not-a-single-company trick once, from inside the government, with a budget.

Doing it from outside is a different problem. His procurement reforms made enemies in the ministry and the contractor base, and those people still run the ministry. A private venture that tests with the military needs the military to say yes, and the six-month humanoid target is the number to hold him to: it lands in late March 2027. If a walking robot has killed a Russian by then, Fedorov will have rebuilt his machine without a government. If it hasn’t, the first thing to check is whether anyone let him near a trench.

Sources: Mykhailo Fedorov on X, thearmyofrobots.com, Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, dev.ua, CNBC

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

British Army Bought 10,000 Drones In A Year, Most Are For Training

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:33:00 GMT

The British Army bought more than 10,000 drones in the past year through Project Rapstone, its fast-track procurement program, and most of them will never see a battlefield. Lt. Col. Matt Keogh, a commander involved in the program, gave the figure at a UK defense industry exhibition earlier in September and told Business Insider the drones are for training.

The training itself is the story. Rapstone soldiers learn to fly first-person-view drones by hand, with no flight aids and no GPS, before they get anywhere near the automated systems that most of the fleet runs on. Keogh calls it “the hardest way to fly,” and the Army does it on purpose.

An army that spends on 10,000 aircraft usually plans to fight with them. Rapstone plans to wear most of these out on training grounds.

Rapstone Spends On Pilots Because The Drones Go Obsolete In Weeks

Rapstone deliberately avoids buying large numbers of the newest drones, Keogh said, because drone tactics and hardware in Ukraine have turned over so fast that a product can be obsolete within weeks or months. The program spends on pilots instead, and buys cheap, fully manual FPV aircraft to train them on.

Britain launched Rapstone in September 2024 to get new gear to soldiers faster, a start date that comes from Business Insider’s reporting: the Ministry of Defence’s own Rapstone pages describe the program without dating it. The MoD now describes it as the program meant to move equipment from industry to the front line within 24 months and double the Army’s fighting power by 2027. The September 16 announcement of 245 sub-250 g FOXE-NATO drones, 110 Sonora training drones and a fleet of Skydio X10 aircraft under a £16 million ($21 million) deal sits inside it, and the £5 billion drone package announced in June put another £50 million ($67 million) into Rapstone over 12 months for FPV and interceptor drones. Britain also committed to 100,000 drones for Ukraine by April 2026, so this is the second ten-thousand-drone number out of London in 15 months.

Keogh said Britain was training pilots on surveillance-type drones “way before Ukraine,” and thousands of soldiers have come through Rapstone training. Most of them flew intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, the kind Western armies have used for years, rather than the FPV attack quadcopters Ukraine made famous. The manual-first rule reaches those ISR drones too: Keogh described stripping safeguards out of the smaller ISR platforms so pilots cannot lean on them.

FPV Training Takes 30 Simulator Hours Before A Two-Week Course

The entry requirement for the Army’s FPV course is experience flying ISR drones, Keogh said. Candidates then log 30 hours in a simulator before a two-week operator course, with an optional two-week commander course after that. Every soldier in the pipeline gets a kit of drones, a controller, goggles and batteries worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Keogh said the overlap between simulator and real aircraft is large enough that a pilot with 30 simulator hours picks up the real thing straight away. That matches what the US Army built into its Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, which loads simulator time in front of the first live flight, and what Bulgaria did last November when it ordered simulators into every land forces formation. The British version differs in what the simulator teaches. The Army wants the pilot to learn manual control the way a driver learns a stick shift before an automatic, or a map and compass before GPS, in Keogh’s comparison, so that whatever drone shows up at the front, the hard part is already trained.

GPS-Denied Training Means Reading A Map From The Video Feed

Britain trains FPV pilots for jammed airspace by sending them on long flights across training grounds, beyond visual line of sight, with no satellite positioning to fall back on. Pilot and commander navigate by matching what the camera feed shows to a paper map, Keogh said. Navigation, he added, is one of the biggest problems FPV pilots face.

The Ukrainian battlefield is the reason. Russian electronic warfare there jams and spoofs GPS across whole sectors, and NATO armies watching the war are building the same conditions into their own courses. Britain is one of them, and it has been public about treating Ukraine as the preview: the drone strategy it laid out at DSEI 2025 and the drone-warfare degree that starts its first cohort this month are built on the same reading of that war.

DroneXL’s Take

The consumer drone industry has spent a decade removing the need to fly, and the British Army is paying to put it back. Every DJI update since the Phantom has taken a skill away from the pilot: position hold, obstacle avoidance, return-to-home, a gimbal that levels itself. That is exactly right for a real estate shoot. It is exactly wrong for a soldier whose GPS is being jammed, because the day the assists fail is the day the pilot finds out whether he can fly. Rapstone’s answer, 30 simulator hours of pure manual stick time before anyone touches an aircraft, is the cheapest training a military can buy, and I’d argue it is also the cheapest training a Part 107 pilot can buy. If you have only ever flown with every assist on, you have never flown the drone. A $20 FPV simulator and a used radio will tell you within an hour how much of your skill was the software’s.

Source: Business Insider, UK Ministry of Defence

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

Paris Study: AED Drones Reach 95% of Cardiac Arrests in Five Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:35:00 GMT

A computer simulation of 28,349 real cardiac arrests around Paris found that drones carrying automated external defibrillators (AEDs) could put a device on scene within five minutes in more than 95% of cases. Fetching an existing wall-mounted AED by road manages that in 30 to 40% of cases. Dr. Hillary Minka, an emergency physician at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, presented the study at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris on Saturday, September 26.

The team modeled seven departments of the Île-de-France region, leaving out central Paris, and measured how long an AED takes to reach the center of each census block under three strategies: more fixed AEDs, drones alone, or both. The hybrid version cut average AED access time by 3.76 minutes across every block, and by more than ten minutes in some outlying and congested ones.

Every one of those flights was a straight line drawn on a map. The researchers flew no drones.

Fixed AEDs Reach 30% of Paris-Region Cardiac Arrests Inside 500 Meters

Only 30% of the 28,349 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests recorded between 2011 and 2024 happened within 500 meters (1,640 feet) of one of the region’s 1,893 registered fixed AEDs, Minka told the congress. Closing that gap with cabinets alone would take 1,712 more devices, for 3,605 in total.

The shortages sit in the countryside and on the outskirts of Paris, according to the study team, and an extra 910 fixed AEDs would bring 84.5% of cases inside the 500-meter target. The 30% figure flatters the cabinets. Matthieu Heidet, a professor of emergency medicine at Henri-Mondor University Hospital in Créteil and a co-author, told The Guardian that in France only 8% of cardiac arrest patients get a public AED applied before emergency crews arrive, partly because so many devices sit inside private buildings that are not open around the clock.

Two Hundred Drone Bases Do the Work of 1,700 New AED Cabinets

A drone base covers a 3,900-meter (2.4-mile) radius against 500 meters for a fixed AED, so each base added cut the cabinets needed. With 100 bases and 26 new AEDs, coverage passed 97%. With 200 bases, 871 existing AED sites and four new ones, it reached 99.4%.

The candidate base locations were existing AED sites, mobile intensive care units and fire stations. Minka’s design puts a trained operator or an automated system in charge of each flight under emergency-service supervision, with a bystander collecting the AED on arrival and a dispatcher talking them through the shock. “Drones will never replace bystanders, resuscitation efforts or emergency medical teams,” she said. Dr. Felix Lorang, who heads the emergency department at Klinikum Lippe in Germany and sits on the congress abstract committee, put the same limit the other way: a bystander who cannot do CPR or work the device still waits for the ambulance, drone or no drone.

The Model Flew Nothing, but France Already Flies AED Drones

The study computed drone travel time as the crow flies, so weather, airspace rules and operational delays are absent from every number above. Minka said the findings need prospective trials and real-world tests before anyone acts on them. Abstract OA066 is not peer reviewed and received no funding.

Those real-world numbers exist, and some of them are French. Everdrone entered live dispatch service for SAMU 76 in Forges-les-Eaux, Normandy, on December 2, 2025, the first French deployment tied into the emergency dispatch chain, roughly an hour and a half by road from Paris. The same operator’s Swedish network beat the ambulance to a Borås cardiac arrest in July, and a bystander restarted the patient’s heart. Sweden’s 2023 Lancet Digital Health trial measured actual drone arrivals against actual ambulances over 11 months, which is the study design Minka is asking for. In the United States, Duke Health began flying AEDs to live 911 calls in July and James City County, Virginia followed on August 1.

DroneXL’s Take

The number I’d want a French health minister to remember from this study is not 99.4%, it’s 8%. Heidet’s figure says a region with 1,893 registered defibrillators gets one onto a chest before the ambulance in fewer than one case in twelve, and the Paris model explains why: the cabinets are in the wrong places, and a good share of them are behind a locked door at 2 a.m. A drone base doesn’t care which side of the door it’s on. That is the case for AED drones, and it’s the kind of delivery I’ve argued for since I first covered Everdrone’s Trollhättan save in January 2022: a flight that has to happen, not a toothpaste run.

Where I part ways with the study is the method. Straight-line simulations were the state of the art a decade ago. Sweden has flown real AED drones against real ambulances since 2020 and folded them into routine dispatch, and France has had a base flying live calls in Normandy since December. My read is that Île-de-France doesn’t need another model to find out whether drones beat the road network. It needs SAMU 76’s flight logs and one base on the outskirts of Paris.

Sources: European Society for Emergency Medicine, The Guardian, Everdrone

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

Space Force Adds Lasers at Cape Canaveral After 500 Port Drone Flights

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:18:00 GMT

The U.S. Space Force is adding a directed-energy weapon to the counter-drone defenses at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, told Florida Today this month. The laser joins sensor-fusion software called Lattice and a radio-frequency jamming system the Eastern Range began installing last winter.

Next door, Port Canaveral says it recorded more than 500 drone incursions in 2025, over cruise terminals that serve up to 60,000 passengers a day and over military and aerospace cargo.

Flying a drone over the port without written permission is already a third-degree felony under Florida law.

Cape Canaveral Adds a Laser to the Jamming It Began Installing in 2025

Space Launch Delta 45 announced a multimillion-dollar radio-frequency counter-drone system in December 2025, built to jam drones without disrupting civilian air traffic. Chatman now says a directed-energy weapon that physically destroys drones will follow, alongside new equipment from the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401.

The December system was the first step. Chatman told Breaking Defense it would give him coverage over the whole Cape instead of the pockets he had. On September 18 he told Defense One that JIATF 401 would deliver new capability within weeks, because his radars track everything from a Cessna up but he needs to see “a 747 down to a quadcopter.” Neither Chatman nor the task force would say what hardware is coming.

Lattice is the software half. Chatman told Florida Today “we’re bringing on the Lattice system for tomorrow,” describing a platform that merges military radar and sensor feeds into one 3D picture to detect, track and respond to drones automatically.

The pressure behind all of this is launch tempo. The Cape flew 109 orbital launches in 2025, and Chatman has said the Eastern Range could handle upwards of 300 a year. Directed energy near that much civilian traffic has a short and rocky domestic record (a Pentagon laser shot down a CBP drone near El Paso in February, and the FAA only cleared military anti-drone lasers in U.S. airspace in April).

Port Canaveral’s 500-Flight Count Launched a Federal Seaport Drone Bill

Port Canaveral’s 500 figure appeared in the July 1 announcement of H.R. 9229, the Seaport Security Act of 2026, which Rep. Jimmy Patronis introduced June 9 with Rep. Mike Haridopolos. The announcement counts “incursions” without defining one or saying how many operators were identified.

Port Canaveral CEO Capt. John Murray has kept pressing the number. At a recent Port Canaveral Commission meeting he listed nuclear submarines, space components and national security missions moving through the port, then described drones filming rockets from overhead: “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” Murray said, according to Florida Today.

The bill is less about penalties than the Florida Today column that revived the number suggests. It would create controlled or restricted airspace below 400 feet (122 meters) over critical seaport areas and have the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security coordinate drone detection and mitigation at ports, with carve-outs for commercial, government and emergency flights, according to a statement from two Federal Maritime Commission commissioners backing it. It also sets civil and criminal penalties. Congress.gov shows it referred to the House Judiciary and Transportation and Infrastructure committees on June 9, with no action since.

Florida Already Makes Port Flights a Felony, and Local Police Can Now Mitigate

Florida’s felony statute for port drone flights, Section 330.41, punishes a pilot after the flight. Stopping a drone in the air takes federal authority, and since July 1 certified state and local police can hold it, jamming or downing drones under the SAFER SKIES Act rule.

The port’s drone page spells out the state side: Port Canaveral is designated critical infrastructure, and flying over its lands or waterways without written permission from the Canaveral Port Authority is a third-degree felony. On the federal side, about 1,500 US agencies are expected to certify at the detection tier of the new rule within two years. A port authority is not a police department, though. The American Association of Port Authorities told WorkBoat that the FAA’s proposed restricted-airspace framework, on its own, would give ports no new power to detect or disrupt drones.

The Space Coast Drone Cases in Court Were Tourists Flying DJI Mavics

Both Space Coast drone prosecutions the Florida Today column cites involved tourists with DJI drones. Xiao Guang Pan, a Chinese-born Canadian, got 12 months of probation and deportation in August 2025. Xiaodong He, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty September 18 to a misdemeanor national defense airspace charge and awaits sentencing.

Pan flew a DJI Mavic 3 Pro from a Port Canaveral parking lot on three days in January 2025, and 243 photos and 13 videos from those flights showed military infrastructure at the Space Force station, according to Florida Politics, citing his plea agreement. DroneXL covered his charges that February and his sentencing that August. He flew a DJI Mavic 4 Pro from the Playalinda Beach lot inside restricted zone R-2932 for 12 minutes and 24 seconds on July 25, passing within 1.56 miles (2.51 km) of Launch Complex 39B, as DroneXL reported after his plea. His wife told police they were on vacation and filming scenery.

The column sets those cases beside a May Vanity Fair profile in which an unnamed FBI counterintelligence agent says China will send amateurs to collect what they can in Florida. That is one anonymous source in a magazine. The court record so far holds a probation sentence and a misdemeanor plea.

DroneXL’s Take

A laser over the launch pads at a range that flew 109 launches last year is a defensible call. What I don’t buy is the spy story being sold around it. My read of the 500 incursions: until Port Canaveral publishes what it counted, the Space Coast drone cases that have reached a courtroom were tourists with Mavics, and they ended in probation and a misdemeanor plea. The number is now doing work in Congress, where H.R. 9229 would draw new restricted airspace over every critical seaport in the country, and a count nobody has defined is a thin basis for that. The cruise-ship photographer is a different problem from a foreign intelligence service, and Florida already wrote a felony for him. So if you’re thinking about launching a Mavic from a Port Canaveral parking lot for the ship-and-rocket shot, don’t be that guy: Xiao Guang Pan did exactly that, and it ended with his deportation.

Sources: Florida Today, The Palm Beach Post / Florida Today column by John A. Torres, Defense One, Breaking Defense, Federal Maritime Commission, Congress.gov, Port Canaveral

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

Charlotte Drone Pilot Pleads Guilty to Flying Between Live Runways

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:06:00 GMT

A Charlotte drone pilot has pleaded guilty to a federal charge for flying inside a runway exclusion zone at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT). Marco Antonio Ochoa, 50, entered the plea on September 22 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark T. Odulio to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. He faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Ochoa launched the drone in March from the Airport Overlook, a public park the airport built so visitors can watch planes land and take off. It sits between two active runways. According to a search warrant reported by WSOC-TV in April, he was shooting video for a social media post for one of his clients.

The airport’s page for the Overlook lists its hours, its playgrounds, its food truck area and its pet relief areas. It says nothing about drones.

Airport Detection Flagged The Seven-Minute Flight Immediately

The airport’s drone-detection system flagged Ochoa’s flight as soon as it started, according to WSOC-TV’s reporting on the warrant. Federal marshals tracked the drone for the seven minutes it was airborne, at 32 to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters), while the runways were in use.

Officials said he had no permission to fly in the restricted airspace and had not properly registered the drone. Agents seized it. Neither the warrant coverage nor the federal announcement names the make or model.

The FBI and the Federal Air Marshal Service investigated, and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kelly is prosecuting, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina. U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson’s warning to other pilots: “Flying in restricted areas can land you in hot water with federal authorities.” No sentencing date has been set.

Federal Law Turns The Overlook Into A No-Drone Zone

The count carries the name of 18 U.S.C. § 39B, “Unsafe operation of unmanned aircraft,” which Congress added in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. That law makes knowingly flying a drone without authorization inside a runway exclusion zone a federal crime, even if no aircraft is put at risk.

The statute defines that zone as a rectangle centered on an active runway at a Class B, C or D airport. It runs 1 statute mile past each end of the runway and is half a mile wide. CLT is Class B airspace, and the Overlook faces Runways 1L-19R and 1R-19L. Pilots who have a real reason to fly near an airport request FAA authorization, most often through LAANC. Ochoa had none.

The squeeze is about to get tighter. CLT is building a fourth parallel runway, 1C-19C, and says on its Overlook page that aircraft operations will move even closer to the park when it opens in fall 2027.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL spent the summer covering drone cases where the line was thin. The Houston church videographer flew for two minutes near a World Cup fan zone while NRG Stadium sat empty, and our coverage argued that intent has to count for something in a case like that. The same pattern ran through the 300-plus drones federal agents seized in the tournament’s first ten days, a population we found was almost entirely people the enforcement system was never built to stop.

Ochoa’s case is different. Seven minutes, as low as 32 feet, from a lawn wedged between two runways while they were in use, for a client, on a drone that wasn’t properly registered. This is the flight § 39B was written for, and it is exactly the kind of flight that gets cited every time someone argues for tighter rules on the rest of us. Don’t be that guy. If a client wants the plane-spotter shot at CLT, bring a long lens to the fence and leave the drone in the car.

Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of North Carolina, WSOC-TV, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, 18 U.S.C. § 39B

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

Amazon Drones Reach Cleveland Suburbs, 3 Miles From a Drone Pharmacy

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:13:00 GMT

Amazon started Prime Air drone deliveries in Northeast Ohio on Thursday, September 24, flying MK30 drones from its CLE2 fulfillment center in North Randall to customers within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers). Amazon says it is the company’s first drone delivery site in Ohio, and it is the Cleveland launch Amazon promised in August. Amazon has 21 drones at the site, and it says the first Ohio delivery was an electric bike charger.

The service covers a circle around the former Randall Park Mall site, southeast of downtown Cleveland, not the city as a whole. The aircraft is the same six-rotor, 83-pound MK30 I photographed at XPONENTIAL in Detroit this spring.

About 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Amazon’s launch pad, Cleveland Clinic has been flying prescriptions to patients’ lawns with Zipline since early August. It does that with four aircraft.

Amazon’s North Randall Hub Flies 21 Drones in Daylight Only

Amazon’s North Randall site launched with 21 drones, and Amazon expects it to add 55 jobs. Flights run in daylight, for items under 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) that fit a large shoebox and are stocked in the building. Prime members fly free on orders of $50 or more.

Smaller Prime orders cost $2.99 and everyone else pays $4.99, the national pricing in Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, which named Cleveland among five metros coming next on the way to nearly 500 cities and towns. Shoppers pick items carrying a “Drone delivery” label and confirm a drop spot at home on their first order, Amazon told Cleveland.com. Axios Cleveland reported in July that the circle takes in most of Cleveland’s southeast side and suburbs including Cleveland Heights, Solon and Chagrin Falls.

Amazon says every Prime Air operation is authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no document for Ohio when DroneXL checked it on September 25. Since July 28, a site document is no longer required: a hub that fits the FAA’s national finding can be cleared in an internal review with no public comment period, as DroneXL laid out this month. Northeast Ohio residents who want to reach Amazon about the flights will find the phone line and chat route in our guide for residents.

Zipline’s Prescription Drones Already Fly Inside Amazon’s Circle

Cleveland Clinic’s Zipline service flies from its Beachwood administrative campus, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) northeast of the North Randall warehouse, inside Amazon’s 7.5-mile circle. At the end of August, four Platform 2 aircraft were flying about 20 prescription deliveries a week to patients within 5 miles (8 kilometers).

The two aircraft deliver differently. Zipline’s P2 holds at up to 300 feet (91 meters) and lowers the package on a tether without landing, as DroneXL reported when the program went live. FAA paperwork puts it at 55 pounds empty with up to 8 pounds of payload, figures DroneXL pulled together in August. The MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds at takeoff, carries 5, descends over the yard and releases the package from about 13 feet (4 meters), according to FAA filings summarized on DroneXL’s aircraft comparison page. Zipline’s aircraft carries a parachute, which brought one down onto a Houston-area highway on September 4. The MK30 has none, a choice Amazon has not explained.

The fleets run the other way. Beachwood has charging hardware for 12 aircraft and flies four. Amazon opened North Randall with 21.

DroneXL’s Take

Northeast Ohio now has both versions of drone delivery over the same east-side streets, and I know which one I’d want over my house. Zipline’s Cleveland Clinic flights carry medication to patients who used to wait hours for a courier. Amazon’s first Ohio flight carried an e-bike charger, in a heavier aircraft with no parachute. I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight, and a prescription does. A charger can ride in a van. That won’t stop Amazon, which says the FAA has authorized its flights. My case is for Amazon to build an aircraft closer to what Zipline flies. In the last two weeks MK30s have set down unplanned beside a Baton Rouge road and on a Waco lawn, and the Drone Delivery Tracker now has 21 more of them to watch over Cuyahoga County.

Sources: Cleveland.com, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Axios Cleveland, Amazon, FAA

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

Amazon Targets December for Jacksonville Drones, Pilot Says

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:13:00 GMT

Amazon Prime Air plans to start drone deliveries on Jacksonville’s west side in early December, according to a local pilot who photographed Amazon’s airspace map at a public meeting at Jacksonville International Airport this week. Amazon has not announced Jacksonville, and the December timing comes from that pilot’s account of the meeting.

Meredith Holladay posted the slide to the Craig Airport Pilots Association’s Facebook group. She wrote that most of the room was military and police, that the red zones on the map are no-fly areas up to 400 feet (122 meters), and that the drones will fly seven days a week, in daytime visual weather only.

Amazon says its Prime Air systems continuously take in the ADS-B position signals that crewed aircraft broadcast. Holladay wrote that the drones have no ADS-B Out of their own, so pilots won’t see them in ForeFlight.

Amazon’s SJA1 Map Puts the Launch Pad Beside Herlong Airport

The slide is headed SJA1, the code Amazon uses for its same-day delivery center at 1700 Imeson Road in west Jacksonville, which opened in October 2025. Holladay placed the launch site just northeast of Herlong Recreational Airport (HEG), with Whitehouse Navy Outlying Field printed on the sectional to the northwest.

Holladay shared the photo in the Craig Airport Pilots Association group, where pilots traded questions about range and altitude. The Jax Daily Record tied the SJA1 code to the Imeson Road building through city permits, and Action News Jax reported its October opening. Herlong is the Jacksonville Aviation Authority’s recreational field, home to light sport aircraft, skydiving and gliders. The biggest red block on Amazon’s slide covers the Whitehouse runways, and more red and orange shapes crowd the Herlong side of the map. Amazon’s operations page says its no-fly zones cover runways, heliports, glider ports and RC flying clubs, plus areas of increased aviation activity.

Holladay put the service radius at about 6.5 miles (10.5 kilometers), with the black ring on the slide as its edge. That is a mile short of the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) range in every FAA review of the MK30. Her daytime-only limit is tighter than the FAA’s approval elsewhere in Florida, too: 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. The slide’s footer calls it Amazon proprietary and confidential trade secret information, an odd label for page 24 of a deck shown to a room of pilots, military and police.

The FAA Has Published No Environmental Review for Jacksonville

The FAA’s Florida environmental assessment, signed June 1, 2026, covers six Amazon hubs: Ruskin, Tampa, Orlando, Tamarac, Riviera Beach and Miami. Jacksonville is not one of them, and the agency’s drone review page, last updated September 24, lists no Jacksonville document.

That is the same gap DroneXL found two days ago when Amazon started preparing a Tallahassee hub. Since July 28 the FAA can check a new site against its national programmatic assessment with no site document and no comment period, the change behind Washington clearing the runway for 500 cities. Jacksonville is also missing from the sites and next launches in Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement. Florida Statute 330.41 keeps the city out of flight paths and altitudes.

Amazon’s MK30 Reads Pilots’ ADS-B, and FAA Rules Keep It From Transmitting

Amazon’s systems take in ADS-B from crewed aircraft and feed it to automated conflict detection, backed by onboard detect-and-avoid the FAA approved. Sending is another matter: 14 CFR 91.225(h)(2) bars drones from ADS-B Out unless they fly a flight plan in contact with ATC or the FAA authorizes it.

An Amazon Prime Air MK30 on display at Amazon's booth at XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit in May. The MK30 has an 83.2-pound maximum takeoff weight and carries packages up to 5 pounds. Photo credit: DroneXL

Amazon’s operations page describes ADS-B going in, never out. If that holds at SJA1, Amazon’s system knows where an ADS-B-equipped Cessna is, and the Cessna’s pilot gets no traffic target for the MK30.

Neither Amazon’s numbers nor the FAA’s keep the drones under the 200-foot ceiling one commenter asked about. Amazon’s operations page lists 205 to 250 feet above ground on the way out and 325 to 370 feet on the way back. The FAA’s Florida review, written for the six other hubs, uses 180 to 279 feet outbound and 279 to 377 feet inbound for an aircraft with an 83.2-pound (37.7-kilogram) maximum takeoff weight. Neither document sets Jacksonville’s numbers.

Amazon does share its traffic with some operators. Its operations page says Prime Air joins UAS traffic management networks with other drone operators and gives local first responders running beyond-visual-line-of-sight programs its planned routes and near-real-time drone positions. As of September 25, the page describes nothing similar for the pilot of a crewed aircraft. Holladay wrote that Amazon is apparently working with ForeFlight to connect the drones’ Bluetooth broadcast. Neither the operations page nor Amazon’s August 19 announcement mentions ForeFlight.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon has published how its system receives pilots’ ADS-B. It has published nothing on what electronic traffic information Jacksonville’s pilots will get about its drones, and Holladay’s account says the answer, for now, is none. That gap opens right next to Herlong, whose gliders and skydivers need more than a slide at a meeting.

The FAA banned ADS-B Out on drones for a real reason. Its Remote ID rule warned that the projected number of drones could saturate ADS-B frequencies and hurt the system crewed aircraft rely on. Nobody wants thousands of delivery drones cluttering a Cessna’s traffic screen.

That rule doesn’t stop Amazon from doing the rest. It already gives first responders who fly drones a live picture of its fleet. It can publish the SJA1 route lines and altitude blocks for pilots in a form they can load. And if the ForeFlight work Holladay heard about is real, Amazon should say so in public and have it running before the first delivery, not after. An 83-pound aircraft working between 180 and 377 feet should show up somewhere a pilot looks. If you fly out of Herlong or Craig, ask Amazon for that route map now, while December is still ahead of you.

Sources: Craig Airport Pilots Association on Facebook, Amazon Prime Air, FAA Florida Environmental Assessment, FAA NEPA and Drones, 14 CFR 91.225, Jax Daily Record, Action News Jax, Federal Register.

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

Amazon Drones Head for Nearly 500 Towns. What Residents Can Still Do

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:48:00 GMT

If Amazon picks a warehouse near you for Prime Air, your town gets no vote on whether its MK30 drones fly over your house. The Federal Aviation Administration controls the airspace, and on July 28 it signed a national environmental finding that lets most new drone delivery hubs skip the local comment period towns used to get. Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026.

Residents are finding that out one town at a time. In Richardson, Texas, one woman counted 52 Amazon drones over her home on what she called a slow day. In Westborough, Massachusetts, hundreds of people filled a hotel ballroom on September 23, and I was in that room when Amazon told them it plans to launch anyway. The only local vote left in Westborough is on the launch pad, and under Massachusetts law the Planning Board may not be able to say no to that either.

That leaves a short list of things a concerned resident can do. None of them stops a drone. Several of them change how Amazon flies.

The FAA Controls the Sky, and a Federal Court Has Kept Towns Out of It

Cities cannot ban drone flights or regulate aircraft noise, because the FAA controls the airspace and the operator’s certificate. In 2017 a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down Newton’s attempt to regulate drones over private property as preempted by federal law.

That case, Singer v. City of Newton, is why city attorneys advise caution. The court threw out Newton’s local registration requirement and its ban on flights below 400 feet (122 meters) over private property without permission. Madison Heights, Michigan now tells residents on its drone delivery page that it is federally prohibited from banning flights or regulating aircraft noise. Richardson’s FAQ says the same about altitude, and its council dropped a rezoning threat in April on legal advice, as DroneXL reported when the New York Times visited the city.

The federal comment window is mostly gone too. Until this summer, each new market triggered its own environmental assessment with a public comment period of about 30 days. The FAA’s national programmatic assessment, signed July 28, lets a hub that stays under 1,150 deliveries a day, and sits at least 600 feet (183 meters) from homes, be approved in an internal FAA check with no public comment at all. A coalition of state attorneys general objected to the draft. The deadline for anyone with standing to challenge the finding in a federal appeals court is September 26, tomorrow, and that is a job for a state or city attorney, not a resident.

Towns Control the Launch Pad, and Often Not Even That

A town’s real authority starts at the ground: site plans, building permits and zoning for the hub itself. Amazon’s pads typically sit in existing warehouse parking lots, which can trigger little local review. Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told Westborough that about 80% of its proposed hubs were approved administratively.

Westborough is the test case. Its Planning Board resumes site-plan review of Amazon’s pads and trailers at 64 Otis Street on October 6, and residents on local Facebook groups are urging it to reject them. If Westborough’s zoning allows the use by right, Massachusetts case law limits that option. In Prudential Insurance Co. v. Board of Appeals of Westwood (1986), the Appeals Court held that when a use is allowed by right and the bylaw’s criteria are met, a board cannot deny site-plan approval and is limited to imposing reasonable conditions. Those conditions can still matter: hours for ground operations, lighting, screening and noise at the site itself.

Some states have already settled the question in the operators’ favor. Florida Statute 330.41(3)(c) bars cities and counties from withholding a permit or passing an ordinance that stops a drone delivery service because of where its drone port sits. Local governments there may still enforce the setback and landscaping rules that apply to other uses in the same zone. Massachusetts goes the other way on one point: Wafaie said Amazon still needs a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the Westborough landing area, a state approval it does not have yet.

The strongest local move so far is a pause. Castle Rock and Parker, Colorado adopted emergency moratoriums on July 21 on new drone delivery hubs, six months in Castle Rock and nine in Parker. A moratorium buys a town time to write zoning rules for hubs before an application arrives, which DroneXL’s guide to how drone delivery approval works calls the most effective thing a town can do.

Decibels Don’t Measure What Neighbors Actually Hear

Amazon spokesperson Jack Stelzner told KWTX the MK30 sounds like a window fan on low at altitude. The FAA’s own Baton Rouge filing puts the delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL from 25 feet, and no decibel figure captures pitch, which is what residents keep describing.

The distinction is measurable. NASA Langley researchers Andrew Christian and Randolph Cabell played recordings of small drones and road vehicles to 38 listeners in a 2017 study and found the drones more annoying at the same loudness. PetaPixel reported the extra annoyance as roughly equivalent to a car driving twice as close. The FAA’s national finding measures noise the way it measures airports, as an annual day-night average, which counts energy and not annoyance. A house under a departure corridor can sit below the federal threshold and still hear a drone every few minutes.

Pitch comes from the propellers, and other companies have designed around it. Zipline’s early aircraft used unevenly spaced propeller blades that spread the blade-passage tone across more frequencies, and Zipline says a software update this month cut 19 seconds of peak noise from each P2 flight. NASA measured Joby Aviation’s air taxi at 45.2 dBA from 1,640 feet (500 meters) in 2022. Amazon has not stated the MK30’s dominant frequency. Pitch is one of the 15 questions DroneXL sent every delivery operator this month, and Amazon has not answered it.

The MK30’s Record Includes a Crane, a Cable and a Building

The MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds (37.7 kilograms) at takeoff, cruises at up to 73 mph (117 km/h) and carries no parachute. Amazon relies on six propellers, redundant systems and an automatic contingent landing. Nobody has been hurt in any MK30 incident on the record.

Two MK30s struck the same construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, minutes apart on October 1, 2025. Wafaie told Westborough the drones missed that crane type and detect it now. Another hit a residential internet cable in Waco in November, and in February one struck an apartment building in Richardson. This month, MK30s made precautionary landings beside a Baton Rouge boulevard and on a Waco lawn.

What a Concerned Resident Can Still Do

Start with the pad, before it is approved: check whether your town’s zoning already covers a drone hub, go to the planning board hearing, and ask for conditions a board can legally impose, like ground-operation hours, lighting and where on the lot the pads sit.

A town that writes hub rules before an application arrives has far more room than one reacting to it.

File complaints with dates and times, and keep filing. Complaints have moved Amazon before: after Richardson residents complained in January, Amazon raised average outbound altitude to 225 feet (69 meters) and moved some routes over commercial land. Amazon told the Times it has adjusted operations in response to feedback, TechSpot noted, without saying how many routes it changed. Every channel is in the box below.

Tell Amazon about its drones

Call: 1-888-280-4331, and say it's about drone delivery
Chat: open Amazon's customer service page, click "Something Else," then "Amazon Drone Delivery"
Online: Prime Air · About Amazon Drone Delivery · Drone Delivery FAQs · Consent for Drone Delivery
FAA: noise complaints · safety hotline

Keep a log. Stephanie Puri’s count of 52 overflights in Richardson reached the New York Times because she wrote it down. A Garland, Texas group, Quiet Skies TX, publishes incident-log templates and asks residents to record date, time, altitude and duration.

Call your state legislators. State law shapes what a town can do with the ground, as Florida’s statute and Massachusetts’ landing-area registration show, and the two are pulling in opposite directions.

Declining drone delivery at checkout is a personal choice, not a shield. Wafaie told Westborough plainly that there is no opting out of drones flying over your property. Amazon’s own terms for customers are on its Consent for Drone Delivery page.

And when one comes down, report it. DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker logs every hub and incident on the public record, and the Waco landing reached it because a resident posted photos.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m pro drone delivery, and residents deserve it straight: the fight over the sky was lost before Amazon arrived, because the airspace was never a town’s to control. What’s left is the ground and the record, and residents should use both. Show up before the pad is approved, and make Amazon answer on the record.

What frustrates me is that Amazon holds most of the fixes, and from what I’ve seen it uses them only under pressure. It raised altitude in Richardson after residents complained. It could publish its routes and tell a town what pitch the MK30 makes before the first flight. It could fly a lighter aircraft: Zipline carries 8 pounds on a 55-pound P2 with a parachute and delivers from 300 feet. Amazon carries 5 on an 83-pound MK30 without one and descends to 13 feet over the yard.

My worry is what happens if Amazon keeps arriving the way it arrived in Westborough: no public meeting planned for the other towns in the service area and no commitment on hours. Castle Rock and Parker already froze hubs. A moratorium grounds a defibrillator drone as surely as a toothpaste run, and the operators doing it right will pay for Amazon’s approach.

Sources: FAA Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (July 28, 2026), Singer v. City of Newton via Holland & Knight, Prudential v. Board of Appeals of Westwood, Florida Statute 330.41, NASA Technical Reports Server, TechSpot, The New York Times, City of Madison Heights, City of Pleasant Ridge, City of Richardson

Update, September 25, 2026: An earlier version of this article listed amazondronefeedback@amazon.com, an address two Michigan cities publish for residents. An automated reply Amazon sent DroneXL says that inbox is no longer monitored. The box now lists the phone and chat channels Amazon gave in that reply.

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

Amazon MK30 Sets Down on a Waco Lawn Days After Baton Rouge

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:15:00 GMT

An Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drone made a precautionary landing on a patch of dry grass at a workplace in Waco, Texas. Danny Bishop, who works there, posted three photos of it to Facebook on Monday, September 21, and wrote that Amazon sent a chase truck to rescue the aircraft, which he said is “expected to make a full recovery.” Nobody was reported hurt.

The drone, registration N328PA, is sitting in its landing attitude on the tail of its fuselage and its lower wing, with the two small wheels on metal arms extended onto the grass. It is the second MK30 in 10 days to set itself down in public view, after one landed beside a Baton Rouge boulevard on September 11, and it came down in the market where another MK30 cut an internet cable last November. Amazon has not said what made this one stop flying.

N328PA rests on its straight lower wing, with one of its landing wheels extended on a metal arm below it. Photo credit: Danny Bishop on Facebook

The FAA Registry Ties N328PA to Amazon’s MK30 Fleet

FAA registry records list N328PA as an MK30 owned by Amazon.com Services LLC, serial number 178650103U, with a registration certificate issued May 14, 2024, and the last five characters of that serial, 0103U, are printed on the fuselage beside the N-number in Bishop’s photos.

All six propellers look whole in the pictures, and nothing lies loose in the grass around the aircraft. The deployed wheels are the tell that this was a landing, not a fall: the MK30 that set down on a Goodyear, Arizona sidewalk in October 2025 had the same wheels out. Amazon describes this Safe Contingent Landing as a switch to vertical flight, a camera and radar scan for a clear spot, and a descent onto it. It lists sudden weather, cell outages, emergency air traffic and system failures as triggers.

A man stands beside N328PA for scale. The MK30 reaches roughly to his hip. Photo credit: Danny Bishop on Facebook

Waco Is Where an MK30 Cut an Internet Cable Last November

Amazon began Prime Air deliveries in Waco in November 2025, flying from beside its fulfillment center in the city. On November 18, less than two weeks after launch, an MK30 clipped a residential internet cable after a drop-off, came down on its own and drew an FAA investigation.

That drone, N139PA, shut down its motors after cutting the line, and Amazon paid for the repair. Waco is one of 11 cities where Prime Air currently flies, KWTX reported on September 22, in a story on residents’ reactions, including a noise complaint to the city and the FAA, that ran a day after Bishop’s post and did not mention the landing. A web search on Friday turned up no news coverage of N328PA and no Amazon statement about it. Bishop’s post had 84 reactions, 23 comments and six shares when DroneXL captured it.

DroneXL’s Take

Two days after Bishop posted his photos, I sat in a Westborough, Massachusetts ballroom while Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told residents the company has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages this year without incident. By Amazon’s framing, this landing probably doesn’t break that record. The drone found open grass, put its wheels down and waited for the truck, which is what a 78-pound aircraft with no parachute should do when something goes wrong. My problem is the word “incident.” Something made this drone abandon its flight, just as something did in Baton Rouge on September 11, and in both cases the public found out from a Facebook post, not from Amazon. If Amazon wants nearly 500 cities and towns to trust these landings, it should count them and publish the causes itself. Until it does, the Drone Delivery Tracker will keep the count.

Sources: Danny Bishop (Facebook), FAA Aircraft Registry, Amazon, KWTX

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

DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:21:42 GMT

The Department of Homeland Security’s own test lab put six Blue UAS in front of 26 public safety pilots, and three of the five it brought to Manhattan could not be flown safely there. The Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, published this month by the National Urban Security Technology Laboratory (NUSTL) in New York, covers three rounds of testing between June 2024 and July 2025. The series started in rural Texas, moved to Miami that November, and ended at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. The Ascent AeroSystems Spirit, the Freefly Astro, and the Teal 2 were excluded from scoring at Hudson Yards because they could not hold position without drifting. Only the Parrot ANAFI USA GOV and the Skydio X10D were rated there.

DHS lists four takeaways at the top of the report: GPS cannot be relied on in dense cities, the link between controller and aircraft is inconsistent, deployment takes too long, and cost is a barrier for many departments. The systems as tested cost between $13,964 and $56,195.

DHS also flew drones from covered nations, the report’s term for Chinese-made aircraft, alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards. Those results are not in the report. Public safety agencies can get them by emailing the lab.

Three of Five Blue UAS Could Not Hold Position at Hudson Yards

A footnote in the DHS comparative assessment report records the Spirit, the Astro and the Teal 2 as unsafe to fly at Hudson Yards because none could hold position without drifting. The test team and safety pilots blamed RF interference and GNSS trouble from the buildings. None of the three was scored.

The Astro would not enter position mode at Hudson Yards and drifted constantly. A safety pilot from the test team took control and tried to switch it into position hold at a higher altitude, which did not work. The Spirit lacked enough satellite reception to hold position at all, and evaluators said its coaxial design gave the operator no physical indication of which way the aircraft was pointing.

The Freefly Astro, carrying the Sony LR1 EO/IR camera and laser rangefinder DHS tested, scored 3.5 in Miami but would not enter position mode at Hudson Yards and was excluded from the complex urban round. Photo credit: Freefly Systems

The Teal 2 could not be launched safely without a GPS lock, and evaluators hit that problem during familiarization flights at Fort Totten in Queens before they ever reached Hudson Yards. During the Fort Totten training, Remote ID failures kept the Teal 2 from taking off until about 10 minutes of troubleshooting cleared the error. Evaluators reported latency at short distances and a shaky, pixelated video feed.

DHS lists the Skydio X10D’s autonomous navigation modes as the reason it stayed stable in the same urban canyon, where it scored 3.7.

Links Dropped 50 Feet From Launch and Deployment Ran to 15 Minutes

The Parrot ANAFI USA GOV lost its connection as close as 50 feet from the launch point at Hudson Yards, and one loss of link ended in a flyaway. Its command and control link scored 1.8 out of 5 in the complex urban round, and its latency scored 1.7.

Evaluators there could not take off between two high-rise buildings. They reset the radio to clear connectivity errors and moved to other locations to launch.

The scale runs from 1, meaning the product met none of the evaluator’s expectations, to 5, meaning it exceeded them. A 3 means it met most of them.

In Miami, the Astro began losing video and control at about 750 feet from the controller during daytime flights at Bayfront Park. The Teal 2 had pairing and Remote ID problems in both Texas and Miami that delayed launch by up to 15 minutes, and its deployability score in Miami was 1.5. The Skydio X2D, tested only in Texas, took about two and a half minutes to recalibrate after every battery change, which evaluators called too long to get the aircraft back in the air.

In one X10D flight, an evaluator’s controller reset and hard rebooted mid-flight. The aircraft landed in place wherever it lost link, and the test team had to clear observers and obstacles while it used its own obstacle avoidance to find a flat spot.

“Deployment time was unacceptable for most first responders,” the report’s summary says. DHS adds that if a drone takes too long to deploy or costs too much, responders may go back to traditional methods instead.

Skydio X10D Scored Best, With Its Own Connection Problems

The Skydio X10D received the best rating of the six systems, 4.0 in Miami and 3.7 at Hudson Yards, which DHS attributes to fast deployment, intuitive controls and the NightSense infrared lighting kit. No other aircraft scored a 4 overall, the mark for meeting all expectations, in any round.

Half of the operators in Miami still saw discontinuities and pixelation in the X10D’s video feed when the aircraft was moving, and some evaluators at Hudson Yards lost connection below 100 feet and at short horizontal distances between high-rises. Adjusting the radio frequency by hand improved the signal, which evaluators counted as a disadvantage in an urban deployment. Redeployment took just under two minutes in Miami and up to three minutes at Hudson Yards, most of it spent waiting for the controller to reconnect after a battery swap.

The report also notes that as of October 2024, X10D systems were being delivered with one battery instead of three because of supply chain problems, with two more promised later. That is the same month China sanctioned Skydio and cut off its battery supplier.

DHS says cost was not a scored criterion but came up throughout the focus group and all three assessments. The X10D cost $28,382 as tested, the Spirit sat at the top of the range and the ANAFI USA GOV at the bottom. In 2021, an internal government memo obtained by the Financial Times put Blue sUAS at 8 to 14 times the price of the DJI drones they were meant to replace.

DHS Tested Chinese Drones Alongside and Left the Results Out

Covered nation platforms were flown alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards because, the report says, response agencies still rely on them for reliability and overall performance. The results for those aircraft are available to public safety agencies on request through NUSTL@hq.dhs.gov and appear nowhere in the 47-page public document.

The executive summary says evaluators found large differences in capability between the covered nation drones and the Blue UAS they tested. It does not say which way the differences ran, and the report never names DJI or Autel. DHS says the assessment examined operator experience only and did not evaluate national security risk under any statute. A Blue List designation, the report adds, says nothing about whether an aircraft can do the job public safety needs done.

The test data is between 14 and 27 months old. The Teal 2 is now the aircraft the Air Force is evaluating a successor for under a $2.49 million order to Red Cat, and the X10D replaced the X2D in the urban rounds after joining the Blue List in mid-2024.

The evaluators came from 13 states and included pilots from the NYPD, FDNY, Boston Fire, Los Angeles Police, Michigan State Police, Texas DPS, the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection. These are some of the largest public safety agencies in the country, and this is what their pilots said about the aircraft they are supposed to buy.

DroneXL’s Take

Volunteer fire departments and small police and rescue teams fly DJI and Autel for the reasons this report spells out: the aircraft power on and hold position, the link stays up, and the price is a fraction of the alternatives. An Arizona fire chief warned last December that lives would be lost if the DJI ban took his department’s air capability away, and Oregon’s aviation department counted 467 restricted drones across 25 states with up to $2 billion in national exposure. Now DHS’s own lab has written the technical half of that argument, with 26 of the most experienced public safety pilots in the country as the witnesses.

The report never says the Chinese drones flew better. DHS flew them at Hudson Yards because agencies still rely on them for reliability and performance, then declined to publish how they scored next to aircraft that could not hold a hover. My read is that the comparison stayed out of the report because it would have ended the argument. Any agency that requests the numbers should publish them.

The security case for Blue UAS was never a performance case, and the report concedes it in one line: a Blue designation says nothing about whether the aircraft can do the job. The supply chain case is thinner than it looks too: the report records the X10D shipping with one battery in October 2024, and Skydio’s own explanation to customers that month, covered in the story linked above, was a Chinese battery supplier Beijing had sanctioned. Blue UAS aircraft are not free of Chinese-made parts, the battery is the documented example, and motors and magnets are the components I would ask any Blue vendor about next. DroneXL’s position has been security standards any manufacturer must meet rather than bans by country of origin, and a Blue List that certifies cybersecurity while its aircraft drift over Manhattan makes that case in a single document.

The report ends by telling agencies to research the capabilities of available equipment before buying. Agencies did that research. The result is a DJI drone in the volunteer fire truck, and DHS just documented why.

Sources: Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026; DHS SAVER program, Blue UAS for First Responders

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

Edison Buys a 60 MPH Flock Drone, Promises 45-Second Response

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:54:13 GMT

Edison, New Jersey, is buying a thermal-equipped police drone from Flock Safety, not from Skydio or BRINC. The Township Council voted 6 to 1 on Wednesday, September 23, to spend $589,000 over three years on the drone and 92 more Flock license plate reader cameras, and Mayor Sam Joshi signed off Thursday.

The money comes from asset forfeiture funds, not the township budget. Edison already runs 22 Flock cameras plus 62 plate readers mounted on police cars. The cameras go up within weeks. The drone follows in a few months, once 911 dispatchers are trained to launch it with a button press to the coordinates of a call.

Joshi says the drone will reach any address in Edison’s 32 square miles (83 square kilometers) in about 45 seconds. Flock publishes an 86-second average response for its drone program.

Edison’s Description Points To Flock’s Alpha Drone

The resolution Edison passed did not name the equipment, but Joshi told PIX11 the drone is a Flock unit that flies at 60 mph (97 km/h) with thermal imaging. That matches the Flock Alpha, the aircraft Flock’s drone as first responder product runs on.

Flock unveiled the Alpha in October 2025 as an NDAA-compliant quadcopter designed and assembled in Atlanta, a year after its $300 million-plus Aerodome acquisition. The Alpha spec sheet lists 60 mph as top speed, plate reads from 2,000 feet (610 meters), and a 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) operating radius per dock. Flock has been selling the Alpha on its camera since late May, and the pitch reached Edison intact: Joshi told PIX11 the drone “can actually lock a target.”

PIX11 reports it will be the first Flock drone in New Jersey with thermal.

Forfeiture Cash Pays For It, And One Councilman Wanted Officers

Councilman Richard Brescher cast the only vote against the purchase and said he would rather spend the money on two police officers, while supporters countered that officers cannot be everywhere at once in the township and that seized criminal proceeds, not local taxes, foot the bill.

Brescher told the meeting “I think they’re invasive,” according to NewsNation, while granting that the cameras work. Council President Joseph Coyle defended the buy in MyCentralJersey’s account of the meeting: “I never want to be part of the would have, could have, should have.”

Joshi said drone video will be stored for one or two days before deletion, and that neither camera nor drone data will go to Flock or to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement. A state Attorney General directive, 2022-12, governs the plate readers. Nothing comparable governs the drone: Dillon Reisman, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Jersey, told NewsNation the state has no statute restricting how police use drones.

Edison is not the first department to fund a drone this way. Conroe, Texas, approved two Skydio X10s and two docks bought with forfeiture money in December 2025.

Flock’s Own Average Is Nearly Double The Mayor’s 45 Seconds

At its 60 mph top speed, the Alpha covers three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in 45 seconds. That is before launch and climb. Flock’s own DFR page claims an 86-second average response and says the drone reaches the scene first on 78% of calls.

Those are Flock’s figures, not independent ones, and they are still roughly double the mayor’s. Normal, Illinois, which added a Flock DFR unit to a six-drone fleet in June, set its expectations lower: its chief predicted first-on-scene about 70% of the time.

Joshi’s 45 seconds could hold near a dock. Whether it holds at Edison’s edges depends on how many docks the township is buying and where they sit, and no official quoted in coverage of the vote has said.

DroneXL’s Take

Edison picked the right kind of tool and sold it with the wrong number. A drone that gets thermal eyes on a missing child or a burning house before a patrol car arrives is drones used for good, and an NDAA-compliant, American-assembled aircraft keeps Edison out of the DJI fight entirely. But a 45-second promise that the manufacturer itself doesn’t make is how DFR programs lose public trust the first time a resident times the drone. Oakland County’s council approved Flock drones over a privacy revolt in April, and Edison just handed its critics an easy fact-check. If you live in Edison, I’d ask the council two things before the drone flies: how many docks, and what response time, if any, Flock committed to in the contract.

Sources: PIX11, NewsNation, ABC7 New York, MyCentralJersey, Flock Safety

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

FCC Targets DJI Chips as Amazon Drones Swarm a Texas Suburb

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:52:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week. The FCC moves to block DJI and Autel chips on any drone. We have Amazon delivery drones that are overwhelming a Texas suburb. And then lastly, SkyeBrowse is rolling out new pricing. Let’s get to it.

The FCC Will Reject Drones With a Single DJI or Autel Circuit Board

First up, starting October 13th, the FCC will block a brand new type of application. If a drone contains a circuit board that is made by DJI or Autel, then it cannot get approval from the FCC.

And here’s a little bit of a twist. It doesn’t really matter where the drone is built. Even a drone that’s assembled entirely in the United States, one that qualifies as Buy America or has Blue UAS approval, is going to get rejected if one of its internal component chips is traced back to DJI.

Pending applications filed before October 13th are going to be grandfathered in, which is kind of mind-boggling if you think about it, because this is about security, right? But if you change even one part of that application, the grandfathering is going to go away.

So if you are a U.S. manufacturer right now with an application in the pipeline, now is the time to file, and to ask your supplier exactly who made every single board that is inside of your aircraft.

52 Amazon Drones in a Single Day Over Richardson, Texas

Next up, one resident in Richardson, Texas, tracked 52 Prime Air drones flying overhead in a single day. According to him, some of them flew as low as 150 feet. Amazon’s permit allows it to fly up to a thousand flights every single day from that hub.

Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drones lined up at a delivery site. Photo credit: Amazon

A local homeowners association leader told the Times that the FAA has failed the city. Part of the frustration here comes from the FAA’s own ruling. Back on July 28th, the agency decided that drone delivery noise does not count as a significant environmental impact nationwide. That decision also ended local comment periods for new hubs.

There’s also a bit of a mixed message here on cameras. Richardson’s city website told residents that the drones do not record any video. Amazon told the Times that its drones actually do record footage near the delivery area.

Amazon Wants 1,000 Daily Flights Out of North Haven, Connecticut

Speaking of Amazon, it is now asking the FAA for up to a thousand flights a day out of the new hub it’s trying to put in North Haven, Connecticut. That’s up to 365,000 flights a year, covering a 7.5-mile radius that reaches into New Haven, Hamden, and Wallingford, if you are familiar with the area. I’m not.

This is the first Prime Air hub in the Northeast that is going to get a public comment window. Connecticut’s environmental agency opened that window on September 16th, and it’s going to close on October 1st.

Interestingly, the thousand-flight number is not really the problem here. It’s actually the same ceiling that Amazon files in almost every city it goes into. The issue is how much scrutiny this specific hub is going to get, since the FAA’s new national noise ruling may let it skip a full local review altogether. If you live near New Haven, this is your window of time to speak up before it closes.

SkyeBrowse Overhauls Its Drone 3D Mapping Pricing

And the last story is that SkyeBrowse just overhauled its pricing for drone 3D mapping. If you’re not familiar, SkyeBrowse turns drone videos into 3D models and into different maps. It’s used for construction, inspections, insurance claims, and even crime scene documentation.

The Commercial tier now starts at $20 a model, which is actually a really good deal for basic capture and sharing. Pro adds exports and AI tools like automatic floor plans and site plans.

Then the Public Safety and Enterprise tier costs $199 per model, and it adds things like CJIS compliance and Axon Evidence integration for the law enforcement agencies that use it. Existing subscribers can also keep their old plans. And of course, the Freemium option that we’ve talked about before is still available for those who just want to try it out before they buy.

That conversation is going to continue on Post Flight, where we’re going to talk about all of these stories uncensored in the premium community. There’s a link in the description. And we’re also going to see you on Monday for the live Q&A. It was pretty lively this Monday. So, have a great weekend. We’ll see you then.

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

Lowe's Now Flies Painter's Tape to Charlotte Yards in 20 Minutes

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:26:00 GMT

Lowe’s started delivering home improvement supplies by drone on Thursday, September 24, from its store in Matthews, North Carolina, a Charlotte suburb in the Mooresville-based chain’s home market. Customers within roughly 5 miles (8 km) of the store order through a “Lowe’s by Drone” storefront in the DoorDash app, and Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery company, flies the order to their yard in as little as 20 minutes.

The pilot covers more than 100 items: screwdrivers, caulk, painter’s tape, paint supplies, batteries, soap and all-purpose cleaner. Every order has to fit under Wing’s limit of about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) per flight. The lumber still goes home in a pickup.

Lowe’s calls itself the first home improvement retailer to offer drone delivery. Six years ago, a hardware store in Logan, Australia, was already one of Wing’s first delivery partners.

The Lowe's store in Matthews, N.C., where the drone delivery pilot is live. Photo credit: Lowe's

Lowe’s Is the First Chain to Fly Orders, Not the First Hardware Store

Lowe’s “first” holds for a national home improvement chain. It does not hold for hardware by drone. Wing’s Logan service drew requests from tradesmen who wanted screws and nails flown to job sites, and Browns Plains Hardware signed on as one of its earliest partners by 2020.

DroneXL covered that in November 2020, in Wing drones to deliver hardware supplies to tradesmen. The store’s Paul Charlton described the problem then: run out of the right screws on a job, and the round trip to the hardware store costs at least half an hour. Wing could do it in seven minutes, he said.

That is the same pitch Lowe’s makes today, down to the forgotten roll of tape stalling a paint job. Lowe’s announcement quotes chief information and AI officer Seemantini Godbole promising “next-generation fulfillment right when they need it.” What is new is the size of the network behind the pitch. Lowe’s runs more than 1,750 stores, and Rajiv Raghunathan, its vice president of technology for stores, told Supply Chain Dive the program could expand to more of them.

Lowe’s Plugged Into a Wing and DoorDash Network Running Since 2025

Lowe’s joined a drone operation rather than building one: DoorDash and Wing launched drone delivery in Charlotte in May 2025 from The Arboretum Shopping Center, starting with Panera Bread and local restaurants. Lowe’s says its Matthews pilot builds on those existing Charlotte operations.

A Kobalt mini pliers set goes into a DoorDash and Wing delivery box. Photo credit: Lowe's

DroneXL reported that launch in DoorDash and Wing Launch Drone Delivery in Charlotte, when the service reached customers within 4 miles of the hub. The Lowe’s radius is 5 miles around the Matthews store, according to CNBC, which reported the launch as an exclusive.

DoorDash now has its own aircraft too. It earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air on July 29, as DroneXL covered in DoorDash Just Became An Airline, while saying its Wing partnership continues. Lowe’s orders fly on Wing. DoorDash is selling Wing’s flights while building aircraft that could replace them.

Wing Has Answered None of DroneXL’s 30 Safety Questions

Wing, the company flying Lowe’s orders over Matthews, has not answered any of the 30 written safety questions DroneXL sent it on September 8, as of Thursday night. They were due September 15. Zipline answered in part the next day. Amazon Prime Air has left 25 questions unanswered.

The questions cover what anyone under the flight path would want to know: weight and payload, recovery systems, single points of failure, drop-zone checks, incident records, sound, cameras, liability and weather limits. DroneXL sent the same generic set to all three operators when it launched the Drone Delivery Tracker, and published where each one stood in Zipline Answers Safety Questions on the Record. Amazon and Wing Don’t.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight: a defibrillator to a cardiac arrest, a prescription to an island, blood to a trauma bay. Painter’s tape is a convenience run. A contractor who saves half an hour mid-job gets real value, so I won’t call it frivolous, but convenience runs are exactly the flights that have to be done right, because they will be the most common ones over people’s houses. Lowe’s just put its brand on a service whose operator has not answered DroneXL’s safety questions. I’d want those answers before putting my name on the box. If you live within 5 miles of the Matthews store, you now know the drone carries 2.5 pounds, and Wing hasn’t told DroneXL what it does when something fails.

Sources: Lowe’s via PR Newswire, CNBC, Supply Chain Dive

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

FCC Says $5B Flowed Into US Drones. Its Own Filing Counts Pledges

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:13:00 GMT

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told the Small Business Administration’s Defense Industrial Base Drone Summit on Thursday that President Trump’s policies have put “billions of dollars now flowing into production plants here in America.” About an hour later, the FCC’s official account posted a clip of Carr under a headline claiming $5 billion in new U.S. drone investment.

The figure is the FCC’s scoreboard for its December 22, 2025 decision to put every foreign-made drone and drone component on the Covered List, which blocks new models from FCC authorization. It is also the economic argument behind the agency’s next move: a proposed sales ban on foreign drones carrying thermal cameras, LiDAR or docking stations.

On July 21, an FCC fact sheet put the total at over $4 billion. The itemized list the agency published with its July drone proposal counts a five-year pledge as its single largest entry.

Carr on stage beneath the Small Business Administration seal at the Defense Industrial Base Drone Summit, September 24, 2026. Photo credit: FCC

FCC Footnotes Mix Venture Rounds, A Valuation And Five-Year Pledges

The FCC’s own list of investments sits in two footnotes of FCC Public Notice DA 26-758. One covers money raised since December. The other covers money only committed, and its anchor is Skydio’s $3.5 billion plan, spread across five years and announced in April.

The raised column cites Zipline’s $600 million round alongside a Reuters story on Zipline’s $7.6 billion valuation (a valuation is what investors think a company is worth; it builds nothing). It also lists Swarm Aero’s Series A and Portuguese drone maker Tekever opening its first U.S. office. A third footnote adds Red Cat’s upsized equity offering and PDW’s $110 million Series B.

Some of it is steel and payroll. The footnotes point to BRINC’s new Seattle factory and an Anduril plant that started building high-speed combat drones in March. Motor startup Westmag, which DroneXL covered when it raised $11 million to build drone motors in South San Francisco, reported committed orders for hundreds of thousands of units, a component class the Covered List now bars from new foreign authorizations.

The committed column is softer. Skydio’s own announcement describes $3.5 billion to be invested over the next five years, with a new plant five times its current space and more than 2,000 jobs. It landed one day after the company closed a $110 million Series F at a $4.4 billion valuation. The same footnote counts a Denton, Texas city council vote on an $870,000 factory incentive and Quantum Cyber’s letter of intent to buy a 43,000-square-foot building.

The FCC repeated the $5 billion figure on X Thursday, but Carr has been saying it since at least August 4, when he used the figure on the TBPN podcast. That was two weeks after the FCC’s written fact sheet, quoted by Military.com, said over $4 billion.

The Investment Number Is The FCC’s Case For Banning Thermal Drones

In DA 26-758, the FCC’s bureaus tentatively conclude that banning sales of foreign thermal, LiDAR, docking and heavy-lift drones would “similarly generate substantial investment in domestic production.” That projected investment is weighed as a public benefit against the cost to operators, which the notice calls minor.

The operators disagreed. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 closed September 2, and Pilot Institute’s count of the record (Pilot Institute is a DroneXL partner) found 3,770 filings against the proposal and 16 for it, with 298 from public safety agencies. DJI’s own filing, signed by former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, argues the seven “military-grade” categories were invented inside the FCC and endorsed by no security agency. The proposal, which I covered on July 22, has not been adopted, and the FCC turned down requests to extend its comment window.

The squeeze is arriving from other directions anyway. Section 232 tariffs of 25% on imported drones up to 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and 100% on thermal-equipped and heavier aircraft, took effect September 3. On October 13, the FCC stops authorizing new U.S.-built drones that contain DJI or Autel logic-bearing chips. And Thursday’s host, the SBA, made drones a priority sector for 90% loan guarantees when it and the Department of War created the Smaller War Plants Commission on August 25.

DroneXL’s Take

I want American drone factories. Skydio’s plant, BRINC’s Seattle move and Westmag’s motor line are good news. What I don’t accept is the FCC grading its own ban with a number that blends a Zipline valuation, a city council vote and a five-year promise, then citing that grade as the reason to pull thermal drones off the shelf for fire departments and search teams. I filed DroneXL’s comment in Docket 26-189 on September 2, alongside thousands of pilots, agencies and service providers who made the same case. Investment pledges don’t find a missing hiker at 2 a.m. A thermal drone does. Until the FCC publishes the tally behind $5 billion and can point to American thermal aircraft a county sheriff can actually buy at a price the budget covers, that number is a talking point, and it should carry no weight in Docket 26-189.

Sources: FCC Public Notice DA 26-758, Brendan Carr on X, FCC on X, Skydio, Military.com, Benzinga, U.S. Small Business Administration

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

Amazon Tells Packed Westborough Room Its Drones Are Coming Anyway

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:06:00 GMT

Amazon told hundreds of people packed into a Westborough, Massachusetts, hotel on Wednesday night, September 23, that it still plans to launch Prime Air drone deliveries from its Otis Street warehouse, and not one resident who took the microphone spoke in favor. The crowd filled the DoubleTree ballroom and an overflow room, and Amazon started ahead of the advertised 6 p.m. time because the room was already full.

I was in that room with a recorder. Right before Tareq Wafaie, who handles Amazon’s Prime Air projects in the Northeast for its economic development team, began his presentation, someone at the back shouted “Welcome to New England, Amazon.” Late in the evening a resident asked everyone who shops on Amazon to raise a hand, and nearly the whole room did. The next question was who thought drone delivery was a bad idea. More hands went up.

Wafaie told the room he had heard its opposition and would take it back to the company. He also said Amazon’s plan is to launch from Westborough, possibly by the end of October.

Westborough’s Only Local Vote Covers Amazon’s Launch Pad, Not the Flights

Westborough’s Planning Board, which resumes its site-plan review on October 6, can rule only on the pads and trailers Amazon wants in its Otis Street parking lot. The FAA controls the airspace, Wafaie said, and Amazon’s Part 135 certificate already covers the MK30 nationwide, though each new site still needs FAA sign-off.

Amazon's same-day facility at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts. Amazon wants to launch and land its Prime Air drones from this building's parking lot. Photo credit: DroneXL

Opting in to drone delivery decides only whether a drone delivers to your yard. When a resident asked how to keep the drones from crossing her property after she declined the service, Wafaie said: “There is no opting out of drones flying over your property.” Amazon will not publish its routes either. Rich, from Amazon’s airspace team, said the software builds each path around no-fly zones and flies as directly as it can from the pad to the customer.

The 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius covers about 175 square miles, Wafaie said, and parts of 13 cities and towns, Spectrum News reported. Wafaie said Amazon held a virtual briefing last week for town managers and state legislators from the area, but a public meeting before each town board is not part of its plan. That settles the question DroneXL raised before the forum, after Southborough found itself on Amazon’s service map through a local blogger rather than the company. Carlos Garcia of the Shrewsbury Select Board, who spoke last, called that answer “not satisfactory to me.”

The federal side is not finished. Wafaie first told a Northborough resident the FAA’s environmental assessment was done. Rich then said Amazon files a separate environmental review for every new site, and the FAA is reviewing Westborough’s now. Massachusetts also requires a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the landing area. Wafaie said Amazon has none of those approvals yet and hopes to have all of them by year-end. Asked about wildlife, he said Amazon ran no peer-reviewed study of its own and relies on the FAA’s review. A horse-farm owner who boards 12 horses asked what happens when a drone spooks them; Wafaie said Amazon has had no complaints of spooked animals.

Wafaie added that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. One resident cited two Denver-area towns that had paused drone hubs this summer. Castle Rock and Parker both adopted emergency moratoriums on July 21: six months on commercial drone-delivery hubs in Castle Rock, nine months on drone dispatch facilities in Parker. A town cannot touch the sky, but it can pause the pad.

Amazon Left the Door Open to 5 a.m. Flights and 1,000 Trips a Day

Amazon’s FAA approval lets the MK30 fly during civil twilight, from shortly before sunrise to shortly after sunset, and allows up to 1,000 flights a day from each site. In Westborough, Wafaie said, Amazon will start with about six drones and several hundred daily deliveries, with one to three airborne.

An Amazon Prime Air representative opens the September 23 community meeting in Westborough, Massachusetts. Photo credit: DroneXL

A resident had the numbers ready: sunrise on June 10 was 5:09 a.m. Asked whether drones could be flying that early, Wafaie said that if customers order at that hour and the drone is cleared to fly, it is a possibility. Later he floated working with Westborough on operating hours, without committing to anything. Amazon’s Richardson, Texas, hub flies from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to the New York Times account DroneXL covered this week.

Wafaie called the 1,000-flight ceiling aspirational for a single Westborough pad with six drones, and said more drones would likely mean another site-plan approval. He would not forecast anything beyond that. One man called the refusal disingenuous; Wafaie asked him to stay civil. Scale was the worry residents kept coming back to. A Hopkinton resident asked the room whether it wanted blue sky or “a highway of drones.” Mark, who lives on Fisher Street near the warehouse, made it personal: “I did not buy a house near an airport in a city.”

Noise drew the most technical pushback. Wafaie said the drone never exceeds 65 to 68 decibels during the 25 to 30 seconds it spends at a customer’s home, citing what he called an independent noise study. A resident who said he works with sound measurement cited what he said was Amazon’s published peak of 81 to 84 dBA at 20 feet (6 meters) and noted that many local towns bar lawn mowing before 7 a.m. Amazon’s FAA filing for Baton Rouge puts the MK30’s delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL, a metric that adds up a whole event’s sound energy and runs higher than a peak reading.

Amazon’s Answers on Drone Cameras Changed Over One Evening

The MK30’s cameras record for the whole flight. Rich said the footage is written over on the next flight unless an incident triggers a safety investigation, in which case it goes to a secure vault. Earlier, Wafaie had told a Westborough resident the cameras were not recording in flight.

Rich also gave the coverage: 350 degrees around the aircraft and 17 degrees vertically in forward flight, enough to see ahead and below. Police asking for footage two weeks after a routine flight would find nothing, he said: “that data doesn’t exist anymore.”

Asked why anyone should trust that the drones don’t surveil, Wafaie said spying would go against everything Amazon does, and the room laughed. A Hopkinton resident answered with the record: in 2023 Amazon paid more than $30 million to settle FTC charges that it kept children’s Alexa recordings after parents asked for deletion and let Ring employees view customer videos. The same mismatch showed up in Richardson, where the city’s FAQ says the drones don’t record video and Amazon’s own operations page says people near a delivery point may be recorded, the Times reported.

Amazon Explained the Tolleson Crane Crash and Skipped Richardson

Asked about the two MK30s that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, Wafaie said the crane should have been permitted with the FAA and was not. The drone was built to scan forward for aircraft and missed that crane type, he said. It detects them now.

That was my question. I also asked what caused an MK30 to strike an apartment building in Richardson in February 2026, and whether the drone carries a parachute. It does not. The MK30 weighs about 83 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff and cruises at 60 to 74 mph (97 to 119 km/h), and Wafaie said six propellers and a safe contingent landing are what the FAA cleared. He did not address Richardson, as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette also noted. He did bring up Richardson more than an hour later, as a city with organized opposition where Amazon now makes tens of thousands of deliveries. Amazon left all eight of the safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4 unanswered. At the meeting, Wafaie answered one of them in passing: Amazon checks each customer’s chosen drop spot against aerial LiDAR data, and in some cases sends someone to drive by before the first delivery.

The Amazon MK30 on display at the Prime Air community meeting in Westborough, Massachusetts, with close-ups of its propeller arms and motor assembly. The aircraft has six propellers and no parachute. Photo credit: DroneXL

Wafaie told the room several times that Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages this year without incident, while conceding, in answer to my question, that a couple of flights had not gone perfectly. DroneXL’s own 2026 file includes the Richardson strike and an MK30 that crashed into a garden in Darlington, England, on July 29, a crash the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch is investigating. On September 11 another MK30 made a precautionary landing beside a Baton Rouge boulevard, upright and with no visible damage.

A hinged hatch on top of the display MK30 opens onto an empty, green-primed bay. Photo credit: DroneXL

When an MK30 does fail, it chooses where to come down. Wafaie said the aircraft finds the nearest open area that isn’t a road or a building, and Amazon keeps no map of predetermined landing sites. Bob, a Westborough resident who said he spent more than 10 years on Air Force drone programs and helped develop the first FAA-approved detect-and-avoid system, asked to see one; there isn’t one. A youth sports volunteer asked Amazon to route around schools, playgrounds and ball fields. Wafaie said that would take out most of every delivery area. The Part 107-certified monitors in the trailer on the pad cannot steer a drone either. They can recall it or order a contingent landing, and Wafaie said they can put every drone down if Westborough police ask.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m pro drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight: an organ for transplant, medication for residents of a remote island, a defibrillator racing to someone in cardiac arrest. Urgency and value earn the right to fly over people’s homes. Toothpaste doesn’t. When a resident asked what problem Amazon was solving, Wafaie’s own example was diapers for a mother home with a sick child, and a same-day van already covers that.

If a company is going to fly consumer goods over backyards anyway, it has to do it right, and Zipline shows what right looks like. Its P2 weighs 55 pounds empty and 63 with a full 8-pound load, stays about 300 feet up and lowers the package on a tether, so the aircraft stays well above the people on the ground. It carries two parachutes, one on the aircraft and one on the delivery pod. The MK30 weighs about 20 pounds more than a fully loaded P2 to carry a 5-pound package, descends to 13 feet over a customer’s yard, and has no parachute. It is too big and too heavy for what it carries.

My read is that this gap is what the Westborough room was reacting to, and it puts the missions I care about at risk. A town has one move left against a company holding the FAA certificate, and Castle Rock and Parker already made it. A moratorium on delivery hubs grounds a medical drone as surely as a toothpaste run. Watch October 6: if the Planning Board approves the pad on the same answers this room rejected, Shrewsbury’s board, which has already talked about a bylaw, has every reason to write one, and Amazon will have taught another town to say no to all of us.

Sources: Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Spectrum News 1, DroneXL recording of the September 23 meeting, Federal Trade Commission, Citizen Portal (Castle Rock), Citizen Portal (Parker).

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

France and Italy Deny CIA Warned of Russian Ship-Launched Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:25:08 GMT

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that the CIA never warned France of a Russian plan to launch explosive drones from merchant ships in the Mediterranean. Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, had dismissed the same report earlier in the day.

Spanish daily El Mundo reported Wednesday that US intelligence told Spain, France and Italy that one of them could be hit by small Gerbera attack drones, hidden in shipping containers and catapulted from international waters. Spain, the third government named, had not commented publicly by Thursday evening in Madrid, and no statement from its defense or foreign ministries appeared in Spanish coverage of the report.

The launch method in the report has been seen before, off Sweden in February.

El Mundo Ties the Warning to Ratcliffe’s Moscow Trip

El Mundo reporter Xavier Colás wrote that European foreign ministries received a CIA report shortly after CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s August 25 visit to Moscow. El Mundo’s sources for the warning are anonymous, led by a person close to Lithuania’s defense ministry who supplied the drone details.

The trip is on the record. CBS News reported that Ratcliffe used it to warn Moscow against attacking NATO members, and the Kremlin said he met Russian intelligence officials rather than Vladimir Putin. The CIA report El Mundo describes has not been published.

The Lithuanian source named the aircraft: the Gerbera, a plywood-and-foam drone roughly 6.5 feet (2 meters) long with an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) wingspan. It weighs up to 40 pounds (18 kilograms), cruises near 99 mph (160 km/h) and has a stated range of 373 miles (600 kilometers), matching the wingspan, weight, speed and range Ukrainian intelligence gave when DroneXL profiled the Gerbera last September. “It is not difficult at all,” the source said of hiding them in a ship’s container.

Launched 124 to 186 miles (200 to 300 kilometers) offshore, a Gerbera would reach the coast in about one and a quarter to two hours, by El Mundo’s math. Its 9- to 11-pound (4- to 5-kilogram) warhead is too small to destroy a large facility, so the paper’s scenario has it temporarily shutting an airport or port, or starting a fire. El Mundo also points to politics: all three countries hold elections in 2027.

Macron Denies the CIA Alert but Calls a Russian Attack Plausible

In the same France 2 and TF1 interview where he said “the CIA did not inform France of this information,” Macron called a Russian attack on Europe plausible. France has not faced a comparable attack yet, he said, but one could happen.

Crosetto wrote on X that the alarm raised by the Spanish paper “serves no one and is not confirmed,” according to ANSA, and that nobody needs more fuel on the fire. Italian officials told ANSA the alert never arrived through intelligence, diplomatic, military or operational channels, Gazzetta del Sud reported.

France is preparing for drone attacks anyway. In the interview Macron pointed to the explosive drone found at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4, an attack Germany formally blamed on Russia this month. On September 18 he ordered a plan to protect critical infrastructure and sensitive defense-industry sites from drone and cyberattacks.

Russia Has Already Flown a Drone Off a Ship Near a NATO Port

The February case off Sweden is the closest thing to El Mundo’s scenario on the record. A Swedish Navy vessel saw a drone take off from the Russian signals-intelligence ship Zhigulevsk in the Öresund and jammed it as it neared the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, docked at Malmö.

The Kremlin called Sweden’s account absurd, USNI News reported, and neither Swedish nor French officials identified the drone’s type in their public statements. In July, DroneXL reported that it was the only case in the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 144-incident dataset with an observed launch from a named Russian vessel. The rest of that report leans on proximity: a shadow-fleet ship sailing near a sighting.

The Gerbera itself has turned up armed at sea. Polish troops pulled a Gerbera 2 from the Baltic off Rusinowo on September 14, and military prosecutors said it carried a live fragmentation warhead. As of September 16, investigators had not established where it launched, and one explanation Polish officials offered was a drift in from international waters.

DroneXL’s Take

When the IISS dataset came out in July, I wrote that a confirmed maritime launch looks like Malmö: a named ship, an observed launch, a military response and a minister on the record. A warning about an attack that hasn’t happened can’t meet that bar.

It still needs sourcing a reader can weigh. This one has anonymous sources, a CIA report that hasn’t been published, and two governments on record denying it.

Governments deny intelligence exchanges all the time, and Macron called a Russian attack plausible in the same breath. The capability was never the question. Leipzig and the armed Gerbera off Rusinowo settled that.

A warning that names the drone and the launch distance is a far more specific claim than a general statement that Russia can do this, and it needs sourcing to match. A leaked alert that draws two government denials within a day makes the next warning easier to wave off. Crosetto is right about the fuel. The better answer is for the three governments to say what their navies and air defenses are watching for in the Mediterranean, because a Gerbera in a shipping container is a real threat whether or not this warning ever reached them.

Sources: El Mundo, Euronews, ANSA, Gazzetta del Sud, CBS News, NBC News, USNI News

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

Skydio's 100 mph F10 Debuts at Ascend, Where 'Lobbying' Is Profanity

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:49:00 GMT

Skydio unveiled the F10 Lightrunner, a fixed-wing drone that takes off and lands on its own from a robotic dock, during the Ascend 2026 keynote on September 23. CEO Adam Bry introduced it on stage in Summerlin, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, at the company’s invitation-only user conference. Skydio rates the aircraft at 100 mph, a 30-mile radius, and up to 120 minutes of flight.

I watched part of the keynote on Skydio’s own livestream, where the chat filter removed a viewer’s comment for “profanity words.” The comment contained no swearing. It contained the word “lobbying.”

Skydio F10 Lightrunner Flies From A Dock That Holds Five Aircraft

Skydio’s F10 product page pairs the aircraft with MegaDock, a ground station that houses up to five F10s and keeps three in the air while two charge. An F10 is airborne 20 seconds after a launch command, with no runway and no crew on site.

That is the pitch for drone-as-first-responder programs that have outgrown the reach of a quadcopter: a vehicle pursuit, a rural 911 call, a search across open ground. Skydio showed an early F10 prototype at Ascend 2025 alongside the indoor R10. Skydio has posted the full keynote on its Ascend page.

Attendees watch Skydio's keynote on the outdoor stage at Ascend 2026 in Summerlin, Nevada. Photo credit: Skydio

The dock is not small. MegaDock measures 14.5 by 20.75 feet (4.4 by 6.3 meters) and 9.5 feet (2.9 meters) tall with its fence, and weighs 6,900 pounds (3,130 kg). It needs a hardwired 200 to 240 V supply on a dedicated 100-amp breaker, a Cat6 network line, and holds up in 80 mph winds unanchored or 110 mph anchored. An F10 recharges from 10 to 90% in 45 minutes. Two F10s can hand off an orbit, so one stays on scene while the other flies back to charge.

Skydio's F10 alongside other Skydio aircraft, its autonomous dock and fleet management screens. Photo credit: Skydio

The product page lists no price and no ship date.

Skydio’s F10 Hangs Its Cameras Off One Wingtip

The F10 is lopsided on purpose. Skydio’s SideEye design mounts the camera gimbal on one wingtip instead of under the belly, and the gimbal rolls continuously without hitting a mechanical stop. With the cameras out on the tip, the airframe stays out of the shot while the aircraft banks.

The Skydio F10 carries its camera gimbal on one wingtip. Photo credit: Skydio

The pod carries three cameras, per Skydio’s F10 technical specs. A 0.5-inch 48MP telephoto runs at a 190mm equivalent focal length. A 1/1.7-inch 64MP narrow camera sits at 46mm. The thermal camera is a FLIR Boson+ at 640 × 512 with sensitivity under 30 mK. Video from the two visible cameras tops out at 3840 × 2880, with electronic image stabilization.

Navigation runs on six 1/1.95-inch 50MP cameras built into the fuselage and wings in a binocular layout, feeding Skydio’s autonomy with obstacle perception out to 300 feet (91 meters). An NVIDIA Jetson Orin and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 do the processing.

The rest of the sheet: 15.43 pounds (7 kg) with batteries, a polymer-skinned foam airframe measuring 57.8 × 33.9 × 7.7 inches (147 × 86 × 20 cm), an 11,000-foot (3,352-meter) density-altitude ceiling, launch and landing in winds up to 27 mph (12 m/s), IP55 sealing and an operating range of -4 to 131°F (-20 to 55°C). The integrated parachute deploys from 150 feet (45 meters) and makes the aircraft eligible for Part 107 Category 3 flight over people while in forward flight. Skydio lists the F10 as NDAA compliant.

Skydio Is Updating Its Software To See Power Lines

Skydio also announced a software update in the keynote that improves how its drones detect power lines, which the company said are hard to pick out in certain light. Thin wires and bare branches are the weak spot of vision-based obstacle avoidance, and speed makes it worse.

A Skydio executive presents reliability data on stage at Ascend 2026. Photo credit: Skydio

Skydio’s Thermal Boost Repeats What FLIR Shipped In 2007

Thermal Boost, a camera feature Skydio showed at Ascend, combines thermal and visible-light imagery in one view. In the keynote demo, a building showed up in thermal while the surrounding parking lot stayed in the regular camera image. Skydio presented it as new and has no product page for it.

Skydio's Thermal Boost demo at Ascend 2026: the rooftop renders in thermal while the parking lot around it stays in the visible-light camera image. Photo credit: Skydio

FLIR launched the same idea as Thermal Fusion on its ThermaCAM T-Series in September 2007, describing it as a feature that “selectively combines thermal and visual images.” Users set a temperature range to show in infrared and let the rest of the frame display as a normal photo. FLIR followed with MSX, short for Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging, in January 2013, which embosses visible edge and outline detail onto the thermal image in real time. Thermal pilots have had both on their screens for years.

Skydio’s Livestream Chat Removed A Comment About Lobbying

The comment removed during the keynote accused Skydio of “lobbying your competition out of existence.” Posted again with the word split as “lob bying,” the same comment went through. That leaves “lobbying” as the only word the filter could have caught.

Whether someone at Skydio added it to the blocklist or it came with the chat platform’s default settings isn’t visible from the viewer side.

It is an awkward word to filter. Skydio is a registered federal lobbying client, and DroneXL has criticized that lobbying and reported the industry backlash against its tactics since 2024. Bry has denied the core accusation. On LinkedIn in July 2024, he said of the Countering CCP Drones Act: “We had nothing to do with it and have not lobbied in favor of it.” The outcome that critics blamed on that lobbying arrived anyway when the FCC added DJI and all foreign-made drones to its Covered List in December 2025.

DroneXL’s Take

The F10 is a real piece of engineering. A fixed-wing drone that launches and recovers itself from a box, with no runway and no pilot on site, solves the problem that has kept fixed wings out of most DFR programs, and hanging the gimbal off one wingtip is the kind of odd, clever design choice this industry needs more of.

From what Skydio showed on stage, Thermal Boost is FLIR’s Thermal Fusion under a new name. Rebranding is what launch events do. Filing “lobbying” under profanity is something else: the company whose CEO says it never lobbied for the DJI ban bill now runs a chat where viewers can’t type the word. The police departments buying Skydio’s DFR hardware can’t get DJI’s next models because of the Covered List, not because Skydio built a better drone.

For once, DroneXL and Skydio agree on something: lobbying really is a dirty word.

The original comment, removed by the Ascend livestream chat for "profanity words."

The same comment, reposted with the word split as "lob bying," went through.

Sources: Skydio F10, Skydio F10 technical specs, Skydio MegaDock technical specs, Skydio Ascend 2026, FLIR Systems, Vision Systems Design, OpenSecrets

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

Tekever Hits $6.4 Billion as University of California Backs AI Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:08:40 GMT

Tekever, the Portuguese-British maker of AI-driven surveillance drones, said Wednesday it has closed the first $580 million of a Series D round at a $6.4 billion valuation. The University of California’s investment office and Baillie Gifford led it. It is UC Investments’ first direct investment in Europe.

When we covered Tekever’s $74 million round in November 2024, the pitch was U.S. expansion. By May 2025 it was a unicorn, valued above £1 billion. The new valuation is more than four times that, and it lands one week after Tekever signed a contract worth up to £400 million ($530 million) to replace the British Army’s Watchkeeper drones.

Tekever lists acquisitions among the uses for the money. The day before the round was announced, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Estonian drone maker Threod Systems, which was reported to be exploring a sale last year.

Tekever Raises Money to Buy Companies, and Has Already Started

CEO Ricardo Mendes told Bloomberg Television he expects the defense technology market to consolidate heavily over the next few years, and that the round is designed to fund growth through acquisitions. Tekever made one purchase this month and signed one framework deal.

The interview was reported by The Next Web. The Series D announcement says the first close covers most of the raise, with more closings to come over the next few months.

On September 1, Tekever bought Flowcopter, the Edinburgh company whose hydraulic transmission powers Tekever’s new AR6 heavy-lift drone, which Tekever says carries at least 441 pounds (200 kg) over 311 miles (500 km). DroneXL first wrote about Flowcopter’s cargo drone in 2022.

The Threod memorandum of understanding, announced September 22, sets up a framework for “long-term cooperation” on technology and joint programs. The announcement mentions no equity stake or acquisition. Bloomberg reported in July 2025 that Threod was exploring a sale after its 2024 revenue rose 87% to €38 million.

Merlyn Advisors joins as a new investor, and its portfolio manager is former U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. “Tekever has a proven track record that shows it can do all three,” Wallace said, meaning innovate fast, scale industrially and meet operational needs. Crescent Cove, Ventura Capital and Iberis Capital put in more money.

The AR5 Takes Over From Watchkeeper, Britain’s £1.4 Billion Drone Fleet

The U.K. Ministry of Defence picked Tekever’s AR5 on July 25 to replace Watchkeeper, in service since 2014. The government announcement sets an initial order of six aircraft, up to 24 delivered by 2029, under a deal worth up to £400 million over 10 years.

The AR5, the airframe behind the British Army's CORVUS program. Photo credit: TEKEVER

Tekever signed the CORVUS contract on September 16. The AR5 carries up to 110 pounds (50 kg) of cameras and sensors, according to the MoD. Tekever says it will build the aircraft in Swindon and expects them to start entering Army service later this year. The case for it rests on Ukraine, where Tekever says its drones have flown more than 50,000 operational hours since 2022.

Watchkeeper is the benchmark CORVUS gets measured against. In 2024 we reported that the U.K. had spent £1.4 billion on 54 of them and that none were on operational deployment. Last November, Skyeton’s Ukrainian-built Raybird was reported to be under consideration as the replacement. Tekever got the job.

Mendes told Bloomberg the company now employs more than 1,500 people. Tekever opened its first U.S. office in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in May.

DroneXL’s Take

My read: most of Europe’s defense tech money has arrived ahead of battlefield results, and Tekever is the rare case where the order ran the other way. Helsing raised $1.8 billion in July after Politico reported its HX-2 hit five of 14 targets in the Donbas, a figure Helsing disputed. Stark’s strike drones missed on all four attempts in October 2025 trials with British and German forces, then raised €500 million in June. Tekever builds surveillance drones, flew them in Ukraine for years, and then got a signed contract from a customer with a £1.4 billion reason to be careful. The 50,000 hours are Tekever’s own figure. The British Army still bet its next surveillance program on that record after Watchkeeper, and that is a harder test than any pitch deck.

The part I’d watch is the shopping list. A company that raises $580 million to consolidate the market now owns a propulsion firm and has a paper relationship with a drone maker that was reportedly exploring a sale. University of California money now sits behind that shopping list, and behind a company that opened a North Carolina office in May to support U.S. partners and end users.

Sources: CNBC, Tekever, GOV.UK, The Next Web

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

Amazon Preps Tallahassee Drone Hub. Florida Law Gives City Little Say

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:06:00 GMT

Amazon is laying the groundwork for Prime Air drone delivery in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. The company is hiring Prime Air Ground Handlers in the city at $27 an hour, has invited drone instructors from Tallahassee State College to an “Amazon Drone Delivery Community Meet and Greet,” and documents filed on Friday, September 18, show a drone storage unit going into the front parking lot of its fulfillment center at Mahan Drive and Interstate 10. Amazon has announced no launch date.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported the hiring and the invitation on September 22. WCTV reported the filing a day later.

The FAA’s public record has nothing on it yet. Its list of drone delivery environmental reviews had no Tallahassee entry on September 23.

Amazon Is Hiring Drone Handlers and Courting Local Pilots Before Any Announcement

Amazon’s Tallahassee job listing pays $27 an hour for ground handlers who move batteries and equipment, watch the airspace for hazards and talk to the community, on shifts of up to 12 hours. An FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate is preferred, not required. WCTV counts at least three openings.

The invitation reached Tallahassee State College about two weeks before the Democrat’s story, adjunct drone instructor Carl Fuqua told the paper. He and two other instructors responded. Fuqua said some people have mixed feelings about drones over their homes, then pointed to the larger metros where Amazon already flies: “It’s not like we’re the guinea pig for it either.”

An Amazon spokesperson told the Tallahassee Democrat the company is working with local officials and exploring an expansion to Tallahassee customers. “We’re also planning a community event in Tallahassee,” the statement said, with details to come. Amazon has run the same kind of preview elsewhere, as DroneXL documented when it put an MK30 at a Tracy car show and ahead of its Westborough forum tonight. Amazon had not announced a date or venue for the Tallahassee event as of September 23.

The FAA’s Florida Review Covered Six Sites, and Tallahassee Was Not One

The FAA’s Florida environmental assessment, signed June 1, 2026, covers Amazon hubs in Ruskin, Tampa, Orlando, Tamarac, Riviera Beach and Miami. Each gets up to 1,000 MK30 flights a day out to 7.5 miles (12 kilometers), from 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Tallahassee does not appear.

It does not need to. Since July 28, the FAA can check a new hub against its national programmatic assessment inside the agency, with no site document and no comment period, the change DroneXL laid out when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. Neither Amazon’s statement nor the FAA’s environmental review page says which path Tallahassee is on.

Ruskin, outside Tampa, is the only Florida hub on the list of 11 operating sites in Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, the one that set the goal of nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026. Tallahassee was not among the five named next launches either.

Florida Law Keeps Tallahassee Out of the Flights and Most of the Pad

Florida reserves drone regulation to the state. Under Florida Statute 330.41(3)(b), a city or county may not enact or enforce an ordinance on the operation of an unmanned aircraft, including airspace, altitude and flight paths. Tallahassee cannot write a rule about where Amazon’s drones fly or how high.

The ground gets its own paragraph. Subsection (3)(c) bars a local government from withholding a development permit, business tax receipt or other use approval from a drone delivery service, or banning one, because of where its drone port sits. The city keeps its ordinary setback and landscaping rules and cannot demand extra landscaping as a condition. The statute defines a drone port as a stand-alone building of up to 1,500 square feet (139 square meters) and 36 feet (11 meters) tall in a nonresidential area, so whether that protection covers Amazon’s storage unit depends on plans nobody has published. Local nuisance, voyeurism and property-damage laws still apply to drones under (3)(d).

The drone port rule came from SB 1068, signed on May 25, 2023, after its House twin cleared a subcommittee with Walmart’s DroneUp flights in mind. Massachusetts runs the other way: Amazon’s Westborough pad needs a state aeronautics permit and a local site-plan vote. Among the 35 states DroneXL checked for drop laws, Florida has no general drop rule at all.

DroneXL’s Take

Tallahassee is about to find out what drone delivery looks like when the public gets no formal say. If the FAA clears the hub against its national finding, there is no site review. Florida law keeps the city out of the flight paths entirely and, if the unit counts as a drone port, leaves it setbacks and landscaping on the ground. What’s left is Amazon’s meet and greet, and on this record that event is the only public forum Tallahassee residents get.

I’m fine with the outcome. A 30-minute delivery of cold medicine from a warehouse that already sends out vans every day is exactly the drone use this site has argued for since 2020, and Florida wrote its law so a city council couldn’t zone it out of existence. My problem is with the paperwork gap. Ruskin’s neighbors can open a PDF that says how many flights, how far and what hours. Tallahassee’s can’t.

The Democrat asked the right question: how does a delivery drone work under Tallahassee’s live oak canopy? Amazon owes the answer in public, with a flight radius and route map, before the first MK30 leaves the parking lot. If you live near that warehouse, the meet and greet is where to ask it.

Sources: Tallahassee Democrat, WCTV, Amazon Jobs, FAA Florida Environmental Assessment, FAA NEPA and Drones, Florida Statute 330.41, Amazon.

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

House Bill Moves FAA Drone Rules From The Box To Your First Power-On

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:00:30 GMT

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a bill on September 15 that would make every small drone manufacturer show new pilots a safety statement built to FAA requirements the first time they activate a drone, then require them to electronically acknowledge each part of it. H.R. 10304, the Drone Safety Statement Modernization Act of 2026, cleared the committee by voice vote as an amended version of the text Rep. James Gallagher (R-Calif.) introduced a week earlier. It goes to the full House next.

Drone makers already owe buyers a safety statement. Congress ordered one in 2016, and the FAA’s version is a print-ready insert for the box.

H.R. 10304 repeals that requirement.

The 2016 Law Reaches The Owner At Delivery And Cites A Repealed Rule

The 2016 requirement, Section 2203 of the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act, only makes manufacturers provide the statement to the owner at the time of delivery. It says nothing about the person who actually flies. Nobody has to read it, and nobody has to confirm they did.

Its content has aged worse than its delivery. Section 2203 tells manufacturers to include FAA-approved language on flying as a model aircraft under Section 336 of the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act. Congress repealed Section 336 in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 and replaced it with 49 U.S.C. 44809, the recreational exception that now requires hobbyists to pass The Recreational UAS Safety Test (TRUST). The statute still describes a rule that has been gone for nearly eight years.

H.R. 10304 Gives The FAA 120 Days To Show What The Statement Must Say

Under the committee-approved text, the FAA sets the statement’s requirements and must publish an example within 120 days of enactment, then review the requirements within 18 months and yearly after that. Manufacturers can use the FAA’s example or write their own, and the agency cannot force its wording on them.

The statement has to cover the rules and where to find them, including which authorizations apply to which kind of flight and pilot certification, plus the Section 44809 recreational rules behind TRUST, which the bill leaves untouched. It must explain temporary flight restrictions and drone-specific airspace limits, and the FAA-approved methods for checking whether a flight in a given piece of airspace is legal, the job the FAA’s B4UFLY service does for recreational pilots today. It closes on safety recommendations and on what happens to pilots who fly unsafely or illegally, spelled out for restricted airspace and for FAA enforcement against anyone who endangers the national airspace system. Each version carries its creation or revision date.

One line closes an exit. Section 44805(h) lets the FAA exempt drones that can’t navigate beyond visual line of sight through advanced flight systems from that section’s safety standards. The bill writes the safety statement out of that exemption, so a basic drone gets no pass.

For DJI buyers, the moment already exists. DJI’s Mini 3 user manual says the drone requires activation in the DJI Fly app before first use.

A One-Time Sign-Off Can’t Warn Pilots About Next Month’s TFR

The acknowledgment happens once, when the initial operator first activates the drone. A temporary flight restriction is temporary by design. The FAA ran nearly 250 of them during the FIFA World Cup, and it said on July 22 that more than 700 unauthorized drones were seized over the tournament.

A statement can teach a new pilot that TFRs exist and what flying into one costs. It can’t tell that pilot about the stadium ring that goes up months after the drone came out of the box. The FAA’s World Cup release doesn’t say how many of those 700 operators were new owners, which is the one number that would show whether an activation screen would have reached them.

The obligation also attaches to the “initial operator.” A drone sold secondhand, or handed down to a family member, reaches its next pilot with the acknowledgment already clicked.

DroneXL’s Take

This is a drone safety rule DroneXL can back without holding its nose: no new ban, no new fee, no new test, just the FAA’s current rules put in front of the person holding the controller at the one moment every new drone passes through. When the FBI’s World Cup count passed 300 in June, I wrote that most of the operators behind it were almost certainly the pilots least likely to check a NOTAM before launch. First power-on is the one moment a manufacturer can reach them before they become that guy.

The weak link is the FAA, not the bill. The same 2016 law ordered the Section 2209 critical-infrastructure rule, which was six years overdue when DroneXL started tracking it in 2023 and only reached a proposal this May. If H.R. 10304 becomes law, watch the 120-day clock on the example statement first and the annual review after it. A statement that falls behind the rules is the 2016 law’s mistake again, on a screen.

Sources: Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, ANS to H.R. 10304, Committee markup results, H.R. 10304 bill status (GovInfo), FAA Section 2203 text, FAA manufacturer’s toolkit, FAA.

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

Orqa, KEF And Blue Arrow Beat GPS Jamming In Front Of Green Berets

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:10:27 GMT

Orqa drones flew a reconnaissance mission and a payload drop at Fort McClellan, Alabama, in late August while GPS and their communications links were both being jammed, according to a joint release from Orqa, Blue Arrow Defense and KEF Robotics. Personnel from the Army’s 1st Special Forces Command and the Alabama National Guard’s 20th Special Forces Group watched.

The drone maker is Croatian. The navigation software comes from Pittsburgh, and the fleet software was written in Kyiv.

Jamming takes away the satellite fix that tells a drone where it is and the radio link a pilot uses to tell it where to go. The payload drop used several drones at once, and both missions were completed.

Soldiers watch from behind the operators' chairs as a drone flies over the range at Fort McClellan. Photo credit: Blue Arrow Defense

KEF’s Tailwind Gave The Drones Their Position From Onboard Cameras

With GPS jammed, the drones took their position from KEF Robotics’ Tailwind software. Tailwind works out where the aircraft is from its onboard cameras and hands the autopilot latitude, longitude, altitude and velocity in the same form a GPS receiver would, so the flight controller keeps flying as usual.

KEF rates its map-free mode at under 2 percent drift at 100 mph (161 km/h), according to its product page, and a second mode matches what the camera sees against a map for longer, higher flights. Limitless Aeronautics, a U.S. maker of drone payload attachments, built the release mechanisms used in the drop.

“GPS jamming and spoofing are operational realities,” said Fraser Kitchell, KEF’s chief executive. DroneXL first wrote about his Pittsburgh company in 2022, when the Army’s Applications Laboratory gave KEF $1.5 million to develop vision-based autonomous flight, and again in 2024 when its work reached from Pittsburgh to Kyiv.

Blue Arrow’s Kyiv-Built Autonomy Is Moving Onto Orqa’s Flight Board

RII is the Blue Arrow software that coordinated the multi-drone payload run. It breaks a mission into smaller sub-missions each aircraft can finish on its own, so one operator can command several drones. Blue Arrow launched RII on April 2, with Ukrainian defense units as its first planned users.

Three drones sit lined up on the strip at Fort McClellan while a team member readies a fourth. Photo credit: Blue Arrow Defense

Blue Arrow grew out of KEF’s partnership with Kyiv’s Sensorama Lab and launched in January 2025, with headquarters in the U.S. and its engineering in Ukraine. Before Blue Arrow launched, the Sensorama and KEF team took first place and $50,000 at a NATO-Ukraine automated guidance hackathon in Kraków in June 2024, the Defense Innovation Unit reported.

When Blue Arrow joined Orqa’s Developer Program, its system was a prototype that needed extra hardware bolted onto the drone. It will now be offered as a package with Orqa drones built around the company’s Auto Pilot Board, or APB, which puts an STM32 H7 flight controller and an NXP i.MX8M Plus processor for AI and video on one board, Orqa’s developer documentation shows. One board instead of two saves weight and power, and it is simpler to build by the thousand.

Blue Arrow CEO Sergii Tereshchenko said Ukraine has shown that “no single company can address every requirement of modern drone warfare.” Olga Pogoda, KEF’s chief operating officer and one of Blue Arrow’s co-founders, sent me the release.

Orqa Brings Ukraine-Tested Drones And Its Own Supply Chain To The Partnership

Orqa, based in Osijek, Croatia, has had its drones in use in Ukraine since 2022 and now supplies FPV systems and components to more than 50 countries, the release says. It designs and builds its own electronics, which the release credits for ending its reliance on Chinese suppliers.

In December 2024 the Pentagon stopped using Orqa drones after the Defense Innovation Unit found radio modules assembled in China inside them, Forbes reported. CEO Srđan Kovačević told Forbes the chips were Taiwanese and European and that Orqa now makes the modules itself.

The release calls the Alabama event a “Watchtower” drone competition. The Army’s record of Fort McClellan that week is 1st Special Forces Command’s first Best Drone Team Competition, run August 24 to 28 with 15 teams.

Orqa expanded its Croatian plant last year to a stated capacity of 280,000 drones a year, and in June it signed a 150 million CAD deal to build in Canada. Kovačević pitched the Alabama work as modular by design, adding capability “without locking the customer into a single proprietary system.”

DroneXL’s Take

Ukraine is writing the requirements for everyone else’s drones, and this is what that looks like when it reaches the U.S. Army. RII was built for Ukrainian units first, and KEF took its navigation software to Ukraine for its first field tests in February 2025, Blue Arrow told AIN.

The modular approach Kovačević described is how that knowledge gets to American operators. The Army buys the best navigation and the best fleet control without marrying one vendor, and the people who learned the problem under Russian jamming get to sell the answer.

DroneXL has argued for years that drones should be judged against security standards every manufacturer has to meet, not by the flag on the box. By its CEO’s account, Orqa brought the problem radio in-house after the 2024 halt, which is the right answer to a finding like that. The partners say they will keep working together in Ukraine and the United States and extend the integration to more aircraft and payloads. Watch for the first Orqa drones to ship with the APB and Blue Arrow’s software on board, because RII and Tailwind have already worked through the jamming at Fort McClellan.

Sources: Orqa, Blue Arrow Defense and KEF Robotics joint press release (supplied to DroneXL, not yet published online), U.S. Army, Defense Innovation Unit, Forbes.

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

Insta360 Luna Pro Review: 8K Gimbal Camera Tested in Alaska Wind

Jake Sloan — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:50:05 GMT

This is the Insta360 Luna Pro, the latest iteration of Insta360’s gimbal cameras, and it was ridiculously windy the day I took it out to test. This video isn’t sponsored by Insta360. They did send me this camera to test, review and keep, but they didn’t even tell me I needed to make a video about it. They just sent it to me.

Honestly, these kinds of cameras are fantastic, and the more I use them, the better they get. They’re excellent cameras for anybody who’s into content creation, as a dad camera, or in this case, as a good little car rig. It works shockingly well. I filmed as much as I could with the Luna Pro itself so you can see as much footage from it as possible.

An Insta360 Luna Pro is mounted on the dashboard of a red truck, recording the driver during a test drive through the Alaska mountains. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Basically a Luna Ultra Without the Second Camera

This is very similar to the Luna Ultra, but without the second camera. Other than that, pretty much everything is the same. You get the same 8K at up to 30 frames a second, in I-Log 10-bit if you want it, normal color 10-bit, or Dolby Vision.

You get the most dynamic range out of the camera if you film in I-Log. If you want to film in I-Log but you’re not necessarily interested in color grading, I use and love the LUTs from Gamut. The colors are amazing and close to ARRI-type colors, which is insane to get out of a pocket camera.

It also has a 2x lossless zoom and a 4x zoom that isn’t lossless, which Insta360 calls a high-res zoom, where the camera upscales the image.

Insta360 Luna Pro footage of a glacier cutting through a mountain valley, shot in 4K 30fps I-Log with 2x lossless zoom. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Tracking and Slow Motion

There were a lot of people at the trailhead, but I typically go much farther than anybody else, so I was still able to get away from the crowds and find a good spot.

This camera features Insta360’s fantastic tracking capability. If you want to add movement to your shots, you can. You can place the subject in different areas of the frame, and the tracking is amazing.

Close-up of the Insta360 Luna Pro's lens module and grille. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

You can film in 4K 30, 4K 60 or 4K 120, and the slow motion modes are pretty decent. You can shoot 4K at up to 120 frames a second in I-Log, and 1080p at up to 240 frames a second, also in I-Log, which is pretty cool.

120 is great slow motion. I know 240 is available on a lot of other cameras on the market now, but to use 240 realistically, the subject has to be so slow to make it look good. It’s actually kind of hard to find stuff like that to film.

Should You Shoot in 8K?

You can also film in 8K at up to 30 frames a second. There is a little more detail in your shot, but the file sizes are definitely bigger. If you’re using the internal memory, which is 47GB and pretty much what I used all day, you may want to reconsider filming in 8K. The same goes if your phone or computer is older and will have a harder time editing it. But the option is there.

You will get the most dynamic range if you film in 4K 30 or 4K 60, because of the way the sensor is designed. If you want the widest dynamic range, which Insta360 says is up to 14 stops, film in 4K 30, 4K 60, or 4K 24 or 25, whatever you prefer.

The Insta360 Luna Pro captures 4K 30fps I-Log footage from a roof-mounted position atop a truck driving down a forest highway. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

That 8K sensor is also what makes the 2x lossless zoom and the up to 4x high-resolution zoom possible. There’s definitely some quality loss with the high-res zoom, but in a pinch, if you really want some powerful zoom, it would probably work.

The Detachable Face Plate Steals the Show

Much like the Luna Ultra, the Luna Pro has the same detachable face plate design, which is super cool for these kinds of cameras. It gives you complete control over everything, just like you were operating the camera normally, but as a remote. The range is limited to about 20 meters, depending on how many other sources of interference are around you.

The coolest thing is that the face plate has a mic built into it.

The Insta360 Luna Pro remote controller displays a prompt to switch to touchscreen remote audio reception. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Audio: Mic Air, Mic Pro and the Built-In Mics

In spite of me inhaling a bug mid-take, the audio options on this camera are solid. It’s compatible with the Insta360 Mic Air, which is what I used for most of the video, and the Mic Pro if you want to step it up and have a few more options. I did a separate review on the Mic Pro.

The built-in audio is pretty good, too. There’s a large wind guard on the camera. I tested it with a slight breeze of maybe 5 to 10 mph coming from directly behind the camera, and the windscreen on the Luna Pro handled that fine. If you want to get into heavier winds, you’re definitely going to want an external mic like the one I used in the intro, because that was very strong wind.

The detachable face plate has a tiny mic built in as well. I tested it standing about 10 or 12 feet away from the gimbal, so roughly 3 to 4 meters, and the audio quality is pretty good. In wind it isn’t going to work so well, because there’s almost no wind protection. But it’s nice to have the option.

That’s one of the coolest things about all these little gimbal creator cameras coming out right now. We have so many good, fantastic options to create content with. Except for really good quality high-resolution stills or really, really low light, my mirrorless cameras are staying home a lot more, partly because these are so much lighter to hike with.

Low Light and PureVideo

Because the Luna Pro shares the same 1-inch sensor as the Luna Ultra, you can get pretty decent low light out of a camera this size. You can’t expect to film in complete darkness like you could with an A7S III, but you can film in pretty low light as long as there’s some ambient light around, like city lights.

If you use Insta360’s PureVideo mode, you get really clean-looking imagery that’s pretty much ready to go. It’s a heavily AI-processed noise reduction system that Insta360 built, and it gives you clean footage straight out of camera that still has good detail.

A frame from the Insta360 Luna Pro's 4K 30fps PureVideo mode, capturing a rain-soaked downtown street at night. Photo credit: Jake Sloan

Is the Insta360 Luna Pro Worth It?

If you create a lot of content and want a really great little stabilized gimbal camera to run around with and capture all kinds of stuff, then yes. Maybe you’re hiking out to a glacier field valley in Alaska for fun. This is a great camera for that, especially if you don’t want to put out the extra money for the Luna Ultra, which is a substantial step up.

I love the Luna Ultra because of that extra camera and its tighter focal length, but you can get some similar effects on the Luna Pro with the 2x lossless zoom. It’s pretty close. Overall, the image quality on this camera is really good. I shot most of this video in auto mode, and I can’t complain about it at all.

If you have questions, ask me in the comments on the video or join my live stream, which happens some Wednesday nights at 4:00 p.m. Alaska time, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, at least if I’m not out in a place like this.

For more on how the dual-lens model stacks up against DJI, see our Osmo Pocket 4 Pro vs Insta360 Luna Ultra comparison, and my earlier Insta360 Luna first look.

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

Zipline Promises Ivory Coast A 300% Return, Not What It Costs

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:18:00 GMT

Zipline will build nine more drone distribution hubs across Côte d’Ivoire, the country Americans know as Ivory Coast, taking a single centre in Daloa to a network of 10 under an eight-year public-private partnership the Ivorian government has approved. Once the buildout is done, the company says the network will serve more than 2,200 health facilities and over 12 million people, roughly a third of the country, carrying blood products, vaccines and essential medicines to clinics that road transport reaches slowly or not at all.

Behind it is American money. The US State Department’s $150 million pay-for-performance award to Zipline, announced last November and covered here when it landed, is what pays to put the hubs in the ground.

Zipline and Ivorian officials put the return to the state at about 300%. Neither the company nor the communiqué the Council of Ministers issued on September 9 says what the state is spending to get it.

Washington Buys The Buildings, Abidjan Buys The Flying

The US grant covers construction of the distribution centres. The Ivorian state covers the service contract: pharmacy-grade warehousing, cold chain, digital tracking and the deliveries themselves, for the full eight years. That split is the whole design of the American award, not a detail of this deal.

The State Department announced the award on November 25, 2025: up to $150 million to Zipline International Inc. to reach as many as 15,000 health facilities across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda, through what the department described as milestone-based payments and co-financing commitments with partner governments. Zipline’s own announcement was more specific. Funding would be released only when governments signed expansion contracts and committed to paying for ongoing logistics services, and the five countries would pay up to $400 million in fees for using the service. That is what DroneXL reported at the time: a structure that spends American money to create African customers.

Côte d’Ivoire is one of those customers now. “Côte d’Ivoire is demonstrating what commercial diplomacy can achieve in practice,” said Caitlin Burton, CEO for Zipline Africa, in the company’s September 21 announcement. Nigeria is the bigger prize on the same terms, where Zipline is adding a dozen hubs by 2028 and aiming at half the country’s 220 million people, and Rwanda went nationwide in February.

The Contract Was Signed In December, Nine Months Before Anyone Announced It

The public-private partnership between the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire and Zipline SARL was signed in December 2025, within weeks of the State Department award that pays for it. The Council of Ministers took formal note of it on September 9, 2026, and Zipline announced it on September 21.

That sequence is on the Ivorian record rather than the company’s. Government spokesman Amadou Coulibaly set out the terms after the September 9 council meeting, reported by the Agence Ivoirienne de Presse: 10 storage and distribution centres, built in two phases. The first phase runs 27 months and covers the existing Daloa pilot plus new sites at Biankouma, San Pedro and Kouto. The second adds six centres in the Autonomous District of Abidjan and the Indénié-Djuablin, Gbêkê, Kabadougou, Bélier and Gontougo regions. The goal, Coulibaly said, is “regular and secure supply” to facilities in hard-to-reach areas.

What the communiqué does not carry is a figure. It describes the American grant and the Ivorian operating commitment in words and attaches no number to either, and Zipline declined to tell Semafor how much it will receive. So the 300% return has been published by both parties and the investment it is calculated against has been published by neither.

Daloa’s Three Years Are The Case The Other Nine Hubs Rest On

Zipline has flown from Daloa since 2023, and its record there is the argument for the other nine sites. The company reports more than 3.55 million medical products delivered to more than 220 health facilities across five regions, including 20,500 units of blood products and 2,058 equivalent lives saved.

About 2 million of those products were vaccine doses. Those are Zipline’s own figures, from Zipline’s announcement. The Ivorian health ministry’s account of the same three years is qualitative: “stronger support for our health facilities,” said Pierre N’Gou Dimba, Minister of Health, Public Hygiene and Universal Health Coverage, who is leading the expansion.

The expansion sits inside Côte d’Ivoire’s Vision 2030 universal health coverage agenda, and Zipline is selling it as industrial policy as much as logistics, with Ivorian staff trained across pharmacy, aviation operations, maintenance and data management. “It is building an autonomous logistics backbone operated by Ivorian talent,” said Xavier Greusard, the company’s vice president for Africa go-to-market. It is also what a company seeking a $20 billion valuation says while African health budgets underwrite its operating revenue.

DroneXL’s Take

I want this deal to work, and the Daloa numbers are the reason. A health ministry buying autonomous logistics instead of another fleet of Land Cruisers is the version of drone delivery DroneXL has argued for since the beginning: unglamorous, measurable, and aimed at people whose roads wash out every rainy season. Three years and 3.55 million deliveries is not a pilot any more.

But a 300% return is a fraction with the bottom half missing. You cannot check a return on investment without the investment, and right now the only party who knows what Côte d’Ivoire is paying is Côte d’Ivoire, which has not said. That is not a technicality when the whole American model here is to fund the buildings once and hand the recurring bill to the health ministry.

Why that matters has a DroneXL dateline on it. In August 2025 we reported that Zipline’s Kaduna State operation was paused after a change in administration, having delivered more than 225,000 medical items from Pambegua, including 154,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses. The technology did not fail. The budget line did. Kaduna was a state-level review rather than a verdict on drones, and Côte d’Ivoire’s arrangement is national, contractual and eight years long, which is exactly the structural fix for what happened in Nigeria. A contract is still only as durable as the appropriation behind it.

So watch the Ivorian finance ministry rather than the launch photos. The first phase runs 27 months from the point Daloa’s expanded operation and the Biankouma, San Pedro and Kouto sites are commissioned, and somewhere in the budget that covers those months there is a line for aerial logistics services. When that line is published, the 300% claim becomes checkable. Until then it is a sales figure with a US grant standing behind it.

Sources: Zipline, US Department of State, Agence Ivoirienne de Presse, Présidence de la République de Côte d’Ivoire, Semafor.

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

DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Hits $572 on Amazon, a Price DJI Never Set

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:06:00 GMT

The DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Standard Combo is $572 on Amazon this morning, 18% off the $699 the listing shows struck through. Amazon flags it as a limited time deal, free delivery lands September 23 to 24, and the page reports 300-plus units bought in the past month.

The oddity sits one row down the same variant picker. The Essential Combo, which drops the gimbal clamp and the wrist strap, is $598. The fuller kit costs $26 less than the thinner one, and it lands $91 under the $689 DroneXL documented on that Essential Combo at the end of July.

What the price tag leaves out is the part that matters. DJI does not sell the Osmo Pocket 4 in the United States and never set a US price for it. The seller of record on this listing is a third party, and the page makes no DJI warranty promise.

Get the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Standard Combo for $572 at Amazon

The Pocket 4 recording hands-free from its tripod, with the rear screen holding the framing as the subject moves. Photo credit: DJI

4K at 240 Frames Per Second Is What Separates This From the Pocket 3

The Pocket 4 records 4K at 240 frames per second from a 1-inch CMOS sensor, double the 120fps ceiling on the Pocket 3. Dynamic range climbs to 14 stops, the color pipeline moves from D-Log M to full 10-bit D-Log, and the shutter floor drops to 1/4 of a second.

That buys footage you can slow to a tenth of normal speed at full resolution, held steady by a mechanical three-axis gimbal instead of by cropping and software. The lens is unchanged at 20mm and f/2.0, so the gains sit in the processing pipeline and the sensor readout rather than in the optics.

DJI’s own comparison chart puts the tracking ceiling at 4x zoom on this generation, against 12x on the dual-lens 4P. Amazon’s listing copy adds Spotlight Follow and Dynamic Framing, plus Subject Lock Tracking and Registered Subject Priority on the autofocus side, which is what you want from a camera most people set down and then walk in front of.

The Pocket 4 with the wider DJI accessory range. Most of what is laid out here ships in the pricier combos, not in the $572 Standard Combo. Photo credit: DJI

The Standard Combo Covers the Camera, a Clamp, a Handle and a Pouch

Amazon’s box contents list the camera, a USB-C to USB-C PD cable, a gimbal clamp, a DJI wrist strap, a handle with a 1/4-inch thread and a portable carrying pouch. Storage is 107GB built in at 800MB/s, which makes a microSD card optional on this generation.

A battery charger is not in there, and DJI’s listing copy points buyers at its 65W Portable Charger as a separate purchase. DJI’s comparison chart rates the Pocket 4 at 240 minutes of operating time against 166 on the Pocket 3, with an 80% charge in 18 minutes.

The rest of the picker shows where $572 sits. Creator is $755, Traveler is $615, Fill Light is $789 and Vlog is $893. Other sellers list the same Standard Combo on the same page at $584, $619, $625 and $699, so this is the cheapest of them. One used unit in Like New condition is $539 from a different storefront, Universal TECH, with six new and used offers starting there.

The magnetic fill light shown here is not part of the $572 Standard Combo. Photo credit: DJI

PH2 Force Is the Seller of Record, and DJI Has No US Channel

Amazon names PH2 Force as shipper and seller on the $572 listing, lists itself as the customer service contact, and offers a 30-day refund or replacement window. DJI brand-store links sit atop the same page, which is catalog furniture rather than a sign that DJI stands behind the sale.

DroneXL has been watching this storefront since July, when the same seller listed the Essential Combo at $689. Its 96 percent positive rating rested on 24 ratings then, with three one-star reviews displayed struck through and credited to Amazon fulfillment. Those numbers move. Tap the seller name and read the storefront yourself before you spend $572.

A marketplace reseller is the only route because the FCC added DJI to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, freezing new equipment authorizations. The Pocket 4 launched in April with no US release, DJI citing an authorization still pending, and the company’s Ninth Circuit challenge to that designation remains unresolved. A verified-purchase buyer put the consequence plainly in an August 13 review: “The Pocket 4 is hard to find.”

Warranty is where that lands on you. When the O4 Wide Air Unit skipped the US market in June, DroneXL verified that DJI’s support documentation listed after-sales service as unavailable in the United States and Puerto Rico for that product. No DJI documentation promises a different answer for a camera DJI does not sell here. Amazon’s 30-day window and its A-to-z Guarantee are the real coverage, which is why the $64.99 three-year protection plan on the page is worth more thought than it usually deserves.

DroneXL’s Take

At $572 this is the best Amazon price DroneXL has tracked on the Pocket 4, and the only reason it reads as a deal is that no official US channel exists to price it against. A rule written for aircraft is setting the terms on a handheld camera with no propellers, no flight controller and no airspace footprint. Nobody at the Commission has explained what a vlogger in Croton-on-Hudson is supposed to be a threat to.

PH2 Force deserves its due here. The seller has moved real volume, and the product carries 4.4 stars across 2,274 ratings, 72% of them five-star.

My read is that the limited time badge does what those badges do and $572 reverts inside a week or two. If you want this camera, budget separately for the charger and treat that 30-day window as your entire warranty. A gimbal fault in month four is your problem, not DJI’s. The Pocket 3 is still the one an American can buy without this much homework, and the fact that this is a real choice US creators have to make is the Covered List working exactly as badly as we said it would.

Sources: Amazon.com product and seller listing, DJI.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

FCC Bars DJI Chips From New US-Built Drones on October 13

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:29:00 GMT

On October 13, a Federal Communications Commission rule takes effect that blocks any radio device from getting an equipment authorization if it contains a logic-bearing hardware component made by a company on the Covered List. For the drone industry that means one specific thing: an aircraft designed and assembled in the United States cannot receive a new FCC authorization after that date if a DJI or Autel-produced circuit sits inside it.

The Commission adopted the rule in July. It reached the Federal Register on September 11, and the clock started there. A Morgan Lewis analysis published September 18 maps where the Covered List has traveled in nine months, and the trip started with drones.

I have tracked every Covered List notice since the Commission swept all foreign-produced drones onto the list on December 22, 2025. This is the first one that asks what is inside the airframe rather than where the airframe was built.

The Rule Reaches Parts, Not Countries

The Commission’s Third Report and Order, FCC 26-50 in ET Docket No. 21-232, bars authorization of any device carrying a logic-bearing hardware component produced by an entity named on the Covered List. It was published at 91 FR 57798 on September 11 and takes effect October 13, 2026.

The test the Commission wrote is a transfer test: the component disqualifies the device when that device would have been refused authorization had the listed company built the whole thing rather than the part. The definition of the part is broad by design. A logic-bearing hardware component is any module, sub-assembly, integrated circuit or other physical part that generates and uses timing signals above 9,000 cycles per second and uses digital techniques, or that uses radio frequency energy to compute, store or move data. Flight controllers, radio modules, camera boards and gimbal controllers all sit inside that description. Housings, fasteners, resistors, wiring and plain battery cells sit outside it.

The rule runs forward only. Applications already pending on October 13 are exempt, and that exemption dies the moment an applicant amends the filing to add, substitute or change a logic-bearing component. Equipment already authorized is untouched.

The same order closed a second door. Any company named on the Covered List that wants a permissive change to equipment now has to file for full recertification, and the Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity route is shut to it for any modification. The waivers the Office of Engineering and Technology granted for Class I and Class II permissive changes on Covered List drone equipment survive, and DroneXL covered those when they were extended through January 1, 2029.

Here is the part that matters most to American manufacturers, and the part the law firm summary does not spell out. The component ban attaches to companies named on the Covered List. It does not attach to the production-location entries, meaning foreign-produced drones, drone critical components and routers, unless the producing company is separately identified on the list itself. DJI and Autel are, through the December 22 public notice that listed the equipment named in Section 1709(a)(1) of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. A board from an unnamed Shenzhen supplier is not.

That distinction stacks on top of a test American manufacturers already have to pass. The FCC’s own guidance says a drone produced in the United States that contains foreign-produced components is not covered as long as it sits on the Department of War’s Blue UAS Cleared List or meets the Buy American standard, which the Commission puts at US assembly with at least 65 percent of component value made domestically. From October 13 that no longer finishes the job. Clear 65 percent, hold the Blue UAS listing, and a single DJI-produced logic-bearing part anywhere in the remaining 35 percent still kills the application.

DroneXL has reported on DJI’s own silicon before. Security researcher Konrad Iturbe’s work on the Fikaxo shell company network turned on two DJI fingerprints inside drones sold under other brands: the company’s proprietary P1 Pigeon chipsets, and the signal structure of its OcuSync protocol. Only the first of those is caught here. The Commission declined to extend the prohibition to software or firmware, so a protocol signature stays what it has always been, evidence of who built the thing, while the chipset running underneath it becomes a disqualifying part. Which parts count as produced by DJI gets settled on a totality-of-the-circumstances test weighing who held substantial responsibility for the design, development, manufacture or assembly.

Drones Were the Template the FCC Applied Everywhere Else

The Morgan Lewis analysis describes a “rapid progression from drones to routers, robotics, and power equipment.” The dates back that up. Foreign-produced drones landed on the list on December 22, 2025, consumer routers on March 23, and advanced robotic devices and power inverters on July 28.

Every one of those entries runs on machinery the drone designation built. A national security determination comes from a White House-convened interagency body, and the listing that follows is categorical, keyed to where equipment is produced rather than who produced it. The escape hatch in each case is a conditional approval administered by the Departments of War and Homeland Security. The piece is worth the attention of drone people for one reason beyond its content: co-author Loyaan Egal previously served as chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, the office that now writes the letters of inquiry.

The FCC has been blunt about what this costs American companies. Its own guidance states that the nationality of the entity producing a drone or a drone critical component is not relevant to whether that equipment was produced in a foreign country. Morgan Lewis makes the same observation through the router entry, which reaches routers built abroad regardless of who owns the builder. Odyssey Robot is the case on the record. The FCC certified the company’s drone and controller in April, opened a show-cause proceeding in July after Iturbe published a report on June 5 questioning its claimed Texas assembly, and revoked both authorizations on August 11, concluding the company had obtained them on false statements about where the equipment was produced. Odyssey did not respond to the order. DroneXL covered that show-cause order and the exemption extension issued the same day.

Drone Conditional Approvals No Longer Carry an Expiry Date

Granted conditional approvals carry no end dates for drones and assorted expiry dates for consumer routers, per the Morgan Lewis review. Drones got that on July 21, when a determination stripped the December 31, 2026 expiry from every UAS approval and tied it to the company’s onshoring plan.

Keep the two mechanisms apart, because they expire differently. The categorical exemptions for Blue UAS hardware and Buy America drones run to January 1, 2028 and will need renewing again. An individual conditional approval now runs until the government decides the onshoring promise was not kept. ABZ Innovation’s L50 sprayer is the live test of what that costs, with the Hungarian company opening a factory at home while telling reporters US production starts next year.

What a company hands over to get there is extensive. Applicants disclose corporate structure and ownership down to beneficial owners of 5% or more, board and executive leadership, and any foreign government ownership or influence. They file a bill of materials, component countries of origin, software and intellectual property ownership, and their own supply chain choke points. The government also wants the plan for building trusted manufacturing capacity in the United States. For a drone company with fewer than fifty employees, that is a corporate audit submitted to the Pentagon in exchange for market access.

Enforcement of the new component rule asks for far less. It rests on the applicant’s own attestation that the device is not covered equipment. The Commission’s accompanying Further Notice asks whether it should require a hardware and software bill of materials with every authorization application, and whether the ban should extend to all components from listed entities rather than the logic-bearing ones alone. Reply comments in that proceeding closed September 21. Will Dawson made the same point from the stage at Commercial UAV Expo three weeks ago, when he told a room of operators that the FCC’s examination now runs down to the kernel.

DroneXL’s Take

The asymmetry in this rule is the whole argument about the Covered List in one sentence. Two Buy America-compliant drones, built on the same bench in Texas, each with one foreign logic-bearing board inside. The one whose board came from a company nobody has listed gets its authorization. The one whose board came from DJI does not. Neither aircraft has been examined.

The government’s answer to that is not nothing. A DJI board arrives with an update channel DJI controls and a parent answerable to PRC law, and an anonymous contract board does not, so the two are not interchangeable just because the silicon looks alike. Fine. Then test for that. The rule instead treats the corporate name as a proxy for the behavior, which catches the supplier that got caught and misses the one that has not. The Commission knows it: the order says it weighed banning every component from listed entities, and every component from any company a foreign adversary owns or controls, and declined both while keeping the record open.

My position has not moved since the component gap I documented in August. Set a standard every manufacturer has to meet and audit against it. DroneXL has already reported that companies clearing the Pentagon’s own process find Chinese motors deep in their supply chains, which is the country-of-origin approach missing the thing it exists to catch.

The unsentimental read: any American manufacturer with an application sitting at a Telecommunication Certification Body should file before October 13, because pending applications are grandfathered and that protection dies on the first component change. This is also the month to ask a contract manufacturer, in writing, who fabricated the module on the board. That question used to be a procurement detail.

Sources: Morgan Lewis, Federal Register, 91 FR 57798, FCC Third Report and Order FCC 26-50, FCC Public Notice DA 25-1086, December 22, 2025, FCC Covered List FAQs on UAS and UAS critical components, FCC Public Notice DA 26-761, FCC Order of Revocation, Odyssey Robot LLC

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

DJI Neo 3 Leak Is Recycled Box Art, and the Vents Gave It Away

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:15:00 GMT

A DJI Neo 3 image went round X on Monday afternoon showing the drone on a wooden table beside its new controller, and the design in it did not add up. The motors look flipped upward, the battery appears to carry ventilation holes, and there are more infrared sensors on the top and sides than the DJI Neo 2 carries.

Jasper Ellens, who posted it and who writes for DroneXL, found the tell inside four hours. Asked in his replies whether the vents were there to stop the drone overheating, he pointed at the batteries: slots in a flight pack were what “made me think it was a AI generated box.” Readers in the same thread landed in the same place.

DroneXL’s archive backs him up from the other direction. The drone in that image is the one printed on the Neo 3’s retail box, the box DroneXL published on September 15. Same pose, same controller laid beside it, same picture on the controller’s little screen.

The Circulating Neo 3 Image Matches DJI’s Box Art Down to the Screen

Set the two side by side and the aircraft is the same one in the same three-quarter pose, down to the black vent slots on its left flank and the picture on the controller’s screen. Only the setting differs: a wooden table in place of white packaging.

The DJI Neo 3 Fly More Combo box that surfaced on September 15. The drone, the controller and the image on the controller's screen match the picture that circulated six days later.

The “dji NEO 3” wordmark sits in both. On the box it is printed across the top of the packaging, where DJI puts it. In the table image it floats above the scene, which is not something a photograph of a drone on a table produces on its own.

The packaging itself is not in doubt. DroneXL has seen it held in a hand in a store, with a red Not For Sale sticker on the front, CE and UKCA marks along the bottom edge, and China’s two newest drone standards printed on the back panel, which DroneXL went through in detail on Sunday. Whatever the table image is, it was built from a real box.

The Battery Vents Are What Marked the Image Out

Slots cut into a flight battery are not something DJI ships, which is why the vents caught Ellens and why they are the most useful detail in the picture. A drone battery is a sealed pack. Draw louvres into one and you have drawn a radiator, not a DJI product.

One reader ran the picture through Grok and reported back that it was almost certainly AI-generated or heavily AI-edited. Another objected on color, arguing DJI would not go from the Neo 2’s dark grey to a light grey Neo 3. That one does not hold: the physical box in the store photos shows a white aircraft too, which is the part of this the packaging does settle.

So the rest of the oddities are features of a drawing. The white cages are drawn as domes over the propellers rather than rings around them, and the extra infrared sensors would go on a drone that already flies with omnidirectional sensing, as DroneXL covered at the Neo 2’s launch. Nobody in the thread has said who made the table version.

Readers Split on Whether the RC Mini Is a Downgrade

The controller is on the real box, so that part of the argument stands. The Neo 3 Fly More Combo ships with the DJI RC Mini, which has a display built into it, where today’s Neo 2 combo uses the RC-N3 and borrows a clipped-in phone’s screen.

Ellens called it a downgrade and another thing you don’t need. One reader argued the small remote suits people flying the thing as an autonomous selfie camera, and Ellens came back asking why a phone would not do that job. Another said he rarely carries the RC-N3 at all and called the RC Mini “a middle ground between using a smartphone and a full-sized remote.”

On the numbers Ellens has a case, six days after DroneXL called the same remote a win. If the RC Mini carries the same hardware as the RC Mini AG, the agricultural controller whose name it shares, that display measures 1.97 inches at 800 nits, against whatever phone you were already clipping in. What you get back is one less thing to mount and pair, on a drone that takes off from your palm and lands back in your hand with no controller involved at all.

DroneXL’s Take

Ellens did the thing more people in this business should do: he put a picture up, asked what he was looking at, and then told his own readers what the batteries told him. Four hours, on his own timeline, no prompting. Compare that with the rest of what will get written about this drone over the next fortnight, which will look like this: one retail box, photographed in a store, feeding images that come back round as fresh leaks with a table under them. My read is that the Neo 3 argument now running is an argument about a drawing made to sell a drone, not to document one. The flipped motors and the vented battery deck are real features of that drawing. Whether either reaches the aircraft DJI ships is the open question, and the only Neo you can buy today is still the Neo 2 we went back to two weeks ago.

Jasper Ellens (@JasperEllens), September 21, 2026

Sources: Jasper Ellens on X, DroneXL’s September 15 box leak

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

Dolomites Parks Ban Hobby Drones, DJI Mini 5 Pro Included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

South Tyrol Bans Drones Under 25 kg in Its Dolomites Parks

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

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

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

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

The Ampezzo Park Around Cortina Requires Written Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

DJI Spinoff Livox Halves Point Rate to Cut Robot LiDAR Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livox Ships the Mid-360 by the Hundred Thousand

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

Source: Livox, Livox on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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