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

Army Official: Crashed Attack Drones Get Replaced, Not Repaired

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 01:01:00 GMT

The U.S. Army’s small attack drones will be flown until they break and then replaced with new ones, with no repair and no stockpile, according to Jon Strzelec, the advanced manufacturing lead for small drones at Army Materiel Command. He described the approach to Breaking Defense’s Ashley Roque in an October interview the outlet published on Thursday, November 12. His word for it is “replace,” where the Army would normally say “sustain.”

Strzelec is the official who said in October that the Pentagon was “artificially” inducing drone demand. In the same Breaking Defense report, Performance Drone Works CEO James Slider said he needed a year of steady orders, which DroneXL covered on October 26. If broken drones are replaced and never repaired, every drone a soldier breaks in training has to be ordered again.

That puts the weight on the companies that build them. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program placed its first base orders, 22,320 drones, in March, with the last of them due within four and a half months. By mid-September, three of the 11 winning companies had delivered everything.

Strzelec Says Building A New Drone Costs Less Than Reworking One

The cost argument is Strzelec’s. He told Breaking Defense that opening up a stored drone to swap a circuit card and reload its software costs more than building a fresh one on an assembly line, and that Russia can counter a new design in Ukraine within 72 hours.

The Army’s direction to his office, he said, was that “we have to manufacture to deliver, not to stock.” Drones from the program’s first round are going to units as training equipment, and he expects soldiers to crash them while they learn. Roque’s article has the full interview, Slider’s reaction and the sustainment concerns of two former Pentagon officials, and it is worth reading in full.

The Army says it is short on trained pilots. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Drone Dominance director, said on September 17 that the service had the drones for every squad and not enough soldiers qualified to fly them, as DroneXL reported in a piece on the shrinking pilot pipeline.

Hegseth’s Memo Made Group 2 Drones Consumable. The Army Sorts By Cost

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 10, 2025, memo ordered that Group 1 and Group 2 drones, everything up to 55 pounds (25 kilograms), be “accounted for as consumable commodities, not durable property.” Strzelec keeps part of Group 2 on the repair side and says cost decides which get thrown away.

The wording comes from the memo’s attachment, quoted by TWZ the day it was released, which adds that small drones should be cheap and rapidly replaceable. DroneXL covered the directive the next day. Group 1 runs up to 20 pounds (9 kilograms) and Group 2 from 21 to 55 pounds.

Strzelec’s exception is the pricier end of Group 2, the aircraft flown on reconnaissance and delivery missions. He told Roque those are likely to stay in service, and that what a drone costs for its mission will decide whether it is kept or thrown away. The memo itself sorts drones by weight class.

Strzelec’s Program Stopped Building Whole Drones To Build Their Parts

The Army’s SkyFoundry effort set out to build 10,000 complete drones a month in Army depots during 2026. By October it had been renamed Advanced Manufacturing for sUAS, and Strzelec told Janes on October 6 that it had moved to making components.

He told Janes the American economy is not positioned to produce the 120,000 drones a year the program first called for, and that the bigger problem was bringing the subcomponents onshore. Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania opened a brushless motor line on June 30. Rock Island Arsenal makes frames, Red River Army Depot in Texas makes batteries, and Army Materiel Command is scaling up chassis, circuit card assemblies and propellers, the Army says. The motor target is 50,000 by the end of fiscal 2027, a figure Strzelec gave Bloomberg that DroneXL reported on October 31.

Circuit cards are among the parts Roque’s article lists as exposed to countermeasures, along with software, radios and cameras. Air Force Col. Dustin Thomas, who commands the Defense Contract Management Agency’s US-X unit, made the matching argument in a September 2 essay for Breaking Defense. He wrote that the military should stockpile components and flexible manufacturing capacity in place of finished drones, or “we risk stockpiling obsolescence.”

Crashing 100,000 Drones A Year Would Use 40% Of The Pentagon’s 2027 Goal

Thomas followed up on October 14 with a second Breaking Defense essay that argues for making industry crash 100,000 drones next year. The Drone Dominance Program’s stated goal is about 250,000 drones by the end of 2027, so training at that rate would use up 40% of the goal.

Thomas is clear in the essay that he is not asking for 100,000 extra drones. He wants the Pentagon to plan on crashing and replacing a portion of what it already buys. He cites Travis Metz of the Defense Innovation Unit, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee this year that training should consume drones in “the hundreds of thousands per year.” Metz is also the official who gave Bloomberg the 250,000 figure.

The program’s own prices put a floor under the cost. Phase 3 lists Close Quarter Battle drones at $3,000 and Deep Strike drones at $5,000 before weaponization, as DroneXL reported when the round opened in September. At those prices 100,000 airframes cost $300 million to $500 million a year. The Pentagon has committed roughly $1.1 billion to all four phases of the competition.

Thomas also lists work that comes with expending drones at that scale: recovering the wrecks, harvesting usable components, handling damaged batteries, recycling materials and disposing of the rest.

Replacement Depends On Makers Who Missed Their First Delivery Dates

Gauntlet I winners had to ship half of their 22,320 base-order drones within two and a half months of the March awards. The rest were due within four and a half. By August 25 the program had received 13,440 of them, about 60% of the total.

Inside Unmanned Systems traced the shortfall to motors, batteries, sensors and chips that meet the Pentagon’s rules on Chinese parts. Those are the kinds of components the Army’s depots have started making. The program later moved 800 undelivered drones to Neros, which had shipped on time.

The money for a standing replacement order is not in hand either. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 request carries $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, and about $53.6 billion of it sits in a reconciliation package that Congress has not passed.

DroneXL’s Take

I think “replace” is the most useful thing an Army official has said to drone makers this year. Slider asked for a year of steady orders, and a training range that breaks drones every week is a steady order. Anyone who has flown FPV will recognize the method too, because you learn a gap by hitting the gate a few times.

Costa has a point that the expensive aircraft need a sustainment plan, and Strzelec agrees with him on the costlier Group 2 drones. I’d take the Army’s math over a repair depot for a $3,000 quad.

I haven’t seen a replacement quantity for training in any Gauntlet order. The Army buys training ammunition every year as a planned quantity, and drones that are flown to destruction need the same treatment. So far the Gauntlet orders are one-off competition awards, and the money that could pay for steady replacement is waiting on Congress. I’ll be reading the Phase 3 contracts and the fiscal 2027 appropriation for a replacement quantity for training. If neither has one, units will fly their drones until they break and then wait for the next competition round to get new ones.

Sources: Breaking Defense (Ashley Roque’s interview with Jon Strzelec, and Col. Dustin Thomas’s essays of September 2 and October 14), Janes, U.S. Army, TWZ, Inside Unmanned Systems, Defense One.

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

Ukraine Gives Allies Its Drone War Footage Free To Train AI Weapons

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 00:28:00 GMT

Ukraine is opening Avengers Labs, the Defense Ministry archive of battlefield footage that trains its AI weapons, to defense companies in allied countries at no charge. Up to 12 British companies are first in line under the only agreement reached so far, and Kyiv is in talks with other governments, The New York Times reported on Thursday, November 12.

The companies pay in software. Any firm that trains a model on the archive has to license what it builds back to the Ukrainian military. And the archive is mostly drone footage, by the ministry’s own description.

When Britain signed up in August, I wrote that this data belonged inside accountable militaries with rules of engagement. The licence that carries it abroad has no human rights clause, the Times reports.

Avengers Labs Is Built Mostly From Drone Footage

Avengers Labs holds more than five million annotated battlefield frames, and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry says most come from unmanned systems through the Delta battlefield system. The Times, shown the platform by the ministry, describes more than five million drone surveillance and strike videos. Both figures are the ministry’s.

A frame and a video are different units, and the ministry’s own September 25 release uses frames. Fedorov’s first offer to allied companies, in March, spoke of millions of drone videos. Whichever is right, the supply keeps growing. The detection system trained on this data processes more than 100,000 drone video streams a month inside Delta, the ministry said in August.

Much of the archive is raw footage of small drones chasing Russian soldiers, the Times reports. A menu bar sorts thousands of annotated clips by target: tanks in winter, trucks at night, Russian drones exploding in a thermal camera’s view. The ministry counts more than 30 Ukrainian companies training models on the platform and three resulting products in combat use.

The Defense Ministry's own graphic for Avengers Labs: a drone's view of an armored vehicle with a target box and a confidence score. Image credit: Ministry of Defence of Ukraine

Companies Train Inside A Sandbox And Never See The Videos

Companies cannot view or download the footage, which sits encrypted with a cloud service outside Ukraine, the Times reports. They run models against it in an isolated system, and one that scores well on false positives and false negatives gets loaded onto an aerial drone, ground robot or sea drone.

The target menu travels with the model. A soldier picks an item on the weapon, tanks for example, and releases the drone to hunt for one on its own. The ministry’s August release describes two uses for these models. In the first, an operator picks the target and the drone steers itself through the last stretch. In the second, the drone is sent into an area to find a target itself.

One executive whose model is now flying in combat told the Times that training statistics showed false positives below 5 percent. The executive spoke anonymously because of a secrecy agreement with Avengers Labs, so that number comes with no way to check it.

The ministry’s September release adds safeguards the Times does not mention. The data is anonymized and delayed so it cannot endanger troops still fighting, and foreign companies get in only after Ukraine completes export control procedures. The UK Ministry of Defence picks the British firms, up to 12 of them, in a competition for models that keep unmanned systems working when the link to the operator or satellite navigation is limited.

Most AI drones in this war still need a pilot to confirm the target. Both armies have also used small numbers of fully autonomous strike drones, the Times reports, including the Russian one that killed three civilians at a Zaporizhzhia gas station in July. Mykhailo Fedorov, the former defense minister who directed the platform’s development, has formed an investment fund that aims to field a fully autonomous AI weapon next year, the Times reports. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, is a lead investor. CNBC reported in September that the money is Karp’s own and not Palantir’s, as DroneXL noted at the time.

The footage has a limit that Kateryna Bondar of the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out to the Times: it is not clear how useful images of Russian equipment are in a war somewhere else. The paper’s example is a Middle East conflict where a weapon would need to recognize Iranian missile launchers in a desert.

The Licence Leaves The Laws Of War To Each Government

The licensing agreement contains no human rights clause, the Times reports. Ukraine opens access through government-to-government agreements, and Ukrainian officials say each receiving government must make its military follow the Geneva Conventions and other treaties. No treaty yet says how those laws apply to weapons that pick their own targets.

A decision on that treaty comes next week. Russian and US diplomats opposed a requirement for “meaningful human control” of lethal autonomous weapons at UN talks in Geneva last month, according to the Times. Human Rights Watch’s account of the expert session that closed on September 5 names Russia and the United States among the states that weakened its final report. That report still affirms that human control and judgment are required to comply with international law, and HRW counts 76 states in favor of negotiating binding rules. The Convention on Conventional Weapons Review Conference meets in Geneva from November 16 to 20 and will decide whether to open those negotiations.

Anna Bacciarelli, who analyzes AI and conflict at Human Rights Watch, told the Times that the opaque reasoning inside these models is a problem because the “black box obscures accountability” when a weapon selects its own target.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who directs the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, pointed to the Rome Statute. Countries that ratified it, Ukraine among them, must hand over for trial officers responsible for war crimes, whatever weapon was used. She told the Times that Ukraine should be cautious about sharing the data with countries that have not accepted that principle, and she named the United States.

DroneXL’s Take

Ukraine should write a human-control condition into the Avengers Labs licence. It already attaches one condition, the software licence back to its own military, so the paperwork exists. It also holds more of this data than anyone else, and the ministry says a set like it is close to impossible for a company, or a country without a modern full-scale war, to collect.

In August I argued that allies would be negligent to leave this archive unread, and I still think so. That argument assumed the footage would land inside militaries that answer for what their weapons do. The licence hands that job to the receiving government. The United States, the ally whose absence from this archive I pointed out in August, is one of the governments Human Rights Watch names for weakening the Geneva report.

Kyiv is short of soldiers and running out of air defense missiles, and it wants autonomous weapons sooner. A clause requiring a human to confirm a strike on a person would also bind the software that comes back to Ukraine under the licence, so it has a cost. I’d still write it, because buyers have no larger archive to turn to. The Times names no country in the current talks, and I’d watch whether the next agreement carries a clause like that.

Sources: The New York Times, Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, Human Rights Watch

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

Amazon Cites FAA Wildlife Review for Nampa. FAA Index Lists No File

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 23:56:00 GMT

Amazon told Idaho News 6 this week that every Prime Air operation goes through a Federal Aviation Administration environmental review before launch, and that the review looks at wildlife. The company was answering a Northwest Nazarene University biologist, who said drones passing about once a minute could push birds out of the neighborhoods around its Nampa, Idaho, hub. The FAA’s public index of drone environmental reviews, last updated November 9, listed no Idaho document when DroneXL checked it on November 12. It listed none on November 2 either, three days after the first deliveries.

The complaints in Nampa began with noise, and the city has asked Amazon for its flight data. The wildlife question lands on the national environmental finding the FAA signed on July 28, which lets a hub open with no site document on that index. That finding says birds disturbed by a delivery drone are expected to leave and come back when the disruption ends.

A Reporter Counted a Nampa Drone a Minute, and a Biologist Says Birds May Leave

Idaho News 6 reporter Keith Burrell spent a couple of hours with neighbors near the flight path and counted a drone overhead about every minute, he reported on November 10. He took that count to David Hille, an assistant professor of biology at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa.

Hille, who teaches wildlife biology and ecology, told the station that birds may treat the drones as predators or competitors. They flush, lose feeding time and burn energy getting away. Asked about one flight a minute, he said “it’s possible that the birds would just leave.” He also said the timing matters, because ducks and swans are moving through the Treasure Valley now and snow geese are expected soon in large numbers.

Hille was describing what could happen. The report cites no bird count or survey from Nampa, and the evidence from residents is anecdotal. One viewer told Burrell her chickens hid during the first days of flights and her dog still barks at the drones. Anna Luke, who lives near the flight path, said she has stopped seeing owls at night. Amazon’s drones in Nampa fly in daylight only, from 30 minutes after sunrise to 30 minutes before sunset, the station reported at launch.

A second count came on Wednesday. Kerri Wattier, whose neighborhood is about a mile from the hub, clicked a handheld counter for KTVB and logged 39 passes over her home between 3:30 and 4:18 p.m. Amazon spokesperson Nissa LaPoint told KTVB the same day that the company is evaluating options for Nampa, including changes to flight paths to reduce the concentration of flights over certain areas. Nampa has now logged at least two dozen inquiries from residents, the city told the station.

That hourly rate has a precedent. In Papillion, Nebraska, a television reporter counted about 50 takeoffs and landings in an hour at Amazon’s Omaha hub in September, as DroneXL reported at the time. In Richardson, Texas, one resident logged 52 overflights of her home in a day.

The FAA’s Index Lists No Review Document for Nampa

Amazon’s statement says every Prime Air operation goes through the FAA’s National Environmental Policy Act review before launch, and that the review evaluates effects on wildlife and the surrounding environment. The statement names no Nampa document, and the FAA’s public index lists none for Idaho.

A review can exist without a public document since July 28. A hub that fits the FAA’s national finding is checked against it inside the agency, with no site document and no public comment period, as DroneXL laid out in September. The finding also says the FAA will keep doing site-specific analysis for wildlife, and consulting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service case by case, until the two agencies sign a standing agreement. Those consultations happen between agencies. So the FAA may well have looked at birds around Nampa, and nothing on its index shows what it found.

Amazon gave one example of adjusting to wildlife. “We modified operations around a known bald eagle nest,” the company said, without naming the site, and it said it takes the same approach wherever it flies, including in areas with migratory birds. One case on the public record fits that description. In Omaha, Amazon agreed with federal officials in August to keep its drones 1,000 feet (305 meters) from eagle nests at Chalco Hills Recreation Area, according to the natural resources district that manages the park. The FAA’s Omaha assessment commits Amazon to that distance for any nest it identifies, and the national finding requires the same buffer from every operator.

The FAA’s National Finding Expects Disturbed Birds to Come Back

The FAA’s final programmatic assessment concludes that delivery drones are unlikely to harm migratory birds. Its reasoning on page 56 is that birds disturbed by a drone “would be expected to leave the area and return once the disruption ends,” and it calls the nuisance short in duration.

The assessment also rests on what it calls the limited scale of operations and on cruise altitudes under 400 feet (122 meters). It notes that the studies showing nest abandonment involved drones sent to survey birds, not package delivery. The FAA and Hille start from the same behavior, a bird that flushes when a drone comes over. They differ on what happens when the next drone arrives a minute later.

The finding does set rules for birds. Operators must stay 200 feet (61 meters) from known breeding or roosting colonies of migratory birds. They must ask the Fish and Wildlife Service field office whether a known colony or high-density nesting area lies inside the operating area, and they may not fly over one. If flights would cross a national wildlife refuge, the operator has to coordinate with the refuge’s managers.

Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge sits southwest of Nampa. It was established in 1909 as a breeding ground for migratory birds, and its Lake Lowell unit covers more than 10,500 acres (4,250 hectares), according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. DroneXL measured the distance from the Amazon fulfillment center building to the refuge boundary on OpenStreetMap’s map data and got about 6.8 miles (10.9 kilometers). That puts the eastern end of the Lake Lowell unit just inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius, with most of the lake outside it. Amazon delivers to homes. None of the reporting from Nampa describes its routes, and Amazon’s statement to Idaho News 6 doesn’t mention the refuge.

Fall at Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge near Nampa, Idaho, in November 2022. The refuge was established in 1909 as a breeding ground for migratory birds. Photo credit: Lena Chang, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Residents who want to raise wildlife or noise with Amazon can call 1-888-280-4331 or use the customer service chat, choosing “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL’s guide for residents covers what a city can still do, and the Nampa hub’s record is on the Amazon Prime Air tracker.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA should post whatever review it did for Nampa, and Amazon should ask it to. Amazon answered a wildlife question by pointing to a federal review, and the FAA’s public index has nothing for Idaho. I don’t read that as proof the review didn’t happen, because the July 28 finding lets it happen out of sight. I do think the finding’s bird reasoning is weak at a hub this busy. It expects a bird to leave and come back when the disruption ends, and two counts in Nampa put a drone overhead every minute or so. Hille was describing a risk, and the reporting from Nampa includes no bird survey, so I can’t say he is right. A bird count under the flight paths this winter would tell us more than Amazon’s statement or his warning does. I’m for drone delivery when the cargo is worth the flight. An 83-pound MK30 with no parachute carrying a shoebox over the same yards at the rate those neighbors counted is hard to defend to the people who live there. Omaha’s eagle buffer is written in an FAA document anyone can read, and I think Nampa deserves the same.

Sources: Idaho News 6, KTVB, FAA drone environmental review index, FAA Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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

Wing Beats Amazon to Memphis With Walmart Drones at $19.99 an Order

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 23:23:00 GMT

Wing began delivering Walmart orders by drone in the Memphis area on Tuesday, November 10, from three Supercenters: Bartlett and Cordova in Tennessee, and West Memphis across the river in Arkansas. It is Wing’s first market in Tennessee and its sixth U.S. metro with Walmart. Memphis is also the first of the seven cities the two companies named in June to start deliveries.

Customers order through the Walmart app, Walmart.com or Wing’s own app, and Wing says the box can arrive in as little as 30 minutes. Each flight carries up to 2.75 pounds (1.25 kilograms), and local station WMC Action News 5 puts the fee at $19.99 per order. The City of West Memphis says Walmart+ members pay nothing for a limited time.

Amazon parked an MK30 delivery drone inside the Renasant Convention Center in June and gave Memphis no launch date. Its Prime Air site still lists the city under “Coming soon.”

Memphis Is the First of Wing’s Seven June Cities to Start Deliveries

Wing and Walmart named Memphis in June alongside New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Salt Lake City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Five months later Memphis is the only one of the seven where Walmart deliveries have started, which makes six metros operating and 13 still waiting.

Wing’s announcement names the stores as Supercenter #950 at 8400 U.S. Highway 64 in Bartlett, #2322 at 577 N. Germantown Parkway in Cordova and #70 at 798 W. Service Road in West Memphis. It says tens of thousands of homes around them can order now. Heather Rivera, Wing’s chief business officer, said the company wants to be “a helpful, good neighbor” to the metro.

West Memphis held its party early. The city’s mayor cut a ribbon with Walmart and Wing on Monday, November 2, and WREG checked that afternoon and found the service was not yet available. DroneXL reported three days later that nothing was flying and that Wing’s map still showed Memphis as coming soon. Wing announced service at all three stores eight days after the ribbon. The Raleigh LaGrange Road store that Walmart put before Memphis and Shelby County planners in August is not on the launch list.

The aircraft cruise at 150 to 200 feet (46 to 61 meters) and up to 60 mph (97 km/h), then hover at about 23 feet (7 meters) and lower the box on a tether. Memphis opened four days after Wing said it will spend up to $125 million on a Fort Worth plant sized for tens of thousands of aircraft a year. The FAA’s Part 108 rule for routine BVLOS flight has been in White House review since July 10, which is 125 days as of Thursday.

A Wing Drone Order Costs $19.99 Without Walmart+ and Carries 2.75 Pounds

WMC Action News 5 reported on launch day that drone delivery costs $19.99 per order. The City of West Memphis said standard fees apply and Walmart+ members get free drone delivery on eligible orders for a limited time. Wing’s own post gives no price.

Wing says the 2.75-pound limit will rise to five pounds (2.3 kilograms) “soon” and gives no date. It stated the same plan at the Orlando launch in July, when the limit was 2.5 pounds, and it has said since January that its larger aircraft is already flying commercially. A half gallon of milk weighs more than four pounds.

Amazon Quoted Memphis $4.99 in June and Still Lists It as Coming Soon

Amazon’s June 16 event at the Renasant Convention Center promised Memphis five-pound deliveries within 7.5 miles (12.1 kilometers) of its own facility for $4.99 with an Amazon Prime membership and $9.99 without. As of November 12 the Prime Air site lists Memphis, TN under “Coming soon,” with no start date.

DroneXL found no start date in Memphis news coverage either. Amazon cut its Prime Air fees in August to $2.99 for Prime members, free on orders of $50 or more, and $4.99 for everyone else, as DroneXL reported with its plan to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026. That deadline is seven weeks away.

Walmart and Wing had named Memphis the week before Amazon’s event, and DroneXL wrote then that the two operators were on a collision course in the city.

DroneXL’s Take

I wrote in June that Memphis would be the place where Wing and Amazon got tested in front of the same customers, and Wing has now turned up first. It did that the quick way, by flying from three Walmart stores that already had the groceries inside. Amazon flies from its own facility, and five months after its convention-center show there is still nothing a Memphis resident can order. That is the store-map advantage I described in July.

Being first does not make Wing the better deal. Without a membership, $19.99 for 2.75 pounds is a price people pay once for the novelty. Amazon now charges non-members $4.99 for five pounds in the markets where it flies. If you live in Bartlett, Cordova or West Memphis, order while Walmart+ covers the fee and look at what the checkout page charges after the offer ends. I think Wing keeps Memphis only if that number comes down before Amazon’s drones arrive.

Sources: Wing, Forbes, WMC Action News 5, WREG, Amazon Prime Air

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

DJI Matrice 4 Firmware Reportedly Grounds Third-Party Batteries

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 22:48:00 GMT

DJI posted new firmware for the Matrice 4E and Matrice 4T on November 5, and one owner says the update grounded the drone as soon as it finished installing. Reddit user HexgenTV reports that aircraft firmware v19.01.00.07 showed a warning to replace the third-party battery with a DJI one, and that the drone would not take off.

The same pilot then rolled the aircraft back to v17.00.00.01, the March build it had been flying on, and says the same battery worked again with no warning. DJI’s release notes for the update never mention batteries. They list two changes, and one of them is a set of unnamed features added to meet regulatory requirements in some regions.

DJI’s Release Notes List A Regulatory Change And No Battery Rule

DJI’s release notes dated November 5 pair aircraft firmware v19.01.00.07 with RC Plus 2 Enterprise firmware v19.01.00.08 and DJI Pilot 2 v19.1.0.45. The What’s New section has two lines: features added to meet regulatory requirements in some regions, and fixes for known issues.

DJI doesn’t say which regions or which requirements, and the wording is not new. The June 10, 2025 entry in the same document, for v14.01.00.10, says DJI added features to meet local regulatory requirements. So the line alone doesn’t tie this update to batteries. The document does show how large a step this release is. The previous one, on July 10, carried aircraft firmware v17.02.05.01, so the numbering jumped past 18 altogether, and the update also moves the DJI O4 Ground Station to v19.01.00.58. Both aircraft files are on DJI’s Matrice 4 Series download page, which still offers the v17.00.00.01 offline firmware as well.

American operators can still install updates like this one. The FCC extended its firmware waiver for previously authorized foreign drones to at least January 1, 2029.

One Rollback Test Clears The March Firmware And Skips Two Builds

HexgenTV posted the report in the r/dji subreddit this week. The rollback clears the March 31 build, v17.00.00.01, and nothing after it. The pilot went straight from that build to v19.01.00.07, so DJI’s May release, v17.01.05.16, and its June release, v17.02.05.01, were never installed on that drone.

The post doesn’t name the battery’s maker, the exact wording of the warning, or the country the drone flies in, and the country matters if the change is tied to a regional rule. As of Thursday afternoon, none of the replies we could read had confirmed the lockout. Most replies argued about whether anyone should fly a Matrice 4 on a non-DJI battery at all. One user asked whether the firmware had killed the pack, and HexgenTV answered: “Just wouldn’t fly, rolling back firmware resolved and battery is good.”

This is one pilot’s account, and DroneXL has not reproduced it. DroneXL has asked DJI whether the update adds a battery check and will update this article with its answer. If you fly a Matrice 4E or 4T on third-party batteries and have installed v19.01.00.07, tell us in the comments below what happened, with the battery brand, your country and the message DJI Pilot 2 showed. If you only run DJI batteries, we’d like to hear whether the update changed anything else.

DroneXL’s Take

I wouldn’t put a third-party battery in a Matrice 4, and most of that Reddit thread agrees with me. It is still the owner’s decision, and a firmware update that takes the decision away should say so in the release notes. If HexgenTV’s account holds up, DJI changed what a paid-for aircraft will accept and filed it under regulatory features for regions it didn’t name. DJI has enforced accessory rules in firmware before. In a January hands-on with the Mini 5 Pro prop guards, Shawn from Air Photography found the drone stopped at 1,640 feet (500 meters) with the guards fitted, whatever the sliders said. On a Mini that is an annoyance, but a police or search and rescue team that finds out at a callout that its spare packs no longer work has a real problem. If your fleet carries any non-DJI batteries, update one aircraft and test it on the ground before you update the rest.

Sources: DJI Matrice 4 Series Release Notes, DJI Matrice 4 Series downloads, u/HexgenTV on Reddit

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

Police DJI M300 Fell 380 Feet. The Force's Checklist Skipped the Arms

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 22:14:00 GMT

A DJI M300 police drone spun out of control and fell from about 380 feet (115 meters) onto a residential road in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, after its rear right motor arm folded in flight. Nobody was hurt. The UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) published its report on the June 1, 2026 crash on November 12. It says the 15.9-pound (7.2 kg) aircraft could likely have killed a person if it had hit one.

The pilot had placed the arms in their flight positions at the start of his shift. His force’s pre-flight checklist did not ask him to check them again before takeoff, and the AAIB says it has investigated M300 crashes like this one before.

The M300 Warned Its Pilot Nine Seconds Before It Fell

The M300’s controller told the pilot to land and check the arm sleeves 4 minutes and 4 seconds into the flight, with the drone 1,165 feet (355 meters) away. Nine seconds later it reported a propulsion system error, and the aircraft began to spin and drop.

The AAIB bulletin puts the crash at 03:23 UTC, which is 4:23 a.m. in Nottinghamshire. The pilot reported very few vehicles on nearby roads and no pedestrians in sight. A police team was searching for suspects and had already flown an Autel MAX 4N for 19 minutes. The pilot switched to the M300 after a request to stream live video to what the bulletin calls the “top desk,” because the Autel’s stream had been less reliable.

The first warning stayed on the screen for one to two seconds. The pilot turned the drone back toward his takeoff point, saw the second set of errors, looked up and watched it fall out of sight. The flight log ends at about 250 feet (75 meters), where the drone was descending at 3,740 feet per minute, or about 43 mph (68 km/h). The AAIB says it was likely falling faster than that when it hit the road.

Wreckage was spread over about 66 feet (20 meters), and the batteries were thrown onto the footpath next to the road. The bulletin reports no damage to property. The drone was damaged beyond economic repair.

The recovered M300 with the rear right (RR) locking collar off its thread. Labels by the AAIB. Photo credit: police, via AAIB

Three of the four locking collars were still engaged when the wreckage was inspected. The rear right collar had come off its thread, and a section of that thread had broken away. DJI analyzed the flight data and the wreckage and concluded that “the accident was caused by the M4 arm not being properly installed.” M4 is the rear right arm.

The Police Checklist Did Not Ask About The Arm Locks

The force’s pre-flight checklist did not include a check that the M300’s motor arms were locked. The 25-year-old pilot had set them at the start of his shift and told the AAIB he did a visual check before takeoff. He had 128 flying hours, 84 of them on the M300.

The bulletin does not name the force. It does record two other lapses. The pilot had not signed off the checklist for this flight or for the Autel flight before it, and his body-worn camera, which should have been recording the pre-flight checks, was not switched on until the drone was in the air. The force then found that its own audits had missed that body-worn cameras were not being switched on until after takeoff. They had checked that in-flight footage existed and had not looked for footage of the checks.

On June 24, 2026 the force issued Safety Notice 1/2026, which found that “critical assembly and safety checks were either missed or not verified.” Its pilots must now confirm before every flight that the marks on each collar and the airframe line up, that the collar clicks when it closes, and that the arm does not move afterward. A second pilot or observer repeats the check when one is available. A collar that does not click, or a worn thread, grounds the aircraft.

The collar marks misaligned (left) and aligned (right), as referenced in the force's safety notice. Photo credit: police, via AAIB

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) sent a notice based on that one to every police force flying the M300 and told the National Fire Chiefs Council. It also recommended that every pre-flight check on a folding-arm drone include a visual inspection of the connecting parts, and that body-worn cameras record the checks. The NPCC says it is working toward common operating procedures, and that checklists still differ between forces. An NPCC-led safety board classified the crash as “medium” severity.

Three 2021 M300 Crashes Pointed At The Same Locking Collars

The AAIB cites three earlier M300 investigations in which a loss of control was attributed to motor arms that were not fully secured. All three happened in England in 2021, in Manchester, Gloucestershire and Chester, and the bulletin says several involved the emergency services.

In Old Trafford, Manchester, an M300 searching for a missing person at night on August 3, 2021 crashed after its left rear arm folded back in flight, and DJI saw a high likelihood the collar had not been fully tightened. Two weeks later a search flight in Cam, Gloucestershire dropped on approach, and the AAIB said the damage suggested an unlocked arm without proving it. On November 21, 2021 an M300 in Blacon, Chester fell just after launch when an arm folded.

The M300, which DJI launched in May 2020, has no dedicated sensor on its arm locks. The bulletin says the warning this pilot saw is triggered by excessive vibration. DJI added arm lock detection with the M350 in May 2023, and the AAIB says that system and the one on the M400 stop the aircraft from taking off with an unlocked arm.

Police forces operate more than 800 drones nationally, including more than 30 M300s. In England and Wales, 1,326 remote pilots logged 82,624 flights in the 12 months to May 31, 2026. The AAIB expects occasional lapses to continue as that number grows and points to two possible hardware mitigations, the newer airframes and parachutes for drones that work over towns. DJI released the AP100 parachute for the M400 in July.

DroneXL’s Take

I think the real fix for this is in the hardware, because the checklist fix depends on people. The AAIB published three reports in early 2022 that pointed at these collars, and four years later a UK police force was still flying the M300 with a checklist that did not mention them. The new notice is sensible, but it depends on a pilot doing three extra checks at 4 a.m. while colleagues wait for video, and on this flight the sign-off had been skipped and the camera went on only after takeoff. DJI’s answer on the M350 was a sensor that refuses to take off, and that doesn’t depend on anyone remembering.

In January I wrote about the AAIB’s record-only handling of the Kent Police crash that injured a child. This bulletin is the fuller kind of investigation I wanted then, and it’s blunt about what a 15.9-pound drone does to a person from 380 feet.

American agencies still fly this airframe too. The Ocean County Sheriff’s Office used an M300 for a rip current rescue in July. If you fly one, check the collars before every takeoff.

Sources: AAIB Bulletin 11/2026, AAIB-31806, GOV.UK

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

Skydio Says It Will Outsell DJI. The Drone Detective Wants the Numbers

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 18:07:00 GMT

This is a guest opinion by Luis Figueiredo. The introduction is by Haye Kesteloo. Everything below the heading is Figueiredo’s text, word for word, and the views in it are his own.

Luis Figueiredo, known in public safety circles as the “Drone Detective,” runs the drone program at the Elizabeth Police Department in New Jersey. His LinkedIn profile lists 20 years in law enforcement, more than a decade of it spent on unmanned aircraft, and he describes himself as a public safety UAS program developer focused on Drone as First Responder (DFR) work.

Elizabeth PD closed 2025 with about 10,000 DFR flights on two DJI Dock 1 units and one DJI Matrice 350, as DroneXL reported when Figueiredo told agencies to stop panicking about the FCC ban. He flies DJI aircraft and has criticized Skydio before.

On Tuesday DroneXL reported that Skydio CEO Adam Bry said his company will outsell DJI to US civilian customers this year. Bry gave no unit or dollar figures. He stressed that DJI still sells drones in the US and competes with Skydio head-to-head, and by his own account Skydio has “basically zero” consumer sales. Days earlier, Axon became the exclusive distributor of Skydio drones to US and Canadian public safety agencies. Figueiredo answered Bry on LinkedIn on Thursday. DroneXL is publishing his post in full.

Figueiredo’s post refers to lobbying. Skydio is a registered federal lobbying client, and Bry said at Ascend 2024, “Yes, Skydio does have a lobbying team,” which he described as focused on customer budgets and regulatory frameworks. DroneXL reported in 2022 that Skydio hired lobbyists to push for legislation favoring Blue sUAS drones over Chinese-made ones. Bry has denied lobbying for a DJI ban. Of the Countering CCP Drones Act he wrote in July 2024, “We had nothing to do with it and have not lobbied in favor of it.” The FCC added DJI and all foreign-made drones to its Covered List in December 2025.

Luis Figueiredo: “I’d Genuinely Like To See the Numbers, Adam”

So Skydio thinks it’s going to outsell DJI in the U.S. civilian market this year? Congratulations! But let’s talk about that for a minute.

Adam Bry (still can’t tag you btw), Skydio’s CEO, seems pretty confident about the company’s sales projections. And as much as it pains me to say it, he might actually be right if things keep going in this direction, especially with Axon now leading the sales process.

See, I do say nice things about Adam and his company occasionally.

I guess it’s easy to celebrate market dominance when your biggest competitor has been dealt a pretty significant regulatory handicap.

In fact, Skydio is starting to remind me of Tonya Harding. Nothing says competitive spirit quite like celebrating a victory after your biggest competition has been taken out of the game.

And not just taken out. We’re talking hands tied behind their back, both arms shackled, legs chained, duct tape across their mouth, and someone standing behind them with a club ready to take out their knee.

Quite the level playing field, wouldn’t you say?

But there’s another part of Adam’s statement I’d like to understand.

What exactly are we calling the civilian market?

DJI has spent years building a customer base across virtually every segment of the drone industry:

Recreational and hobbyist pilots
Photography, cinematography and film
Real estate and commercial media
Construction and infrastructure inspections
Energy and utility companies
Surveying, mapping and engineering
Agriculture and precision spraying
Search and rescue
Public safety and emergency response

Skydio certainly has customers in the enterprise markets, but let’s be honest: it isn’t competing for the average recreational pilot looking to buy a Mini or Mavic for the weekend.

So are we comparing the same customer base? The same industries? The same opportunities?

Or are we celebrating market share gains in a market where one of the biggest competitors has had its ability to introduce new products effectively restricted?

Here’s another way to look at it:

Imagine opening a business, lobbying to have your biggest competitor kicked out of town, and then holding a press conference to announce you’re now the most successful business in the neighborhood.

Even the mob would appreciate that business strategy.

In the mob, they call it taking over the neighborhood. In the drone industry, apparently, they call it gaining market share.

I’d genuinely like to see the numbers, Adam. Actual units sold, broken down by industry and customer segment.

Because outselling your competition by building a better product is one thing.

Outselling them after helping change the rules of the game is something else entirely.

Source: Luis Figueiredo on LinkedIn, November 12, 2026.

Luis Figueiredo runs the drone program at the Elizabeth Police Department in New Jersey. The views in this guest opinion are his own and do not represent the Elizabeth Police Department, the City of Elizabeth, or DroneXL.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. The introduction is by Haye Kesteloo; the guest opinion is by Luis Figueiredo. Read our editorial standards.

Katy Approves Zipline Drone Hub, the Only Part Texas Lets It Decide

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:45:00 GMT

The Katy City Council voted unanimously on Monday, November 9, to let Zipline build a drone charging station in the West Ten Business Park, behind the shopping center at 27240 Katy Freeway, just north of Interstate 10. The site is a little under 3 acres and will hold six towers, each docking up to six aircraft, serving a delivery radius of about 3 miles.

Zipline told the council deliveries could start in as little as three months. The city said on Tuesday that the approval covers that one parcel and nothing else in Katy, and that any future drone facility needs its own council vote.

Council members pressed Zipline on flights near schools and on the cameras its aircraft carry. Texas Government Code 423.009 voids almost any city ordinance regarding the operation of a drone.

Zipline Still Needs a Katy Building Permit and at Least 12 More Weeks

Zipline’s next step in Katy is a city building permit, expected to take at least four to eight weeks, then eight to 10 weeks of construction. Development manager Jason Drews said the station will cost more than the usual $400,000 to $600,000 because it is larger, Community Impact reported.

Zipline first proposed a different location and worked with city staff to find the business park site, according to the Chronicle, and it told the council it keeps chargers in commercial areas because takeoff is the noisiest part of a flight. The FAA’s Texas draft likewise limits charging and pickup sites to existing commercially zoned land. The ordinance carries penalties of up to $2,000 a day for violations, and the Chronicle reports Zipline has not announced which Katy businesses will take part.

The figures Zipline gave the council match its federal paperwork: an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) payload, up to 70 mph (113 km/h), and a cruise altitude the FAA’s draft environmental assessment puts at 330 feet (101 meters). Drews also said Zipline does not deliver tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceuticals. Its prescription deliveries run through health-system programs, such as Cleveland Clinic’s in Ohio.

Zipline aircraft dock on and depart from charging towers at one of the company's sites. Katy's station will have six towers. Photo credit: Zipline

Katy residents already have drones overhead. Wing has flown Walmart orders from two Supercenters on North Fry Road with Katy addresses since January 15, so Zipline would be the second operator serving the area.

Zipline Pitched 150 Million Miles as Its Houston Expansion Awaits the FAA

Zipline told the council its aircraft carry emergency parachutes and run about 500 preflight safety checks. The company says the fleet has flown more than 150 million autonomous miles without a serious incident causing injury or property damage. Neither number comes from an independent source.

Katy Police Chief Bryon Woytek called the service “as safe, if not safer, than delivered by a car.” Zipline’s parachute has already been used in the Houston area. On September 4, a Zip came down under its canopy onto Highway 6 in Cypress, northwest of Houston, with nobody hurt. Zipline called it a midflight issue and, as of November 11, has not published a cause. The noise figure Zipline gave Katy, about 60 decibels, is also the company’s own. Its recent 68% noise reduction claim came from internal modeling, not microphones.

The federal side is unfinished. Zipline’s Houston-area expansion sits inside the FAA’s five-metro Texas draft, which would amend its Part 135 operating authority to cover up to 65 Houston chargers and lists Fort Bend, Harris and Waller counties in its study area. Comments closed October 11. As of November 11, the FAA’s drone environmental review page lists only the draft, with no final decision.

Zipline’s School Keep-Out Zone Is a Company Rule Katy Cannot Enforce

Council member Paula Taylor, who teaches at Katy High School, worried about students ordering coffee and food to campus, and Zipline answered that it neither delivers to schools nor flies over public school property. Texas law leaves that promise in Zipline’s hands.

Taylor described the problem schools already have with Uber Eats and Grubhub: “kids wanting to leave class to go get coffee deliveries.” A member of Zipline’s government affairs team answered that Katy students “will not be able to get their Starbucks coffee from us,” the Chronicle reported. Zipline also keeps away from private schools and preschools, and from sports fields. “We won’t even fly over one of those either,” Drews said of public school property.

None of that can be written into a Katy ordinance. Section 423.009(b) of the Texas Government Code bars a city from adopting or enforcing any measure regarding the operation of an unmanned aircraft, and subsection (d) voids one that does. The exceptions cover special events, the city’s own drones, and the area around city-owned facilities, the last only with FAA authorization after a public hearing. School campuses belong to Katy ISD, not the city.

Council members Johnston Dietz and Paul Follis asked about hurricanes and the aircraft’s cameras. Zipline said its meteorologists and two monitoring centers can ground flights. It said the cameras are for navigation and obstacle detection, not surveillance, with some footage kept for incident review. The privacy backstop is state law: Government Code 423.003 makes capturing images of people or private property for surveillance a Class C misdemeanor.

DroneXL’s Take

Katy did the part of this that Texas lets a city do, and did it well. The hub sits on commercial land off I-10, where Zipline says it wants its chargers anyway, the approval stops at one parcel, and the council asked its questions in public before the towers go up.

That is more than Cypress got. Zipline’s first Houston base serves unincorporated Harris County, and Texas counties cannot zone, so residents there had no hearing to attend. It is also the order Round Rock got backwards a month ago.

But the answer Paula Taylor got is a Zipline policy, and the city cannot enforce it. I believe Zipline means it, and I would rather have its keep-out list than none. The place that list could become binding is the FAA’s Texas review, and the draft only credits Zipline for avoiding “fly less areas” during operating hours without saying which places those are. Before the FAA signs the final version, Katy’s council should write to the agency and ask it to name schools and sports fields in that document, because Texas has left Katy no way to hold Zipline to a promise made at its own council meeting.

Sources: Houston Chronicle via GovTech, Community Impact, FAA draft environmental assessment, Zipline Texas metros, Texas Government Code Chapter 423

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

Amazon's UK Drones Go From 600 to 8,000 Homes. The Circle Didn't Grow

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:12:00 GMT

The UK Civil Aviation Authority has granted Amazon Prime Air a SAIL 4 Operating Authorisation and Flightworthiness Validation for its MK30 drones in Darlington, County Durham. Amazon’s UK newsroom announced it on November 10, three days after Prime Air vice president David Carbon called it a global first on LinkedIn. Amazon says the approval lets Prime Air fly over more densely populated parts of the area and lifts eligible households from about 600 to roughly 8,000.

DroneXL has followed this operation since the first Darlington deliveries in May, and in September Amazon asked the CAA to fly across the whole town. The SAIL 4 approval came seven weeks before the trial permission’s December 31 expiry.

The map did not get bigger. Amazon still limits Prime Air to homes within 7.5 miles (12 km) of the Darlington fulfillment center, the same radius it launched with.

SAIL 4 Rises With The Number Of People Under The MK30

The 8,000 homes were always inside the 7.5-mile circle. Amazon’s first authorization kept the MK30 over the less crowded parts. Under the UK’s risk method, more people beneath a flight raise the score, so the same MK30 model had to prove SAIL 4 integrity before crossing those streets.

SAIL stands for Specific Assurance and Integrity Level. It is the output of a UK SORA assessment, the CAA’s version of the Specific Operational Risk Assessment, which weighs the ground risk of a flight against the air risk around it. Amazon’s announcement calls SAIL 4 medium to high risk, the level where the CAA expects an operator to show serious technical and organisational safety assurance.

An MK30 on a test stand. Photo credit: Amazon

Amazon’s announcement lists what the CAA assessed: the operation, the aircraft, the organisation and its approach to risk. The redundancy case it makes is specific. An independent computer watches the main flight-control system and can hand control to a secondary system, then trigger a return to base or a controlled landing. The aircraft has six motors and a three-cell battery, and its detect-and-avoid system is meant to spot clotheslines and trampolines on descent. Theunis Scheepers, director of Prime Air Europe, said “Earning it took years of disciplined engineering.”

The same release promises delivery in under two hours and lists baby products, household essentials, beauty, health and wellbeing items, and office and tech supplies. Its example customer is a new parent who needs nappies.

The “world first” is Amazon’s claim. The only CAA comment on it DroneXL found is the one quoted in Amazon’s release, where Sophie O’Sullivan, the CAA’s director of future safety and innovation, called it a “first in-kind announcement.” The CAA’s newsroom had no release on the approval when DroneXL checked on November 11, and DroneXL has not seen the authorization document itself.

Amazon’s Announcement Is Silent On The 100-Delivery Cap

Amazon’s SAIL 4 announcement says nothing about the trial caps of 10 flights an hour and 100 deliveries per weekday, or about when the new authorization expires. At 100 a day, each of the 8,000 eligible households would get one drone delivery about every 16 weeks.

Through September, Amazon had not come close to the trial ceiling. It reported more than 500 flights and deliveries since February, about three a weekday, against a cap of 100. Neither Amazon nor its release says whether that ceiling has moved now that the eligible households have.

The 10-an-hour figure also sits in Amazon’s planning case. Its planned rate fell from 21 flights an hour to 10 when Darlington Borough Council granted only temporary planning permission for the site, as DroneXL reported on December 1, 2025. Amazon’s SAIL 4 announcement says nothing about that permission changing.

Richardson, Texas is the nearest US example of a Prime Air hub running under far looser limits. Amazon told the Richardson City Council in March that its hub filled about 150 orders a day, against the 1,000 a day its FAA approval allows, and in September one resident’s tracker logged 52 drones overhead in a single day.

The CAA Moved Before The AAIB Reported On The Beaumont Hill Accident

An MK30 came down in a Beaumont Hill garden in Darlington on July 29, and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch opened an investigation. A search of AAIB reports for “MK30” and “Darlington” on November 11 found none on the accident. The CAA approved denser flights before the AAIB published anything.

Amazon’s account, reported by DroneXL in August, is that the drone touched an object extending above the roof of a moving vehicle and came down as designed. Nobody was hurt. The AAIB writes safety recommendations and cannot ground an aircraft, so its findings were never a legal precondition for the CAA’s decision.

The MK30 has hit buildings before. In February one struck an apartment building in Richardson and landed smoking on the sidewalk. The aircraft weighs 83 pounds (37.8 kg) at takeoff to carry 5 pounds (2.2 kg), and it carries no parachute.

DroneXL’s drone delivery tracker keeps a running record of US Prime Air sites and incidents. Readers in US Prime Air markets can find their options in our guide to what residents can do; Amazon takes drone complaints at 1-888-280-4331 or through customer-service chat (“Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery”).

DroneXL’s Take

The CAA has the right model, and I’d rather Amazon earned every street this way than drew a circle on a map and flew everything inside it. SORA makes an operator prove more as the ground below gets busier, which suits an 83-pound aircraft over people’s gardens.

I don’t like the order of events. Beaumont Hill, the only British MK30 accident on the public record, still has no published AAIB report, and the CAA has now cleared the same parachute-less aircraft to serve roughly 13 times as many eligible households. The CAA may well have seen Amazon’s own data on Beaumont Hill, but the AAIB has published nothing on it, and the people who live under the new flight paths are the ones who most need it. I’m for drone delivery where urgency justifies the flight. A nappy run does not, and that makes the safety case the whole argument.

The caps are the number to follow. If the 100-a-day ceiling holds, Darlington stays a demonstration that just added 7,400 eligible households.

Sources: About Amazon UK, UK Civil Aviation Authority, AAIB reports on gov.uk, FOX 4

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

Amazon Wants Kids Inside for Drone Drops. Homewood Says It Wasn't Told

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 23:36:00 GMT

Amazon’s drone delivery site in Markham, Illinois, has generally hit its maximum of 300 orders a day since flights began on October 12, Amazon economic development manager Sam Bailey said at a ribbon-cutting at the warehouse on Tuesday, November 10. He told customers to clear the yard when a drone is coming and to keep their children indoors. Homewood Mayor Rich Hofeld told the Chicago Tribune’s Daily Southtown that his village got no warning or communication from Amazon before the service started. Homewood later told residents it could not ground the drones.

Bailey said 21 MK30 drones fly from the site, and the Tribune puts Homewood, Harvey and South Holland inside its 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, along with Dolton. The Matteson warehouse launches next, Bailey said, without a date. He said the drones peak at 68 decibels at the point of delivery, without giving a distance or a metric. Amazon’s own test readings, in the noise report attached to the FAA’s Chicago draft, put an MK30 delivery at 82.4 dBA Lmax 20 feet (6.1 meters) away.

Markham Generally Hits 300 Orders a Day. The FAA Draft Analyzed 1,000 Flights

Markham’s 21 drones have generally reached the site’s 300-order daily maximum, Bailey said, and 60% of the warehouse’s inventory can go by drone. The FAA’s July draft analyzed up to 1,000 MK30 flights a day from each of three Chicago-area sites, between 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m.

Scaling up is something Amazon is “always considering,” Bailey told the Daily Southtown, and Matteson, at 7001 Vollmer Road, will add capacity. In March, Amazon told the Richardson, Texas, council that its hub there filled about 150 orders a day, against the 1,000 its FAA approval allows, as DroneXL reported.

Amazon has approval from Markham for the takeoff and landing site and from the FAA to use the airspace, Bailey said. Markham’s is on paper: the city signed a zoning letter in November 2025 saying drone delivery is permitted by right on the lot, according to the FAA draft, which describes the federal step as an amendment to Prime Air’s operations specifications. The FAA’s drone environmental review index, updated November 9 and checked by DroneXL on November 11, still lists only the July draft assessment for Markham, Matteson and West Chicago, with comment closed August 14 and no decision posted. The FAA’s July 28 national finding lets it approve new Part 135 delivery markets on one nationwide study. No public FAA document DroneXL could find names the authorization Markham flies under, and Bailey, in the Tribune’s account, did not say.

Homewood Says Amazon Gave No Warning. Its Mayor Got the FAA’s July Notice of the Proposal

Hofeld and Homewood’s village staff and trustees are on the distribution list for the FAA’s July 15 notice of the Chicago draft, according to the draft’s Appendix A. That notice covered Amazon’s proposal and a comment window, not the October 12 launch Hofeld says Amazon never warned the village about.

Amazon also announced the Chicago-area sites in February, when Homewood was among the eligible communities reported, and held a community meet-and-greet in Tinley Park on March 2. “You just don’t know until you look up and there it is,” Hofeld told the paper. Residents commenting on Homewood’s social media post asked why the drones were flying and how they would be told about them, he said, and reactions ran from enthusiasm to outright hostility. The Village of Thornton’s recreation department said preschool children watched a drone deliver to Cora Court.

Markham Mayor Roger Agpawa, who cut the ribbon with his city council, ordered a delivery himself shortly after launch. He said some residents raised noise and safety concerns, that Amazon answered them to his satisfaction, and that he doesn’t see Amazon’s drones as more dangerous than smaller recreational ones. “Nothing is ever foolproof,” he added.

Homewood and Dolton both sent residents with concerns to amazondronefeedback@amazon.com, the Tribune reported. An automated reply Amazon sent DroneXL in September says nobody monitors that inbox anymore. Residents can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 and say it is about drone delivery, or open the customer-service chat and pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” The FAA hotline the officials also listed takes safety reports and reports of rule violations. It is not a noise line, and a drone flying within its FAA authorization breaks no rule.

Illinois law leaves the villages little else to offer. 620 ILCS 5/42.1 makes drone regulation a state power, and DroneXL’s Matteson guide lists what remains for a south-suburban village. DroneXL’s guide for residents covers the rest, and the Amazon Prime Air tracker lists the hubs and incidents DroneXL has documented.

Amazon’s Drop Rules Start With Clearing the Yard

The MK30 releases a package from about 12 feet (3.7 meters) and cancels the delivery if it detects movement in the area, Bailey said. Customers should clear the area when a drone is incoming. “You want your kids inside the house,” he said.

Nobody should stand underneath to catch a box, Bailey said, and Amazon will not drop a package in an unsafe location. Its drops have missed before: in Richmond, Texas, an MK30 put a customer’s cat food in her pool on August 17.

Bailey also said the forward-facing cameras serve only for navigation, that nobody views the footage, and that it would be used only after an incident or emergency. The drone, he said, cannot take pictures. He told Pflugerville, Texas, the same in September, and Amazon’s own Prime Air operations page said at the time that people near a delivery may be recorded, as DroneXL found. Footage kept for an incident has to be recorded first.

Amazon’s Drone Stays Above 68 Decibels Out to 79 Feet From the Drop

Amazon’s own delivery readings, from tests at the Pendleton UAS Range in Oregon in October 2024, stay above 68 dBA Lmax out to 79 feet from the drop point, at 69.0 to 71.3 between 75 and 79 feet. They fall below 68 by 175 feet, to 61.9 to 63.7.

In May Bailey told the Nampa, Idaho, commission that the figure came from a test in the backyard of an Arizona Airbnb, as DroneXL reported on Wednesday. The Pendleton readings are in Appendix E of the Chicago draft and cover a fully loaded drone’s descent, delivery hover and climb-out. The 20-foot microphone also recorded 91.7 dBA SEL, the FAA’s sound exposure metric.

DroneXL’s Take

Bailey’s best argument for the Markham drones was the sick kid whose medicine turned out to be expired, and that is exactly the delivery DroneXL wants drones to make. Amazon’s own instruction for that delivery is that the kid should be inside when it arrives. The drone is an 83-pound MK30 with no parachute that lets go of the box 12 feet over the yard. Every MK30 collision DroneXL has reported ended with the aircraft on the ground. That covers the Tolleson crane, the Waco cable, the Richardson apartment building and, in Darlington, England, what Amazon called an object extending above the roof of a moving vehicle. In Tolleson, one of the two drones caught fire on the ground. Amazon says the Darlington drone came down as designed. I’d rather see that medicine lowered on a tether from about 300 feet, the way Zipline’s P2 delivers, with a parachute on board. Until Amazon flies something like that over Homewood, I’d follow Bailey’s advice and keep the kids inside.

Sources: Chicago Tribune / Daily Southtown, FAA Draft Environmental Assessment, Amazon Prime Air, Chicago, July 2026 (PDF), FAA Appendix A, Agency and Public Outreach (PDF), FAA Appendix E, Technical Noise Report (PDF), FAA drone environmental review index, 620 ILCS 5/42.1.

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

Anne Arundel Police Launch DFR Drone. Their Log Shows No Kings Flights

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 23:35:00 GMT

The Anne Arundel County Police Department was set to begin flying a Drone as First Responder pilot on Wednesday, Nov. 11, from an automated dock near Evergreen Road and Waugh Chapel Way. The drone covers the Waugh Chapel Towne Centre, the Route 3 corridor and parts of Gambrills, Odenton and Crofton, and police say it launches only for active 911 calls, emergencies in progress, injury crashes and officer requests.

The Maryland department already posts its drone flights on a public log at least 30 days after each one, and DroneXL went through all 2,621 entries from July 2025 through Oct. 11, 2026. Eighteen of them, flown on the two days anti-Trump No Kings rallies took place in the county, are labeled as No Kings events, a protest or a public demonstration.

The department’s own drone page lists crowd management at public special events as an approved use. The same page says the program is not used to collect video “for the sole purpose of monitoring constitutionally protected activities.”

Police Say the Waugh Chapel Drone Keeps Its Camera on the Horizon in Transit

The Waugh Chapel dock is part of the department’s annual holiday safety initiative in the Western District. Its cameras stay pointed at the horizon on the way to and from calls, and its video falls under the department’s body-worn camera evidence and retention rules, police said.

Eye on Annapolis reported that the dock uses Skydio drone technology. The department’s announcement, as reported by Eye on Annapolis and WMAR, did not say how long the pilot will run or how many flights it expects a day. Residents of the Monarch apartments and townhomes next to the dock may see the drone launch and land.

The dock adds to a patrol-response pilot the department announced in August 2025, expanding a drone program it says has more than a decade of specialized use behind it. Montgomery County made a similar camera promise for its DFR program after hearing from residents: its drones fly out with the cameras pointed up and switched off until they reach the call.

Nearly Half of Anne Arundel’s 2,621 Logged Drone Flights Were Training

Anne Arundel’s public flight log on AirData lists 2,621 drone flights from July 2, 2025, through Oct. 11, 2026. Training, testing and practice account for 1,304 of them. Another 598 carry no description at all, which leaves 719 flights tied to a call, a case or an event.

Most of those 719 match uses the department has described: missing people, crash scenes, barricades, burglaries, warrant service and traffic at school graduations. The busiest month was March 2026, with 255 flights. Nearly every entry lists a date, a time and a street or address, and many add a case number and a one-line summary.

Lewisville, Texas, also posts its DFR flights, and its log fell two months behind the department’s own press figures before the city caught it up this week. Anne Arundel’s latest entry is from Oct. 11, which fits its stated delay of at least 30 days.

Anne Arundel Police Logged 15 Drone Flights on the March 28 No Kings Day

On March 28, the third nationwide No Kings day, Anne Arundel’s log shows 15 drone flights at three locations in Pasadena, Parole and Glen Burnie. Each site has its own case number, and the entries are labeled “Public Demonstration,” “No Kings/ Day 3” and “Protest.”

The six Pasadena flights ran from 9:05 to 10:59 a.m. on Magothy Beach Road. Six more flew at the Annapolis Corporate Park in Parole from 10:59 a.m. to 1 p.m., and three at Crain Highway and Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard from 2:33 to 3:42 p.m. Those times line up with the county rallies Patch listed for that Saturday: Pasadena from 9 to 11 a.m. at an address Patch kept private, Annapolis on Riva Road from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Glen Burnie Town Center, at that same intersection, from 2 to 4 p.m. DroneXL found no March 28 entry near the fourth county rally, in Odenton at Annapolis Road and Gateway Boulevard. The log adds three more flights labeled “No Kings Event” at Glen Burnie Town Center on Oct. 18, 2025, the second national No Kings day.

The entries do not say what the drones were watching for, whether they recorded, or whether anything was kept. The department’s drone program page says the drones use no facial recognition and that video with no evidentiary value is kept no more than 30 days. The same page says an annual report on drone use “is published and made publicly available.” On Nov. 11, its Annual Reports section said reports would start in 2026 and listed none.

The ACLU of Maryland raised protest monitoring when the department announced the patrol program in August 2025, pointing to Frederick County sheriff’s drones over public gatherings. David Rocah of the ACLU told The Banner that police policies should be written into enforceable rules: “There’s no consequences for violating them.” A 2025 General Assembly bill to limit police drone use died without a committee vote.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d rather see a drone than a helicopter over a big crowd at a busy intersection, and the county’s policy allows that, so a flight at a rally proves nothing on its own. The labels are my problem. The same log calls most of its Pride and St. Patrick’s Day parade flights “overwatch,” which at least names a job. Nine of the protest-day entries name No Kings outright and the other nine say “Protest” or “Public Demonstration.” None of them says what the flight was for. Anne Arundel deserves credit for publishing a log detailed enough to show this at all. As the Waugh Chapel dock adds flights over a shopping district, the department should say what those 18 flights were for and whether any of their video still exists. It should also post the annual report its own page says is already public.

Sources: Eye on Annapolis, Anne Arundel County Police Department drone program page, Anne Arundel County Police AirData flight log, Patch (March 27, 2026), The Banner (August 7, 2025), WMAR-2 News.

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

Fedorov's New Company Wants A $25,000 Missile To Kill Shaheds

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s former defense minister, has gone into the missile business with Pavlo Yelizarov, the founder of the Lasar’s Group drone unit. Their company, Mission Defense Partners, wants an all-weather missile that kills Russian Shahed drones for $20,000 to $25,000 apiece. Yelizarov laid out the plan in an interview with the Ukrainian tech outlet DOU, published Wednesday, November 11.

The company is built on the civilian drone factory that has supplied Lasar’s Group since 2022, and its founders are the same partnership that produced the jet interceptor Fedorov unveiled in October. Fedorov, who was removed as defense minister on July 15, said in September that Palantir CEO Alex Karp would be the first major investor in a company he was launching. Yelizarov told DOU the Palantir agreements are still waiting to be signed.

Yelizarov Says Ukraine Cannot Yet Build A 15-Kilometer Radar-Guided Missile

Short-range missiles are one of Ukraine’s most painful gaps, Yelizarov told DOU. Ukraine today cannot build a missile with a 15-kilometer (9.3-mile) range and a radar seeker. MDP’s answer is a cheap missile for Shaheds that works in fog, rain and wind.

Some English-language reports turned the 15-kilometer figure into a spec for an MDP product. In the interview it is the capability Yelizarov says Ukraine lacks, and he gives no range for the missile his company is developing. He does say which unit would fly it: “As soon as we solve this task, Lasar’s Group will be able to use them,” he said, in Interfax-Ukraine’s translation. Ukraine’s defense ministry is funding the same hunt: Brave1 grants for drone-launched air-to-air missiles, announced at the end of October, aim to cut the cost of killing jet Shaheds.

Yelizarov’s case for the anti-Shahed work rests on his time as deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force, a post he quit after Fedorov’s dismissal. He says Roman “Fish” Yashchenko, Lasar’s Group’s first pilot, was put in command in Poltava, where 25 Shaheds had been downed in the four months before he arrived. After that, the count was 135 in March, 196 in April and 167 in May. Those are Yelizarov’s figures, given in the interview.

The Jet Interceptor Downed Two Geran-5s Within Days

On October 12, Fedorov posted video of a new jet interceptor drone built with Yelizarov’s team and already in combat testing over Kyiv. Lasar’s Group crews used it to shoot down two Russian Geran-5 jet drones heading for the capital, a month after development began.

The new interceptor's thermal camera closes on a Geran-5 near Kyiv, in a frame from Fedorov's October 12 video. Photo credit: Mykhailo Fedorov / Telegram

The Geran-5 is Russia’s turbojet Shahed derivative, which Ukraine’s military intelligence estimates can reach up to 373 mph (600 km/h). “Its speed lets it shoot down jet Shaheds before they reach the city,” Fedorov wrote on Telegram. He says the goal is full autonomy, with the interceptor finding and engaging Russian drones without an operator. DOU photographed an interceptor at the interview and captioned it as built by Fedorov and Yelizarov’s company.

Palantir Funding Waits On Agreements Yelizarov Hopes To Sign Soon

Fedorov met Palantir to discuss funding under an investment program for Ukrainian startups, Yelizarov says, and those agreements are not yet signed. MDP runs a separate investment arm for that money. It is looking at in-flight guidance correction for drones and at air defense technology.

That is a different arrangement from September’s. On September 1, Fedorov said Karp would be his new company’s first major investor, and CNBC reported the money was Karp’s own, not Palantir’s, with no amount disclosed. The interview does not say whether MDP is the company Fedorov announced in September. Yelizarov’s account now puts Palantir the company at the table, through a startup fund, with nothing signed.

MDP has three co-owners. Yelizarov holds about a third and Fedorov is another, and the third partner’s name is being withheld. Yelizarov says he went with Fedorov to Italy for two days, where Fedorov had taken an unpaid advisory role with the defense minister, and then to the United States for the talks.

The Factory Runs At 30% And Yelizarov Blames Export Rules

The civilian factory MDP is built on employs up to 1,000 people and runs at 30% of capacity, Yelizarov says, and he wants to export the other 70%. His fix for the export controls is a notification-only system for EU and NATO buyers: report the contract and quantity, then ship.

In summer 2022 Lasar’s Group could not find drones on the market that met its needs, so it set up a civilian company to build to its specs, and for three to four years it was that company’s only customer. Other units can now buy, after an interview to show they can use the hardware. DroneXL covered how that model turned Lasar’s Group into Ukraine’s “McDonald’s” of drone strikes in January.

Yelizarov also describes a “drone NATO” idea from Fedorov’s team: Ukrainian pilots flying interceptors remotely, from Ukraine, over Latvia, Lithuania or any partner with an agreement. If Russia sends 400 Shaheds at a Baltic state, the 20 to 40 pilots Ukraine might train for its military will not be enough. He says the generals, the defense ministry and European partners have all heard the proposal, and no one has decided on it.

DroneXL’s Take

Mission Defense Partners has the right price target. A $20,000 to $25,000 missile sits between the roughly $2,000 Sting interceptor drone and the Patriot rounds Fedorov was trying to trade drones for in Washington in August. The defense ministry’s Brave1 grants show Kyiv wants something in that slot too.

The factory is the bigger problem I see. Export control exists for a reason, and Yelizarov says so himself: Ukrainian technology should not end up with terrorists or drug traffickers. But a drone plant sitting 70% idle in a country short of hard currency is a policy choice, and a notification regime for NATO and EU buyers is a modest fix. My read is that the idle capacity is the money that would pay for the missile work, and Kyiv’s export rules are keeping it on the shelf.

Sources: DOU, Interfax-Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov on Telegram, CNBC, Militarnyi. Quotes translated from Ukrainian.

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 2: A 25-Year TV Cameraman Says Fly It Lower, Not Higher

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 22:58:00 GMT

Chris Goor spent 25 years as a broadcast TV cameraman, and in a YouTube tutorial published November 3 he shows how a DJI Neo 2 launched from his palm now does the work of the crew he no longer has. When a TV shoot has some budget, he says, a Steadicam or gimbal operator follows the presenter around. Filming himself, he gives that job to the drone.

Goor runs the Brand Video Pro channel, where he coaches experts over 40 on building a personal brand on camera, and he recommends the Neo 2 as a simple drone to start with. His first rule for drone selfies is to fly lower than new owners usually do. The Neo 2 can record sound itself, and Goor still records his voice on a separate microphone.

Goor Keeps the Neo 2 Low and Times His Lines to Its Preset Moves

Goor keeps the Neo 2 low because a flat image only shows motion when the camera passes things. Fly high and nothing is close enough to pass, so the drone has to move fast to look like it is moving at all. A low, slow pass feels like travel.

The same goes for a walk-and-talk. “No one really wants to see the top of my head,” he says in the video, and a camera looking down from height frames the mud at his feet instead of the scenery behind him. He calls the floating walk-and-talk his version of a yap video, and says it took him about a year to talk naturally to a drone hovering in front of him.

For short-form video he writes the script in short lines, each sized to fit one of the Neo 2’s preset moves, such as flying away from him or a helix that circles him and reveals the countryside. A whole reel runs about 45 seconds. To join two clips he finishes a line to his main camera in a tight shot, turns, and picks up from that turn as the drone sets off on a preset.

Longer takes leave two options, Follow mode or Spotlight, which he describes as a tripod in the sky. He shoots landscape even for vertical reels, because portrait only crops the middle of the frame, and landscape lets him leave room ahead of himself when the drone follows from the side. The drone has crashed more than once and been blown around by wind, he writes in the video’s description.

Goor Syncs Separate Audio With a Clap and Cleans the Drone Noise Later

Goor skips the Neo 2’s own audio because a separate microphone, or his phone recording a throwaway reference clip, sounds better. He claps on camera, then in the edit lines up the frame where his hands meet with the spike in the audio waveform.

A hand gesture that both cameras can see does the same job. For rotor noise, his first fix is to step a few paces away from the drone. Then he plays four cleanups side by side. The DJI app removes the noise in real time, which he says gives it little time to work. He tends to use Adobe Podcast (podcast.adobe.com), which gets maybe two or three times the clip’s length to process. Final Cut Pro’s built-in voice isolation is not the cleanest by his account and audibly ramps up as his voice comes in, though it is fine under music. He thinks his new favorite will be a new Final Cut Pro plugin that runs on his computer and, he believes, makes an AI guess at his words.

DroneXL’s Take

The clap is the most useful trick in Goor’s video. When the Neo 2 launched, Jeven Dovey showed DroneXL readers how the DJI Fly app records a phone-connected mic and strips the drone noise as you talk, and for a quick clip that is still the easy route. Goor takes the slower route, with his own recording and a cleanup done afterward. I’d do the same for anything longer than a clip, because a cleanup that runs live never gets a second pass. American creators also can’t walk into a store and buy his drone. DJI never launched the Neo 2 in the United States, and the FCC’s Covered List has blocked new foreign drone authorizations since December 2025. The clap and the offline cleanup work with any camera they can buy.

Source: Chris Goor - Brand Video Pro 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.

Asics Says Corvus Drones Find Lost Shoes 60% Faster in Mississippi

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 22:24:00 GMT

Asics America flies Corvus One inventory drones seven times a night inside its 855,000-square-foot (about 79,400 square meters) distribution center in Byhalia, Mississippi, and says it now recovers misplaced inventory about 60% faster than before. Corvus Robotics, the Mountain View drone maker that raised $18 million in 2024, announced the deployment on November 10.

The drones count two of the building’s highest-risk storage areas every month. Asics policy used to count them twice a year. In one three-month stretch the drones found 26 misplaced cases holding more than 200 pairs of shoes.

Before the drones arrived, Asics kept 12 to 15 of every 100 units out of the availability feeds it sends to online marketplaces.

Asics Held Back Online Stock Because Lost Units Became Cancellations

Asics withheld 12 to 15 of every 100 units from online marketplaces because the last units of a product carried fulfillment risk. A pair the system showed but nobody could find meant a cancelled order, and the alternative for held-back stock was liquidation at a steep discount.

“If a unit went missing, we might not find it for six months,” said Kyle Koestler, senior director of distribution and transportation at Asics America, in the Corvus press release. That missing unit could be the last pair for an order Asics had already taken, he said, and the customer would get a cancellation instead of shoes.

With monthly counts in the riskiest areas, Asics now publishes its full availability feed to marketplaces and sells that product at full price, according to the release.

Corvus One Checks Every Box Count Against Its UPC Reads

Asics schedules seven Corvus One flights a night, starting around 7 p.m. They cover the singles area, which holds single pairs and returns, and the case reserve of full cases. In each location the drone reads every UPC, counts the boxes and checks one number against the other.

The double check exists because of returns. Koestler says in a video on Corvus’ Asics case study page that returns from wholesale accounts, not just e-commerce customers, go back on the shelves, so the same barcode can show up five or six times in one location. If the drone counts 10 boxes, it should come back with 10 UPC reads.

A Corvus One drone reads the UPCs and counts the shoe boxes in the singles area at Asics America's Byhalia distribution center. Photo credit: Corvus Robotics

The aisles are less than 6 feet (1.8 meters) wide. Corvus One navigates them with onboard cameras, and the building has no beacons, stickers or markers to guide it, according to Corvus. The facility holds close to 3 million units across about 44,000 SKUs, 2.3 million of them pairs of footwear, all tracked in a Manhattan Associates warehouse management system.

Asics Inventory Staff Fix Most Drone Findings From a Desk

The morning after each night of flights, an Asics inventory associate reviews every flight and fixes most discrepancies from a desk, using the drones’ video and images. Asics says the drones freed about 200 hours of counting labor a month for reconciliation, root cause research and wholesale projects.

“If it’s something that we can correct from the desk, we’ll correct it then,” said Angela Williford, inventory control operations manager at Asics America, in the case study video. She said the team now checks the footage before sending anyone out to a location.

DroneXL’s Take

The 60% figure is Asics’ own estimate, and in the case study video Koestler presents it as his own rough number. I’d point other retailers at the holdback, because it shows an inventory problem costing Asics marketplace sales until monthly counts fixed it. GNC made a similar case in June, when four Corvus drones helped cut its daily nonshipments to about 98 at an Indiana warehouse. Neither company gives a fleet size or a price, so nobody outside Asics can check the payback. Even so, stock that sells at full price instead of a liquidation discount is a better argument for warehouse drones than saved labor hours, and Corvus should put it in the headline.

Sources: Corvus Robotics via GlobeNewswire, Corvus Robotics Asics case study, 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.

Nampa Wants Amazon's Drone Flight Data. It Holds the Hub's Permit

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 21:25:00 GMT

The City of Nampa, Idaho, has asked Amazon for flight data on the Prime Air drones that began flying over the city on October 30, and city staff visited the area last week to observe them. Nampa has received about 20 to 25 emails and phone calls about the drones since deliveries began, communications director Amy Bowman told BoiseDev. Meridian, parts of which sit inside the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius, says it has had a handful.

Nampa also holds the conditional use permit for Amazon’s launch pad, which its Planning and Zoning Commission approved 6-1 on May 26, and Meridian holds none. At that hearing, Amazon told the commission a backyard delivery in a sound test topped out at 68 decibels. The city’s planning director said at the time that the permit can be revoked.

Nampa Has Shared Complaints With Amazon and Asked for Its Flight Data

Nampa has passed residents’ concerns to Amazon, requested flight data, and hopes to send staff back to the delivery area this week, Bowman said on Tuesday. The city is in communication with Amazon about ensuring it complies with the conditional use permit, BoiseDev reported on November 11.

BoiseDev’s report quotes no city finding that Amazon has broken the permit’s terms, and Amazon also needed FAA approval to fly.

The complaints residents have made publicly are about sound. Residents told Idaho News 6, in a report published November 10, that they can hear the drones inside their homes, one of them with the windows and doors closed. Kristie Patterson, who works from home, said “I’m constantly hearing them buzz over our house on a daily basis.” She has looked at homes elsewhere after 10 years in the neighborhood. Anna Luke said her family no longer finds the backyard relaxing, with one drone heading one way and the next coming back the other.

Meridian communications manager Trevor Smith said the city is gathering residents’ feedback on how the drones affect their neighborhoods. Meridian’s drone delivery page tells residents that cities are “generally preempted” from regulating delivery drones and sends them to Amazon or the FAA’s noise complaint portal. Nampa’s flyer gives the same advice. Residents can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 with the date, time and address of the flight, and Meridian warns that Amazon will ask to verify an account. The online route, choosing “Something Else” and then “Amazon Drone Delivery,” asks the user to log in or create an Amazon account. DroneXL’s guide for residents covers both.

Amazon’s 68 Decibels Came From an Arizona Backyard

Amazon’s 68-decibel figure came from a test in the backyard of an Airbnb in Arizona, Amazon senior manager Sam Bailey told the Nampa commission in May. The front of the same house measured 61 decibels. BoiseDev’s account of the hearing gives no distance from the drone and no measurement method.

Bailey also described a typical delivery. The MK30 cruises out at an average of 225 feet (69 meters), descends to about 13 feet (4 meters) to drop the package, and climbs to 300 to 400 feet (91 to 122 meters) for the trip home, with about 20 seconds over the drop point. He said Amazon planned to start Nampa with 12 to 15 drones. Amazon’s FAA filings list the MK30 at 83.2 pounds (37.8 kilograms) at takeoff carrying 5 pounds of cargo, and no FAA filing or Amazon spec DroneXL has reviewed lists a parachute.

The FAA’s filings describe the MK30, the aircraft flying from Nampa, in a different metric. Its noise appendix for Amazon’s Baton Rouge hub puts an MK30 in delivery hover at 92.1 dBA SEL measured 25 feet (7.6 meters) away, the figure DroneXL compared with Amazon’s “quieter than a truck” claim in September. Its Chicago appendix puts a cruising MK30 at 63.7 dBA SEL at 200 feet (61 meters), as DroneXL reported when the Markham hub opened. SEL packs the sound energy of a whole pass into one second, so it does not line up with a single meter reading in a backyard.

Nampa Can Revoke the Permit, a Lever Dolton Lacked

Because the permit is conditional, Nampa has the authority to revoke it, planning and zoning director Rodney Ashby said in May. As an example, he said the city could act if drone noise proved much higher than Amazon represented, at least two residents complained and staff found the complaints valid.

Amazon would then have to return to the commission for reinstatement. Ashby’s description, as BoiseDev reported it, did not say how the city would measure “much higher” or against which Amazon figure.

That is more than Dolton had. When MK30s reached Chicago’s south suburbs, Dolton and Homewood sent residents to Amazon and the FAA. Homewood said federal rules and Illinois law leave it unable to ban the drones or regulate their noise in flight, and the same state statute binds Dolton. In Richardson, Texas, resident complaints in January got Amazon to raise its average outbound altitude to 225 feet and move some routes over commercial land, the same 225 feet Bailey described for Nampa. In September one Richardson resident still logged 52 overflights of her home in a day. The Nampa hub and its record are on DroneXL’s Amazon Prime Air tracker.

DroneXL’s Take

Nampa should use the flight data to set a number before it argues about one. Until the city measures in a Nampa yard under the actual routes, I think noise much higher than Amazon represented is a standard Amazon can’t fail, because the only Amazon number on the record came from an Arizona backyard with no distance attached. The flight data matters for a second reason. Richardson showed the complaint is about repetition as much as volume, and a per-street count of overflights is the number that would show whether a few backyards carry most of the traffic. I’d still rather see delivery drones carry insulin than a phone case, and an MK30 that weighs 83 pounds at takeoff, with no parachute, is a lot of aircraft for a five-pound box. Nampa can’t change that. It can make Amazon’s May numbers mean something, and as the city that issued the hub’s permit, it is the only one under this circle that can.

Sources: BoiseDev, November 11, BoiseDev, May 28, Idaho News 6, City of Meridian, FAA noise complaints

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

US Marines Turn Counter-Drone VR Goggles Into Suicide Prevention Tool

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 17:52:00 GMT

A US Marine Corps logistics battalion at Camp Pendleton, California, bought 20 OperatorXR virtual reality sets in 2025 for $200,000 to teach its Marines and sailors to hunt down hostile drones. Since July, the same headsets have also run suicide prevention training, and about 350 Marines had been through it by mid-October.

The buyer was 1st Marine Logistics Group’s Headquarters and Service Battalion. Its executive officer, Maj. Paul Kim, wants at least 1,000 Marines through the suicide prevention module this year.

The trainees in the drone scenarios include supply administrators, and the course is run by a logistics group, not an infantry unit.

Marine Logistics Units Train Against Drones Because They Are the Priority Target

Logistics units are the enemy’s first target when Marines move forward, Lt. Col. Gloria Luedtke, the H&S Battalion commander, told USNI News. Her battalion’s Combat Skills Training School started a Counter-sUAS Course this year. Any 1st MLG or I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) unit can send Marines to it.

“Logistics is always the number one target,” Luedtke said. The course has its own outdoor range at Camp Pendleton and teaches Marines to detect and defeat small drones, and to hide from them. The VR purchase came during a modernization push that Brig. Gen. Omar Randall started across 1st MLG in 2025.

OperatorXR’s Interceptor Kit Rebuilds Ukraine-Style Drone Fights Indoors

OperatorXR’s OP-2 Interceptor counter-drone kit fits in a portable hardened case and turns an office, warehouse, gym or ship’s hangar bay into a virtual battlefield. Marines and OperatorXR contractors build its scenarios from news headlines and after-action reports out of Ukraine and the Middle East, running training modules from Moth+Flame.

Trainees carry tracked stand-ins for their issued rifle or pistol, and the software lays trenches, bunkers, camouflage netting and trees over the real room. Two or more Marines can work a scenario as a fire team or squad, finding and shooting down drones while fending off enemy fighters. The headsets in the Marine Corps’ own photos are HTC Vive units with OperatorXR branding on the faceplate. The Marine Corps says the setup lets Marines rehearse drone threats that are not practical to recreate in live-fire training.

Kim said Marines are placed in a war-torn Ukrainian setting where they hide around corners and shoot down drones. “My heart rate is going up. I’m scared to go around the corner,” he said of training in it. Cpl. Nicholas Muldrow, a supply administrator, compared it to skeet shooting and said an instructor taught him that a drone can fly up and then come straight down at you. The next scenarios add chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.

OperatorXR says more than 120 law enforcement and military agencies train on its OP-2 system.

The Same Headsets Have Trained 350 Marines in Suicide Prevention

H&S Battalion added a second Moth+Flame module, for suicide prevention, in July during two training days of its Small Unit Leaders Course. The trainee talks out loud to an AI-driven Marine in crisis. The headset microphone picks up every word, and the avatar reacts to what it hears.

At each turn the software offers several responses, and one of them is the preferred answer for getting the Marine to accept help. Depending on the choices, the conversation can escalate into serious concern over self-harm, and the avatar can turn agitated and curse at the trainee. One scenario makes the trainee the roommate of a lance corporal who is despondent over a failed relationship and punishment by his unit. Each session ends with a feedback review that students can later discuss with instructors. The headset comes last: Marines first get classroom work on emotional intelligence, hard conversations, coaching and counseling.

Sgt. Isaiah Wilson, 7th Engineer Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, wears a VR headset during suicide prevention training in a Small Unit Leaders Course at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 15, 2026. Photo credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Mary Torres

The idea came from Kim. He saw an OperatorXR headset demonstrated while teaching leadership and ethics at the US Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center, and he knew Marine Corps Special Operations Command already used the system. Interest has run ahead of his plan, so he is raising the goal and extending the module to Corporal’s Courses and Lance Corporal Seminars around I MEF.

A demonstration at a Camp Pendleton commanders’ conference drew a lukewarm response from senior leaders, Luedtke said, but units asked for the system once the conference ended. Students describe the conversations as harder than they expected. “I definitely questioned myself a lot more than I thought,” said 2nd Lt. Rylee Rives, a logistics officer with Combat Logistics Battalion 5.

DroneXL’s Take

Most of the Marine drone training DroneXL has covered this year was for specialists. The Corps’ service-wide small drone training framework in January is about building drone operators, and the 24th MEU spent three weeks on FPV attack drones in May. In March, Marines in South Korea shot down target drones with Stinger missiles. This program puts supply administrators in a warehouse with a drone diving at them. My read is that Luedtke has the order right. If logistics is the enemy’s first target, the Marines in logistics need the repetitions first, and a VR kit gives them a diving drone that a live-fire range can’t practically recreate. At $10,000 a set, I’d want one in every support battalion in the Corps.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255, to reach the Veterans Crisis Line, which also serves active-duty service members.

Sources: USNI News, DVIDS (U.S. Marine Corps), OperatorXR

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

German Military Bans DJI Drones Again After Its 2023 Ban Didn't Stick

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 12:44:00 GMT

Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, have banned Chinese small drones from their barracks and training grounds with immediate effect, and ordered every unit to stop flying the ones it already owns, DJI models included. A Defense Ministry spokesperson confirmed the move to Der Spiegel, which reported it on Tuesday, November 10, and said existing systems will be replaced with German or European products.

The Bundeswehr has banned Chinese drones before. That order, issued in November 2023, warned that Bundeswehr data could flow to Beijing. A year later, the military signed a contract for 500 DJI Matrice M30T drones.

Defense Ministry Ties the Drone Ban to Technological Sovereignty

The ministry presents the move as industrial policy as much as security. A spokesperson told Reuters that “Chinese-made models will no longer be used” in order to strengthen the Bundeswehr’s self-sufficiency and technological sovereignty. The same spokesperson said there is no blanket ban on systems from any particular country.

The decision rests on individual risk assessments covering military, IT and data security, according to the ministry. Der Spiegel’s report says the orders went out to the whole force in recent weeks, because of concern that the drones could pass details of exercises, images of bases and training grounds, or information on German weapons systems to Chinese intelligence.

Spiegel also reported lists of car models from BYD, Geely and NIO circulating in the forces. Soldiers who drive one now park outside the gate and walk in. Spiegel points to Norway, where the armed forces found during their Hovedstad home defense exercise in September that Chinese-made rental cars had recorded the security checks at a military camp’s entrance. The ministry told Reuters there is no general ban on vehicles from any country or maker, but access to sensitive sites can be restricted where a car’s sensors pose a risk. Poland banned Chinese-made vehicles from its military facilities in February, and the US barred BYD cars from its air base on Okinawa last month, Reuters reported.

A Drone Task Force Put DJI on the Approved List in 2024

Seven months after the first ban, the Bundeswehr’s own drone task force reopened the door. Its then head, Wolfgang Jordan, recommended in June 2024 that eight DJI models, the Matrice M30 among them, go on a white list that otherwise held only US-made drones, CORRECTIV reported in August.

The CORRECTIV investigation quotes the order it reversed. Lieutenant General Martin Schelleis, then head of the Joint Support Service, signed Order 159 in November 2023, banning unmanned aircraft from states with special security risks, “currently only China.” Spiegel says the reversal came out of plain need. The Bundeswehr was behind on drones and wanted to catch up fast, and security concerns took a back seat. A Bundeswehr insider told CORRECTIV that no German or European drone matched DJI on quality and price.

In November 2024, the Bundeswehr signed a framework contract with Droneparts GmbH for 500 DJI Matrice M30T drones, according to the contract, which CORRECTIV obtained. It included a “no-spy” clause stating the aircraft were hardened against data leaks. Jordan’s rules said the DJI drones had to fly without an internet connection and have their data deleted after each use.

Local commanders could also buy commercial drones themselves with little paperwork, the ministry confirmed to Spiegel. Insiders estimate they bought several thousand Chinese drones nationwide, M30Ts among them, and reportedly many other DJI models. Nobody tracked centrally which unit bought which drone, so the Bundeswehr had no option but a force-wide ban, Spiegel reported. The ministry won’t give a number, citing military security.

The rules never allowed DJI drones in reconnaissance or tactical roles during exercises, according to Spiegel, and units used them for taster courses for future drone pilots and as targets for air-defense systems. The ministry at first argued they flew only where no security-relevant information was involved, and in August a spokesperson told CORRECTIV that flying only on military property, offline and under strict rules, ruled out a leak of sensitive data.

An Insider Says Counterintelligence Found Traces of Data Diversion

Whether the drones ever leaked sensitive data is not known, Spiegel wrote, but one insider who had repeatedly filed complaints against the Bundeswehr’s use of DJI drones told the magazine that the MAD, Germany’s military counterintelligence service, found forensic traces of data being diverted from drones the Bundeswehr had flown.

The ministry did not answer Spiegel’s questions about those suspicions directly. Insiders had warned of the risk when the white list was drawn up, and Spiegel cites Western intelligence assessments that all Chinese drone makers work closely with Chinese authorities.

CORRECTIV had already described how readable the drones are. After a Bundeswehr DJI drone crashed in April 2025, the military filed a warranty claim, and DJI rejected it as pilot error based on its own analysis of data stored on the aircraft, according to an insider. A penetration test found the onboard memory would need to be overwritten up to 1,000 times to clear it, the same insider said. The ministry disputed that account, saying all IT devices go through mandatory deletion procedures before they are handed to outside parties. CORRECTIV also reported that the Bundeswehr takes the drones off the cellular network and loads its own software onto them, and that the spying scenario modeled in an internal Bundeswehr analysis has not been proven.

DJI has repeatedly said its drones pose no security risk. In May, an OnDefend audit of the Air 3S and Matrice 4E found no clear evidence of hidden backdoors and no data transmissions outside the United States during testing.

DroneXL’s Take

I have argued against the US DJI ban for years, and I won’t argue against this one. A military keeping Chinese drones off its own training grounds is taking a legitimate security measure, and it doesn’t need the unconfirmed MAD finding to justify it.

Germany also drew the line in the right place. The Bundeswehr banned DJI from its barracks, not from German farmers or firefighters. Compare that with the FCC adding foreign-made drones to its Covered List last December, which reaches every American who wants a new DJI model.

Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment operate a DJI Mavic 3 during a live-fire exercise in Selija, Latvia, on April 29, 2026. Photo credit: U.S. Army / Spc. Gabriel Martinez (DVIDS)

Germany needed two bans to get here, and I suspect the same rush for cheap, capable drones explains why soldiers from 1-12 Cavalry flew a DJI Mavic 3 in a live-fire exercise in Latvia in April. If the MAD finding holds up and covers DJI aircraft, the Pentagon should be asking which of its own units still train with DJI drones.

Sources: Der Spiegel, CORRECTIV, Reuters, DVIDS.

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

Ring's $250 Drone Cam Finally Ships January 27, Pending FCC Approval

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 03:40:00 GMT

Ring finally has a drone. The Amazon-owned company announced the Ring Drone Cam on Tuesday, a 165-gram flying indoor security camera that ships to US customers on January 27, 2027 for $249.99. It is the same idea, at nearly the same price, that Amazon showed as the Always Home Cam in September 2020, promised for 2021, offered by invitation in 2021, and never shipped.

The drone launches alongside the Ring Rover Cam, a $999.99 wheeled security robot for businesses, under a new Ring Robotics label. Both run on what Ring calls AI Pilot, which maps a building, suggests patrol points and flies or drives to them on a schedule or when another Ring device trips an alarm. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff presented both at a media event in New York.

Amazon’s announcement offers an email sign-up for the Drone Cam rather than a preorder. Amazon’s announcement carries the standard notice that the drone has not yet been authorized under Federal Communications Commission rules and can’t be sold until it is. Since December 2025, those rules have blocked new authorizations for foreign-produced drones and drone components unless they qualify for an exemption.

Ring Rover Cam (left) in an office and Ring Drone Cam (right) in a home. Image credit: Amazon / Ring

Ring Rebuilt The Drone Around The Cloud After Scrapping Two Designs

Ring started over about a year ago. Siminoff told The Verge the company had worked on the drone since 2016 and nearly shipped two earlier models. The new design carries little onboard sensing, and moving its brains to the cloud is how Siminoff says Ring got it under $250.

Siminoff described the earlier attempts to Bloomberg as “a vicious cycle.” Each added sensor or processor needed a bigger battery, the extra weight needed stronger rotors, and flight stability got worse. The last version DroneXL covered was the CES 2023 demo, which The Verge’s reporter says was about four times the size of the new drone.

The trade-off is the internet connection. The Verge reports that without Wi-Fi the Drone Cam can do little beyond landing. Bloomberg says an unconnected unit can still take off and land safely. Ring rates it at five to eight minutes of flight, and every minute in the air costs eight minutes on the dock, so a five-minute patrol needs about 40 minutes to recharge.

The Drone Cam records 2K video with a 148-degree field of view, and two LED lights switch on in low light. Owners set it up by carrying the drone through the house so it can build a floor plan. It works with Ring’s existing cameras, doorbells, sensors and alarms, and with Amazon’s new Alexa Home Map. The camera is off while docked, an LED shows when it records, and video uses Ring’s Throw Away the Key encryption (TAKE). Amazon’s release says the propellers “aren’t quiet,” and Ring is pitching the noise as a deterrent. A compatible Ring Protect plan is required for scheduled flights, and Amazon’s announcement doesn’t name the plan or its price.

Siminoff told CNBC that Ring has put “guardrails in there to make it so it doesn’t fly outside.” Journalists at the preview watched preproduction units fly preset routes but were not allowed to control them, according to Bloomberg.

Ring Rover Cam Is Amazon’s Astro Rebuilt As A Business Security Robot

The $999.99 Rover Cam ships December 16. Preorders are open on Amazon. It is a security version of Amazon’s Astro home robot, with a periscope camera on an adjustable mast, a siren, two-way audio, 4K recording while it moves and person detection while docked.

The Ring Rover Cam with its periscope camera raised. Photo credit: Amazon / Ring

Bloomberg reports it patrols for up to 30 minutes and covers up to 5,000 square feet. Amazon’s release says the Rover grew out of Astro owners’ feedback, and Siminoff told Bloomberg most of the hardware is unchanged. The new piece is a light tower that projects a ring onto the ceiling so staff can see where the robot is. Amazon has tried this market before. It discontinued Astro for Business in July 2024, and those robots stopped working that September.

Ring Says The Drone Cam Is Assembled In The US As It Seeks FCC Approval

The Drone Cam needs an FCC grant under a rule that, since December 22, 2025, has covered drones and critical components produced in a foreign country, unless an exemption applies. Siminoff told The Verge the drone “does comply with” FCC regulations and is assembled in the US.

Ring told The Verge its FCC certification is in process, and the outlet notes that new gadgets routinely go through it before launch. CNBC reports the January ship date is pending FCC approval.

The same rule is why no new DJI aircraft can be certified for the US. The determination the FCC adopted lists flight controllers, navigation systems, batteries, motors, and sensors and cameras among critical components, and says the list is not exhaustive. Under the FCC’s guidance, a drone assembled in the US that contains foreign parts still qualifies if it is on the Blue UAS list or meets the Buy America standard of at least 65 percent domestic component value, exemptions now extended to January 1, 2028. Amazon’s announcement and the Verge, Bloomberg and CNBC reports do not say where the Drone Cam’s components are made or which path Ring is using.

The FCC has also shown it will pull a grant it later decides was issued in error. In August it told DroneXL the HOVERAir VERSA’s certification was granted in error, directed the company to stop sales, and said it was sending guidance to every certification body to strengthen its Covered List due diligence. Nothing in the public record suggests a problem with Ring’s application. The rule also leaves a door open: the Department of War or Homeland Security can clear a specific drone, class of drones or component, as the Department of War did in January for Blue UAS-listed hardware and Buy America products.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon’s drones run late, and Ring’s is no exception. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes in December 2013 that drone delivery could be four or five years away. Nearly 13 years later, Prime Air flies in 13 US metros by DroneXL’s count, and Amazon paused deliveries twice in 2025. Ring showed its home drone in 2020 for a 2021 launch, and the new version is due January 27, 2027. I’d rather Amazon ship flying hardware late than ship it broken, and by Siminoff’s account, Ring dropping two designs it nearly shipped counts in its favor.

Ring should tell buyers where the Drone Cam’s parts are made, beyond the final assembly Siminoff says happens in the US. If Ring is relying on the 65 percent domestic-content test, it should say which components come from where and show the numbers. If it needs a Department of War or DHS exemption, that’s fine too, as long as the same path is open to every other drone maker. My read is that how the FCC handles a 165-gram Amazon camera will tell hobbyists whether the Covered List is applied the same way to every company. If the Drone Cam ships on January 27, a grant has to exist first, and it will be listed in the FCC’s public equipment authorization database, where anyone can look it up.

Sources: Amazon, Bloomberg, The Verge, CNBC, CBS 60 Minutes

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

Skydio CEO Adam Bry Says Skydio Will Outsell DJI in the US This Year

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 03:05:00 GMT

Skydio CEO Adam Bry says his company will do more sales to US civilian customers than DJI this year, calling it “a pretty staggering fact” in an hour-long interview with Ti Morse’s Relentless channel published November 8, 2026. Bry recorded it inside Skydio’s factory, which he says will triple its output this year.

Bry also said DJI has copied “a huge number” of the things Skydio does, and that a battery-swapping dock adds value only “if it’s free and it’s perfectly reliable.” DJI launched its first battery-swapping dock, Dock 4, on October 14.

Bry Says Skydio Wins on Professional Sales Against a DJI That Still Sells Here

Bry’s claim covers US civilian sales only, and he says it rests on “the best available public data” about DJI plus Skydio’s own numbers. He stressed that DJI still sells drones in the US and competes with Skydio head-to-head, even though it cannot launch new models here.

He did not say which public data he used, or give a dollar or unit figure for either company. DJI, a private company, does not publish US sales figures.

Bry opened the interview by correcting his host, who said DJI cannot sell in the US. “This is not broadly understood,” he said. The FCC added DJI and all foreign-made drones to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, which blocks new FCC authorizations while leaving older models on sale. That is why the Dock 4 and Matrice 5TD launched in October with radio approvals listed for Canada, Europe, China and Japan, and none for the FCC.

Bry gave three reasons for Skydio’s lead. Skydio has “basically zero” consumer sales and, as he understands it, most of DJI’s revenue is consumer, so the comparison is fought on professional ground. He said Skydio benefits from an “overwhelming preference” among its customers to buy American. And he credited the shift from hand-flown drones to dock-based systems, which Skydio began investing in heavily around 2021, when there was no market for docks and the company was, in his words, “wildly unprofitable.”

Bry Says DJI Copied Skydio. Skydio Showed a Dock First, DJI Had Vision First

Bry said DJI copied Skydio’s fisheye, computer-vision-centric drone design, and that Skydio showed a dock before DJI announced one. The dock dates hold up. Skydio unveiled its Skydio 2 Dock in October 2019, and DJI announced its first Dock in March 2022.

Bry was mild about it. DJI products “kind of look similar today,” he said, adding, “that’s just the way it goes.” Neither company reached market much ahead of the other. Skydio’s 2019 dock led to the Skydio Dock and Dock Lite, launched in December 2022. DJI slated its first Dock, unveiled with the Matrice 30, for sale from the fourth quarter of 2022.

The vision claim holds up less well. DJI’s Phantom 4, launched March 1, 2016, was billed by DJI as the first consumer quadcopter camera to use “highly advanced computer vision and sensing technology,” which it used to sense and steer around obstacles. Skydio’s first drone, the R1, shipped two years later. Skydio pushed vision-based autonomy much further with its fisheye navigation cameras, but DJI was selling a drone that steered by computer vision first.

Bry’s verdict on the R1 itself was unsparing: “technology marvel but commercial failure.”

Bry Says Battery Swapping Costs Reliability, and DJI’s Dock 4 Bets Otherwise

Ti Morse recounted an off-camera meeting where, by his account, Bry said swapping would add about 5% to flight time in few of Skydio’s use cases. On camera, Bry said swapping adds some value “if it’s free and it’s perfectly reliable,” but the extra mechanism costs money and reliability.

Morse said several companies, “I think DJI included,” are building such docks. Bry did not mention Dock 4. DJI’s Dock 4 swaps the Matrice 5TD’s battery in 25 seconds and turns the aircraft around from landing to takeoff in 45, with a Task Relay mode that alternates two aircraft over one scene. Skydio’s F10 MegaDock handles continuous coverage with more aircraft instead: it holds up to five fixed-wing drones and keeps three in the air while two charge.

Skydio’s customers outside the military fly about 40,000 flights a week, Bry said, a number doubling year over year. The interview cites no published data behind the battery-swap estimate, so it can’t be checked from outside Skydio. US police departments can’t test the other approach either, because Dock 4 has no FCC authorization.

China’s Sanctions Cost Skydio Batteries, and Bry Says It Gained Flight Time

Bry said Chinese officials shut down Skydio’s battery supplier and seized its equipment on the day of the October 2024 sanctions, cutting Skydio to one battery per drone. Replacement cells sourced from the US and allied countries added “a couple minutes in flight time,” he said.

DroneXL reported the battery rationing in October 2024, with Dongguan Poweramp as Skydio’s sole battery supplier. Bry also disclosed an internal split. One camp at Skydio wanted to work with the US government to “get some relief here and maybe broker some kind of deal.” Bry said he took the other side, treating the sanctions as a reason to cut China out faster.

He called Skydio’s supply chain, now at what he described as zero China dependence, “still a kind of fragile endeavor.” Skydio plans to spend about $1 billion with US suppliers over five years, part of the $3.5 billion US investment it announced in April.

DroneXL’s Take

Bry said the rise of OpenAI and Anthropic has been great for Google, because a real rival forced it to focus. He wants Skydio “to be winning against the best,” whether or not DJI can sell in the US. I agree, and it’s the best line in the interview.

It’s also why the US sales claim tells us less than Bry thinks. By his own account Skydio is beating the best in a market where the best can’t ship its new hardware, while DJI’s battery-swapping Dock 4 is already being tested by Polish mountain rescuers. Morse opened the interview by recalling Bry’s talk of expanding overseas faster to meet DJI head-to-head. That’s the scoreboard I’d watch, because outside the US both companies are selling their newest drones.

Source: Relentless, “Outcompeting DJI | Adam Bry, Skydio” (YouTube, November 8, 2026), Skydio, DJI, FCC.

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

FAA Touts 2.2 Million UTM Drone Flights at AUVSI. Part 108 Still Waits

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 02:33:00 GMT

The FAA told AUVSI’s Drone & AAM Policy Symposium in Washington this week that drone traffic management is no longer an experiment. Jessica Jones, executive director of the agency’s Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, said 2.2 million flights have gone through strategic deconfliction under UAS Traffic Management (UTM) since January.

Acting Deputy Administrator Liam McKenna, the Day 1 keynote at Nationals Park, said the FAA has started looking at how it certifies aircraft and how it writes rules. The two-day event, which also produced a new AUVSI CEO, closed on Tuesday, November 10.

Neither official gave a date for Part 108, the rule that would make beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight routine, beyond the message that action would come soon. Congress set December 7 as its deadline.

FAA Says UTM Already Runs at Scale Before Any BVLOS Rule

Jones presented the 2.2 million deconflicted flights as proof that drone integration has moved past research, according to Autonomy Global’s report from the room. “UTM is here and it’s now,” she said. The report does not say which operators or programs the figure covers.

Jones also said the agency has seen too little data sharing because developers test in isolation, and she asked them to bring the FAA in early and use its test sites. Two of those sites, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Indiana, were added in January, the first new designations in nearly a decade. McKenna made the same pitch to counter-drone makers when he described the interagency counter-UAS agreement on stage, the day DHS announced it.

NASA’s Parimal “PK” Kopardekar, who shared the stage, described wildfire research that takes the agency’s UTM work into portable airspace management. The aim is to let responders plan and deconflict drone flights around the clock, including when smoke or darkness limits conventional aerial operations, and NASA plans to move the technology toward broader use by states and industry.

McKenna Opens a Type Certification Rethink With No Timetable

McKenna said the FAA has begun examining changes to aircraft type certification. Neither safety nor innovation, he argued, justifies “a process that takes this long that is this cumbersome.” The work is early: he announced no reform package and no timetable, and asked industry for feedback, especially on eVTOL.

He also listed rulemaking changes under consideration. They include shorter rules, a faster path from concept to publication, artificial intelligence to help with research and comment review, and more transparency between a proposed rule and the final version.

None of that touches the rules already in the pipeline: Part 108, Part 149 and the Section 2209 limits on drone flights over critical infrastructure. Officials put no date on any of them.

Part 108 Has Sat at the White House Since July 10

The final Part 108 rule, titled “Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations,” is still listed as pending at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The OIRA review list dated November 10 shows it received on July 10 with a statutory deadline.

While the rule sits there, its publication date is a White House call as much as an FAA one. The statutory deadline is December 7, 16 months after the August 2025 proposal, as set by the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act. The long-range approval the FAA announced on Monday, the Skyways flight from a Shell facility to a Gulf platform, came through a Section 927 waiver, one operator at a time, because Part 108 does not exist yet.

The FAA’s own $12 million research round for its test sites, announced in October, is also meant to generate data for a rule that has not been published.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA brought the best argument for Part 108 to AUVSI itself, and then left it on the stage. If 2.2 million flights have been deconflicted through UTM this year, the agency is telling industry that the airspace management Part 108 depends on already works, and operators flying waiver to waiver should not have to wait on a White House desk to use it. I’m glad McKenna is questioning how long type certification takes, and his own words concede the process is slow. But a certification rethink with no timetable is a promise, and Part 108 is already written and under White House review. The test of this week’s talk about faster rules is December 7. If the rule is not out by then, every number the FAA put on that stage is an argument against the administration’s own delay.

Sources: Autonomy Global, OIRA review list (reginfo.gov), AUVSI symposium program.

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

HOVERAir VERSA Goes On Sale In Europe And Canada, But Not The US

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 23:46:00 GMT

HOVERAir put the VERSA on sale today, November 10, through its own web stores, Amazon and retail partners. The 2-in-1 camera costs €499 (£429) on its own, and the FlySmart bundle that adds the clip-on Flight Kit costs €599 (£519). HOVERAir’s price list also covers Australia and its Canadian store.

The United States is not on that list. A US visitor who clicks Shop on hoverair.com is sent to HOVERAir’s global store, set to Canada, and the company’s own price sheet says “VERSA is currently not available in the US.”

VERSA Packs A Flying Camera Into A 163-Gram Handheld

In handheld mode the VERSA weighs 163 grams and shoots 4K at 60 frames per second on a 1/1.3-inch sensor through a 3-axis mechanical gimbal. Snapping on the 67-gram Flight Kit turns it into a 230-gram self-flying camera rated for 14 minutes in the air.

Without the Flight Kit, the VERSA is a pocket gimbal camera with a flip screen. Photo credit: HOVERAir

Co-founder MQ Wang, in a background interview HOVERAir sent out with its launch kit, spends much of it on the joint between the two halves. The patent-pending MagLatch mount went through 5,000 attach cycles plus vibration, pull and torsion tests so the propeller cages stay attached at up to 22 mph (36 km/h) and in Level 5 winds. The pogo pins, rated for up to 5 amps, took nearly two years of custom work.

The VERSA camera docks into the Flight Kit through HOVERAir's MagLatch mount and its pogo-pin power contacts. Photo credit: HOVERAir

The camera runs on a 4-nanometer chip with no fan. It cools passively in the hand and from propeller airflow in flight, which Wang says keeps fan noise off the built-in microphone. A 2,070 mAh swappable battery covers both modes, good for up to three hours of handheld recording or one 14-minute flight. HOVERAir rates the sensor at up to 17.5 stops of dynamic range, a figure from its own spec sheet, and its 3D Worlds mode flies a 360-degree path to build a scene with Gaussian splatting.

Wang’s case for the product is that most people don’t want to become drone pilots, they want the aerial perspective. The VERSA puts that idea inside a camera people carry whether they plan to fly or not.

The FCC Said In August That Even The Camera Alone Is Covered

HOVERAir’s price sheet does not give a reason. In August, the FCC set aside the VERSA’s equipment authorization days after Indiegogo pre-orders opened. It said the camera alone is a prohibited UAS critical component under its Covered List and the camera with the Flight Kit is a foreign-made drone.

DroneXL initially reported on August 18 that the VERSA had cleared the FCC, based on HOVERAir’s statement and a grant that appeared in the agency’s database. ZeroZero Robotics had sought authorization for the camera alone, with the propeller cages treated as an accessory. The FCC then told DroneXL the grant was issued in error, that selling the device in the US is “a violation of U.S. law,” and that it was weighing further action against HOVERAir for an apparently willful violation. The rule behind it is the FCC’s December 22, 2025 decision to add all foreign-produced drones and their critical components to the Covered List. After the VERSA case, the FCC said it was sending guidance to all Telecommunications Certification Bodies, the private labs that issue grants, to strengthen their screening.

When DroneXL checked the global store from a US connection on November 10, it showed Canadian pricing in US dollars: $539 for the camera and $649 for the FlySmart bundle. Its country selector had no US option, and the price sheet’s footnote says the USD prices apply to the Canadian store only.

The Indiegogo campaign now says shipping is underway and most orders were expected out by the end of October. Backers can request a refund through HOVERAir’s customer support until their order ships. As of November 10, the campaign page does not mention US backers. The VERSA is the second HOVERAir product this year, after the waterproof AQUA in May, to go on retail sale without the US.

DroneXL’s Take

Calling the Flight Kit a drone is the Covered List doing exactly what it says, and in my view HOVERAir earned the August reversal by certifying the camera alone. The camera half is harder to defend. As I read the FCC’s statement, the only thing making a 163-gram handheld gimbal a drone part is the kit it docks into, so an optional accessory keeps it off US shelves. American buyers already watched DJI’s Osmo Pocket 4P launch without them in July because DJI itself is on the Covered List. The FCC’s published test asks whether a part is designed and intended primarily for drone use, and its VERSA statement never explained how a handheld camera meets it. I think the agency owes manufacturers that explanation in writing, because right now nobody building a camera with an optional flight module can be sure it is legal to sell here.

Sources: HOVERAir launch release and 2026 price overview, HOVERAir VERSA specifications, HOVERAir background interview with MQ Wang, HOVERAir, Indiegogo, FCC spokesperson statement provided to DroneXL in August 2026

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

FAA Clears First Coast-to-Gulf BVLOS Flight for Skyways and Shell

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 23:06:00 GMT

The FAA said on Monday, November 9, that it has issued its first authorization for a drone to fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight from the U.S. coastline out over the Gulf. The operator is Skyways, the Austin, Texas company that flew cargo to a Baltic Sea wind farm for RWE last year.

Skyways will fly its autonomous V2 vertical takeoff and landing aircraft from a Shell Pipeline Company facility in Gibson, Louisiana, to a Shell platform in the Gulf. On the way out it will inspect a pipeline right-of-way. At the platform it will fly a simulated equipment delivery. The FAA approved it as a Section 927 waiver, not under the BVLOS rule the industry is still waiting for.

Skyways says it expects the approval to lead to regular inspections and paid cargo runs across the Gulf. The FAA’s announcement describes a single flight with a simulated delivery, and neither release gives a date or a distance for it.

Section 927 Lets the FAA Approve Gulf Flights Before Part 108 Is Final

Section 927 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 lets the agency approve some drone operations by waiver instead of rulemaking or an exemption. The FAA applies its exemption safety test, but a Section 927 applicant does not have to show the relief is in the public interest.

The FAA’s Section 927 waiver page spells out the over-water route. The agency says it is considering near-term approvals for operations more than 12 nautical miles from the United States, as long as they stay out of another country’s territorial airspace and meet the Section 927 criteria. Skyways describes its own waiver as covering flights from the U.S. coastline over the high seas.

Part 108, the FAA’s rule for routine BVLOS flight, is still not final and has sat at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs since July 10. The 2024 Reauthorization Act gave the agency 16 months from its August 7, 2025 proposal to finish it, which runs out on December 7. Until then, every long-range flight like this one is a one-at-a-time approval. The White House framed this one as a preview anyway. Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in the FAA’s announcement that the administration wants a future where “advanced drone operations are routine.”

Skyways V2 Combines Electric Lift With a Heavy-Fuel Cruise Engine

The V2 takes off and lands on electric motors, then switches to a heavy-fuel engine for cruise, according to Skyways’ announcement. It flies on satellite-based command and control, so the link does not depend on line-of-sight radio. Skyways plans and monitors missions through its own SkyNav software.

Skyways V2 in flight over water. Photo credit: Skyways

Skyways puts its record at 3,500 autonomous flights and about 90,000 kilometers (roughly 56,000 miles) flown for customers that include the U.S. Navy, Japan’s Ministry of Defense, DSV, Skyports Drone Services and All Nippon Airways. Those are the company’s own totals. When the Austin American-Statesman profiled the company in February, Skyways said the V2 carries 30 pounds over 450 miles.

CEO Charles Acknin said the approval “opens up a much larger operating envelope for us in the US.” Its Arkona flights in Germany ran about 50 miles round trip from a port base. Europe has flown shore-launched offshore missions as well. In October, Glasgow’s Airspection announced beach-launched BVLOS flights to a Liverpool Bay wind farm inside the UK CAA’s BVLOS sandbox, an 8.7-mile round trip.

Shell Already Runs Its Own Drone Flights From Gulf Platforms

In September, the Journal of Petroleum Technology reported that Shell had become the first Gulf operator with FAA approval to self-authorize BVLOS drone flights from any of its Gulf facilities. Its team ran 44 drone-in-a-box flights from the Mars platform in April.

Those flights launch from the platform itself, while the FAA’s first covers a flight that starts on the coast. Skyways says Shell Pipeline Company already works with it on pipeline right-of-way inspection across the Gulf. Shell Pipeline Company president Wesley Stewart said the waiver will help “streamline offshore inspections, maintenance and logistics.”

Ross Doak, Shell’s senior robotics engineer, told JPT the company has been testing DJI and Skydio drones for its platform program. DJI’s is the most common system in use inside Shell, and the team is still building trust in the Skydio. He told the journal: “We’ve got very high confidence in the DJI system.” The aircraft on this waiver is built by Skyways in Austin, but the FAA headlined its release “American drone dominance” for a customer whose most common drone is a DJI.

DroneXL’s Take

Section 927 is the most useful tool the FAA has handed long-range drone operators this year, in my view, and this approval shows why. Skyways and Shell brought an aircraft with a flight record and a concrete mission, and they got a yes without waiting for Part 108 to clear the White House. That is how BVLOS should work while the rule is stuck. But one demonstration flight with a simulated delivery is not a Gulf drone network. Skyways says paid cargo comes next, and neither release says this waiver covers it. If Part 108 misses its December 7 deadline, I want to see the FAA issue these waivers by the dozen, because operators should not have to wait on OIRA to fly over open water.

Sources: FAA, Skyways, FAA Section 927 waiver guidance, Journal of Petroleum Technology.

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

AutoPylot Maps Nearly 2,000 Local Drone Rules That LAANC Doesn't Cover

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 22:33:00 GMT

AutoPylot, one of the FAA-approved providers of B4UFLY and LAANC, has put local drone rules on its flight map. The feature, called Pilot Reports, opened to every pilot in all 50 states on November 9 in the free AutoPylot app, on phones and on the web. It starts with nearly 2,000 local rules. Pilots can view them without an account and need one only to add a rule.

Federal data stops at the airspace. A pilot can hold a valid LAANC authorization and still be breaking a city ordinance, a state park order, or the sign at a trailhead, because none of those appear in FAA data. DroneXL has covered that gap in Raleigh’s park rules and in the ordinance Olathe, Kansas pulled after a local pilot pushed back.

AutoPylot already had a list of every local drone ordinance it could find, linked from its pre-flight checklist. Pilots have opened it close to 100,000 times.

AutoPylot Opened the Map to Pilots Because Its Own List Never Caught Up

AutoPylot’s ordinance list was a static help article that was never complete and sat outside the map pilots plan on. Pilot Reports moves those rules onto the flight map and opens it to submissions, so pilots can add rules the company missed, including posted signs.

In its Pilot Reports announcement, AutoPylot says local rules are spread across thousands of separate municipal websites, often in code sections that never mention drones by name. Founder Tauty Shalna, in a message to DroneXL, called Pilot Reports “Waze, but for local airspace regulations instead of traffic.”

Pilots can file three kinds of report. A Posted Sign needs a photo and one line of description. A Rule or Permit needs the rule text and a source. A Pilot Spot marks a place where pilots fly and makes no claim about whether flying there is allowed. Each submission gets a boundary (the single spot, a park or property, a whole town, a county or a state) and a pin the pilot drags into place, with optional links or photos as evidence.

The Pilot Reports flow, from a local rule on the flight map to a pilot's own submission. Image credit: AutoPylot

Pilot Reports Separates Rules That Apply From Rules That Might

Pilot Reports marks a rule as applying when it covers the whole area a pilot is planning in, such as a city ordinance for the entire municipality. A rule covering only that city’s parks or beaches shows as possibly affecting the flight, because the pilot may not be in one.

AutoPylot reviews every submission before other pilots see it, usually within 48 hours. Until then, only the pilot who filed a report can see it. Once approved, it shows up for anyone planning a flight within one mile, and the submitter learns how many pilots it reached.

Every rule card carries its source. Pilots can mark a rule as still accurate or out of date with a single tap, which AutoPylot expects to be the most common way pilots contribute. The nearly 2,000 rules on the map so far came from the company’s own research and from pilots during a beta that Shalna says started a few weeks ago.

A rule marker, the Local rules nearby header and the rule card at Strands Beach in Dana Point, California. Image credit: AutoPylot

DroneXL’s Take

I’d tell pilots to tap the source link on every card before anything else. A lot of local “drone laws” govern the ground, where a city can legitimately control takeoffs and landings on its own property, and some reach for the airspace, which belongs to the FAA. Raleigh’s park guidelines restated federal flight rules as if they were city rules. Showing the source, and marking a parks-only rule as one that might not apply, lets a pilot read the actual text and decide what it covers. When the University of Alabama repeated its game-day drone ban at Bryant-Denny Stadium, I pointed readers to B4UFLY or AutoPylot for the stadium flight restriction, and neither would have told them about a sign at a trailhead. A park ranger writing a ticket doesn’t care about your LAANC approval. Check the local layer before you drive out.

Sources: AutoPylot, FAA B4UFLY

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

AUVSI Hands CEO Job To Counter-Drone Executive Brett Feddersen

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:59:00 GMT

The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) has named Brett Feddersen its president and CEO, effective December 1. Feddersen comes from counter-drone company D-Fend Solutions, where he was vice president of strategy and government affairs, and he moves into the job from a seat on AUVSI’s own board.

He replaces Michael Robbins, who left for the Semiconductor Industry Association at the end of September. Chief operating officer Heather Lee has run the association as interim CEO since October 1. AUVSI announced the pick on Monday, the opening day of its Drone & AAM Policy Symposium in Washington.

The announcement says AUVSI under Feddersen will push autonomous systems into routine, scaled deployment, with dual-use programs, domestic and allied manufacturing, and advanced air mobility on the list. It does not mention the FCC Covered List, which has kept new foreign-made drones off the U.S. market since December 2025.

Feddersen Spent Most Of His Career On Drone Security

Feddersen’s resume is almost entirely security work. AUVSI lists Pennsylvania State Trooper and helicopter pilot, Army lieutenant colonel, White House director for transportation and border security, and executive director for national security programs at the FAA. The association says he wrote the national framework for mitigating drone threats.

DroneXL first wrote about him in 2020, when he joined AccelerātUM, a group of former FAA executives set up to speed up drone operations. That article credited his federal work with promoting the drone industry’s economic competitiveness as well as countering drone threats. He then went to D-Fend, whose EnforceAir system takes over a drone’s control link and lands it. Motorola Solutions agreed to buy D-Fend for $1.5 billion in June and closed the deal on August 20, so Feddersen arrives at AUVSI from a Motorola company.

In September 2025 he testified to the House Judiciary crime subcommittee as D-Fend’s vice president and as chair of the Security Industry Association’s drone security subcommittee. He asked Congress to give detect-and-track authority to state and local police and to trained security staff at critical infrastructure, and to expand the 2018 federal mitigation pilot to the same groups. Three months later Congress handed trained state and local police some of that authority in the FY2026 NDAA.

Brett Feddersen becomes AUVSI president and CEO on December 1. Photo credit: AUVSI

Feddersen Told Congress Drones Should Stay Aircraft Under The Law

At the same September 2025 hearing, Feddersen defended the federal framework drone pilots fly under. Rep. Brad Knott (R-N.C.) said a drone is not an airplane and asked about a facility-specific code for unmanned aircraft. Feddersen disagreed and said the aircraft designation gives operators more protection.

“Aircraft is the right designation for that,” he told the subcommittee, according to the official hearing transcript. He also pushed back on the idea that only federal agents can be trusted with counter-drone gear, citing his years as a trooper.

The same hearing shows where his security instincts point. Asked by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) whether China may have had a hand in drone activity around U.S. military sites, Feddersen said yes and called drones a tool for criminal networks and foreign adversaries. None of his answers that day took a position on DJI or the Covered List.

AUVSI’s Announcement Names Inspectors And Responders, Not Their Fleets

Feddersen’s statement names the people who fly for a living: a commercial drone inspecting energy grids and a first responder deploying a life-saving system. It says AUVSI members need technology that is “safe, certifiable and secure.” It says nothing about the hardware those operators already own.

That gap is what the Drone Service Providers Alliance asked the board to close. In August DSPA called on AUVSI to reset after Robbins, judging drones on measurable risk instead of country of origin. Robbins had welcomed the FCC’s December action within hours and defended the broader version in May at XPONENTIAL Detroit, where DroneXL was in the room. In the October announcement of this week’s symposium, Lee said that restrictions protect the industry and strategy is what builds it.

The next fight lands on those fleets directly. The FCC is still weighing a ban on imports and sales of previously authorized foreign thermal, LiDAR, spray and docking drones, senior national security counsel Adam Chan said on a podcast published October 30. In the comment record, 1,686 of the 1,701 filings that answered the FCC’s economic-impact question described severe harm.

DroneXL’s Take

I’m carefully hopeful about Feddersen. A former trooper who tells Congress that drones belong under the aircraft rules, and that local police can be trusted with the same tools as the FBI, sounds to me like someone who knows most people flying drones in this country are doing a job. That is a better starting point for operators than the manufacturing-first case AUVSI made in Washington under Robbins.

I’m less sure about where he has spent his career. He comes from the detect-and-defeat side, and his last employer sells drone takeover systems to federal agencies and, through Motorola, to police. AUVSI already speaks fluent threat. Drone service providers need it to tell the FCC that a surveyor’s or a fire department’s existing fleet is not a national security problem until someone shows it is. If AUVSI says that while the thermal and spray drone ban is still on the FCC’s desk, DSPA got the reset it asked for in August.

Sources: AUVSI announcement, November 9, 2026; Motorola Solutions announcement, August 20, 2026; House Judiciary subcommittee hearing transcript, September 16, 2025.

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

China's GJ-11 Stealth Drone Lost Its Target in Cloud, Then Hit It

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 01:03:00 GMT

China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired new footage of the GJ-11 stealth combat drone on Monday, including the first close-up look at its internal weapon bays. The report ran as part of CCTV’s countdown to the 77th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) on Wednesday.

CCTV also said the flying-wing drone hit its target in its first live-fire test, after thick cloud nearly kept it from finding that target. The broadcaster did not say when the test took place or which weapon the GJ-11 fired.

GJ-11 Footage Shows Serrated Bay Doors Built for Stealth

Serrated edges run along the doors of the GJ-11’s internal weapon bays, the detail the new footage shows most clearly. The South China Morning Post, which reported the footage on Monday, said the design suggests the drone can carry relatively large missiles without giving up its stealth.

The Aviationist counts two bays on the underside, set between the main landing gear. The clips also show a shielded jet nozzle and a low-visibility coating. A faceted optical window under the nose looks similar, the Post said, to the electro-optical targeting system on China’s J-20 stealth fighter.

The GJ-11 retracting its landing gear after takeoff, with the shielded exhaust visible on top of the wing. Video still: CCTV

The Aviationist also noted that the landing gear now retracts on camera after takeoff. In the PLAAF’s November 2025 anniversary film, which showed the GJ-11 flying in formation with a J-20 and a J-16D, the gear stayed down.

The GJ-11, short for Gongji-11 or Attack-11, is the air force’s first stealth combat and reconnaissance drone. It is also known as Xuanlong, and Western coverage has long called it Sharp Sword. China unveiled it at the October 2019 parade for the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic, and the Post says it entered service no later than 2025.

CCTV Says the GJ-11 Scouts and Strikes for Crewed Fighters

According to CCTV, the GJ-11 has operated in coordination with another drone and can also work with crewed aircraft. The broadcaster said the drones can act as “the eyes of crewed fighter jets,” scouting enemy air defenses, drawing fire as decoys, or launching guided munitions on a crewed aircraft’s direction.

The drone’s integrated control station and its operators can be loaded straight onto a military transport aircraft and moved where they are needed, CCTV said.

The GJ-11 is also going to sea. Chinese state media reported on October 30 that the GJ-21, the GJ-11’s carrier-based variant, had taken off from and landed aboard the Sichuan, China’s first Type 076 amphibious assault ship. DroneXL reported in 2024 on GJ-11 mockups spotted beside the Type 076 under construction in Shanghai.

GJ-11 Found Its Target Only After Circling Back

Operator Shi Xiaoran told CCTV that the GJ-11 could not find its target through thick cloud on its first run in that live-fire test. The drone circled back for another pass, located the target, launched its weapon and scored a hit on the second attempt, Shi said.

The report said the GJ-11 went through a series of tests at a desert facility in northwestern China. The Post noted that the air force runs a base at Malan in Xinjiang, where several of China’s new drones are believed to have been developed and tested.

US Air Force Fired Its First Drone Wingman Missile in July

The nearest US milestone came in July. On July 15 the Air Force said Anduril’s YFQ-44A had fired an AIM-120 AMRAAM at a digital target over California’s Mojave Desert, with a human operator ordering the shot. Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach declined to share more, citing operational security.

Anduril said the drone flew from Edwards Air Force Base and told Breaking Defense the test was an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike, with its Lattice software feeding the target track to the drone. The YFQ-44A first flew on October 31, 2025. General Atomics said in July that it was on schedule to fire from the internal bay of its YFQ-42A later this year. Both Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) designs got the green light for production in June, and the Air Force says they cost about a third of an F-35A. The Aviationist rates the GJ-11, a large stealth flying wing, closer in class to Lockheed Martin’s Vectis than to either CCA.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d treat the GJ-11 as a weapon the PLA already operates. China has had it in service since at least 2025 and has now taken its navy version to sea on the Sichuan. The cloud story points the same way, because state television had no need to admit that the drone lost its target on the first pass. CCTV gave no date or weapon for the strike, so the hit can’t be checked from outside China, and the Air Force held back further details of its own YFQ-44A shot for operational security as well. American planners should read that fumbled first pass as a sign the GJ-11 is past the demo stage, and plan for it on that basis.

Sources: South China Morning Post, The Aviationist, South China Morning Post on the GJ-21, Breaking Defense, Air & Space Forces Magazine

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

Shield AI Bets $5.3B on Echodyne's Drone Radar at a $28.8B Valuation

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 00:27:00 GMT

Shield AI has agreed to buy Echodyne, the Kirkland, Washington company whose radars sit inside hundreds of counter-drone and security systems in more than 40 countries, in a deal valued at up to $5.3 billion. The San Diego drone and autonomy maker announced the agreement on November 5. It pays $4.8 billion at closing and up to $500 million more if Echodyne hits agreed performance targets, with closing expected in early 2027 once regulators sign off.

To pay for it, Shield AI is raising $2.5 billion, including a $1 billion Series H at a $28.8 billion post-money valuation, up from the $12.7 billion investors put on the company in March. It is Shield AI’s fifth acquisition and its largest. The last time Echodyne raised money at a set price, in 2022, PitchBook valued it at $485 million.

Shield AI Is Paying for Echodyne With a $2.5 Billion Raise

Shield AI’s announcement splits the $2.5 billion three ways: the $1 billion Series H, a $1 billion structured equity investment from funds managed by Blackstone, and $500 million in debt arranged by JPMorgan Chase. Series H money goes principally to the acquisition.

Disruptive and Innovation X Capital co-lead the Series H, and Advent and JPMorgan’s Security and Resiliency Initiative are back in it. Those two led Shield AI’s $1.5 billion Series G in March, and Blackstone funds bought $500 million of preferred equity alongside that round. The new valuation is about 2.3 times the March one, set less than eight months later. The financing won’t go through if the acquisition falls apart, according to the companies. Shield AI’s November announcement also drops the “AI” and calls the company simply Shield.

Echodyne Keeps Its Team and Its Washington Factory

Echodyne keeps running as it does today. CEO Eben Frankenberg will report directly to Shield AI CEO Gary Steele and keep responsibility for Echodyne’s products and its customers. Its radars stay on sale as standalone products, and Shield AI says no Echodyne layoffs or relocations are planned.

The deal also puts more of Shield AI in the Seattle area. Echodyne opened a $40 million, 86,350-square-foot factory in Woodinville, Washington, in July, built to produce about 30,000 radars a year. Shield AI picked Washington in September as the production home of X-BAT, the vertical-landing jet drone the Navy put $50 million behind in August. The combined company will have about 2,700 employees.

Echodyne Grew Into a Profitable Counter-Drone Supplier

Shield AI is paying more than ten times Echodyne’s 2022 valuation for a radar maker that counter-drone demand has made profitable, according to early investor Madrona. Echodyne has raised only about $200 million in total, and its headcount grew from 260 in July to about 400.

The biggest recent order came in September, when the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 awarded Echodyne a contract with a $250 million ceiling to supply counter-drone radar to US and allied forces over 36 months. Both companies say they expect triple-digit revenue growth this fiscal year.

The radars use Echodyne’s patented Metamaterials Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) design, a solid-state flat panel that Echodyne says is built from standard materials and processes to cut the unit cost of high-performance radar. Integrators mount them on remote weapon stations and on directed-energy weapons such as high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves, and use them to cue interceptors toward incoming drones. When DroneXL covered Echodyne’s role in a $490 million Air Force counter-drone program in June, its EchoShield radar was a primary radar inside Trust Automation’s base-defense system.

Echodyne radars mounted on US military Joint Light Tactical Vehicles. Photo credit: Echodyne

Shield AI has so far served only government end users, Steele told Bloomberg, as GeekWire reported. Echodyne brings civilian customers too. Stadiums and airports use its radars to spot drones that shouldn’t be there, and police and fire departments use them to fly their own drones safely in shared airspace. BRINC agreed in 2024 to integrate Echodyne radar into its drone-as-first-responder system for flights beyond visual line of sight. Steele named the Super Bowl and FIFA as the kind of market he wants: “every single thing is going to need protection from drones.”

DroneXL’s Take

My read is that the big money in American drones has moved to the sensors. On the day Axon valued Skydio at $5.2 billion, Shield AI agreed to pay more than that for a company whose product finds drones. A year earlier, counter-drone radar maker Chaos Industries raised $510 million at a $4.5 billion valuation. Lasers and interceptors can’t do anything until a radar tells them where to point, and the investors writing these checks have priced that in. Police departments flying drone-as-first-responder programs need Shield AI to keep its promise to sell Echodyne radars on their own, and a factory built for 30,000 radars a year gives it every reason to.

Sources: Shield AI via PR Newswire, Shield AI Series G announcement, GeekWire, Military Times

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

DHS Pact Gives FAA Counter-Drone Review as Hegseth Calls Lasers Safe

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 22:23:00 GMT

Five federal departments have agreed to give the FAA a formal safety review of new counter-drone systems, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Monday. The memorandum of understanding joins DHS with the departments of Transportation, War, Energy and Justice. DHS did not publish its text.

The announcement landed on the day of a counter-drone grant forum at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, where DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton spoke. States have until November 16 to apply for FEMA’s second $250 million counter-drone round, most of which must pass through to local and tribal agencies.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in the same announcement that border deployments have shown high-energy lasers can work safely alongside civilian aviation. In February, two laser engagements in Texas led the FAA to close airspace twice.

The Agreement Puts the FAA’s Safety Review Into Federal Counter-Drone Development

Under the memorandum, the FAA will quickly run safety risk assessments of proposed counter-drone systems and can add its own measures, including airspace restrictions, when it judges the risk too high. The signatories will work with the FAA and the FCC on technical requirements, field testing and data sharing.

The scope covers systems that detect, track, stop or take control of drones, according to the DHS announcement. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agreement “establishes a consistent process” for using that equipment without compromising aviation safety.

The White House Task Force to Restore American Airspace Sovereignty led the agreement. President Trump created it in his June 2025 executive order on drone threats, chaired by the national security adviser or a designee. DHS said the memorandum builds on the drone ban along the entire US-Mexico border and on the FAA’s safety assessment of the War Department’s high-energy laser.

Mullin framed it as border policy that will “help counter cartel drone threats.” FBI Director Kash Patel cited the more than 700 drones seized at this summer’s World Cup by federal agents working with state and local officers trained at the FBI’s counter-drone school. Attorney General Todd Blanche pointed to the five men arrested this summer over an alleged plan to fly explosive drones at a White House event, a case whose criminal complaints describe no finished explosive drone.

Police Buying Jammers With FEMA Money Already Coordinate With the FAA

Since July 1, a local agency taking down a drone has followed a Justice and Homeland Security interim final rule. It routes each operations plan through a federal portal for FAA airspace coordination. Air traffic control must hear within five minutes of mitigation starting.

FEMA’s second round, the other half of the $500 million in the July 2025 reconciliation law, is open to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories. FEMA’s program page describes the money as funding to “detect, identify, track, or monitor” drones. Jammers and takeover systems are allowed only for law enforcement and correctional agencies whose officers are trained, or scheduled for training, at the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center.

The first $250 million went last December to 11 states hosting or supporting World Cup matches and the National Capital Region. This time, state administrative agencies file with FEMA by 5 p.m. Eastern on November 16, with project selection expected December 2 and awards December 10. Local agencies apply through their states, and Kansas, Indiana and Mississippi closed their local windows 10 to 12 days before FEMA’s deadline, as DroneXL reported on November 2. Houston’s city council approved its bid on a 47-item consent agenda last week.

The White House Task Force on the 2028 Summer Olympics hosted Monday’s forum with DRONERESPONDERS and the Commercial Drone Alliance. The event page listed White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka, JIATF 401 director Matthew Ross and FAA acting deputy administrator Liam McKenna among the keynotes. The organizers’ release on Tuesday confirmed that Hamilton spoke and said FEMA briefed attendees on the FY 2027 grant. It does not quote him, and FEMA had published no transcript of his remarks by Tuesday evening. His agency’s October 16 announcement called unlawful drones “a real and growing danger.”

Hegseth’s Safety Claim Rests on an FAA Finding That Came After Two Texas Closures

Hegseth said lasers can be “deployed rapidly and safely alongside civilian aviation,” and the FAA found on April 10 that the lasers posed no increased risk to fliers. It followed two February laser engagements in Texas that closed airspace, canceled 14 flights and destroyed a roughly $30 million CBP drone.

On February 10, CBP fired a Pentagon-owned LOCUST laser near Fort Bliss at what turned out to be party balloons, and the FAA shut down El Paso’s airspace until the White House intervened hours later. On February 26, soldiers near Fort Hancock used the same system to destroy a drone that belonged to CBP. The agencies had argued for months over whether their legal duty to coordinate with the FAA meant asking permission or giving notice, and the April clearance followed a joint test at White Sands Missile Range. The Pentagon now counts more than 300 border drone defeats this year, and only two targets have been identified in public.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA review in this memorandum is what federal agencies should have done in February. Since July, a sheriff’s office that wants to switch on a jammer has had to route its plan through FAA airspace coordination and tell air traffic control within five minutes, under a rule anyone can read.

The departments that fired lasers over El Paso before asking the FAA now have their own version of that discipline, but it lives in a document DHS has not released. I’d accept the April safety finding Hegseth can point to. Calling the border record proof that lasers run safely alongside civilian aviation skips the two closures that forced that finding. DHS should publish the memorandum so pilots can read the federal rules as easily as the ones written for their local police.

Update, November 10, 2026: the forum organizers’ release confirmed that Hamilton spoke. An earlier version of this article said he was billed as a keynote speaker.

Sources: DHS announcement, November 9, 2026, DOJ and DHS interim final rule, 28 CFR Part 124, FEMA C-UAS Grant Program, FEMA press release, October 16, 2026, Countering the Threat forum event page, forum organizers’ release, November 10, 2026, Executive Order 14305.

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

Lewisville Police Drones Flew 1,789 Times. Public Log Now Caught Up

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:32:00 GMT

Update, November 11, 2026: Lewisville has since updated its public DFR dashboard. As of Nov. 11, it lists 2,053 flights, including flights from September through this week and the Oct. 20 chase, so the gap described below no longer exists.

The Lewisville Police Department says its drones flew 1,789 times between Jan. 1 and Nov. 3, about six flights a day. The department’s example of what that buys came on Oct. 20, when one of its drones tracked a man who fled from officers behind a motel to an apartment balcony and guided officers to him, police said.

The North Texas department flies Skydio drones from docks around Lewisville under FAA authorization for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights, according to the department. The department has 19 drones and 15 trained operators, and the program officially launched on May 8.

The department also posts its Drone as First Responder flights on a public dashboard, and the city’s transparency page says those flights update automatically. When I went through the dashboard on Nov. 9, it listed 1,303 flights, and the last of them took off on Sept. 2.

A Lewisville Drone Reached the Motel Call in Under a Minute

The Oct. 20 call started behind a motel, where an officer found a man believed to be wanted and a second officer was sent to help. The drone the department calls DFR 2 launched and reached the scene in less than a minute, police said, the Cross Timbers Gazette reported.

When the man fled on foot, the drone followed him into a nearby apartment complex. Police said he tried to hide on a balcony and change his appearance before officers, guided by the drone, arrested him.

A drone over a foot chase is the same idea Spokane police used in July, when a Skydio X10 took over a vehicle pursuit after the patrol cars backed off.

Lewisville’s Drone Flights Peaked at 389 in July

Lewisville’s public dashboard lists 106 flights before the May 8 launch, then 188 in the rest of May, 289 in June, 389 in July and 322 in August, which works out to nearly 13 flights a day at the July peak.

That curve fits the department’s own description of flights rising through the spring and peaking in the summer. It also explains the six-a-day average: the 1,789 figure starts on Jan. 1 and takes in more than four months before the official launch, when the dashboard logs only those 106 flights.

Dashboard entries list a case number where there is one, usually a purpose such as emergency call for service, search and rescue or training, the flight’s length and whether the drone collected video or photos.

Lewisville’s Public Flight Log Stops at September 2

The 1,789 flights the department reported through Nov. 3 are 486 more than its public dashboard lists. The dashboard, linked from the city’s LPD Transparency page, showed no flight after Sept. 2 when I checked it on Nov. 9, so the Oct. 20 chase is not in it.

Lewisville's DFR dashboard on Nov. 9, filtered to Sept. 1 through Nov. 9: nine flights, all on Sept. 1 and 2, out of 1,303 in the log. Screenshot: DroneXL

According to police, flight activity remained steady through October. If the 486 are simply the flights from Sept. 3 through Nov. 3, that works out to about eight flights a day, a little below the dashboard’s August rate of about 10 a day. The city’s page says DFR flights update automatically and other drone activity monthly, while the dashboard itself says flights are updated monthly. Neither page, as I read them on Nov. 9, explains why nothing after Sept. 2 appears.

The transparency page that links the dashboard is what Police Chief Brook Rollins promised residents at the launch. He told the Gazette in May that the department was launching “a public-facing transparency portal” and publishing its policies so residents could see how the drones are used. The DFR policy is posted on the transparency page.

DroneXL’s Take

Lewisville put its DFR flights on a public map with case numbers attached, which is what I want every department to do, and the Oct. 20 arrest is a good example of what these programs are for. A flight log is only useful while it is current, though, and this one now runs two months behind the department’s own press figures. A resident can read about DFR 2’s chase in the paper and still can’t find that flight in the record the chief promised. Bellingham, Washington, runs the same Skydio dashboard, and when I checked it in October it showed flights from five days earlier. Lewisville should publish on the schedule its own transparency page describes, post its September and October flights, and confirm that they account for the 486-flight difference before it releases its next set of numbers.

Sources: Cross Timbers Gazette (November 8, 2026), Cross Timbers Gazette (May 12, 2026), City of Lewisville LPD Transparency page, Lewisville Police Department DFR flight dashboard.

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

Colombia Blames ELN for Drone Strike a Week After US Reapers Debut

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 11:59:00 GMT

Explosive-laden drones hit the Colombian Army’s compound in Santa Rosa del Sur, a gold-mining town in southern Bolívar department, around midday on Saturday, November 7. Three soldiers died and 16 were seriously wounded. Defense Minister Jorge Mora pointed to the National Liberation Army, the cocaine-trafficking guerrilla group known by its Spanish initials, ELN.

The attack came as the United States helps both Colombia and Venezuela go after that group. On October 30, according to The New York Times, US-supplied drones and intelligence helped Venezuela’s military bomb an ELN camp across the border. The next day, President Abelardo De La Espriella watched three MQ-9A Reapers that Washington is lending Colombia fly over the Tolemaida military base. Mora linked Saturday’s strike to an arrest made in Santa Rosa del Sur the day before.

Colombia’s Defense Minister Links the Attack to an ELN Finance Leader’s Arrest

Mora said the attack appeared to be the ELN’s response to the capture of Leivis Enrique Valero Castillo, alias Carrito, whom the government accuses of being a main figure behind the finances of the ELN’s Guamocó Resistance Front. He was arrested in Mina Nueva, in rural Santa Rosa del Sur.

De La Espriella announced the arrest, made during an operation called Ocaso, on Friday. The drones struck the next day while local officials held a security council at the mayor’s office, called after three people were killed in the municipality the day before, according to Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office. Mora’s remarks were reported by El Espectador. On Saturday, ColombiaOne reported that authorities had not confirmed a link between the arrest and the attack, and The Rio Times reported that no group had claimed it. DroneXL found no ELN claim or denial in Colombian or US coverage as of Monday, November 9.

Footage from the base showed smoke rising after three explosions and soldiers taking cover in sandbag shelters, the Associated Press reported. On Sunday the Army named the dead: professional soldier Jairo Lince Carvajal and soldiers Dilan Andrés Lozano León and Álvaro Pushaina. The latest official count, published by El Universal, lists 16 seriously wounded and 31 members of the unit affected in all. The mayor, Milton Olaya, put the number of injured at 35.

The compound is home to the Army’s 48th Jungle Battalion, which has come under drone attack in this municipality before. In August 2025, according to the military, the ELN’s Northeastern Front dropped explosives from drones on the battalion’s troops in La Pradera, a rural part of Santa Rosa del Sur, killing one soldier and wounding seven, Cambio reported. Drones carrying explosives killed another soldier in rural Santa Rosa del Sur and neighboring Arenal del Sur in May 2026, according to the Army’s First Division as cited by The Rio Times. The Ombudsman’s Office has had the town under an early warning since 2023 and says the government commission meant to act on such warnings has not been convened, despite worsening risks.

The Ombudsman’s Office also says the ELN is fighting the Clan del Golfo and FARC dissidents under alias Calarcá for territory and mining income in the Serranía de San Lucas around the town. Officials blamed Calarcá’s militia for the August 2025 drone attack that brought down a police Black Hawk near Amalfi.

The US Is Helping Target the ELN on Both Sides of the Border

In a November 3 report, The New York Times cited four US officials who said Washington supplied intelligence and the drones for the Apure strike in Venezuela, ColombiaOne summarized. Who flew them is unclear, though one source said the model is routinely flown by the US military.

Initial reports put the toll at eight ELN members. Fundaredes, a Venezuelan rights group, now counts 23 dead. Its regional coordinator, Juan Francisco García, says interviews with survivors and relatives show the dead included suppliers, pilots and relatives of fighters. According to Fundaredes and local sources cited by ColombiaOne, the camp was an ELN drug storage and distribution point.

Colombian authorities had said they could not defeat the ELN because its fighters often escaped to Venezuela, where officials let the group operate openly, the Times reported. Since US forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in January, Washington has had a cooperating government on both sides of the border. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in September the ELN should no longer operate in Venezuela “with impunity.”

The three Reapers arrived in Colombia unarmed and in containers, on loan, and were assembled at Tolemaida, Infobae reported. Assembly and testing are part of Vanguardia del Sur 2026, a joint exercise with US troops that runs until November 11, and Colombian troops will be trained to run the aircraft’s surveillance systems before operations start. Colombia’s military says the Reapers will support operations against the ELN and other armed groups by locating their camps. The US also handed over a Black Hawk helicopter at the ceremony, according to Noticias RCN.

De La Espriella answered Saturday’s attack with a promise of more air strikes. “For every attack, one bombardment,” he wrote, in the Times’ translation.

Colombia’s President Says Petro Left No Anti-Drone Shield Behind

The day after the attack, De La Espriella said Gustavo Petro’s January anti-drone shield produced nothing. Petro says he left the contract process ready. De La Espriella called that a lie and said Petro’s officials traveled abroad without results and left no studies behind, La FM reported.

The January plan committed about $1.6 billion to a National Anti-Drone Shield of sensors, electronic warfare and interceptors, with military bases among the first priorities. In February, Petro’s defense minister, Pedro Sánchez, said 74 companies from 20 countries wanted to take part and that the project was in its pre-contract phase, with the market study under way. The ministry also said it had detected about 9,000 drone attack attempts in 2025 and blocked about 96% of them, and that the 4% it missed killed several soldiers and civilians and injured more than a hundred people, Asuntos Legales reported.

Saturday’s strike was at least the second deadly drone attack on an army compound in nine weeks that authorities blamed on the ELN. On September 4, explosives dropped from drones, followed by a clash inside a military compound in Ocaña, Norte de Santander, killed three soldiers, the Associated Press reported. De La Espriella said on Sunday his government is working on both anti-drone defenses and offensive drones for the armed forces. He gave no amount, funding source or timeline and cited the country’s very difficult public finances.

DroneXL’s Take

The Reapers and the promised bombardments help Colombia hunt the people who launch these drones. In my view they won’t protect the next army compound, because stopping a drone over a base takes detection and defeat systems at the base itself.

The ministry’s February numbers say it blocked about 96% of the drone attacks it detected in 2025. The ones that get through still kill soldiers, three at Ocaña and three more at Santa Rosa del Sur. Ten months after the shield was announced, Colombia’s president and his predecessor are arguing over whether Petro left it ready to contract. Before the next round of air strikes, I’d want De La Espriella to put a number and a date on the base defense he promised on Sunday.

Sources: The New York Times, El Universal, El Espectador via Pulzo, ColombiaOne, ColombiaOne on Apure, The Rio Times, AP via Stuff, Infobae, Cambio, Asuntos Legales, La FM, AP via CTV

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

Russia's Geran-5 K5-K Runs on 52 US Parts, 23 From Texas Instruments

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 11:24:00 GMT

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency HUR published a teardown on November 9 of the Geran-5 K5-K, a shorter and faster version of Russia’s jet-powered attack drone, and counted 93 foreign-made electronic parts inside it. Fifty-two came from US manufacturers, and 23 of those were made by Texas Instruments.

Russia started firing the K5-K at Ukrainian cities in early autumn, according to HUR. The agency examined one that came down almost intact in a field, and it now files the weapon as a small cruise missile rather than a drone.

HUR’s page for the original Geran-5, the version DroneXL first reported on in January, lists 16 foreign parts.

The Geran-5 K5-K Is 8 Feet Shorter and Climbs 3,300 Feet Higher

The K5-K is 13.1 feet (4 meters) long, against 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) for the original Geran-5, and its wingspan shrank from 10.5 to 9.8 feet. HUR lists a ceiling of 19,700 feet (6 km), up from 16,400 feet, and a cruise speed above 280 mph (450 km/h).

HUR’s statement on the teardown adds that the K5-K can reach 620 mph (1,000 km/h) during some maneuvers. That figure was carried by RBC-Ukraine and UNITED24 Media, but it does not appear in the specification table on HUR’s own portal. Range is unchanged at about 620 miles (1,000 km), and the warhead still weighs 198 pounds (90 kg). The airframe HUR examined carried a TBBCh-90 thermobaric warhead.

HUR lists a TRD-200 turbojet as the engine, assembled at Russia’s Alabuga plant in Tatarstan, the same site where teenagers build Shaheds, from Chinese components. The original Geran-5 flew on an imported Telefly TF-TJ2000A. HUR deputy chief Vadym Skibitsky put the price of each Chinese turbojet at $35,000 to $40,000 in August, Militarnyi reported.

Texas Instruments Made 23 of the 93 Foreign Parts in the K5-K

The parts list on HUR’s War&Sanctions portal names 52 components made by US companies. The rest are 10 Chinese, 10 Swiss, three Japanese, two British and one German, with 15 unidentified. Texas Instruments alone made 23, including voltage regulators, CAN bus transceivers and two digital signal processors.

Analog Devices follows with six, counting a Maxim Integrated transceiver, then Vishay with four and onsemi and CTS Corporation with three each. The Swiss column is seven microcontrollers and a voltage regulator from STMicroelectronics, which HUR files under Switzerland because the company is headquartered in Geneva, plus two u-blox satellite navigation modules.

HUR says Russia keeps trying to remove the markings from imported parts, and it names Texas Instruments signal processors and Murata inertial modules. Both TI processors appear on the portal as “DSP” with no part number, and the Murata module has none either. The first Geran-5 taken apart in January held six Texas Instruments chips and CTS clock oscillators built in 2024 and 2025. The three CTS oscillators in the K5-K are newer still: their markings read 2517, 2539 and 2603, which as year-and-week date codes put them between April 2025 and January 2026.

Texas Instruments told Bloomberg in December 2023 that it stopped selling into Russia in 2022, and that because its chips can last decades, some found there may have been in inventory before sanctions. TI vice president Shannon Thompson told a Senate subcommittee in September 2024 that the company works to prevent the illicit diversion of its parts into Russia. Western parts have reached Russia through resellers in third countries before, the route that put German parts in Gerans and that a GRU officer ran out of Tokyo.

A Chinese Raspberry Pi Clone Steers the K5-K by Matching Photos

The K5-K checks its route with Susanin, an optical-electronic correlation system HUR first found in the Geran-4. It compares pictures from an onboard camera with reference images stored on a microcomputer, and in this airframe that computer is a Chinese Coke Pi in a labeled plastic case.

The Susanin image-matching unit from the K5-K: a Coke Pi microcomputer in a black plastic case, labeled "Сусанин" (Susanin). Photo credit: HUR War&Sanctions

The camera is dual-band rather than a plain optical sensor, and HUR could not identify its maker. The parts list also carries a genuine Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, filed under Britain. HUR found a similar Coke Pi unit, labeled “Sosiska,” in the Gerbera-2 drone it published on November 2, where it detects and tracks interceptor drones.

The rest of the avionics match the latest Geran-4 Seeker: a flight controller, a SADRA Seeker inertial navigation system with a DISMAG magnetic compass module, a tracker, a mesh modem and a Russian copy of the 16-element Harxon GI-006 anti-jamming antenna. HUR’s breakdown of the original Geran-5 shows no image-matching unit: it navigated with a Kometa-M12 satellite receiver and a MINSOO inertial unit. Jamming satellite navigation is one of Ukraine’s standard defenses against Shaheds, and matching photos needs no satellite signal.

Russia Builds 4,000 Jet Gerans a Month as Ukraine Stops 76% in One Raid

Russia builds about 4,000 Geran-4 and Geran-5 jet drones a month, up from about 3,000 in August and twice its output of propeller Geran-2s, HUR told NV in October, while Ukraine’s Air Force says it shot down or suppressed 59 of 77 jet drones in one October attack.

The production figure comes from Militarnyi’s report on HUR’s interview. Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said that attack lifted the jet-drone rate to 76%, from about 60% the month before, Odessa Journal reported. Interceptor drones are closing the gap. The upgraded ZIRKA brought down a Geran-5 at about 250 mph (400 km/h) and 11,500 feet (3,500 meters), Militarnyi reported on November 1, after the SBU released the first video of a jet Shahed kill in September. Ukraine’s Brave1 cluster is also paying companies to build drone-fired air-to-air missiles.

On October 29 a jet-powered drone got through and hit a platform at a railway station in Dnipro where a train to Zaporizhzhia was waiting, killing 14, according to regional officials and Ukrainian Railways, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Neither said which Geran variant it was.

DroneXL’s Take

The old-stock explanation that Texas Instruments offered in 2023, chips bought before sanctions and still sitting in Russian warehouses, gets harder to apply with every teardown. The CTS oscillators in this K5-K were made as recently as January, so at least part of the Western supply feeding Alabuga is new production.

I don’t think TI or CTS are selling to Russia, and nothing on HUR’s list says they are. My read is that export controls on commodity electronics fail at the distributor and reseller level. A voltage regulator that ships by the million passes through enough hands that the maker loses sight of it long before it reaches a Russian assembly line, which is how the German parts and the Tokyo pipeline worked too.

In September I argued that sanctions aim at the wrong end of the Geran, at the Western parts instead of the Chinese engine. The K5-K shows the Western end still leaking with new parts, and Washington should put at least as much pressure on the distributors that move these reels as on the chipmakers whose logos HUR photographs.

Sources: HUR War&Sanctions portal, UNITED24 Media, RBC-Ukraine, Militarnyi, Odessa Journal, Ukrainska Pravda, Bloomberg

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