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

Amazon Wants 500 Drone Cities. Washington Cleared the Runway

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:16:00 GMT

Amazon says its delivery drones will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of this year. Drone delivery spent six years inching through federal review one market at a time, and the obvious question is how it suddenly cleared a continent.

Two things changed, and neither one is a drone. The FAA approved Amazon’s hubs at a pace it had never worked at before, signing off 34 of the 40 hubs in the company’s filings during a five-month run this spring. Then, on July 28, the agency removed the environmental review step for most future hubs altogether, and with it the public comment period that was a town’s only formal say in the matter.

Behind both sits an act of Congress passed in 2024 and an executive order signed in June 2025 that names environmental reviews as something to be streamlined. One deadline is left on the July decision. It falls on September 26.

The old process gave your town a 30-day window

An operator that wanted to fly deliveries in a new metro used to trigger its own environmental assessment. The FAA published a draft, opened a comment period of roughly 30 days, and printed what the public sent in, with its own responses, in the final document. It did that more than 20 times between 2021 and 2025, and every one of those filings sits on the agency’s public NEPA page.

That window is how a resident of Matteson, Illinois or Papillion, Nebraska could put an objection into a federal record with their name on it. It is also why DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker can list 40 Amazon hubs by street address: the addresses sit in those filings, because the filings existed. Every one of those assessments ended in a Finding of No Significant Impact.

The comment window was never a veto. The FAA controls the airspace and the operator’s certificate, and no volume of local objection has ever stopped a drone delivery approval. What it did was force a document into existence, on a schedule, with the hub’s address in it, and give a town a dated place to go on the record.

One national document now covers the whole country

The new document is a Programmatic Environmental Assessment, or PEA. The idea is ordinary enough in federal practice: rather than analyze 500 nearly identical proposals one at a time, an agency analyzes the category once and then checks later proposals against it. Congress specifically told the FAA to do this in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024.

The FAA signed the national finding on July 28 and published notice in the Federal Register on July 30. Photo credit: FAA

The FAA published the draft on December 9, 2025, and gave the public 30 days, over the holidays. New York and Washington asked for 45. They got 15 more, closing January 23. A total of 241 written submissions came in. The final version and the decision were signed on July 28 and published in the Federal Register on July 30.

Here is the mechanism that matters. When an operator now applies to serve a new area, the FAA compares the application against the national document. If it fits, the approval is covered and no new environmental review is prepared. If it does not fit, the FAA writes a narrower review that “tiers” off the national one, covering only what the national document missed.

Neither path includes a public comment period. The comparison is an internal FAA review of an operator’s application. That is the whole change, and its fingerprints are already on the tracker: four Amazon metros are announced with no FAA filing to be found for any of them.

Fitting inside the document mostly means staying under a noise number

The test an application has to pass is largely a noise calculation. The FAA set a ceiling of 1,150 deliveries a day from one hub, averaged over a year. An application that stays under it, with the hub far enough from homes, is covered by the national document and needs no further review.

That number is not arbitrary. Because a drone flies out and back, 1,150 deliveries counts as 2,300 overflights, and the FAA calculated the point at which that many passes stop being quiet enough. To get there the agency used the loudest delivery aircraft it has measured, roughly 78 decibels sound exposure level in cruise, out of every Part 135 delivery drone flying today.

The other conditions are similarly concrete. A hub running the full 1,150 deliveries has to sit at least 600 feet from noise-sensitive land, a category that includes homes. A hub cannot go within half a mile of certain historic properties where quiet or an open sky is part of what makes them historic. Operators have to submit their aircraft’s noise data and show it does not exceed what the FAA already modeled.

An operator that wants more than 1,150 deliveries a day, or a hub closer than the setback allows, needs a more detailed analysis. Even there, the FAA writes that in most cases the operator’s own noise measurements will be enough to satisfy it.

Some things did survive. The FAA says it will keep doing site-specific analysis for historic and cultural resources and for wildlife until it finishes standing agreements with state preservation officers and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Tribal consultation continues regardless. But those are consultations between agencies, not comment periods for the public.

Congress ordered the streamlining and an executive order set the clock

The speed is not an accident and it is not a mystery. Two documents explain it, and only one of them belongs to the current administration. One is an act of Congress passed with bipartisan majorities in 2024. The other is an executive order signed in June 2025 that names environmental review as something to streamline.

The first is the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, passed with bipartisan majorities and signed in May 2024. Section 909(c) directs the FAA to examine and integrate programmatic approaches to NEPA for large-scale distributed drone operations. The national document names that section as the requirement it is fulfilling. Congress ordered this, before the current administration took office.

The second is Executive Order 14307, Unleashing American Drone Dominance, signed June 6, 2025. Most coverage focused on its DJI and supply-chain provisions. The relevant part here is Section 3(b), which makes it US policy to advance drone commercialization by “reducing regulatory uncertainty, and streamlining approvals and certification processes, including for consumer goods delivery and environmental reviews.”

Environmental reviews, named, for consumer goods delivery. The draft of the national document appeared six months later.

The same order told the FAA to publish a proposed BVLOS rule in 30 days and a final rule in 240. That is the Part 108 rule that will eventually replace Part 135 for delivery. And on September 29, 2025, when two people asked for more time to comment on it, the FAA refused and said why: meeting the executive order’s deadline “will require extraordinary measures that do not make it practicable to extend the comment period.”

That is the agency stating on the record that a White House deadline is the reason a comment period cannot be extended. Three months later the FAA gave the public 30 days over the holidays on the national environmental document and, when two attorneys general asked for 45 more, granted 15.

Line the dates up and the pace explains itself. June 2025, the executive order. August 2025, the proposed BVLOS rule. December 2025, the draft national environmental document. January 2026, seventeen states object. July 2026, the FAA finalizes it. August 2026, Amazon announces nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year. Years of nothing, then fourteen months of everything.

Amazon’s own approvals sit inside that window, and this is the part worth being precise about. The national document did not hand Amazon its 500 towns. Nearly all of those hubs were approved the old way, with their own environmental assessments and their own comment periods, just at a speed the FAA had never managed before. Tolleson, Arizona cleared in November 2024. Then 22 Texas hubs were signed on a single day, February 5, 2026. Four Detroit hubs and two in Kansas City followed on May 1. Six Florida hubs on June 1. That is 34 approvals in five months, against a process the agency itself describes as taking six to eight months apiece.

Which leaves five hubs still in FAA review, in Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha, and four metros Amazon has announced with no filing found anywhere: Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise. Those are the ones the national document now covers. The 500 came from the sprint. What comes after the 500 comes from the rule change.

To be precise about cause: the FAA does not cite the executive order in the national environmental document. It cites the 2024 statute. What the record shows is a congressional mandate to streamline, an executive order making streamlined environmental review for delivery an explicit national policy, and an agency that has said in writing it is working to that order’s clock.

The attorneys general made specific objections, not general ones

The January filing is worth reading if you want to know what a government lawyer thinks is missing. Illinois, New York, Washington, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Harris County signed it.

Their central complaint was one of scale. The FAA analyzed a nationwide program without knowing where any hub would go, then concluded the impacts would not be significant. The states called that a paper exercise and argued you cannot find no significant impact for a place you have not identified.

They also listed gaps. The document does not analyze the fire risk of lithium-ion batteries on aircraft nobody is watching, and they pointed at the Tolleson crane crash, where an NTSB preliminary report noted a battery ejected and caught fire. It measures drone noise against airport noise but not against the traffic and rail noise most neighborhoods actually hear. It considers a single overflight rather than the same house being overflown day after day.

The FAA published the 241 comments and its responses in Appendix E of the final document, and issued the finding.

One federal window is still open, and it closes September 26

The decision document ends with a right of appeal. Any party with a substantial interest can ask a United States Court of Appeals to review it, and the filing has to happen within 60 days of the order. The order was issued July 28. That puts the deadline at September 26, 2026.

This is not a public comment form. It is a petition for judicial review, the kind of filing a state attorney general or a city attorney makes, not a resident with a complaint about noise. But it is the only remaining federal window on this particular decision, seventeen states are already on record objecting to it, and in eighteen days it shuts.

What a town still controls is the ground, when there is a decision to make. The FAA regulates the airspace and the certificate; it has no authority over private property, a point the attorneys general made when they noted the agency cannot enforce its own hub setbacks. A hub is a building or a parking lot in somebody’s jurisdiction, and site plans, permits and conditional use approvals are local. The catch is that these hubs are designed for existing parking lots and rooftops, and one that needs no construction may trigger no municipal review at all. DroneXL has published a plain-language guide to the approval process on the tracker, setting out which levers are real, which are conditional, and which do not work.

DroneXL’s Take

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this story that is dishonest and it is the easy one to write. The FAA did not sneak this through. It published in the Federal Register twice, posted an explainer video, notified state and federal officials and tribes, extended the comment period when asked, took 241 comments and printed its answers to them. If nobody in your town knew, that is not because the notice was hidden. It is because federal environmental notices are not how normal people find out anything.

I also think streamlining was the right instinct, and Congress ordered it in a bipartisan bill before this administration existed. Twenty-plus separate assessments, six to twelve months each, every one ending in the same finding, is not a process protecting anyone. It is a queue. If the answer is always going to be yes, the honest move is to say so once rather than pretend to deliberate twenty times. DroneXL is pro-drone and pro-delivery. I want this industry to work.

The problem is what got streamlined away, and the pace at which it went. An executive order that names environmental reviews as a thing to streamline is a policy choice a President is entitled to make. An agency telling the public it cannot extend a comment period because of that order’s deadline is where a policy choice starts eating a procedure. Neither is illegal. Both are worth a citizen knowing about. The FAA replaced a process that produced a public document naming a specific address on a schedule with a process that produces an internal determination. Those are not the same thing even if the outcome is identical, because the first one told your town something and the second one does not. The agency has effectively decided drone delivery is a solved category, at the exact moment the fleet is scaling from perhaps 500 flights a day to a stated ambition of hundreds of millions of deliveries a year, on aircraft that this summer alone hit a crane, an apartment building, an internet cable and a Houston highway.

Seventeen attorneys general saying the analysis is too thin to support the conclusion is not the drone-panic crowd. Those are lawyers who read the document. When the people whose job is reading federal filings say the filing does not add up, and the agency finalizes it unchanged five months later, the reasonable response is not alarm. It is attention.

So watch September 26 for whether any of those seventeen states converts a comment letter into a petition for review. If none does, this decision is settled federal policy and the argument moves entirely to city halls, which is where DroneXL will be reporting it. If one does, the Ninth or the Second Circuit ends up deciding how much analysis a nationwide finding of no significant impact actually requires, and that ruling would reach a lot further than drones.

Sources: FAA Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment, Finding of No Significant Impact and Record of Decision for Drone Package Delivery Operations in the United States (July 28, 2026); Federal Register, 91 FR 48208 (July 30, 2026); Executive Order 14307, Unleashing American Drone Dominance, 90 FR 24727 (June 6, 2025); Normalizing UAS Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations, proposed rule, 90 FR 38212 (Aug. 7, 2025); Comments of the Attorneys General of Illinois, New York, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Harris County, Texas (January 23, 2026); FAA: Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations; FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, Section 909(c).

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

DroneXL Asked All Three Delivery Drone Giants the Same 15 Questions

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:04:00 GMT

DroneXL today launched the Drone Delivery Tracker, a public record of every drone delivery company flying over American homes under an FAA authorization: Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline to start, 40 Amazon hubs with street addresses, 368 Wing nests, five Zipline authorizations, eight incidents, and the questions each company has and has not answered.

The page is built from the FAA’s own environmental filings, the operators’ statements and DroneXL’s reporting. Every row links to its source. It updates the day a story publishes and gets a full sweep every Monday.

This morning all three companies received the same fifteen questions, on the same terms, due Monday, September 15. Wing and Zipline each got fifteen more specific to their aircraft. Amazon also still owes answers to the eight it received on September 3 and let lapse on September 5. Every operator’s page now reads “Pending” until they reply.

The tracker lists every hub, market and incident on the record

The Drone Delivery Tracker covers Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline. It maps 40 Amazon hubs from FAA decisions, Wing’s five authorized metros and 368 nests, and Zipline’s five FAA actions from North Carolina to Seattle, plus eight incidents: six Amazon incidents and two Zipline parachute landings in Texas.

Amazon’s page is the most detailed because Amazon’s filings are. The FAA decisions for Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City and Tolleson name each hub by street address, so the tracker maps all 40 with a 7.5-mile operating circle around each, the radius Amazon’s own filings define. Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha sit in FAA review. Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse and Boise are announced with no filing found. That is the geography behind Amazon’s promise of nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026: the 500 is not a list Amazon published, it is every municipality inside those circles.

Wing's Hummingbird lowers each package on a tether from a 23-foot hover. Its FAA filings authorize 368 nests across five metros. Photo credit: Wing

Wing and Zipline pins are metro-level, because their filings authorize a nest count inside a metro rather than addresses. Wing’s DFW, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte authorizations add up to 368 nests at up to 400 flights a day each. Zipline is authorized for up to 75 sites in Dallas-Fort Worth and has a 75-site Seattle proposal in review.

The incident table is the part I expect towns to read first. Amazon’s six entries run from the two Pendleton crashes in December 2024 through the Tolleson crane strikes, the Waco cable, the Richardson apartment building and the package released into a Richmond swimming pool. Zipline’s two are the parachute landings in Greenville on July 26 and on Highway 6 in Cypress on September 4. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s record. That is the absence of a record, not a safety statistic, and the page says so; a sweep of FAA and NTSB files is under way.

The aircraft page puts weight, payload and noise side by side

A separate aircraft comparison page compares the four delivery aircraft on the same rows: takeoff weight, payload, how the package reaches the ground, hover height over the home, recovery system, redundancy and measured noise. Every figure comes from an FAA filing. Where a filing is silent, the table says so.

The numbers that matter most are the simplest. Amazon’s MK30 is an 83.2-pound aircraft carrying five pounds, or 15.6 pounds of drone per pound of cargo, with no parachute, dropping the package from about 13 feet. Zipline’s P2 is 63 pounds carrying eight, hovers at about 330 feet while a tethered droid sets the package down, and carries a parachute that has now deployed twice. Wing’s 7000W-B is 14 pounds carrying about 2.5, lowering the package on a tether from 23 feet; its 8000-A is 24.3 pounds carrying up to 6.6.

Zipline's Platform 2 hovers at about 330 feet while a tethered droid sets the package down. The aircraft carries a parachute, which has deployed twice over Texas this summer. Photo credit: Zipline

Noise is where the record is thinnest. Amazon’s numbers are public because the FAA’s consultant put microphones under the MK30 in Pendleton: 63.7 dBA SEL for a cruise pass at 200 feet, about 82 dBA at 20 feet in hover. Wing’s and Zipline’s figures sit in appendices of their DFW and Florida filings and have not yet been extracted into the tracker. That is the first item on next Monday’s update, and it is also question nine on every operator’s list.

Amazon has answered none of its questions and now has fifteen more

Amazon received eight MK30 questions on September 3, due September 5. Its communications team replied twice about email delivery and never about the aircraft. Today Amazon received the fifteen questions every operator gets; Wing and Zipline received those plus fifteen specific to their aircraft. All are due September 15.

The eight questions I sent from the Commercial UAV Expo floor were not exotic. Why does the MK30 weigh 78 pounds empty when Zipline carries more with 55? Does it have a parachute, and if not, why not? What does it do after it hits a crane, a cable or a building, all of which it has done? None got an answer. Amazon’s tracker page shows all eight marked “No answer” and will keep showing that until Amazon changes it.

Wreckage of an Amazon MK30 after two of the drones struck a construction crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025. Photo credit: 12News

The fifteen generic questions are the ones a town council should be asking before the first flight: weight and payload, recovery system, collision behavior, single points of failure, delivery method, drop-zone checks, incident record, who gets the call when an aircraft comes down, sound level, pitch, overflight frequency, cameras and data, liability, weather limits, and whether the operator will send an engineer rather than a spokesperson to a public meeting. They are published on the tracker as a handout, operator-neutral, for any town to use.

Wing’s specific set asks, among other things, how many of the 368 nests sit within 120 feet of a home, school or church, the setback the FAA allows. Zipline’s asks what caused the two parachute deployments and whether they share a failure mode. Nobody has replied yet, which is expected on the first morning; all three pages carry a “Pending” marker and the date the questions went out. Every answer publishes in full on the operator’s page the day it arrives. So does every silence.

Readers can search their town, send tips and follow the weekly sweep

The tracker has a town search covering every Amazon hub city, the FAA jurisdiction lists for Kansas City and Chicago, and every Wing and Zipline market in DroneXL’s record. A corrections and tips form, with an anonymous option, reaches the editor directly. Tips are leads until confirmed.

The town search will grow. Amazon’s other 35 hubs each come with an FAA list of the municipalities inside their operating area, and extracting those lists is the job that turns the search into a yes-or-no answer for roughly 500 towns. Amazon hub coordinates are placed from the street addresses in the FAA decisions and are approximate pending geocoding, which the page says next to the map.

Operators are added when they meet one of two tests: an FAA authorization for package delivery in the United States on the agency’s public list, or confirmed US commercial delivery flights documented by DroneXL or a public record. Announced but unfiled operators wait. Every operator that qualifies gets the same template and the same fifteen questions on the same deadline.

DroneXL’s Take

I built this because the FAA approves the airspace and the certificate, the operator announces the metro, and the town finds out when one comes down on a residential street. There is no public place where a resident of Matteson, Illinois or Pea Ridge, Arkansas can see who is authorized to fly over their street, what the aircraft weighs and whether it has a parachute. The filings exist. They are 300-page PDFs on an FAA index page. Nobody reads them, so nobody asks.

The operators will say, fairly, that the record is good. Zipline’s fleet has flown more than 140 million autonomous miles without a serious injury, and both Texas parachute landings ended with an intact aircraft and nobody hurt. Wing has no US incident I can find. Even Amazon’s six entries include no injury. I accept all of that, and the tracker prints it. A record that includes the operator’s strongest facts is the only kind a town will trust.

But a good record is not the same as a public one, and the difference is what Amazon’s silence exposes. Eight plain engineering questions, five days, two replies about email formatting. A company that plans to fly an 83-pound aircraft over 500 towns and cannot say in writing why it left out a parachute has not earned the benefit of the doubt, whatever the incident count says. I don’t think Amazon’s engineers lack the answers. My read is that the communications team has decided the answers are worse than the silence, and the tracker is built to make silence expensive: a dated, permanent “No answer” on the page every reporter and council staffer will find first.

September 15 is the date to watch. If Wing and Zipline answer, and I expect both will answer at least the generic set, the page will show for the first time how the three aircraft compare on the questions that matter to the people under them, in the operators’ own words. If Amazon lets a second deadline pass, that is a story on its own, and it will run.

The tracker is a standing product, not a story. Next Monday’s sweep adds Wing’s and Zipline’s noise figures, the first batch of FAA jurisdiction lists for the Texas hubs, and whatever the three companies have said by then. If you live under one of these routes, the tips form is the fastest way to reach me.

Sources: FAA Public Involvement and Environmental Review for Drone Operations, Amazon Prime Air FAA FONSI/RODs (Texas, Florida, Detroit, Kansas City, Arizona), Wing Aviation FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Central Florida, Houston, Atlanta), Zipline FAA FONSI/RODs (Dallas-Fort Worth, Pea Ridge, Salt Lake City, Kannapolis), FAA Part 135 National Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (December 2025).

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

Infinite Electronics: Counter-Drone Demand Now Outpaces Drones

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:58:00 GMT

At Commercial UAV Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, I sat down with Gabriel Guglielmi, Vice President of Global Product Management at Infinite Electronics. The company is a privately held US firm that owns 19 different companies, and the common thread between them is that they all provide high-performance connectivity components for many industries, including drones and counter-drones.

19 Companies Across the US and Europe

Part of the group is in Europe and part is in the United States. Of the 19 companies, 11 are originally US companies and eight are European, but most of them sell globally.

When I asked what brought Infinite Electronics to Commercial UAV Expo, Guglielmi pointed to the obvious: unmanned systems, drones, and counter-drones are a fast-growing market, with a lot of money being injected by government, by private individuals, and by commercial companies. “We are here to support that market,” he said.

At the same time, the US is building a supply chain around drones and counter-drones, and Infinite Electronics wants to be one of its key partners, helping drone makers and counter-drone makers build their systems.

NDAA-Compliant Components From Antenna to Payload

In recent years there has been a big push to bring production back to the United States, and a lot of drones now have to be NDAA compliant in order to be used by the government. I asked Guglielmi how the company’s products fit into that.

All of the products Infinite Electronics makes are NDAA compliant, he told me. The company is also bringing some production domestically. That has its challenges, but the direction is clear: the US having its own domestic supply chain, Europe having its own, and China and Asia having theirs.

To show how the parts fit together, the booth had a drone on display. Infinite Electronics doesn’t make drones, but it makes the connectivity products around them. It starts with the antenna receiving the RF signals. There are different types of antennas depending on form factor and frequency range, and the company’s latest one comes in different variants, one of which resists jamming so that the drone keeps its GPS signal.

That matters because losing GPS has become one of the problems the industry faces. When a drone loses GPS, people don’t know where it is, and it could hit a power line or crash into a critical facility.

From the antenna, the signal goes through cable assemblies, with different types of cable and different connectors depending on the application. And because a drone typically carries a payload, whether that’s a camera, a lidar unit, or something else, Infinite Electronics also provides the RF connectivity that goes to the payload, along with USB connections.

Hardware That Lets Radios Hop Frequencies

In conflict zones around the world, jamming drones and trying to get through jamming systems has become a cat-and-mouse game. Some drones I’ve seen use AI to lock onto targets, while others use fiber-optic wires. So I asked what Infinite Electronics does to make the radio signal as resistant to jamming as possible.

The company doesn’t do any software, Guglielmi explained. Everything it does is hardware. What it provides, for example, are antennas with a large band. To resist spoofing, the radio or the board inside the drone hops frequencies very quickly so that the jamming system cannot follow. Infinite Electronics’ job is to provide components that manage a larger band of RF signals, so that the drone maker can change frequency very quickly, depending on the environment and depending on the jamming.

Counter-Drone Demand Now Outpaces Drones

When I asked what I should have asked but hadn’t, Guglielmi steered the conversation to counter-drone technology and walked me through a second mock-up on the booth.

Again, Infinite Electronics doesn’t build counter-drone systems, but the mock-up showed where its parts go. At the top sit the antennas that take in all the RF signals. Here you have to think about direction and frequency range, because you need to detect where the drone is around you. Cables then run down into the boxes, and those can be RF cables or fiber optic, with different types of connectors depending on the use case. On the side, the mock-up carried different protocols, including USB and Ethernet.

Everything feeds into a box with a backplate, power, and a fan. Customers put in whatever they need, such as a computer that processes all the information coming in from the antennas. From there it goes to command and control, which decides what to do with the drone: Is it a threat or not? Should it be countered, or should you just wait?

Guglielmi brought up the FIFA World Cup, where an FBI-led task force took down 700 drones. I added that recently in Leipzig, drones were coming into airports, and that it has been a hot topic in Europe and in the US as well.

Counter-drone also comes up in border control, he said. It’s easier to deploy this type of equipment than to build a wall or station people along it. From Infinite Electronics’ perspective, counter-drone is seeing even higher demand than drones.

One Supplier, Same-Day Shipping, Fast Scale

I asked whether the 19 companies under the umbrella are all mostly focused on the hardware required for connectivity. Guglielmi confirmed that Infinite Electronics is a hardware company. It does a bit of low-level firmware, but it is mostly hardware.

The mock-ups on the booth are there to show customers what’s possible, to get the reaction of “Oh, we can do all this?” One advantage he highlighted is that customers can buy from Infinite Electronics products they would otherwise have to source from multiple different suppliers. The goal is to make it easy: one point to buy all the components.

Most of those components are available for same-day or next-day shipment, or in less than a week. The company can also scale up production quickly through internal facility partners. In this market, a design is turned on and a few months later it’s in production, so time to market is critical. People are now counting in days and weeks, where before they counted in years.

Regional Supply Chains Replace the Global One

The urgency and the frequency have gone up a lot with all the conflicts, so I asked how the US NDAA requirements compare to the requirements some European countries have, and how the company deals with matching different requirements around the world.

Guglielmi had also been at XPONENTIAL Europe in Düsseldorf, and he said what’s happening is clear: the supply chain is becoming regional. There’s a supply chain for the US or North America. There has to be a supply chain for Europe, eventually including North Africa. Then China is its own supply chain, and Asia is its own supply chain. What used to be a global supply chain is now getting sliced into regional supply chains, and to be a player you have to cope with the different requirements.

Having companies in both Europe and the United States helps. In Europe, Infinite Electronics appears as a European company, and in the US the same. The company also plays in China, in the more commercial market.

This article is based on my interview with Gabriel Guglielmi at Commercial UAV Expo 2026. Watch the full video on the DroneXL YouTube channel, and find more of my work on my DroneXL author page.

DJI Mini 3 Drops To $315 For Labor Day. Skip The Other Two Bundles

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:06:00 GMT

Amazon has cut the DJI Mini 3 with the RC-N1 controller to $315 for Labor Day, $104 under the $419 list price. The listing carries Amazon’s Overall Pick badge, shows more than 1,000 units sold in the past month, and delivers free to Prime members tomorrow.

The same listing offers two other configurations, and neither is worth your money today. The DJI Mini 3 with the screen-equipped DJI RC is $492, down from $549. The Fly More Combo with the DJI RC is $625, down from $719. Both sat far lower in June, and DroneXL logged those prices at the time.

For a first-time pilot, $315 buys a 249-gram aircraft with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, 4K HDR video, and a camera that rotates to shoot vertical natively. It also buys a drone with no obstacle sensors.

Get the DJI Mini 3 for $315 at Amazon

The DJI Mini 3 with the RC-N1 controller. Photo credit: DJI

The $315 Package Is The Only One Of The Three Worth Buying

The base Mini 3 at $315 is $20 under the $335 DroneXL called the lowest price ever last Black Friday. The DJI RC bundle and the Fly More Combo sit $153 and $176 above the floors they hit in June, so their strikethrough prices measure against list, not this summer.

The price history on the base package runs like this. DJI launched the Mini 3 in December 2022 at $469 with the RC-N1, per Billy Kyle’s review of the drone. List settled at $419. Amazon sold it for $369 in June 2025, then $335 for last year’s Black Friday. In March it dropped to $299 during the Spring Sale. In June, Prime Day took it to $269.

So $315 is not the floor. It is $46 above it, and the lowest price since Prime Day ended on June 26. A fair price on a two-and-a-half-year-old aircraft, not a record.

The other two bundles are where a Labor Day shopper gets fooled. DroneXL’s Prime Day 2026 roundup recorded the DJI Mini 3 with DJI RC at $339. Today it is $492, with Amazon showing 20 units left. The Fly More Combo with DJI RC fell to $449 on June 30. Today it is $625, and a strikethrough from $719 makes that look like a gift. It is $176 more than the same box cost ten weeks ago. If you want the screen or the three-battery kit, wait. If you want the drone, the $315 package is the one.

A 1/1.3-Inch Sensor And Native Vertical Video For Under $320

The Mini 3 shares its airframe and sensor size with the Mini 3 Pro. Its 1/1.3-inch CMOS shoots 4K HDR video at 30 frames per second behind an f/1.7 lens. Stills are 12 megapixels, or 48 in high-resolution mode, and the gimbal rotates 90 degrees for full-sensor portrait video.

That vertical mode is the reason the Mini 3 still sells in 2026. A 9:16 clip comes off the card using the whole sensor, not a crop out of a horizontal frame. The DJI Mini 4K, DJI’s cheaper mini at a $299 list price, has a smaller 1/2.3-inch sensor and no vertical shooting. At $315, the Mini 3 costs $16 more than the Mini 4K’s list price. For anyone who posts to Reels or Shorts, that $16 settles it.

The battery is rated at 38 minutes and O2 transmission at 10 km (6.2 miles). DJI rates wind resistance at Level 5, or 38 kph (24 mph), and top speed at 58 km/h (36 mph). Rafael Suárez flew a Mini 3 as his main work drone for two years and wrote in February that he never felt limited by it.

Coastline shot straight out of a DJI Mini 3, no obstacle sensors required. Photo credit: Rafael Suárez

What the $315 box does not contain is any obstacle sensor. There is no ActiveTrack and no APAS, and the only vision sensors on the aircraft point down, for hover and landing. Billy Kyle put it plainly in 2022: “it would likely crash almost immediately because it can’t see.” The pilot is the collision-avoidance system, and that is the same at $315 as it was at $469.

The RC-N1 in this package has no screen. Your phone clips in on top and runs DJI Fly, and that is the reason this bundle is $177 cheaper than the DJI RC version today.

The Mini 3 Sits Outside Every Open FCC Front

At 249 grams the Mini 3 stays under the FAA’s 250-gram registration threshold for recreational flying, which also exempts it from Remote ID. Part 107 pilots register any aircraft they fly for work regardless of weight, and the Mini 3 broadcasts Remote ID once registered. The caveat is the battery.

DJI’s Intelligent Flight Battery Plus stretches flight time to 51 minutes and pushes the aircraft past 249 grams. Fit one and the recreational exemption is gone: the drone must be registered and Remote ID applies. Amazon’s listing flags the weight change in its own bullet points, and the FAA rule does the rest. The US Fly More Combo ships with three standard batteries, so this only bites if you buy the Plus separately.

On the federal side, this is one of the few DJI aircraft with nothing hanging over it. The Mini 3 received its FCC equipment authorization in 2022, three years before the Commission added all foreign-made drones to the Covered List on December 22, 2025, which is why it can still be imported and sold. The open proceeding, PS Docket 26-189, targets previously authorized drones in seven capability categories, among them LiDAR and thermal imaging. The Mini 3 has none of the seven. Comments closed September 2, and DJI filed asking the FCC to rescind the notice outright. The DJI Mini 5 Pro carries forward-facing LiDAR and is inside that docket. The Mini 3 is not.

DroneXL’s Take

Buy the $315 Mini 3 if you want a first camera drone this month, and do not touch the other two configurations until they come back down. That is the whole recommendation, and the price history makes it for me.

Every retailer will call today’s $315 a Labor Day deal, and it is one. But I logged this drone at $335 last November and called it the lowest ever, and Amazon has gone under that figure at least three times since. DJI has not been able to bring a new consumer drone into the US since December, so the aircraft it already has authorized are what it can sell, and they have been discounted in waves since the Spring Sale in March. Whether Black Friday matches June’s $269 is worth watching. Last year’s stopped at $335, so I would not count on it, and I would not wait three months for a possible $46.

A beginner on a $315 drone with no obstacle avoidance will fly it into a tree at some point, and DJI stripped the sensors out for exactly this price point. I still recommend it, because the tree is the lesson. A Mini 3 that cannot see forces the habit every pilot needs and that ActiveTrack lets you skip: keep the aircraft in sight and bring it home yourself. I would rather a new pilot learn that on a $315 airframe than on a Mini 5 Pro that costs more than twice as much.

The bundle pricing is the part that irritates me. Amazon’s strikethrough shows $719 on a Fly More Combo that sold for $449 ten weeks ago, and a Labor Day shopper who did not read DroneXL in June has no way to know that. The badge is accurate against list and misleading against history, which is why the base package gets the recommendation and the other two do not.

Source: Amazon.com DJI Mini 3 listing, September 7, 2026.

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

Army's $3-a-Shot Laser Cuts Cartel Drone Flights 75%, Military Says

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:21:00 GMT

Cartel drone activity over the Rio Grande Valley has dropped roughly 75% since the US Army started burning drones out of the sky with a high-energy laser on August 25, military officials told CBS News. The laser has destroyed eleven drones in ten days, and the officers running it say the point is to stop the same drones from coming back night after night.

The claim arrives ten days after DroneXL reported the laser’s first three kills, when neither Joint Task Force-Southern Border nor US Northern Command would say whose airspace the shots crossed. That question is still open. So is a new one: 75% of what. Army Col. Robert Felicio, who commands the 130th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade on the border, declined to give CBS News the daily count his unit sees before or after the laser arrived.

The Laser Killed Eleven Drones And Border Traffic Fell By Three Quarters

Joint Task Force-Southern Border has stopped about 300 cartel-linked drones since January 1, most by jamming them back across the river. The Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser destroyed eleven of them between August 25 and early September, and officials say drone traffic thinned sharply after the first three fell.

Felicio told CBS News the change since the laser arrived has been marked. His distinction between jamming and destroying is the whole argument for the weapon: a jammed drone flies home and returns the next night, while a lased one is a pile of parts. “If it’s an immediate threat, I’m getting rid of it,” Felicio said, adding that sending the same drone back only lets the cartel keep using it.

Soldiers tracked one drone passing the same Rio Grande overlook three times before CBS News arrived there Friday. It is the behavior DroneXL described when cartels started fielding FPV drones and their own counter-drone gear last year: cheap quadcopters flown as spotters, over and over, to map where agents are so smugglers can be where they aren’t.

Army Lt. Col. Ray Richards of the Massachusetts National Guard’s 211th Military Police Battalion put the effect in cartel accounting terms. Every drone that does not come home is money spent for nothing. Richards said “disruption to the cartels, that is a huge part of that story.”

Soldiers Aim The Laser With An Xbox Controller For $3 A Shot

The border laser is an Army version of AeroVironment’s LOCUST, vehicle-mounted and aimed from inside. Operators track the target on a tablet-style display with an Xbox controller, then fire. AeroVironment puts each shot at $3, against interceptor missiles that run into the millions per round.

In a demonstration CBS News watched Friday, soldiers launched a small quadcopter over an empty field near the border wall and dropped it from the vehicle. The beam was invisible; the only sign of it was a brief flash where it hit. The recovered drone had a damaged propeller and no battery but was otherwise identifiable.

The $3 figure is real but it is the wrong denominator. Per Laser Wars, a Substack tracking military directed-energy programs and citing budget documents, a single unit costs between $17.4 million and $25 million. The Army just committed to dozens: on September 2 it awarded AeroVironment a $464.8 million production contract for the 30-kilowatt LOCUST X3, the first production contract for a laser weapon in US military history. That deal follows the $96 million Army interceptor award DroneXL covered last October, and it makes AeroVironment the company most exposed to whether the border numbers hold up.

The laser also has a weather problem. Rain and vapor scatter the beam and cut its power. Navy Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, in a Washington Post op-ed published the same day as the Army contract, made the case for lasers as an additional layer with known limits, not a replacement for missiles.

The 75% Drop Is Measured Against A Number Nobody Has Published

Felicio did not disclose how many drones his brigade detected before August 25 or after it, and officials told CBS News the drop could reflect cartels rerouting around the Rio Grande Valley rather than grounding their fleets. The 75% figure is a military estimate with no published baseline.

The last public figure is old. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, then commanding US Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2024 that border incursions probably ran over 1,000 a month, while conceding that nobody knew the actual number. The Rio Grande Valley sector alone logged more than 10,000 incursions in one year, per Border Patrol testimony from 2023. A 75% drop from a thousand a month is a very different story than a 75% drop from a few dozen a night in one sector, and the military has not said which one it is measuring.

Felicio also declined to say which side of the border the eleven drones came down on, offering only that the US government is coordinating with Mexican authorities on tracking threats. That is the formula USNORTHCOM used after the first three kills, and Mexico’s president has already called unilateral US action on Mexican soil a breach of sovereignty.

The FAA Fight From February Is Now Called Coordination

Military officials told CBS News they coordinate regularly with the Federal Aviation Administration, checking its requirements before and after each laser shot so civilian aircraft are never put at risk. Seven months ago that coordination did not exist, and the same program shut an airport and destroyed another agency’s aircraft.

In February the FAA closed El Paso International Airport’s airspace after a laser at Fort Bliss fired at what turned out to be metallic balloons, and two weeks later the same system shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone near Fort Hancock because CBP had not told the Pentagon it was flying. The FAA’s objection then, as CBS News reported at the time, was blunt: a misfire into an airliner would be an instant disaster.

The path from there to eleven operational kills ran through a joint safety test at White Sands in March and the FAA’s April clearance for the military to run anti-drone lasers in US airspace under a signed agreement. What checking the FAA’s requirements means in practice, which airspace gets restricted and for how long before a shot, has not been published.

The threat the laser answers has a body count, though not yet on this side of the river. A report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, documented 221 cartel drone attacks inside Mexico between 2021 and 2025 that killed 77 people. Roughly 8,000 US service members are posted along the border, and officers took CBS News to an overlook to show how little ground separates their positions from the drones’ launch points.

DroneXL’s Take

Ten days ago I wrote that there would be a next engagement announcement, and that what mattered was whether it got more specific about where the drones fell. It did not. It got a percentage instead, and a percentage with no denominator is harder to check than a location.

I want to be fair to the soldiers here. Destroying a spotter drone instead of chasing it home is sound logic, Richards is right that every lost airframe is money out of a cartel’s pocket, and a $3 shot against a consumer quadcopter is the first time in this fight that the defender pays less per engagement than the attacker. If traffic really fell by three quarters in two weeks, that is the most consequential counter-drone result along the US border this year.

But 75% is doing a lot of work for a number with no denominator. The military would not give CBS News a before count or an after count, and it volunteered that the cartels may simply have moved. A drop the Army cannot show a baseline for is a press line, not a finding. My suspicion is that the real number sits in JTF-SB’s detection logs and is perfectly releasable. Northern Command’s commander at the time told the Senate in 2024 that nobody knew how many drones crossed the border, and its deputy commander said last month that the command lacks the sensors to see a drone swarm forming. A command that says it cannot count the threat should not get credit for a precise reduction in it.

The airspace question is also still sitting there, unanswered for the second time. Eleven drones have been destroyed and neither government will say on which bank they fell. Watch two things. Whether the FAA publishes what its pre- and post-shot requirements are, now that the Army is buying dozens of these systems for domestic use. And whether Mexico’s government says anything once the count of destroyed drones climbs past the point where “coordination with all partners” can carry it.

For commercial pilots working anywhere near the southern border, the practical note from August stands, with more force. A weapon that fired at balloons in February has destroyed eleven drones in ten days, and the Army is about to have a lot more of them.

Sources: CBS News, U.S. Army, AeroVironment, Breaking Defense, The Washington Post

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

DJI Neo 2 After One Year: The Drone I Fly More Than Any Other

Shawn Air Photography — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:43:00 GMT

Good day folks, Shawn here from Air Photography. The DJI Neo 2 has been out for almost a year now. It launched in mid-November of last year, and I like to do these follow-up reviews sharing my user experience after using a product for the past year. This is a user experience review, not a technical one. If you want to know everything about the Neo 2, my original review covers all of it.

Over the past year I’ve made several videos about the Neo 2: tutorials, demonstrations, and of course a full review. In those videos I talked a lot about how this has become one of my all-time favorite drones from DJI. It is not the most technical drone. There are better, higher-performance drones when it comes to capabilities and video quality. But the Neo 2 is very flexible in how you use it, and it is so convenient to bring along with you. For me that matters, and it is probably why I’ve flown this drone more than any other drone I own.

The Neo 2 Fits Where Bigger Drones Never Get Packed

Traditional drones are big and bulky. They need a proper bag, a controller, spare batteries, and a plan for using them. The Neo 2 is different: because it flies autonomously without a controller, the drone itself is all you need to bring along on a hike or a day trip.

The Neo 2 fits in a hand and in a small bag, which is why it comes along on trips a bigger drone would miss. Photo credit: Air Photography

If you’re out exploring or on vacation, you pull the Neo 2 out of a small bag, capture a quick orbit, do a quick dronie, or use your smartphone for a more traditional shot. Whether you use it or not, it’s easily at hand.

A bigger drone you have to plan for. You need the right kind of backpack, and it isn’t something you bring along if you don’t intend to use it. When you’re out exploring, you don’t want to lug equipment you won’t touch. The Neo 2 is quite different in that respect, and that’s the whole reason it gets so much airtime with me.

Tracking Works Autonomously, by App, or With a Full Controller

The Neo 2 tracks in a few different ways, and all of them work well. Set the mode selector to tracking, launch it from your hand, and it locks on instantly. Connect a remote and you unlock full ActiveTrack for vehicles, longer distances, and different angles.

One of the nice upgrades over the original Neo is the ability to adjust the tracking parameters with the buttons on the side, and this generation gives you a visual preview so you know exactly what those parameters are set to. That makes it very convenient for tracking on a bike or on a hike. I compared both drones side by side in my Neo 2 vs Neo 1 video when the new one launched.

Autonomous tracking on a mountain bike trail, no controller involved. Photo credit: Air Photography

The small, sturdy build makes it extremely durable. Even if it does come into contact with an obstacle, the chance of damage is minimal. It also has obstacle avoidance: LiDAR at the front and basic sensors on the bottom and top, so it does a pretty good job of staying clear of things, and that’s not usually something you have to worry about.

When you have it connected to the app during autonomous tracking, you can change the direction it tracks you from on the fly. Have it tracking you from the rear, then select on the dial to track from the front or side, and it keeps recording while it moves to the new position. That produces some really dynamic footage. You can also use hand gestures to push it off to the side, bring it in closer, or move it back, which I demonstrated in my gesture and voice control guide.

Vehicle tracking needs a controller connected; then the Neo 2 gets the full ActiveTrack toolset. Photo credit: Air Photography

For a more traditional tracking experience, connect it to a remote and you get the full ActiveTrack, which lets you track vehicles as well as track from higher and from different angles. I think this is one of the best drones for tracking, period. The build and the size give you worry-free tracking shots.

One Drone Covers Palm Launch, Controller Flights, and FPV

Flexibility is the big reason I call this an incredible drone. It takes off from your palm and lands back in it when the task is done. Connect a remote and you get a traditional flight with more precision, more range, and cinematic footage. Add goggles and you have FPV.

Paired with a controller, the Neo 2 flies like a traditional camera drone with more range and precision. Photo credit: Air Photography

So you get the best of both worlds: quick, easy shots autonomously, or more cinematic shots when it’s connected to a controller. On top of that, you can connect the Neo 2 to FPV goggles and an FPV controller for a more immersive flight.

It is not a high-performance FPV aircraft by any means. If FPV is the main thing you want to do, this is not the drone to choose. But it’s fun, and you can still capture some beautiful FPV-style shots. That range of ways to fly it and use it is why it has become one of my favorites and the drone I’ve probably flown the most out of everything I own. What I fly changes with what I’m doing on a given day, but the Neo 2 keeps winning that decision.

Firmware Updates Added Apple Watch Control and New Shot Modes

DJI kept adding to the Neo 2 over the past year. A December firmware update brought Apple Watch control, and in June two new automated shots arrived, Highlight Slow-Mo and Helix Close-Up, alongside the usual fine-tuning. The drone I own today does more than the one I unboxed last November.

The DJI Fly app connection is where the new shot modes and Apple Watch control live. Photo credit: Air Photography

I covered the Apple Watch update when it landed, and it fits the way I actually use this drone: hands-free, phone in the pocket, on a bike or on a trail. The two new modes came with firmware v01.00.0700, and DJI fine-tuned a few other things along the way as well.

Battery Life, Sensor Size, and Storage Leave Room for a Neo 3

No product is perfect and the Neo 2 is no exception. Four things could improve on the next generation: flight time, especially in FPV; the half-inch sensor; the lack of a memory card slot; and compatibility with the RC 2 Pro, which DJI still has not added.

Flight time first. I know there’s only so much you can do with an aircraft this small. The battery can only be a certain size before the drone gets too big and heavy. But flight time can be limiting, especially in FPV. Flying FPV takes a lot of power. You get up and flying in sport mode, and the next thing you know it’s warning you the battery is low and you need to come home. When you’re using it autonomously and grabbing little shots here and there, it’s not so much of an issue. Hopefully the next generation squeezes in an extra few minutes.

The built-in prop guards are part of why the Neo 2 shrugs off contact with branches. Photo credit: Air Photography

The sensor could use an upgrade. The footage isn’t bad and I don’t have many complaints, but it is only a half-inch sensor, so video quality is limited. You’re not going to get Mini 5 Pro quality from a sensor that small. A larger sensor next time around would lift the video quality noticeably.

The Neo 2 also has no memory card slot, only internal storage. To be honest, that has not limited me the way I use it. I have never been out flying and filled the memory, and the files from the Neo 2 don’t tend to be large, so you can capture quite a bit on the internal storage. If you’re flying all day, it might be an issue, and the option to expand with a card would be a nice upgrade.

And then the RC 2 Pro. It’s overkill for a drone like this, but if I’m out with a couple of different drones and bring this one too, I’d like to connect them all to one remote instead of carrying several. I was hoping DJI would add it. They haven’t yet.

The Neo 2 Earns Its Place at $229

Price is the bonus. The drone-only kit, for anyone flying it autonomously, runs about $229, which is pretty incredible for the technology and capability you are getting. A full kit with extra batteries and a controller comes in around $399. That puts a capable, reliable drone within reach of beginners.

B-roll like this, shot on the Neo 2, shows up in many of my reviews without anyone noticing. Photo credit: Air Photography

I’ve had a lot of fun with this drone over the year, for personal flying and for work. If you’re a regular on my channel, you’ve probably seen the Neo 2 at work in the background without realizing it. A lot of the B-roll in my e-bike reviews comes from it. I’ve even used it in Spotlight mode with the camera just floating there to grab B-roll. It has become a genuinely valuable tool, which is what I said after 30 days and again when I named it my all-time favorite drone at the end of last year. A year in, that still holds.

For beginners who don’t want to spend a lot to get into the hobby but still want a fully capable and reliable drone, this is it. Those are my thoughts after flying the DJI Neo 2 for the past year. I’d love to hear about your experience: if you picked up a Neo 2, let me know in the comments. Hopefully you enjoyed this video and found it had value. Thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.

This article is based on a video from Air Photography’s YouTube channel. You can find more of Shawn’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.

Germany Plans To Let Utilities Fight Off Drones After Leipzig Bomb

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:14:00 GMT

Germany plans to station rapidly deployable counter-drone units in nine cities and to change the law so that power utilities and defense manufacturers can actively fend off drones themselves, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. The package, which the interior ministry confirmed to Reuters the same day, is Berlin’s first structural answer to the explosive quadcopter that struck a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4.

Dobrindt called Russia’s hybrid attacks a daily reality and said they will grow. The plan also includes a national cyber-defense sensor network the ministry calls a Cyberdome, and wider use of facial recognition and video surveillance at transport hubs.

DroneXL has covered the Leipzig case since August 6, when the first report of a dud bomb on the apron came in. Five weeks on, the physical evidence stands at three drones and two explosives, Germany has formally blamed Russia, and the Bonn consulate closes September 18. The shield is what comes after the attribution.

Federal Police Counter-Drone Units Would Cover Nine Cities

New mobile counter-drone units of the German federal police would be stationed in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Hanover and Cologne, according to interior ministry information cited by Bild am Sonntag. They would guard the airspace over airports and rail stations, plus Berlin’s government district.

The units get vehicles and helicopters so they can move fast, Deutsche Welle reports from the Bild account, and the same report says the shield is meant to defuse drone-borne explosives as well as intercept the aircraft carrying them. Reuters, which confirmed the outline with a ministry spokesperson, describes them as rapidly deployable units for critical transport hubs and government districts. “These attacks will increase, but we can defend and protect ourselves,” Dobrindt told the paper.

This is the third growth announcement for the same force in nine months. Germany stood up its federal police counter-drone unit in Blumberg in December with about 60 officers and a plan to pass 130. On August 18, at the opening of the DLR drone security center in Cochstedt, Dobrindt said the force would double. Sunday’s plan spreads it across nine cities without saying how many officers the finished force will have.

The gap the units are meant to close is the one Leipzig exposed. The airport had a counter-drone system installed on August 4, and the armed quadcopter crossed the fence without it raising an alarm. The charge lay on the apron for roughly four hours before an airport bus driver spotted it.

Critical Infrastructure Operators Would Fend Off Drones Themselves

Under the planned law change, infrastructure operators such as water works and power suppliers would gain legal authority to actively counter drones instead of detecting them alone. That authority now rests with the federal police and other agencies. Tagesspiegel’s account of the Bild report uses the phrase actively fend off.

Neither Bild’s account nor the ministry’s confirmation to Reuters says what fending off means in hardware: jamming, net capture, interceptor drones or kinetic means. Neither includes a bill text or a budget line, and neither gives a date for a cabinet decision. A power plant’s security chief with a jammer is a different proposition from a federal police officer with one, and the plan as reported does not draw that line.

For an American reader the comparison is the Safer Skies Act, Sections 8601 to 8607 of the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. After years of lobbying, it let trained state and local police detect and mitigate drones at covered venues, under federal training and oversight requirements. The stadium owner still cannot touch a drone. Germany’s plan, as Bild describes it, would hand the equivalent of that authority to the venue.

The Cyberdome sits alongside the drone measures: a dense network of digital sensors meant to detect and intercept hacking attempts against government and company networks. The surveillance expansion, with AI-supported video and biometric facial recognition, targets railway stations and other hubs, to pick out suspected saboteurs before they act.

The Leipzig Case Now Runs To Three Drones And A Formal Attribution

On the evening of August 4, a quadcopter carrying a charge struck the wing of a parked Antonov An-124 at Leipzig/Halle and dropped it there. A DHL freighter hit a second drone during a go-around and diverted to Hanover. A third surfaced at Kabelsketal ten days later, near suspected hexogen.

DroneXL’s reporting on the case runs from the first drone beside the An-124 to the three-drone, two-explosive picture that emerged in late August. On September 1, Germany formally blamed Russia, summoned the ambassador and ordered the Bonn consulate general and the Russian House in Berlin closed, NPR reports. Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the attribution clear and legally sound at a party event near Hanover on Saturday.

Moscow’s answer came Sunday. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Vesti channel that the German accusations were “the start of a real war” and that Merz’s push to make Germany Europe’s leading military power amounts to a declaration of war on Russia, per the Tass account Reuters cites. Russia denies any role in Leipzig.

Leipzig/Halle was hit before. On July 20, 2024, a parcel with an incendiary device ignited at the airport’s DHL hub before it could be loaded onto a flight to Britain, part of the Lithuanian-mailed parcel plot now at trial in Vilnius. In August, investigators reported a DNA trace on the Leipzig drone matching evidence from that 2024 case.

The wider count is the ministry’s own. Federal Criminal Police Office president Holger Münch told Bild in December that more than 1,000 suspicious drone flights were logged in Germany in 2025, most of them over military sites and airports. The airport association ADV put the airport share above 140. Asked whether the drones were always Russian, Münch said “we don’t know that with one hundred percent certainty” (translated from the German).

DroneXL’s Take

Leipzig earned Germany this shield. A bomb-carrying drone crossed an airport fence, beat the installed defense system and lay on the apron for four hours, and the plot behind it ran to at least three aircraft. A government that did not answer with helicopters and nine-city units would be failing at its job. I have no quarrel with the mobile police force.

The part I do have a quarrel with is one sentence long in Bild’s account. Water works and power suppliers would get the legal authority to actively counter drones. The way I read it, that is a broader grant of counter-drone authority to private operators than any Western government I can name has proposed, and it arrived in a Sunday newspaper interview without a definition of the word counter.

Consider what the same step took in the United States. The Safer Skies Act took years of lobbying by sports leagues and venue operators, and when it finally passed inside the FY 2026 NDAA it stopped at trained police using approved systems under federal oversight. The venue still has to call someone. That line exists because a jammer does not know whose drone it is jamming, and a stadium operator with one is a hazard to the police helicopter overhead and to every GPS receiver in range. Germany’s plan, as reported, would hand the jammer to the venue.

Set that against Münch’s own number. More than 1,000 suspicious flights in 2025, and the BKA president cannot say they were all Russian. In December he described their purpose as intimidation and information gathering. Some of them were not even that. During the Munich airport closures last October, a drone spotted 700 meters (0.4 miles) from Frankfurt Airport turned out to be a man testing a new hobby drone, Frankfurt police said at the time. He went into the count too. Under the plan as described, the substation operator gets to decide what happens to the next one.

I wrote on Tuesday that rules written in the week after an attack tend to land on the pilots who didn’t carry it out. This one arrived in week five, which is at least a slower reflex. Whether the bill, when a text exists, requires the same training and equipment approval Germany already imposes on its own federal police is the point to read first. If it does, this is a serious plan. If it hands a private operator a jammer and a phrase, Leipzig will have been used to write a law that the Leipzig drone would have ignored.

Sources: Bild am Sonntag, Reuters, Tagesspiegel, Deutsche Welle, NPR

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

Amazon Had Two Days To Answer 8 MK30 Safety Questions. It Didn't

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:48:00 GMT

Amazon Prime Air did not answer eight written questions about its MK30 delivery drone by the deadline DroneXL set for Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern. The questions went to three Amazon addresses on Thursday afternoon, the day after the company declined to put an engineer on the record at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Among other things, they asked why a drone carrying a 5-pound box weighs 78 pounds, and why it has no parachute.

Amazon’s communications team replied twice on Friday. Neither reply addressed the questions.

The deadline has passed, and the offer has not. Amazon can still answer, and DroneXL will publish its responses in full. The questions are printed below so that Amazon, and the nearly 500 cities and towns it plans to fly over by the end of the year, can see exactly what was asked.

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

Amazon Has Not Answered These Eight Questions

DroneXL asked Amazon Prime Air to attribute its answers to a named spokesperson or engineer, and offered a 15-minute recorded video call with an engineer as an alternative. The questions cover the aircraft’s mass, its missing recovery system, its collision record and the fleet Amazon plans to fly.

FAA filings list the MK30 at 77.9 pounds empty and 83.2 pounds at maximum takeoff weight, carrying a 5-pound payload. Zipline’s P2 carries 8 pounds at 55 pounds empty; Wing’s production aircraft carries 2.6 pounds at about 12 pounds. What drives the MK30’s mass, and did Amazon evaluate a lighter airframe for the same 5-pound, 7.5-mile mission?
Does the MK30 carry a parachute or any ballistic recovery system? If not, was one evaluated, and why was it excluded?
After a mid-air collision with a fixed object, such as the crane in Tolleson, the cable in Waco or the building in Richardson, what is the MK30’s designed descent behavior, and which systems remain functional?
What is the status of the FAA and NTSB investigation into the October 1, 2025 Tolleson crane strikes, and what changes did Amazon make to Detect-and-Avoid or operating procedures after Tolleson, Waco and Richardson?
Amazon’s propeller redesign cut perceived noise by roughly half. Did Amazon test whether a smaller, lighter airframe with the same propeller design would be quieter still? What were the results?
Packages are released from about 13 feet. What does Amazon do to verify the drop zone is clear of water, people and pets, and what changed after the August 17 pool delivery in Richmond, Texas?
How many MK30 aircraft are in service today, and how many does Amazon expect to operate to serve nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026?
Who is the on-the-record contact for DroneXL’s future Prime Air coverage?

Amazon Answered The Email About The Email

Amazon’s two Friday replies concerned whether DroneXL had told the company in writing that Wednesday was its last day at the Expo. The first asked DroneXL to resend that message. The second acknowledged it: “I’m not sure why we did not receive.” Neither mentioned the eight questions.

DroneXL had supplied the original message with its full headers on Friday afternoon. The exchange followed the publication of DroneXL’s opinion piece on the MK30 on Thursday, which described Amazon’s decision not to make an engineer available while I was at the show. Amazon disputed that description by phone, off the record. DroneXL corrected one point, on which Amazon was right, and expanded the account of Amazon’s interview offers. The corrected article carries a dated note. Amazon’s communications lead acknowledged those updates in writing on Friday evening, and still did not answer a question about the drone.

The Aircraft Is Why The Questions Matter

An MK30 weighs 78 pounds (35.5 kilograms) empty and carries a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) box, per FAA filings. It has six motors, redundant flight controllers and no parachute. Amazon says no single failure can cause loss of control. That is a claim about motors, not crane booms.

The record is the reason the questions are not academic. Two MK30s struck the same crane in Tolleson within minutes of each other last October. One clipped an internet cable in Waco 13 days after service launched there. One hit an apartment building in Richardson in February and landed on the sidewalk with its propellers turning. No one was seriously hurt in any of them. Each one ended with the airframe on the ground, because an aircraft that has struck a fixed object does not fly home on five motors.

An MK30 on a Tolleson sidewalk after an emergency landing in October 2025, days after Amazon resumed flights following the crane strikes. Photo credit: Austyn C. / ABC15

Amazon’s competitors made different choices with the same problem in front of them. Zipline’s P2 carries a heavier box, 8 pounds, in a lighter aircraft, 55 pounds, and carries a parachute; when one came down in a Greenville, Texas street in July, it arrived under canopy. Wing’s production aircraft weighs about 12 pounds. Whether Zipline’s approach is safer in every case is a fair debate. That Amazon will not join the debate is the finding here.

Five Hundred Cities Multiply Every Open Question

Amazon said on August 19 that Prime Air flies thousands of deliveries a day from 11 sites and will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end, a sixfold footprint. Every flight is an MK30 over someone’s street. Amazon has not said how many aircraft that takes.

That number was question seven. Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, by its own count. It matters because incidents are a rate, and the rate gets multiplied by the fleet. Amazon called the second pool delivery in a year uncommon, which is a claim about frequency that nobody outside Amazon can check without knowing how many flights there are. As DroneXL noted when the expansion was announced, the 500 figure counts every municipality inside each hub’s 7.5-mile radius, so the fleet is smaller than the headline. How much smaller is the answer Amazon has.

Every one of those towns has a council, and every council can ask the eight questions above. DroneXL will publish a guide for them, operator-neutral, with the same questions put to Zipline, Wing and Wingcopter.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL is not against drone delivery. I went to Düsseldorf and Las Vegas to look at this aircraft because I want it to work. Prescriptions flown to people who cannot drive are the drones-for-good story this publication exists to tell, and Zipline is doing it with a parachute on board.

Amazon deserves two things said in its favor. Its redundancy is real engineering, and in every MK30 incident on record, no one on the ground was seriously hurt. Those facts are in the article because they are true, and they are not answers to the questions.

What I cannot explain is the silence. A company confident in its design answers the parachute question in one paragraph, because the engineers who made that decision have the paragraph ready. Amazon has had the question since Thursday, had an engineer available for a Thursday it knew I would miss, and spent Friday on the delivery status of an email. The explanation that fits that record is a company that would rather not have this conversation in public, and I would like to be wrong about that.

The MK30 at Amazon's Prime Air booth in Dusseldorf in March 2026, backed by the company's "Gravity Shmavity" banner. Photo credit: DroneXL

The fix is not complicated. If the MK30 hits a power line or a crane over a neighborhood in Boise or suburban Cook County, an 83-pound aircraft is coming down. Obstacle avoidance and six motors are the layers meant to keep that from happening. A parachute is the layer for when they don’t, Zipline flies with one, and Wing’s aircraft weighs a fraction as much. Amazon should build the safest drone it can, which likely means a recovery system, and it should be able to say so on the record.

The offer stands. Eight questions, answers published in full, whenever Amazon is ready. Between now and December, the councils of nearly 500 towns will have the chance to ask them too.

Sources: Amazon, FAA, DroneXL correspondence with Amazon Prime Air

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

Zipline Drone Ends Flight On Houston Highway The Way Amazon's Can't

Haye Kesteloo — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:08:00 GMT

A Zipline delivery drone came down under its emergency parachute onto the southbound lanes of Highway 6 near Timber Creek Place Lane in Cypress, northwest of Houston, on Friday morning, September 4. Nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, Zipline says, and law enforcement agencies told KPRC 2 News they never got a single call about an aircraft sitting in a traffic lane.

A photo shot through a windshield shows the white Platform 2 Zip lying across the lane, wing and rotor booms still attached, with its orange canopy stretched toward the curb and cars a few lengths ahead. A second photo shows the aircraft on the grass verge with the parachute folded beside it. Zipline says the Zip was on its way to pick up an order when it hit what the company calls a midflight issue and deployed the parachute as designed. The cause has not been determined.

Two days ago I published a piece from Commercial UAV Expo on Amazon Prime Air’s 83-pound MK30, which flies over US neighborhoods without a parachute. Zipline’s aircraft is 20 pounds lighter and carries one.

Zipline Says A Midflight Issue Triggered The Parachute

Zipline told KPRC 2 News the aircraft encountered a midflight issue on its way to a pickup, deployed its parachute and landed without injuring anyone or damaging property. A spokesperson said such landings, which the company calls paralands, are rare and part of the redundant safety system.

The descent followed Zipline’s published protocol. Its safety fact sheet says a Zip that cannot resolve an in-flight problem deploys its parachute and sounds an audible alert on the way down, while a team member is dispatched to retrieve it. The same document puts the fleet’s record at more than 135 million autonomous miles without injury. The statement Zipline gave KPRC on Friday rounds that up to 140 million miles and more than 2.5 million deliveries, and lists the layers under it: redundant propellers, redundant communications equipment, a parachute, and 500 safety checks a second. “Safety is Zipline’s top priority,” the statement opens.

The Zipline Zip after being moved to the grass beside Highway 6 in Cypress, Texas, wing and rotor booms intact, with its deployed parachute bundled beside the fuselage. Photo credit: Diana Acosta via KPRC 2 News

Storms moved through the Houston area on Friday. A company spokesperson said weather is not believed to have played a role. Zipline has not said what did, and KPRC has asked the FAA for comment.

Diana Acosta, a Zipline customer who saw the aircraft on the ground, told KPRC it didn’t hit a car and didn’t fall on anybody. “It made me kind of nervous,” she said, before adding that somebody didn’t get their food on time.

The Zip Weighs 20 Pounds Less Than Amazon’s MK30 And Carries A Parachute

Zipline’s P2 Zip weighs 55 pounds (25 kilograms) empty and under 63 pounds (28.6 kilograms) at maximum takeoff weight, per the FAA’s February 2026 re-evaluation of Zipline’s Arkansas operation. Amazon’s MK30 weighs 83 pounds (37.8 kilograms) at takeoff, per FAA filings. It has no parachute.

I put those figures side by side on Thursday, after Amazon spent two days at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas declining to put an engineer on the record about the MK30 while I was in the same hall. Amazon’s argument is that six motors and redundant flight controllers mean no single point of failure can cause loss of control. The MK30’s actual failures were collisions: two into a crane in Tolleson, one into an apartment wall in Richardson, Texas. Redundancy does nothing for an aircraft that has already hit something, and those MK30s came down at whatever speed gravity chose.

Friday’s Zip came down at parachute speed. Whatever went wrong on board, the aircraft ended its flight slowly enough for the driver who stopped behind it to photograph it through her windshield, canopy on her hood, and the wing was still on the fuselage when it reached the grass. That is the case for carrying a canopy’s weight on a delivery drone, and it is the case Amazon has not answered.

Houston Is Zipline’s Second Texas Paraland In Six Weeks

Zipline launched Houston service in Cypress on April 29, 2026, with a First Flight early-access program for 5,000 residents and partners including Chipotle and Walmart. Friday’s landing is the first Zipline incident DroneXL has recorded in Houston, the second in Texas since July, and the first on a highway.

On July 26, a Zipline Zip flying for Walmart parachuted onto a residential street in Greenville, northeast of Dallas, and settled about three feet (0.9 meters) from a parked pickup. A resident heard the alert, walked out of her garage and watched it land. Nobody was hurt there either, and a Walmart employee arrived quickly to cover the aircraft with a tarp.

The Texas network has grown fast enough that these events were always going to happen over somebody’s street. Zipline spread to more than 20 municipalities across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in under a year, then opened Houston in April and added Austin in June. Zipline says its Zips fly at up to about 300 feet (91 meters), so the canopy had time to open and the aircraft had time to drift. Where it drifted was into the southbound lanes of Highway 6, with traffic visible ahead of it in the photo.

DroneXL’s Take

Two Zipline paralands in Texas in six weeks, both under canopy and nobody hurt, is the safety record working in public. I said the Greenville landing was good news for Zipline, and I’ll say it again about Cypress. The last-resort layer worked after everything upstream of it failed.

The concession is the road. A parachute does not pick its landing spot, and a 60-pound aircraft drifting onto a highway on a Friday morning is a worse place to end a flight than a quiet street in Greenville. Had a car been under it, Zipline’s “no injuries” line would read very differently, and no amount of canopy changes the fact that the Zip was over traffic when it quit. The position survives anyway, because the alternative on offer in this industry is not a delivery drone that never fails. It is Amazon’s, which fails in an aircraft 20 pounds heavier and arrives at terminal velocity. Given a choice between a parachute over Highway 6 and no parachute over Highway 6, every driver on that road on Friday would pick the parachute.

What I keep coming back to is the detail KPRC put in its second paragraph: nobody called the police. A drone landed in a traffic lane with an orange canopy across the asphalt, and nobody thought it warranted a call. Part of that is a soft landing that left nothing on fire. Part of it is that Cypress has had these aircraft overhead since April and has stopped treating them as an event. That familiarity is the most valuable thing Zipline has built in Texas, and it is fragile.

Which is why the silence on the cause matters. Zipline told KPRC the midflight issue has not been determined and that weather is not believed to be a factor, and it has said nothing more specific than those two words. I made the same request after Greenville and I’ll repeat it: publish what happened to this aircraft, in plain language, the way Zipline publishes its mileage numbers. A company that runs 500 safety checks a second has the telemetry to say what tripped on Friday. A parachute landing you explain is a demonstration. One you leave at “midflight issue” becomes whatever the neighborhood decides it was.

The regulatory backdrop makes this worth getting right now. The Transportation Department’s BVLOS rule is delayed, and Amazon intends to fly the MK30 over nearly 500 cities and towns by December. Every paraland that ends with a photo and no injuries is evidence for the version of Part 108 that lets delivery drones fly over neighborhoods. Every unexplained one is evidence for the version that keeps them over fields.

Sources: KPRC 2 Click2Houston, Zipline safety fact sheet, FAA environmental re-evaluations (Zipline Pea Ridge, Amazon Pendleton), Houston Chronicle, Community Impact

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

DJI Mavic 4 Pro Shot Down in Alabama, GoPro Sells 90% of Itself, UAS Sentry Launches Nexus Observer: This Week in Drone News

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:54:54 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have three stories for you this week: a DJI Mavic 4 Pro gets shot out of the sky in Alabama, GoPro sells 90% ownership, and UAS Sentry launches a new portable Remote ID detection tool. Let’s get to it.

A DJI Mavic 4 Pro Gets Shot Out of the Sky in Alabama

Up first, a real estate photographer in Athens, Alabama, had his drone shot down mid-job. Michael Gardner was flying his DJI Mavic 4 Pro off Lindsay Lane on Saturday, August 29, when he heard a gunshot. His video feed went haywire and the drone dropped out of the sky. He got it back two days later, after someone else found it.

No shooter has been identified yet, and Gardner is filing a police report and reaching out to the FAA.

Now, remember, shooting at a drone is a federal felony. It falls under the same laws that protect airliners, and it carries up to 20 years in prison. Courts have already sent people to prison for this exact thing. If someone shoots at your drone, land safely if able, document everything, and call the police and the FAA.

GoPro Sells 90% of Itself to Starman Optical

Next up, GoPro is selling 90% of, well, itself. The company announced a merger with Starman Optical, a private US optics company, paying GoPro shareholders $285 million and wiping out $92 million in debt. GoPro keeps about 10% of the combined company and stays on the Nasdaq.

The rescue comes after a rough stretch. GoPro stock is down 96% since its 2014 debut, and in June, the company warned it might not survive another 12 months. In July, founder Nick Woodman put in $20 million of his own money just to keep the lights on.

The new plan points GoPro’s optics at defense, government, and AI data centers. GoPro says it will keep supporting existing cameras, but makes no promises about future models.

UAS Sentry Unveils the Nexus Observer Portable Remote ID Detector

UAS Sentry unveiled a new portable Remote ID detection unit at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. It’s called the Nexus Observer, and it costs $1,595.

It uses two antennas and two separate processors to scan both the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz bands that drones use to broadcast Remote ID. It has a built-in touchscreen, so no phone or app is required to see a drone’s location and its pilot’s location in real time. The unit runs over 12 hours on battery and comes in a water-resistant case. Buyers get two years of cloud access included, with alerts, geofencing, and flight replay.

Drone detection tech is getting cheaper and easier to deploy, which means Remote ID compliance matters more than ever if you’re flying.

No Post Flight this week since Jason, Ben, and I are out, and no Monday Live for Labor Day weekend. Have a great weekend and we will see you for the News Update next week.

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

Wing Claims Largest US Drone Network As Amazon Promises 500 Cities

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:06:00 GMT

Wing told its followers on X on September 3 that it is making “thousands of deliveries to homes each day” and building the largest residential drone delivery network in the United States, five weeks after opening Greater Orlando with Walmart as its first Florida market. The post named no new store or date. It did put a daily rate, however rounded, on a program mostly described in lifetime totals and store counts.

The timing is the story. Two weeks earlier, Amazon promised Prime Air in nearly 500 US cities and towns by December 31, the loudest counterclaim yet to Wing’s “largest” language, and one that lands in Texas and Georgia metros Wing already serves.

Walmart’s Own Quarter Backs The Thousands-A-Day Figure

Walmart said on May 29 that it had passed one million drone deliveries, with just over 40 percent completed in the fiscal quarter ending April 30. That is more than 400,000 flights in 89 days, roughly 4,500 a day across Wing and Zipline, from 66 stores in four states.

So Wing’s “thousands” is arithmetic rather than marketing, as long as Wing carried most of that volume. Walmart does not break the million out by partner. Zipline flies Dallas-area and Arkansas stores; Wing flies Dallas-Fort Worth, metro Atlanta, Greater Houston, Charlotte, and since July, Central Florida. Wing’s own lifetime count, per its June newsroom post, is more than one million commercial deliveries, a global figure that includes Australia.

Walmart U.S. chief David Guggina gave the same count on the May 21 earnings call. Florida now makes five.

Amazon’s 500-City Map Is The Claim Wing Is Answering

Amazon announced on August 19 that Prime Air will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, up from 11 sites in seven states. Each site covers a circle of about 175 square miles (453 square kilometers), and every municipality inside it counts toward the total.

Wing counts differently. Its unit is the Walmart store: 66 flying across both of Walmart’s drone partners as of May, Orlando’s two since July, and a contract for more than 270 locations by 2027. Each hub holds up to 18 aircraft and serves a radius of about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers). Amazon’s volume figure, from Prime Air vice president David Carbon, is “hundreds of thousands” of packages this year. As DroneXL noted when the 500-city plan landed, a municipality count and a delivery count measure different things. A circle is also easier to draw than a hub is to permit.

Orlando Still Runs From Two Stores On A 2.5-Pound Payload

Wing’s Florida service launched July 29 from Walmart Supercenters in Apopka and Clermont, covering what the companies put at more than 50,000 homes, businesses, and apartment buildings. The aircraft flying there carries up to 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms) per trip, half the ceiling Wing says its larger drone will reach.

Three more stores were due “in the coming weeks”: Ocoee, a second Clermont location on US Highway 27, and Haines City. Wing’s Orlando service page still lists Apopka and Clermont as the only communities served, and neither company has announced the other three as live. DroneXL’s July 29 report has the launch details.

The next market is already meeting resistance. Spectrum News reported on August 19 that Wing was finalizing its initial Walmart sites around St. Louis after presentations to the City of Maplewood and the City of St. Charles, over objections from some Maplewood residents. It is the same fight DroneXL covered in North Carolina in June, one parking lot at a time.

DroneXL’s Take

“Largest” is the wrong contest. The number worth having is the one Wing dropped in as an afterthought: a rate. Amazon’s 500 cities is a map. Wing’s thousands a day is throughput, and the cost of throughput is what killed Walmart’s last Florida partner. DroneUp was spending about $30 to fly a package against a $7 target when it shut 18 hubs in 2024. Neither Wing nor Amazon publishes cost per delivery, so a daily rate is the closest thing to an economics number either has offered.

Amazon’s claim is not empty. Prime Air keeps opening sites. But I have watched Amazon reveal launch sites in Tracy, California and Richmond, Virginia that were missing from the list it published with the 500-city promise. The map is still being drawn. My read is that Wing posted when it did because Amazon’s number was getting repeated without arithmetic behind it, and Walmart’s quarter hands Wing some.

The tell will be Walmart’s November earnings call. The last verified figures came in May: 66 stores in four states and 400,000 flights in a quarter. A store count north of 100 and another quarter of growth would make “thousands a day” look conservative. Flat numbers, with Orlando’s expansion stores still dark and St. Louis still in hearings, would mean the largest network in America stopped growing while its competitor drew circles. Amazon’s own deadline, December 31, comes six weeks later.

Sources: Wing on X (September 3 post), Wing newsroom, Walmart, Walmart Q1 FY27 earnings call, Spectrum News.

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

DJI Power 2000 Now Plugs Into Your Wall Socket. Not in America

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:52:00 GMT

DJI opened IFA 2026 in Berlin on Friday by putting its Power 2000 power station on stage as a grid-tied home battery, bundled for the first time with DJI-branded solar panels and a microinverter, and closed the presentation with a black slide reading “Beyond Batteries. The next generation of power is coming.” The kit rolls out in Germany first. The grid-tied mode behind it works in a handful of European countries and nowhere in the United States.

The 2,048 Wh station itself is not new. DJI launched it in July 2025 at $1,299 as a portable pack for drone crews and blackout backup. What changed on Friday is the pitch. A wall-mounted diagram at DJI’s booth in Hall 20-129 runs a line from a PV module through a microinverter into a Schuko wall socket, then into the Power 2000, then out to a refrigerator and a TV, with the grid and a smart meter hanging off the top. DJI’s slide puts the payoff at €680 a year in electricity savings, on DJI’s own math, with a paragraph of disclaimers underneath.

DroneXL has covered DJI Power since the first Power 1000 leak in December 2023, and the framing has moved a long way from faster Mavic battery charging. The world’s largest drone maker spent this stage slot on a home appliance.

DJI Power Builds a Balcony Solar Kit Around the Power 2000

DJI’s first balcony solar system pairs its own solar panels and a grid-tied microinverter with the DJI Power 2000, sold in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. The panels feed the flat through a standard Schuko socket, and the station stores whatever the household is not using at the time.

The IFA announcement DJI published on August 27 listed a new balcony solar system alongside the Power 1000 Mini, Power 1000 V2, Power 2000 and Power Expansion Battery 2000 as the products visitors could handle at the booth from September 4 to 8. pv magazine Deutschland reported on August 28 that DJI would start the rollout in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. DJI had published no price and no ship date for the kit as of Friday morning, and the stage presentation, posted as video by the DJI Power account on X, added neither.

The grid-tied storage function is the older half of the story. DJI added it to the Power 2000 by firmware in 2025, first for Germany, France and Spain, and its IFA 2025 release described the same loop: charge from panels by day, feed the surplus to the grid once the pack is full. What Berlin adds is DJI selling the panels and the inverter under its own name, so a renter can buy the whole plug-in system from one box. DroneXL covered the Power 2000’s launch in July 2025, when the balcony use case was a footnote.

The German market DJI is walking into has rules that make the pitch work. Since Solarpaket I took effect in May 2024, a plug-in solar system can feed up to 800 W into a household circuit through an ordinary wall socket, with a simplified online registration. The Power 2000’s 3,000 W continuous output and 22,528 Wh expansion ceiling with add-on batteries sit far above what a balcony rig needs, which is the sales argument: the same box that runs a film set can sit in a Berlin flat soaking up midday solar.

DJI Claims €680 a Year in Savings, on Its Own Arithmetic

DJI’s headline slide shows 2,160 kWh of annual solar generation, a 90 percent self-consumption rate and €680 in estimated annual electricity bill savings for a household running its balcony kit with a Power 2000, and every one of those figures is footnoted as a DJI Power internal calculation.

The footnotes deserve as much attention as the numbers. In DJI’s own words, solar generation varies with location, weather, installation and shading, and the savings figure excludes the purchase price of the equipment, installation, maintenance, taxes, fees and incentives. The €680 is a best-case model of the electricity bill alone, before you subtract what the kit cost.

The 90 percent self-consumption figure is the one worth understanding, because it is the whole reason to put a battery behind a balcony system. A bare plug-in setup exports most of its midday output to the grid for nothing, since nobody is home to use it. A battery holds that output for the evening. Whether a household gets to 90 percent depends on how much it consumes and when, which is exactly what DJI’s footnote says.

DJI has not published the panel wattage or the electricity tariff behind the 2,160 kWh and €680 figures. Without those inputs the savings claim cannot be checked.

DJI Power Also Built a Cable for Drone Ground Stations

One slide was aimed at drone operators. It introduced a DJI Power SDC to PoE Power Cable. The cable lets a DJI power station feed the DJI O4 Ground Station directly over Power over Ethernet, so a remote relay site can run with no grid connection at all.

The slide paired the cable with what it called DJI Power’s next-generation power station, the same unannounced product the closing teaser pointed at. The O4 Ground Station launched on June 16 as a PoE-powered relay and gateway for Dock 3 and Matrice 400 fleets, and its published specs put typical gateway-mode draw at 17.1 W, a 7 W low-power mode, and 65 W maximum with cold-weather heating on. Its built-in backup battery lasts about 45 minutes in gateway mode.

Those numbers are why a power station makes sense in front of it. Divide the Power 2000’s 2,048 Wh by the 17.1 W typical draw and you get roughly 120 hours, about five days, before conversion losses and heating eat into it. Add a solar panel and a ground station on a ridgeline stops needing a trench to the nearest outlet. It is the first DJI Power accessory built for ground infrastructure rather than for topping up aircraft batteries.

DJI Says Its Battery Business Rests on 15 Years of Drone Batteries

DJI presented the Power line as an extension of its drone battery engineering and put three numbers behind it: more than 15 years of battery expertise, more than 700 battery patents and applications, and more than 10 million users worldwide. The footnotes attribute all three to DJI internal records.

The 10 million figure is the one to read carefully. The footnote says DJI has served more than 10 million users across its product portfolio, which means drones and cameras, not power stations. It is a statement about DJI’s installed base. DJI has never published Power unit sales, and Friday did not change that.

The engineering lineage is real enough. The Power 2000’s 10 ms UPS switchover and the 1-ton static load rating on the case date from the July 2025 launch, and DJI Power’s Tongxi Lu told T3 in May that the division shares its battery management and fast-charging engineering with the drone side. She also said most Power buyers still come from DJI’s drone and camera base, and that reaching people who have never owned a DJI product is the division’s biggest problem. A balcony kit sold to renters in Germany is the clearest answer to that problem DJI has shown so far.

Americans Can Buy the Battery, Not the Home Energy Part

The Power 2000 stays legal to buy in the United States because its FCC authorization predates the December 22, 2025 Covered List action, but grid-tied mode is not enabled on US units, DJI has announced no US balcony kit, and Friday’s teased hardware needs a grant DJI cannot get.

The station on a US retailer’s shelf is the same hardware as the one on stage in Berlin, minus the firmware feature that makes the whole IFA pitch work. DJI’s grid-tied function shipped for Germany, France and Spain first and has spread to other European markets since. A grid-interactive inverter sold in the US would also need UL 1741 listing and utility interconnection approval, a separate process from anything the FCC does.

The newer Power products show where the wall sits. DJI launched the Power 1000 Mini globally in April, and DJI spokesperson Daisy Kong told The Verge at the time that US authorization was pending, as DroneXL reported on April 20. That piece told readers to watch the status for 90 days. The window closed in late July, and DJI has announced no US launch for the Power 1000 Mini since. Whatever the next generation of power turns out to be, if it has an app it has a radio, and it faces the same gate.

The US plug-in solar market DJI is skipping is starting to exist. Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar systems in March 2025, Virginia signed its own law in April 2026, and several more states have followed this year. A Chinese company selling a balcony battery into American apartments would land in the middle of the same security fight that already covers its drones and its robot vacuums. DJI knows that, which is the likeliest reason Berlin got the announcement and America got nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

DJI is spending its IFA stage on home batteries because the drone business has a ceiling and this one, so far, does not. Aircraft answer to airspace rules and, in the United States, to a Covered List blocking every new model. A balcony battery answers to none of that.

Look at what the company has shipped outside of aircraft in the last 18 months. The Avinox M2S and M2 drive units pushed its e-bike motor business to 1,500 W and 150 Nm. The ROMO robot vacuum became a real product line, with a second generation debuting in Berlin this week. The Osmo 360 II launched on August 13 at 8K60. And now a company that sells drones is selling solar panels to tenants in Berlin. Every one of those products is DJI’s battery or motor engineering wrapped in a new case.

The pitch on Friday’s stage is the one I find most convincing of the lot. DJI’s drone battery experience is real, and a home battery is a product where the boring engineering is the entire product. The balcony market in Germany is large, regulated in DJI’s favor since 2024, and already contested by Anker Solix and EcoFlow, the same names DJI went up against when it entered portable power stations in 2024. This is the shortest line DJI could draw from what it already knows how to build to a market that is growing.

Yes, the €680 slide is a best-case number wrapped in disclaimers, and DJI has not shown a price. Every company in this category does the same. The question for a buyer is whether the hardware is good, and DJI’s power stations have been.

The problem is the same one that has followed every DJI announcement since December: none of this reaches American buyers, and the gap is widening from drones into things that are not drones at all. I do not think the Covered List was written with balcony batteries in mind. My read is that it does not need to be. As long as DJI cannot get a new FCC grant, every product with a Wi-Fi chip is blocked by default, and a home energy system that talks to a smart meter is more radio, not less. Americans will watch DJI’s power business grow up in Europe the way they watched the Osmo Pocket 4P and the Mic Mini 2S.

The teaser gives us something to watch. DJI said the next generation of power is coming. Whether that station ever gets a US listing is the test. If it does, DJI found a path through the authorization gate for products without a drone attached. If it lands in Germany and stays there, what this article describes is the pattern for everything DJI builds from now on.

Sources: DJI (IFA 2026 announcement, Power 2000 press release), DJI Power on X, DJI Enterprise (O4 Ground Station specifications), pv magazine Deutschland, T3

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

TSA Plans Closed-Door Part 108 Security Talks After the Rule Lands

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:42:00 GMT

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is recruiting drone operators for a series of closed-door technical roundtables on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) security, and the meetings will not happen until after the Part 108 final rule publishes. The notice appeared in the Federal Register on September 4. Requests to participate are due October 19.

TSA wants the sessions to shape model language for the TSA-approved security programs that Part 108 operators will need. In plain terms, the security half of the rule does not yet come with instructions for complying with it, and TSA plans to write those instructions after the rule is final, in rooms it fills and closes itself.

DroneXL has covered the TSA piece of Part 108 since the joint proposal dropped in August 2025, and this is the first public signal of how TSA intends to turn its proposed security program requirement into something an operator can actually submit. Vic Moss of the Drone Service Providers Alliance posted the notice to LinkedIn on Thursday evening with one line: “expect another Part 108 delay.” The document supports a narrower reading, and a more useful one.

TSA Picks the Participants and Closes the Door

TSA will validate every participant as a representative of a BVLOS operator or an industry association, cap attendance at two people per organization, and require a non-disclosure agreement before anyone enters. Each roundtable is closed to the public under Sensitive Security Information rules, and TSA may trim the list further.

The notice, signed September 1 by Scott C. Gorton, TSA’s acting assistant administrator for strategy, policy, and engagement, says TSA will invite “relevant associations and corporate representatives known to TSA through its regular stakeholder engagements.” Operators flying BVLOS today under FAA waivers or exemptions, and those planning to seek a Part 108 permit or certificate, may also ask in. Kristine Adams at BVLOS@tsa.dhs.gov is the contact, and TSA may hold the sessions in person with a virtual option or virtually only.

TSA closes the meetings under 49 U.S.C. 114(r) and 49 CFR part 1520, the statute and regulation that protect Sensitive Security Information. Participants must qualify as covered persons under 49 CFR 1520.7 or be designated as such by TSA for the event, and their duty to protect what they hear survives the meetings. The sessions are not a deliberative body: TSA wants individual views rather than group recommendations, and the notice draws an explicit line between this format and a federal advisory committee. There is no public comment period attached.

The Security Program Language Does Not Exist Yet

TSA proposed two security requirements in the August 2025 joint notice with the FAA: vetting of certain covered personnel and a TSA-approved security program for certain operators. TSA is still finalizing both, and the model approaches for meeting them will be built from what participants bring to the roundtables.

That sequencing is the news. The roundtables are meant to surface the organizational, structural, technological, and physical methods operators already use to secure BVLOS flights, so TSA can turn them into model approaches other operators can copy. TSA says outright that some procedures operators already follow under FAA waivers may adequately satisfy parts of its security program requirements. An operator reading that sentence in October 2025 would have found it hard to believe.

The proposal that sentence softens was the most contested security text in the rulemaking. As DroneXL reported when the comment period closed, the TSA provisions drew formal opposition from Amazon, Walmart, DoorDash, Wing, and Zipline, with Wing warning that every package handler in a drone delivery chain could face TSA enrollment, and two leaders of the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus asking TSA to withdraw and start over. Whether the final text narrows that scope is unknown until it publishes. What the roundtable notice shows is that even a narrowed version will arrive without a compliance template.

The FAA Rule Sits at OIRA With Meetings Booked Through September 16

The FAA’s final Part 108 rule has been under White House review since July 10, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs still listed it as pending on September 4. OIRA’s calendar shows stakeholder meetings on the rule booked through September 16, which makes publication before mid-month unlikely.

OIRA’s entry for the rule flags a statutory legal deadline the FAA has already missed, on top of the 240-day clock in Executive Order 14307 that expired February 1. The meeting log for the rulemaking runs to 51 sessions across both stages, with final-rule meetings held August 28, September 1 and September 3, and more booked for September 8, 14, 15 and 16. OIRA cancels pending meetings if a review wraps up first, so the calendar can shorten, but as booked it points to no clearance before mid-September. Day 90 of the standard review window falls on October 8. TSA’s October 19 deadline for roundtable requests lands 11 days after that, and TSA says it may adjust the registration period once its own final rule publishes.

The slip has a documented history. The FAA reopened the comment file for two weeks in January on electronic conspicuity and right-of-way, blew through its February deadline over the same right-of-way fight, and in August the Department of Transportation’s chief of staff told the Commercial Drone Alliance the delay was deliberate, to avoid hard-coding today’s technology into the rule. Roughly 3,100 comments were filed against the original proposal, which DroneXL broke down section by section when it published.

One gap in the record matters here. TSA’s companion rule, RIN 1652-AA80, does not appear as a separate entry on OIRA’s pending-review list as of September 4, and TSA’s notice describes its own final rule only as forthcoming, with no date. Whether the TSA text travels inside the FAA package or has not been submitted at all, TSA has not said.

DroneXL’s Take

Moss is right that this notice is bad news for anyone waiting to fly BVLOS at scale, and he is pointing at the wrong calendar. The FAA rule can publish in October and still leave operators unable to comply with its security half, because the model program does not exist.

It will be drafted after publication, from a room TSA picks, under NDA. The delay is real. It moves from the Federal Register to TSA’s approval queue, where nobody can see it.

I will give TSA the statute. Security-vulnerability discussions belong under SSI, and 49 U.S.C. 114(r) does not leave the agency much choice about closing the room. What the statute does not require is an invitation list built from the regulator’s existing contacts, or a two-seat cap that a national retailer fills as easily as a two-person mapping shop and benefits from far more. Pete Meachum stood in front of the Commercial Drone Alliance five weeks ago and said Secretary Duffy wants no lock-in protection for incumbents. A closed roundtable seeded from TSA’s own contact list is how lock-in gets written without anyone deciding to write it.

The most useful sentence in the notice is TSA’s own concession that what waiver holders already do may satisfy parts of the security program. That is what Wing and Zipline argued last fall, and it is the door small operators should walk through: the operators with years of waiver-based BVLOS logs hold exactly the evidence TSA says it is looking for. Request a seat before October 19, bring the procedures you already fly by, and make TSA say on the record why they fall short.

Three dates now govern the security half of Part 108. September 16 is the last OIRA meeting on the books. October 8 is day 90. October 19 is TSA’s cutoff. If the FAA rule clears OIRA before October 8, the roundtables can convene this fall; if it does not, the FAA rule slips into a 30-day extension and TSA’s process slips with it. My read is that the second outcome is the one this notice is quietly built for.

Sources: Federal Register, Reginfo.gov, Federal Register (NPRM, 90 FR 38212), Vic Moss via LinkedIn.

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

DJI Fixes Pocket 4P FrameTap And Mic Conflict, Users Find It First

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:26:00 GMT

DJI has shipped Osmo Pocket 4P firmware that lets the Osmo FrameTap remote and a DJI Mic 3 or Mic Mini 2S transmitter connect to the camera at the same time, and the change appears in none of DJI’s published changelogs. Pocket 4P owners in Japan found it this week and posted the screenshots. Until now the remote and DJI’s wireless microphones could only take turns on the camera, which made the Vlog Combo that bundles both a kit you could not fully use in one shot.

The find surfaced on September 3 from Adobe Community Evangelist Yoshihiko Ichii, a Japanese video producer who runs the country’s Premiere Pro user group, who posted a photo of his Pocket 4P with a Mic 3 transmitter linked while the FrameTap showed a live 4K/60 feed. His message, translated from Japanese: “DJI, I think you should announce it more loudly.” The post had 15,000 views by Friday morning.

Japanese Pocket 4P Owners Confirmed The Change Before DJI Mentioned It

Three Pocket 4P owners in Japan posted the same finding this week. Ichii’s photo shows one Mic 3 transmitter and the FrameTap connected together. A second owner, posting as @fridaysbeer, went further: two Mic 3 transmitters linked at 100% while the FrameTap streamed the camera view.

That second post puts the firmware at V01.01.71.31 and adds the limit that still stands: the FrameTap and the DJI Mimo phone app cannot hold a connection to the camera simultaneously. A third owner, @yuu_u001 of Photo Journal PRESS, replied to Ichii that the FrameTap ran alongside either a Mic Mini 2S or a Mic 3 for him too. His device-info screen reads firmware 01.01.71.20, the August build, so the two version screens together place the change in August and carry it into the September point release. DJI has not said which build added it.

Firmware screens on a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P and its FrameTap remote, shown in Japanese, list the camera and RC versions users pointed to after finding the pairing behavior DJI left out of its changelog. Photo credit: Yuu (@yuu_u001) via X

The Osmo FrameTap is a 29 g (1 oz) viewfinder remote that shows the Pocket 4P’s live feed, controls recording and the gimbal, and picks a tracking subject with a double tap. DJI sells it only bundled, in the Pocket 4P Vlog Combo or with the Osmo Mobile 8P.

That combo lists at £605 / €689, as DroneXL reported when the Pocket 4P launched worldwide on July 30. A Japanese user guide published July 28 laid out the catch: under the shipping firmware the FrameTap and a DJI Mic transmitter could not connect to the Pocket 4P at the same time, so the two headline accessories in the box worked in separate takes. DroneXL covered the remote’s FCC filing last December, and Shawn from Air Photography called it a game changer in his Osmo Mobile 8P review here in June. On the Pocket 4P, this conflict held that verdict back.

DJI’s Notes For The August Update Say Nothing About Microphones

DJI’s changelog for the 4P’s August firmware, as CineD reported on August 19 from DJI’s release notes, lists the Camera Cloud Service, 10-bit D-Log for slow motion, version 2.0 LUTs, and 45-degree diagonal joystick control. No line mentions the FrameTap or the wireless microphone menu.

The newest Pocket 4P release-notes PDF DroneXL could retrieve from DJI is still the June 29 launch document, and the only FrameTap note in it points the other way. The June 29 launch release notes state that the remote does not support simultaneous connections to a mobile device and the Pocket 4P, the restriction @fridaysbeer says still applies. DroneXL found no DJI statement or support article describing the mic change as of Friday morning.

None of it reaches American buyers through official channels. The Pocket 4P remains off the US availability map under the FCC Covered List, and the guide’s author reports DJI has no plans to sell the FrameTap on its own.

DroneXL’s Take

The Vlog Combo’s pitch is a one-person film crew: remote in one hand, mic on your collar, camera on a tripod. For two months that box shipped with two accessories that could not work together, and the only documentation was a blogger telling buyers to test before anything important.

Then DJI fixed it and told nobody. Ichii had to find out by accident and ask the company, in public, to take credit for its own work.

To be fair, two months from launch to fix beats most camera makers, who would have left the limitation in the manual for good. The complaint is the silence. DJI is fighting a Covered List and a Ninth Circuit case, and the one fight entirely within its control, telling customers what its firmware does, is the one it keeps skipping. My read is that the fix landed in August under “fixed some known issues,” because a limitation DJI never listed is easy to fix without listing either.

Watch the Osmo Pocket 4P downloads page for release notes on 01.01.71.31. If a simultaneous-connection line appears, DJI heard Ichii. If it doesn’t, the feature stays folklore and the next Vlog Combo buyer learns about it the way he did. American creators can skip the vigil. The fix is for a camera the Covered List will not let them buy.

Sources: Yoshihiko Ichii (@ittsui) on X, @fridaysbeer on X, @yuu_u001 on X, CineD, HAL gadget guide (note.com), DJI Osmo Pocket 4P release notes.

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

DJI Takes Pocket 4P to Venice Film Festival, US Still Shut Out

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:21:00 GMT

DJI will put the Osmo Pocket 4P on stage at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Monday, September 7, at 9:00 AM GMT, the company said Friday morning on X. The session is billed as a DJI Filmmakers and Visionaries Session at the Venice Production Bridge, the festival’s industry market on the Lido, and it comes with a slogan aimed at a specific audience: “written by a younger generation.”

It is the fourth European stage in four months for a camera that launched worldwide on July 30 without a US price or a US mention. Cannes in May, China in June, Berlin this week, Venice on Monday. The country that wrote the rule keeping the Pocket 4P off its shelves is the one country DJI has not scheduled a stop in.

The 9:00 AM GMT start is 11:00 AM in Venice and 5:00 AM on the East Coast.

DJI Puts Three Cinematographers and Four Shorts on the Lido

The Venice session is a panel called “New Generation, New Cinematic Language,” running 11:00 to 12:30 local time at the Biennale Match Point Arena on the Lido. Entry is free with a reservation, and four young cinematographers will present short films shot on the Pocket 4P.

DJI teases the Osmo Pocket 4P ahead of a Filmmakers & Visionaries session at the Venice Production Bridge during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 7, 2026. Photo credit: DJI

DJI’s event notice, published by Italian outlets ahead of the festival, names three established cinematographers for the panel, followed by a two-hour networking reception at the Hotel Excelsior. Michele D’Attanasio holds two David di Donatello awards for cinematography, for Veloce come il vento and Freaks Out. Cristiano Di Nicola shot Piove and La valle dei sorrisi and has a film at this year’s festival, L’Estranea by Paolo Strippoli. Valentin Vignet is a French documentary and narrative cinematographer and a grandson of Agnès Varda.

The four shorts are the new part. According to the same notice, DJI commissioned four young cinematographers to each make a short film on the Pocket 4P, on themes the notice lists as childhood and a father-son relationship, the body moving through a city, the perception of time, and nature and memory. The program gets its first showing at the panel. The notice does not say whether or when the films will be released to the public, and DJI’s post on X does not mention them at all.

The Venice Production Bridge runs September 3 through 9 inside a festival that opened Wednesday and closes September 12. DJI is running a second European booth at the same time: the Osmo 360 II launch release puts the company at IFA Berlin from September 4 through 8, with the Pocket 4P on the table there too.

The Pocket 4P Has Toured Europe Since May Without Touching America

DJI unveiled the Pocket 4P at Cannes on May 14. It went on sale in China on June 15 and across the UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia on July 30 at £529 and €599. The United States was absent from every announcement because the Covered List blocks new DJI authorizations.

When DroneXL covered the Cannes reveal, I wrote that the venue was the headline, since DJI had never picked a more loaded cinema setting for a Pocket announcement. The press release that day held back every spec and named no market. Venice is the same play with the specs filled in. The camera pairs a 1-inch, 20mm-equivalent f/2.0 wide sensor with a 60mm-equivalent f/1.8 telephoto, records 4K at 240 frames per second, and weighs 230 g (8.1 oz). CineD’s lab measured 16 stops of dynamic range at the industry-standard threshold on launch day, the best result in its history and ahead of the ARRI Alexa 35.

DJI has been on the FCC Covered List since December 22, 2025, and the Pocket 4P’s certification landed on the wrong side of that date. Asked about the US on launch day, DJI told DPReview that “the application for authorization is still pending.” Nothing has moved since. American buyers who want one are paying importers: DroneXL found the 4P listed on Amazon at $980 the day before the global launch, $276 above DJI’s own conversion of the European price.

The one dual-lens pocket gimbal Americans can buy at retail is the Insta360 Luna Ultra, which went on sale in the US on June 10. DJI sued Insta360 over it in Texas the same week, then dropped those suits on June 28 with no settlement announced. Insta360 owns the American dual-lens segment by default.

The Younger Generation DJI Wants Includes Students It Cannot Sell To

DJI’s Venice slogan and its newest American marketing program target the same people: the X post promises cinema written by a younger generation, and eleven days earlier DJI opened a Campus Creators program offering US students cash, free gear, and early access to products it cannot sell in America.

DroneXL covered that program on August 24. Its application template used “US Campus Creator” as the example subject line, and its reward card listed early access to new DJI releases. For an American student, that early access means hardware like the Pocket 4P, which no classmate can buy in the country. The Venice panel and the campus pitch are two halves of one strategy: build a generation of creators on DJI cameras, in Europe through festivals, in America through campus social feeds, and let the FCC docket run on its own clock.

DroneXL’s Take

Cannes, China, Berlin, Venice. That is a product tour for a camera that cannot legally be sold in the United States, and DJI is spending festival money on it anyway. My read is that DJI has stopped treating the US as a launch market for the 2026 handheld lineup and started treating it as a future one. You do not commission four short films and book a Venice Production Bridge panel for a camera you plan to discount in a year. You do it for a brand you expect to be selling in 2028, to buyers who are 22 today.

The Covered List’s defenders have a fair point I will grant them: a national security designation that carves out exceptions by product category is not a designation, and DJI’s data practices are the subject of a live federal proceeding, not a settled question. The Pocket 4P got caught in a net Congress and the FCC cast at drones. Fine. But the net has now been in the water for eight and a half months, and what it has caught in the camera aisle is a 230-gram device with no rotors and a dynamic range measurement that embarrassed ARRI, sold at a European price American creators pay a $276 premium to import. The security case for keeping a handheld gimbal camera off US shelves has not been made by anyone, because nobody has tried to make it. It is a side effect, and the beneficiary is another Shenzhen company.

What bothers me about Venice specifically is the audience DJI picked. “A younger generation” is not a slogan for the people who bought a Pocket 3. It is a slogan for people who have not bought anything yet, and DJI is courting them in two places at once: on the Lido with a two-time David di Donatello winner, and on American campuses with an email address and a promise of early access to gear they cannot buy. One of those pitches is clear about where the camera can be bought. The other never says, and it is the one aimed at Americans.

Monday’s session is worth watching for one thing: whether DJI puts the four shorts online. A festival showing that never leaves the Lido is a press event. A festival showing that ships to YouTube the same afternoon is a marketing campaign with a clear target, and the target is not in Italy. September 15, when the Osmo 360 II reaches European shelves with the US store still showing one Osmo 360, is the next date after that. If both pass with no American movement, the question DroneXL has asked since May stops being whether DJI has a US plan for these cameras and becomes when it decided it did not need one.

Sources: DJI (@DJIGlobal on X, September 4, 2026), The Way Magazine (DJI event notice), La Biennale di Venezia, Venice Production Bridge, DPReview

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

GoPro CEO Promises 'More Cameras' After Merger, Names None

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:49:00 GMT

GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman published an open letter Thursday telling customers the company will keep building cameras after its merger with Starman Optical. The letter, posted to GoPro’s news blog and addressed to “our GoPro community, fans and customers,” says GoPro plans to deliver “more innovative cameras, smarter accessories, and more powerful software and services” once the deal closes. It names no camera and no date.

The letter arrives two days after GoPro agreed to sell 90% of itself to Starman for $285 million, a deal that points the 24-year-old camera maker at AI data center, government, defense, and aerospace markets. Woodman opens by acknowledging “some concern” about GoPro’s post-merger commitment to camera development. He then spends five paragraphs saying that commitment is intact.

On Tuesday, I wrote that the word to watch in GoPro’s merger announcement was “existing,” because supporting existing products is a different promise than shipping new ones. Woodman’s letter answers that directly. The answer is a promise of more cameras, with nothing attached to it.

Woodman’s Letter Promises Cameras And Names None

The September 3 letter commits GoPro to “more innovative cameras” without identifying a model or a date. It attributes the future to Starman’s balance sheet, says Starman shares GoPro’s passion for the brand, and closes with the “Be a HERO” slogan. Each camera sentence is a plan or an expectation.

“Making amazing cameras for all of you is our core DNA,” Woodman writes, adding that this “will never change.” He credits the merger’s “improved financial strength” for putting GoPro in a better position to invent, and points to 2,500-plus patents over 24 years as proof it has been busy. The goal he describes, “a more diversified company” that is stronger financially, is the framing GoPro’s merger announcement used on September 1.

What the letter leaves out is anything a buyer could hold GoPro to. There is no mention of a HERO14 or a Mission 2, and nothing about a successor to the 197-gram MISSION 1 PRO ILS that GoPro declared available on September 2, one day after signing the merger. There is no statement about the size of the camera engineering team after closing, or what share of Starman’s capital goes to consumer hardware. The letter ends with a securities-law disclaimer, the same “No Offer or Solicitation” and forward-looking-statements language GoPro attaches to its SEC solicitation filings. That marks the reassurance as merger solicitation material, and every camera promise in it as a forward-looking statement that “could differ materially.”

GoPro Told Employees Specifics Wait Until The Deal Closes

The letter’s silence on products matches what GoPro told its own staff. In a September 1 email disclosed in a Schedule 14A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Woodman wrote that GoPro would not share more specifics on its go-forward strategy until after closing, expected before year-end.

The same filing shows who GoPro is merging with. Starman Optical, Inc. is a Delaware company wholly owned by Action Acquisitions LLC, and TechCrunch reported that Starman Optical was incorporated on August 31, one day before the announcement, while the transceiver business, Starman New Photonics, dates to 2025 and is still building its New Jersey factory. The employee email calls Starman an “up and coming” US transceiver maker whose high-margin revenue is expected to fund GoPro’s move into new markets. Expected, not booked.

The customer email in the same filing is the closest GoPro has come to a hardware commitment: “The current product lineup stays in production and remains available for purchase.” That sentence covers cameras that already exist. Woodman’s public letter adds the word “more” and stops there.

GoPro Has Spent A Year Promising A Product Pipeline

GoPro’s forward-looking language about cameras predates the merger by ten months, and the year in between was the worst in the company’s history. Read against that record, a promise with no product attached lands differently with this audience than it would with a general reader.

In November 2025, Woodman bought $2 million of GoPro stock and said the purchase reflected his excitement for GoPro’s “diversified product pipeline in 2026 and beyond,” according to the company’s announcement. In April 2026, GoPro laid off about a quarter of its workforce and introduced the Mission 1 lineup. On May 11, the board announced a review of strategic alternatives with Houlihan Lokey. In June, GoPro told investors there was substantial doubt it could continue as a going concern. In July, Woodman lent the company roughly $20 million through senior secured notes; GoPro’s own prospectus supplement says that even with that money it did not expect to have enough liquidity to meet its financing obligations.

The company has also cut a product this community bought before. The Karma drone was recalled weeks after its 2016 launch and shut down for good in January 2018. And GoPro has been selling off imaging patents from the pile Woodman now cites as proof of innovation: Skydio bought 114 of them in November 2024 for its own government-focused business.

DroneXL’s Take

Give Woodman this: the letter is more than the press release offered. Tuesday’s announcement promised to “fully support” existing consumer products. Thursday’s letter promises more cameras. That is a real change in wording, and it came because customers made noise, which is the only pressure this audience can still apply.

Wording is where it stops. A promise of “more innovative cameras” with no model and no date is what a CEO writes when the people about to own 90% of his company have not told him what he is allowed to build. The employee email says as much: no specifics until closing. The letter cannot be a roadmap because the roadmap does not yet belong to GoPro. It belongs to a holding company whose operating subsidiary was incorporated the day before the deal, and it gets written after the stockholders vote.

The disclaimer tells you the rest. A letter that opens with “our collective stoke” and closes with several hundred words of forward-looking-statements boilerplate knows which audience it is really for. The fans get the stoke. The SEC gets the caveats.

FPV pilots need to know whether the ILS gets firmware in 2027, whether a second body follows, and whether GoPro’s camera engineers survive the year. None of that is in this letter. My read is that it is missing because nobody at GoPro is currently permitted to know it, and a CEO who cannot say what the plan is falls back on saying who he is. That is the job “core DNA” is doing in this document.

The proxy statement GoPro must file before the stockholder vote is where the real answer lives. It will lay out the merger agreement and the board’s reasons for taking $1.14 a share, including what Starman told the board about its plans for the business. If a camera commitment exists anywhere in this deal, that document is where it lives. Until it shows up there, treat “more cameras” the way you treat any spec GoPro has not shipped: as marketing.

Source: GoPro (Letter from Nick), GoPro merger announcement, SEC Schedule 14A, TechCrunch.

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

Secret Service Saw Drones Near Obama and Sanders, Then Came Butler

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:16:00 GMT

The Secret Service recorded three drone incidents around its protectees between 2015 and 2021, changed no policy on civilian drone use after any of them, and never wrote down why. That is the finding of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published Thursday, which follows the paper trail forward to July 13, 2024, when Thomas Crooks flew a drone for roughly 11 minutes over the Butler, Pennsylvania rally grounds before shooting Donald Trump.

The report, GAO-26-108455, covers fiscal years 2015 through 2025. In that window the Secret Service reviewed 83 security incidents and updated its protection policies after 25 of them. For the other 58, agency policy did not require anyone to record the reasoning for leaving the rules alone. GAO’s auditors say that gap is why nobody can now explain what the agency concluded when a drone touched President Barack Obama’s motorcade in Hawaii in December 2015.

DroneXL first reported on the Butler drone a week after the shooting, when investigators disclosed that Crooks had flown a DJI aircraft on a preprogrammed path over the Farm Show grounds. Two years and one counter-drone buildout later, federal auditors have counted how many earlier warnings sat in the agency’s own files.

GAO Found Three Drone Incidents and No Record of Any Decision

The Secret Service encountered drones near protectees in December 2015, May 2016 and January 2021, according to GAO’s report. None produced a policy on civilian drone use, and the agency documented no rationale for leaving its rules unchanged after any of them. GAO calls that missing paperwork the core problem.

The first incident came on a return trip from a golf outing in Hawaii, when a civilian operator’s drone came into contact with Obama’s motorcade. The second was a drone flown about 200 feet (60 meters) over a crowd at a San Jose, California rally for then-candidate Bernie Sanders. The third was different in kind: at the January 2021 inauguration, agents spotted multiple drones shortly before Joe Biden arrived and did not immediately recognize them as U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft flying with authorization. That one did trigger an immediate change, clarifying who inside the Secret Service leads on drone countermeasures. It still produced nothing on what to do when a member of the public puts a drone over a protectee.

Secret Service officials told GAO that some incidents warranted no change because they found no operational deficiency, the mitigation worked, and nobody was hurt. That may well have been the reasoning in 2015 and 2016. Nobody can check, because the incident form had no box for it. GAO’s conclusion is blunt: “Some of the missing information has been relevant to subsequent attacks.”

Had the rationale been recorded, GAO writes, it would have surfaced in the agency’s annual incident reviews and could have shown drones recurring in security incidents before one was used in an assassination attempt.

The Butler Drone Flew for 11 Minutes Over Ground the Secret Service Never Surveyed From Above

GAO states that Crooks flew his drone for about 11 minutes over the Butler crowd, and that the flight helped him position himself to fire. Trump was wounded, two attendees were injured and one was killed. The Secret Service flew no drones over the site that day.

The agency turned down offers of drone coverage from local law enforcement the night before the rally, according to a whistleblower account relayed by Senator Josh Hawley, then asked the same partner to fly after the shots were fired. DroneXL’s analysis of the drone reconnaissance laid out how a consumer aircraft on a waypoint mission gave a 20-year-old a site survey the protective detail did not have.

The fixes since then have been hardware and authority. The Secret Service moved to boost its own drone surveillance within weeks of Butler and by mid-2025 was fielding military-grade aircraft. GAO’s earlier report on the rally, published in July 2025, recommended the agency document training requirements for its counter-drone operators and write down what its new Aviation and Air Security Division is supposed to do. This week’s report says the Department of Homeland Security agreed and has acted on some of it.

What the new report adds is that the missing ingredient in 2015 and 2016 was not a sensor or a statute. It was a sentence.

Eight of 22 Protection Policies Missed Their Four-Year Review, One Dates to 2001

Secret Service policy since March 2022 requires every protection policy to be reviewed and updated, or formally reauthorized, within four years of issuance. GAO checked 22 policies governing domestic and foreign advance planning and found eight had not been touched inside that window.

Three of the eight are specific to foreign protective advances. The oldest is the Vice Presidential Protective Division’s foreign advance policy, effective July 16, 2001. The Dignitary Protective Division’s motorcade policy dates to May 2019, and the Office of Protective Operations’ site security policy, the document governing how an advance team identifies a venue’s vulnerabilities, was last issued in May 2022. Officials told GAO they try to keep up but cannot always find people to do the drafting, and current policy assigns that job to no specific position. GAO’s second recommendation is to name one.

A 1991 Memo Still Governs Overseas Protection and Places the Secret Service Inside Treasury

The Secret Service and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service divide responsibility for protecting the President abroad, and foreign dignitaries in the United States, under a 1991 memorandum of understanding that requires an annual review. GAO found it has never been updated and does not mention drones.

The memo still describes the Secret Service as part of the Department of the Treasury, which stopped being true in March 2003. It omits protectees added by statute since, including former Vice Presidents. GAO notes that unmanned aircraft may now enter or operate in the restricted areas where protectees visit or live, and that neither agency’s current advance policies cover the joint coordination the memo was written to handle.

The two agencies do not agree on whether that matters. Secret Service officials told GAO they do not think the memo needs updating, because a presidential policy directive and existing statutes cover the roles. GAO’s auditors reviewed both and disagreed. Diplomatic Security Service officials said they had considered an update in 2022 but never engaged the Secret Service on it, and described operating under a 35-year-old memo as unacceptable. Both departments have now agreed to convene a working group.

DHS Accepted Every Recommendation and Then Argued About the Framing

GAO issued four recommendations, three to the Secret Service and one to the Secretary of State. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with all three of its own: after-action reports will record why an incident warranted no policy change, and each directorate will name someone to own policy reviews.

DHS also told GAO the report lacked context about how hard the Secret Service tries to keep policies current. GAO’s response, in the published text, is that the report provides appropriate context. Nathan Tranquilli, GAO’s acting director for homeland security and justice, told the Associated Press the drone incidents were a “compelling example” of what goes missing when the agency does not record its reasoning.

The report was requested by Representatives Bennie Thompson and Seth Magaziner, the ranking Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee and its counterterrorism subcommittee. It lands after a year in which protectees faced an alleged April 2026 assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a May 2026 shooting near Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade, and a foiled drone-and-sniper plot against the UFC event on the White House grounds in June. GAO also records that the Secret Service’s total enacted budget rose 82 percent across the audit period, from $1.84 billion in fiscal 2015 to $3.4 billion in fiscal 2025.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered the Secret Service and drones since the agency flew its own aircraft over the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in 2020, most recently the counter-drone teams on the National Mall this July 4. The fixes since Butler added hardware or authority. This report says the failure was neither.

Start with what the agency is not being accused of. Nobody at GAO says the Secret Service should have predicted Butler from a drone bumping a motorcade in Hawaii. The zero-fail mission is real, the tempo is real (7,641 protective visits in fiscal 2025 alone), and the threat picture since 2024 has gotten worse by any honest count. Reviewing an incident and deciding it needs no policy change is a legitimate outcome.

The problem is that the decision left no trace. After a drone made physical contact with the President’s motorcade, the agency filed an incident form and moved on, and today nobody can say whether the reviewers decided civilian drones were beneath policy, or planned to revisit it, or never asked the question. That is not a hardware gap. It is an institution that had three chances to notice a pattern in its own records and had built no mechanism for noticing. Secret Service officials acknowledged to GAO that recording the reasoning would show a decision was deliberate and risk-based. They conceded the point in the same paragraph GAO made it.

My read is that this report cuts against the reflex that has governed drone policy since July 2024. The Secret Service did change things inside the building, and GAO records them: a 2025 staffing policy for candidate details, a new Protective Readiness section, a February 2026 instruction to review incidents continuously. None of them require anyone to write down why an incident changed nothing. The response the public saw was aimed outward, at the aircraft and the people who fly them: new federal counter-drone money, mitigation authority for local police under the Safer Skies Act, restrictions that grounded certificated Part 107 pilots at World Cup venues who had never done anything wrong. I do not oppose protecting a president. I do object to the drone community absorbing every cost of an institutional failure while the institution’s own review process, the one thing that would have connected 2015 to 2024, went unexamined until a congressional auditor asked. The Secret Service’s budget rose 82 percent across the years its civilian drone policy stayed blank. Whatever that money bought, it did not buy a sentence on a form.

The fix DHS has agreed to is cheap, and it is the right one. It is also undated and easy to let slide once the headlines move on. GAO keeps a public tracker of open recommendations, and Recommendation 1 of GAO-26-108455 stays open until the Secret Service shows the revised incident-reporting policy exists and is in use. That is the document to ask for. Until it appears, the agency that missed three drone warnings has agreed, in writing, that it should have written things down, and has not yet written that down either.

Sources: Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-108455; Associated Press via Fortune.

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

XTEND CEO Signs $1.5B NYSE Deal Mid-Call, Pentagon Score Still Sealed

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:19:00 GMT

Aviv Shapira signed the closing documents for XTEND’s merger with JFB Construction Holdings at about 2:30 pm Eastern on Thursday, a minute or so before he joined a video call with me from New York, where he had flown in from Tampa the night before. The combined company, XTEND AI Robotics, is set to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange at 9:35 am Friday under the ticker XTND, with a bell-ringing ceremony planned for Tuesday, September 8.

The last hard condition fell earlier in the day. XTEND said Thursday morning it had received the $60 million in cash the merger agreement required. When I checked the JFB quote at 3:12 pm, the stock was at $5.02, a dollar above the $4.00 line that would have halved the exchange ratio for every shareholder on both sides.

What has not changed since I wrote about this listing on Tuesday is the Pentagon’s silence. The Department of War flew Gauntlet II at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August and has published no results. Asked how his STRIKER drone performed, Shapira gave me five words and moved on.

XTEND Signed the JFB Closing While Its CEO Was on a Press Call

XTEND’s all-stock merger with JFB Construction Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed Florida contractor, was set to close September 3 once the $60 million cash condition was met, and Shapira told me he had signed the closing documents. The combined company, XTEND AI Robotics, Inc., lists on the NYSE as XTND on September 4.

The mechanics are the ones DroneXL laid out on Tuesday in XTEND Hits the NYSE Friday Before the Pentagon Scores It. Each JFB share converts to one XTND share and each XTEND ordinary share to about 1.36, provided JFB closed at or above $4.00 on Thursday. At 3:12 pm the stock was at $5.02, a dollar clear of the line, and the official closing print had not been published when this article was written. Former JFB stockholders end up with 19.20% of the economic interest and 10.35% of the voting power, down from the 30% they were promised in February, because XTEND raised private money before the close and every dollar of it came out of the construction company’s side.

Shapira said the reverse merger cut the time to a listing roughly in half compared with a conventional IPO, and that the pairing was less random than it looks. JFB builds factories, and XTEND is building them: Shapira told me the company now has two in the United States, though only the Tampa-area XFAB appears in its releases. The two companies met on a school-security project, in which XTEND drones sit on the ceiling and can be flown remotely when someone enters the building. JFB describes itself as a general contractor that has worked in 36 states.

A compact tactical quadcopter fitted with a sensor pod and police-style strobes hovers on patrol beneath a container crane at a working port. Photo credit: XTEND

“This puts to rest one of the final closing conditions and strengthens our balance sheet,” said Tal Horesh, XTEND’s chief financial officer, in Thursday’s release. Shapira becomes chief executive and board chair. Joseph F. Basile III, JFB’s CEO, becomes executive vice president of construction operations. Markets are crazy, Shapira told me, and this is the time to go public.

Shapira Says ‘I Think We Did Good’ at Fort Carson

XTEND flew STRIKER, an indoor attack drone running its XOS software, in the Department of War’s Gauntlet II at Fort Carson in August. The program site still lists Gauntlet II as in progress, with no leaderboard. Shapira said only that he believes the company performed well.

“I think we did good,” he said, then turned to a part of the program that is already decided. XTEND’s X-Strike lethality package, a US-made electronic safe-and-arm device paired with a warhead, was accepted into Drone Dominance on August 20 and holds limited approval from the Army Fuze Safety Board. Five other companies won the program’s lethality challenge in May, and in Shapira’s account those packages still have to be validated as safe while XTEND’s already is. He expects X-Strike to earn revenue on its own, whichever airframes win.

He also put the prize in his own terms. Drone Dominance is one of 40 to 50 programs XTEND is competing in worldwide, he said, but he called it one of the largest, with each winner taking somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 drones. Against the 25,000 systems he says XTEND has fielded in seven years, a win adds about a sixth to the installed base in a single order. Every one of those drones would ship with the XOS marketplace on board, where he counts about 40 downloadable applications, from GPS-denied navigation to swarming.

The record before Fort Carson is public. XTEND Reality Inc. was on the roster of 25 companies invited to Gauntlet I at Fort Benning and was not among the 11 that took orders for 30,000 drones in March. It requalified at Camp Grayling in June, one of 19 companies out of 49, and had to build 120 armed units in about five weeks to stay in. Shapira said the program forced XTEND to build another factory and that, for his company, it has done nothing but good.

A soldier carries a folded carbon-frame FPV quadcopter strapped to their assault pack during a unit staging in an urban courtyard. Photo credit: XTEND

Shapira Counts 25,000 Systems; His Own Press Release Says 12,500

XTEND’s fielded-systems count depends on who is talking. Shapira told me twice on Thursday that XTEND has about 25,000 systems in the market across 30 countries, while the company’s release the same morning, like the boilerplate on its recent releases, says more than 12,500 systems in more than 30 countries.

The gap is not explained by the Atlas acquisition, the Riga-based robotics company XTEND bought this year and finished integrating on July 27. Atlas brought 4,200 deployed systems and four ISR platforms, which would take the total to roughly 16,700. Nobody has said where the other 8,000 come from, and XTEND has not put a new number in writing. That figure is what the Drone Dominance math above is built on, and the company should say which one it is listing on.

Replay Technologies and a Drone Arcade Became a Defense Company

XTEND began seven years ago in Tel Aviv as a gaming company, with software that let anyone fly an FPV drone by telling it where to go. In 2019 and 2020 Israeli soldiers used the same headset rig to intercept aerial threats over Gaza. Shapira puts that count near 3,500.

Before XTEND there was Replay Technologies, which Shapira co-founded with his brother Matteo. Replay’s freeD format reconstructed a stadium in 3D so a broadcast could show a play from the quarterback’s eyes, which is how it reached Super Bowl coverage. The company won two Emmys for broadcast technology, in 2013 and 2015, and Intel bought it in 2016 and rebranded the product Intel True View. Shapira, an aerospace engineer with a master’s in rocket propulsion who spent years at Thales and similar companies, told me it was the second company he had sold. Rubi Liani, who ran Israel’s drone racing league, joined the brothers to start XTEND. Soldiers called the early system an Iron Man suit.

The idea Shapira kept from Replay is telepresence. XTEND’s drones fly indoors, in tunnels and under bridges without GPS, using cameras and laser sensors to hold position, but he argues the airframe is not the product. Each carries an Nvidia Jetson and a clip-on payload hub rated for 1.1 to 11 pounds (0.5 to 5 kilograms) depending on the platform, and the operator taps a window or a doorway on screen and the drone goes there. The same interface runs XTEND’s fixed-wing aircraft, boats and ground robots. He described XOS as an operating system with a marketplace, like a phone, and said XTEND has put it on top of Lockheed Martin UAVs and Quantum Systems aircraft rather than replacing their software. Auterion looks like a competitor on paper, he said, but sells differently.

An XTEND quadcopter hovers low over a wildflower meadow, its downwash sending dandelion seeds swirling through the air. Photo credit: XTEND

Eric Trump Holds His XTEND Stake Through American Ventures

Eric Trump is not a direct investor in XTEND and holds no board seat, Shapira said. His exposure runs through American Ventures, which backed the JFB combination in February alongside Unusual Machines, Protego Ventures and Aliya Capital. Unusual Machines has Donald Trump Jr. on its advisory board.

I asked how a company competing for Department of War contracts keeps that separate, given that ethics experts have raised the question. Shapira’s answer was that there is, legally and practically, no connection between XTEND and Eric Trump, whom he described as someone he met during due diligence, who flies drones for fun and wants American companies to fill the gap DJI leaves in the US market. Bloomberg valued the Trump family’s drone holdings across XTEND, Powerus and Unusual Machines at about $750 million in March; the White House and the Trump Organization have denied any wrongdoing.

XTEND Plans Acquisitions, Then Germany, Japan, the UAE and India

XTEND plans to buy companies whose hardware can run XOS and join its marketplace, then open subsidiaries in Germany, Japan and the UAE, with India after that, Shapira said. It has six today. They are in Israel, the United States, Mexico, Singapore, Latvia and one he could not immediately recall.

Shapira has already bought two drone companies, Atlas among them. Taiwan, he said, has too many drone makers and too little market for XTEND to open an office there; the plan is to put XOS inside some of those companies’ products instead. On the US industrial base, he pointed to Unusual Machines’ motor and battery production in Orlando as the layer everything else depends on, and said the lesson of Ukraine is that a country cannot rely on anyone else for components. The Section 232 tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones point the same way, and so does the Drone Dominance rule barring Chinese motors and batteries in Phase II.

He was blunt about why the West is behind. Ukraine is at war and the United States is a peacetime army, he said, and a peacetime army does not carry the urgency of one where people die. Israel got that urgency after October 7, when XTEND’s drones had to become GPS-denied and comms-denied capable in a hurry; he also claims XTEND built fiber-optic controlled drones before they became standard in Ukraine, a claim I could not check. In Europe he pointed to the Drone Coalition, the Latvia- and UK-led group of 20 nations supplying Ukraine, which XTEND takes part in through Atlas. When the Pentagon bought AI-guided attack drones from XTEND in January 2025, that was the first US order DroneXL covered for this company. On Friday it lands on the Big Board.

DroneXL’s Take

I came off this call impressed, and I do not say that about many reverse-merger CEOs. Shapira has sold two companies, holds two Emmys for a broadcast format that put viewers behind the quarterback at the Super Bowl, and turned a drone-racing arcade into a defense company because Israel needed something to knock threats out of the sky over Gaza. The factories in Tampa, Swindon, Riga and Singapore were up before the tariffs and before Drone Dominance made a non-China supply chain a condition of entry. That is not luck. It is a company that read the market early and is collecting on it now, the way any company would.

That is also why I am not spending this Take on the last name in the cap table. The facts are in the article: Eric Trump’s stake runs through American Ventures, Unusual Machines is an investor, Shapira says there is no legal or practical connection to Department of War procurement, and ethics experts have asked the question anyway.

What I wrote on Tuesday still holds, and the call sharpened it rather than softened it. The price runs ahead of the record. Shapira told me 25,000 systems, twice. His press release says 12,500, and the one acquisition that could explain the difference accounts for 4,200 of it. A company listing at $1.5 billion should not have a factor of two on its headline number depending on who is speaking. Then there is Fort Carson. Five words, “I think we did good,” are the entire public record on how STRIKER flew, and the valuation sits on that sentence until the Department of War posts a leaderboard.

Shapira wants the story to be software, XOS riding on other people’s airframes. I believe that is where he thinks the margin is. He also did the arithmetic for me without being asked: a Gauntlet II win is 4,000 to 8,000 drones, a sixth of everything XTEND has ever fielded, in one order, and he called it one of the largest programs on his list himself. Software may be the pitch. Fort Carson is the number.

Friday at 9:35 tells us what the market thinks of a construction stock turning into a drone stock. Tuesday’s bell is the party. The leaderboard, whenever it posts, is the story, and it decides whether $1.5 billion is a valuation or a bet. We will be covering XTEND either way.

Sources: JFB Construction Holdings and XTEND, September 3, 2026; DroneXL interview with Aviv Shapira, September 3, 2026; Drone Dominance Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilot Institute Coded Every Filing In Docket 26-189

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

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

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

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

The Definition Question Drew 1,584 Answers And Nine Defenders

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

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

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

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

One Filing Agreed The Economic Impact Is Minor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Businesses And First Responders Wrote Most Of The Record

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

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

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

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

Late Filings Changed The Mix, Not The Verdict

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Pilot Institute, The 26-189 Comment Record

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

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

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

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

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

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

DJI Says No Security Agency Ever Endorsed The Seven Categories

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

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

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

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

The Filing Argues Drones Are Not Communications Equipment At All

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

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

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

DJI Turns The FCC’s Own Rulebook Against The Notice

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

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

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

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

Identical American Drones Stay Legal While First Responders Lose Access

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The MK30 Carries Less Cargo Per Pound Than Wing Or Zipline

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon Says Its Inventory And Range Dictated The Size

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

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

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

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

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

Redundant Motors Do Not Replace A Parachute

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

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

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

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

Amazon Drops Boxes From 13 Feet And Plans 500 Cities

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern leaves a checkerboard on his control screen.

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

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

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

Drone Coverage Still Misses Small Sharks on Windy Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

Video: shark surveillance drones over Sydney beaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The US Store Still Lists Exactly One Osmo 360

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nordfors Says No American Drone Matches What Rescue Teams Fly Today

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

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

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

Weber County’s Record Is The Evidence Behind The Comments

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

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

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

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

Comments Close At Midnight Eastern Tonight

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

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

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

The Full Text Of Nordfors’s Comments

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

To whom it may concern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments Close Tonight And The FCC Already Refused To Extend

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

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

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

How To File Your Own Comment In Docket 26-189

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

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

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

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

The Full Text Of DroneXL’s Comments

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

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

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

Filed: September 2, 2026

Who I am and why I am filing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Domestic fundraising is not domestic replacement capacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Revoking authorizations the Commission already granted destroys regulatory certainty

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

8. What I am asking the Commission to do

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

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

Respectfully submitted,

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DJI Fills Its Vegas Booth With Drones The FCC Proposed Banning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GoPro Lists FPV Drones First Among The ILS Mounting Use Cases

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

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

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

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

PetaPixel Found HyperSmooth Blurs Footage At Cinema Shutter Speeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

Sources: GoPro, GoPro on X, PetaPixel.

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

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

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

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

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

Gunshot Ends a Routine Real Estate Shoot in Athens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Airspace Myth That Keeps Getting Drones Shot

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

Source: WAFF 48

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

Germany Blames Russia For Leipzig Drone Bomb, Closes Consulate

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

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

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

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

Dobrindt Says The Drone’s Components Match Known Russian Operations

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

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

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

Berlin Closes The Bonn Consulate And Goes After The Shadow Fleet

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

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

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

Moscow Denies The Attack As Poland Reports Fresh Sabotage

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: Associated Press, CNN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Markiplier Bought 8.5% Of GoPro Weeks Before The Deal Landed

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

Source: GoPro, Bloomberg, CNBC.

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

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

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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DroneXL’s Take

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