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Utah Rescue Captain Tells DC the FCC Drone Ban Will Cost Lives

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:42:58 GMT

Captain Kyle Nordfors, the drone coordinator for Weber County Search and Rescue in Utah, has taken his fight against the Federal Communications Commission’s “military-grade” drone proposal to Washington’s own newspaper. In an opinion piece published by The Hill this morning, October 2, he writes that the drones the FCC wants to pull from the US market have helped his volunteer team save an estimated 25 to 30 lives and cut its average search from four and a half hours to under one.

The proposal, in PS Docket 26-189, would bar the import and sale of foreign-made drones carrying a thermal camera or LiDAR, among other categories. Nordfors says that describes nearly every aircraft his team flies, including the one that found a snowboarder in the dark two years ago.

He also says he has flown the American-made alternatives, and none of them match his fleet. The companies positioned to replace it charge three to eight times as much.

Nordfors Puts a Price on the Fleet and on the Alternative

Weber County bought its entire fleet of 12 drones for roughly $90,000, Nordfors writes in The Hill. A helicopter costs millions before crew, fuel and standby time. The thermal drone in that fleet had eyes on a missing North Fork snowboarder in 10 minutes, hours faster than a ground team or a helicopter launch.

The North Fork rescue is one DroneXL readers know. Our December 2025 investigation into DJI drones saving American lives documented it: a pre-release DJI Matrice 30T found the snowboarder off-trail, after dark, with ice forming on his skin. Nordfors uses the same case in The Hill to make the point that the FCC’s proposal would classify that exact aircraft as military-grade because of its thermal camera, and the LiDAR that keeps it out of trees and cliff faces.

On the domestic alternatives, Nordfors is specific. He writes that the US-made drones on the market cost three to eight times as much and deliver less than half the capacity, with shorter flight times, weaker thermal sensors and less reliable performance in high winds and cold. “I have tested them, and none have been able to match what my team’s current fleet can do,” he writes.

The federal government’s own test lab reached the same result, and DroneXL published it yesterday. A DHS addendum marked For Official Use Only scored the Matrice 30T at 4.3 out of 5 at Hudson Yards, against 3.7 for the Skydio X10D, with the DJI Matrice 4T at 4.6, the highest mark of any aircraft in the Blue UAS series. The two DJI aircraft outscored both Blue UAS on all nine criteria. DHS left those scores out of the public report.

Nordfors briefs Weber County Search and Rescue team members on a search area from the screen in the team's rescue van. Photo credit: Weber County Search and Rescue / Pilot Institute

That is the same claim he put on the record with the Commission itself. His comments in Docket 26-189, filed on September 2 and published in full by DroneXL, named Skydio directly and said the proposal would set the country back an easy ten years. The Hill piece drops the names and the “blood on their hands” language and keeps the numbers.

The Record Shows 16 Comments in Support of the FCC

Nordfors cites Pilot Institute’s analysis of the docket, which found 98.6 percent of comments opposed the proposal and just 16 supported it. Pilot Institute, a DroneXL partner, read and coded all 3,824 filings with readable text; Greg Reverdiau walked through the method and the results on DroneXL on September 9. On the economic-impact question, 1,701 filings addressed it and one agreed with the FCC.

Nordfors writes that many of the opposing comments came from agencies like his. The proposal’s own economic analysis tentatively concluded the impact would be minor and contained because domestic production is more prevalent in the higher-end categories. The comment record, and his own cost figures, say otherwise.

He closes the piece with the same offer he made the Commission: come to Utah and watch a search. “See side-by-side how the American drones match up to the equipment you want to ban,” he writes.

Nordfors is the sUAS Team Coordinator for Weber County Search and Rescue and UAS Chairman of the Mountain Rescue Association, which covers more than 90 rescue teams in North America. He is a 25-year aviation veteran and a current Boeing 737 captain for a US legacy airline. He won the Unsung Hero Award at the Global Search and Rescue Excellence Awards in London in May 2025 for the drone work behind these rescues.

DroneXL’s Take

Kyle is a friend, and I have covered his team’s rescues for years, so take this with that disclosure. He is right, and the fact that he has to say it in The Hill instead of being heard in the docket tells you something about how this proposal was built.

The FCC asked whether domestic alternatives exist and whether the economic impact would be minor. A rescue pilot with an airline captain’s certificate answered both questions with numbers: $90,000 for 12 aircraft, a search time cut by three and a half hours, and a domestic alternative that costs up to eight times more and does less than half the job. Then 3,770 other filers said some version of the same thing, and DHS’s own evaluators put the Matrice 30T six tenths of a point ahead of the best Blue UAS at Hudson Yards and filed the result where the public could not see it. A month after the record closed, the Commission has issued no order, and Nordfors is still extending the Utah invitation in print, which tells you nobody took it. I don’t expect the FCC to argue with his numbers. My read of the December Covered List action is that the agency’s habit is to not engage with the public safety record at all, and this docket is on the same path.

I have been making the “drones for good” argument since my DroneDJ days, and the people who need to hear it most are the ones who still think of drones as toys. A retired FDNY firefighter laughed at the idea over lunch a few years ago. Nordfors’s piece is written for that reader, not for me, and it is the right venue for it. Congressional staff read The Hill. I doubt many of them read PS Docket 26-189.

Whether the Commission’s order, whenever it comes, addresses the public safety record directly or hides behind its tentative finding that only recreational users are affected is the test. If you run a rescue program and have not told your congressional delegation what your fleet does and what it would cost to replace, Nordfors just wrote the template.

Source: The Hill; Pilot Institute FCC comment record analysis; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758

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

Amazon Asks Westborough to Delay Drone Pad Vote as Board Says No

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:12:00 GMT

Amazon has asked Westborough’s Planning Board to push the hearing on its Prime Air drone launch pad from October 6 to November 10, according to the board’s revised agenda on the town website. The request, filed under the name of Amazon economic development policy manager Tareq Wafaie, covers site-plan application 26-02275, the only local vote Amazon needs before its MK30 drones can fly from the parking lot at 64 Otis Street.

Wafaie told a packed Westborough hotel ballroom on September 23 that Amazon hoped to launch by the end of October. A November 10 hearing puts the earliest possible local approval ten days past the end of October, and five weeks past the date the board was set to vote.

On Thursday night, Westborough’s Select Board met in the Mill Pond School auditorium in front of a capacity crowd, none of whom spoke for the drones, and agreed to take the fight to the State House. Amazon did not send anyone.

Amazon Wants Five More Weeks on the Only Vote Westborough Controls

The October 6 Planning Board agenda lists 64 Otis Street, applicant Tareq Wafaie, Amazon, as a site-plan review hearing with “Continuation requested to November 10, 2026 meeting,” permit 26-02275. Two unrelated applicants on the same agenda, an earth-moving permit and a warehouse site plan, asked for the same date.

The board votes on continuances at the meeting itself, so Tuesday’s 6:30 p.m. session in the Forbes Building’s Great Hall decides whether Amazon gets the delay. The agenda shows the board’s next scheduled dates as November 10, November 17 and December 1.

When Amazon filed the request is not clear from the record. The PDF the town serves at the agenda’s web address carries a “Revised agenda posted on 9-11-26” stamp, but when DroneXL checked that same agenda on September 28 for the survey story, it listed no Amazon item. Either the town replaced the file without a new stamp, or the request was added after September 28, which would put it within days of the lawmakers’ letter. The Planning Department’s filing record would settle which.

Amazon has given no public reason for the request. It moves the local vote past the launch window Wafaie floated on September 23, and past the pause three state lawmakers asked for on September 29 in Amazon Drone Hub Faces Pause Call From Lawmakers as State Sues FAA. Sen. Michael Moore, Rep. Kate Donaghue and Rep. Hannah Kane asked for answers on operating hours, flight paths, service range and daily flight counts first. None of Thursday’s reports carried an Amazon response to the letter, the Select Board meeting or the continuance.

Even with the pad approved, Amazon would still need the FAA’s site-specific environmental sign-off, which a member of its airspace team said on September 23 was under review, and a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the landing area. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists the hub as in review. The FAA’s drone environmental review index listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 28.

Westborough’s Select Board Voted to Take the Drones to the State House

Westborough's Select Board and town staff on the Mill Pond School stage on October 1, 2026, for the special meeting on Amazon's Prime Air proposal. Amazon sent no one. Photo credit: Stephen Quinn, WHDH 7News, via X.

The Select Board’s special meeting opened at 6 p.m. Thursday with public comment, followed by a 7 p.m. item on additional comments to the Planning Board about Prime Air and a 7:45 p.m. item on next steps with the town’s legislative delegation on unmanned aircraft. Westborough TV recorded it.

Board members were unanimous in opposing the proposal, WHDH reported, and said they would draft a letter to state lawmakers and look at towns with more restrictive drone bylaws, naming North Reading. WCVB’s account has the board reviewing the town’s own drone rules and noise ordinances as well.

Residents rallied outside before the doors opened, WCVB reported, and more than 100 filled the auditorium, per WHDH. Resident Faina Kofman, speaking a year to the day after two MK30s struck a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, told the board a person with malicious intent could use a drone to “interfere with emergency operations or conduct unauthorized surveillance.” Resident James Bedar: “The simple answer to all these questions is no, we don’t want this.” A mother quoted by WHDH asked what it means for a family if devices overhead record the backyard where she breastfeeds and her children play.

The Mill Pond School auditorium during the Westborough Select Board's October 1, 2026, meeting on Amazon Prime Air. Photo credit: Stephen Quinn, WHDH 7News, via X

The room matched the numbers. The independent Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey at dronefeedback.com, run by a resident with no tie to Amazon or the town, stood at 1,211 responses on Friday morning, up from 853 when DroneXL first reported it on September 28, with opposition unchanged at 92%, 3% in support, 3% supporting with safeguards, and 94% saying they are unlikely to use drone delivery. Hopkinton residents were among those outside, the Hopkinton Independent reported, and Hopkinton’s own Select Board takes up the hub on Tuesday, October 6, the same night as Westborough’s Planning Board. Chair Shahidul Mannan invited Amazon, which had not confirmed. Amazon is Westborough’s largest taxpayer, WHDH noted, and held its own community meeting on September 23, the one DroneXL reported from in Amazon Tells Packed Westborough Room Its Drones Are Coming Anyway.

North Reading’s Bylaw Regulates Hobbyists, Not a Part 135 Carrier

North Reading’s drone bylaw, adopted at Town Meeting on June 5, 2017, bans interfering with emergency responders, recording people where they expect privacy, and flying within 25 feet of bystanders. Operators must keep the aircraft in sight. The Attorney General approved it that November. Fines run to $300 per violation.

The bylaw sits as Chapter 9 of the town’s general bylaws, the North Reading Transcript reported when it passed, and the police chief who proposed it said he wanted something on the books in the absence of state law.

Those are rules written for a Phantom in a park. Amazon flies the MK30 under a Part 135 air carrier certificate, beyond the operator’s line of sight by design, and a Massachusetts town has already lost in federal court over that kind of rule. In Singer v. City of Newton (2017), a federal judge struck Newton’s ban on flights beyond the operator’s line of sight, along with its registration rule and its altitude limit over private property, as preempted by federal aviation law. My read is that a Westborough copy of North Reading’s bylaw would bind the hobbyist next door and not a single Amazon flight.

The Planning Board’s own hand is weak too, as its vice chair John Gelcich told the September 15 hearing: “we are almost required to approve it,” the Boston Globe quoted him. Town counsel treats the pad as accessory to the warehouse, which puts it in site-plan review rather than a special permit, and under Prudential Insurance Co. v. Board of Appeals of Westwood (1986) a Massachusetts board cannot deny site-plan approval for a use allowed by right once the bylaw’s criteria are met. It can impose conditions. DroneXL walked through what those conditions can and cannot cover in its guide for residents. Residents with questions for the company can call Amazon at 1-888-280-4331 and say it is about drone delivery, or open the customer-service chat and pick “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.”

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon asked for the delay the lawmakers wanted and told nobody, and I count that as the week’s real news. A continuance request is not a pause, and Amazon has not called it one, but the effect is the same: no pad vote before November 10, no October launch, and five more weeks to answer the four questions Moore, Donaghue and Kane asked. If Amazon walks into the Great Hall on November 10 with those answers, the delay was worth it. If it walks in with the same slide deck it showed on September 23, it will have spent the time teaching Westborough, Shrewsbury and Hopkinton to write bylaws that do not work and to ask Beacon Hill for one that might.

The Select Board did the one thing Thursday that can matter. A town cannot regulate the airspace, and North Reading’s bylaw shows how little a town can do alone. A state already licenses commercial landing areas through MassDOT Aeronautics, and the delegation that signed the September 29 letter now has a unanimous Select Board asking it to act. Watch November 10 for the pad, and watch for a bill filed in Donaghue’s or Moore’s name before then. The one that shows up first tells you who is setting the schedule in Westborough, and as of this week it is not Amazon.

Source: Town of Westborough Planning Board agenda, October 6, 2026, Town of Westborough Select Board agenda, October 1, 2026, WHDH, WCVB, Hopkinton Independent, Boston Globe, Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey, North Reading Transcript, Town of North Reading AG approval notice, Holland & Knight on Singer v. Newton

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

Castle Rock Froze Walmart's Drone Hub 7-0. Its Clock Runs Out Jan 21

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:46:02 GMT

Castle Rock, Colorado, needed one meeting to stop Walmart’s drone delivery hub. On July 21, 2026, the Town Council adopted Ordinance No. 2026-023 on first and final reading, 7 to 0, under an emergency clause that made it law the moment the vote closed. For six months the town will not accept, process or approve any application for a commercial drone delivery hub.

The trigger was a pre-application from Walmart for an 18-drone port at its store at 133 Sam Walton Lane, north of downtown, flying orders to homes within five to six miles. Walmart flies its drones with Wing, Alphabet’s delivery unit. Neither company had filed a formal application when the council voted.

The ordinance is two pages long, and this week it was circulating in a Facebook thread among Westborough, Massachusetts residents fighting an Amazon Prime Air hub there. The moratorium expires January 21, 2027. The council said in July that the pause buys time to write rules. No draft has been published.

Castle Rock Wrote A Definition Before It Wrote A Rule

Section 4 of the ordinance defines a commercial drone delivery hub as “an area used for the storage, charging, take-off and landing of private unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the purpose of picking up and discharging cargo.” The zoning code had no such use.

The recitals list what the town wants to regulate: proximity to residential and other sensitive areas, light, noise, size, site design, hours of operation and screening. Nothing in the document touches flight, altitude or routes. A staff memorandum to the July 7 council meeting said the Federal Aviation Administration has primary authority over drone operations and that the town’s reach ends at launch and landing areas, setbacks, screening and lighting. Staff told the council the town may have limited ability to address flight complaints once a hub is approved and operating, and pointed to disputes in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina as the reason to write standards first.

Town Attorney Michael J. Hyman approved the ordinance as to form and Tara Vargish, director of development services, as to content. Mayor Jason Gray and Town Clerk Lisa Anderson signed it. The emergency clause cites Section 2.02.100.E of the municipal code, which requires an extraordinary majority; the council had all seven votes.

Gray’s line at the meeting, reported by Colorado Community Media, was “I just think there’s a lot more questions than answers right now.” Councilmember Max Brooks said the delivery model will be commonplace in six months, six years or 16 years, and the town did not need to rush to embrace it before understanding the impacts. Brooks also raised privacy, telling Denver7 residents would have concerns “as they should.”

Parker Paused For Nine Months The Night Before

Parker, Castle Rock’s neighbor in Douglas County, passed its own emergency ordinance on July 20, suspending for nine months any land use approval or building permit for a drone dispatch and delivery facility. Councilmember Anne Barrington put it as “We’re not saying no, we’re just saying no today.”

Parker is bringing in a consultant to study federal and state rules, industry practice and other jurisdictions before writing its framework. Castle Rock’s council liaison told the Planning Commission on July 23 that staff would bring proposed use categories, design standards and zoning rules back to the commission in the fall, per Citizen Portal’s record of the meeting. As of October 2, no draft has surfaced in the town’s public meeting records or in local coverage; the last time drone delivery appears in a Castle Rock meeting record is that July 23 briefing.

On the far side of Denver, Northglenn went the other way. Its Planning Commission recommended a Commercial Drone Delivery Hub land-use category on September 15, with 200-foot buffers, a 65-decibel cap and 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. hours, and its own staff memo said a hub in the next town can legally deliver to every address in Northglenn regardless. That memo applies to Castle Rock in reverse: the moratorium keeps the pad out of town and stops there.

Walmart Has Hit Three Local Stop Signs This Year

Castle Rock is the third local government this year to stop a Walmart-Wing launch site. Cobb County, Georgia denied one in April, Axios reported. Parker and Castle Rock froze applications before any were filed. Lincoln County, North Carolina approved one 3 to 1 on June 15 over a 200-signature petition.

Walmart passed one million drone deliveries in May and announced with Wing in September a network of more than 270 launch locations for 2027. Colorado was on neither company’s 2026 market list. Each of the three Colorado sites surfaced through a pre-application at a planning counter, not a press release.

The Westborough residents who found Castle Rock’s ordinance are in a different legal position. Their Planning Board can only approve or deny Amazon’s site plan for a fenced pad on an existing parking lot. Westborough changes its zoning at Town Meeting, not by a seven-member council on an emergency clause, and the board hearing Amazon’s application has no power to impose a pause. The Colorado document reads to them as the tool their town does not have.

DroneXL’s Take

Castle Rock did the honest version of this. It did not pretend to regulate airspace, it did not ban drones, and it did not hide the applicant. It admitted its code had no word for what Walmart wanted to build, wrote the word, and stopped the clock while it writes the rest. That is what a zoning moratorium is for, and a 7 to 0 vote with the town attorney’s signature on it is harder to attack than a petition.

The weakness is the clock. Six months runs out on January 21 and the town has shown nothing. Northglenn, which started later, already has a draft with numbers in it. If Castle Rock reaches January with no ordinance, it either extends the moratorium, which starts to look like the ban it said it was not, or it lets the pause lapse and takes Walmart’s application into a code that still has no standards. Watch the Planning Commission agendas between now and then; that is where the real decision gets made.

For the Westborough crowd passing this around: the ordinance stops a pad, not a drone. Northglenn’s own memo says the hub next door serves every address in town. Castle Rock’s residents will find out whether that holds the first time a Wing aircraft from a store outside the town line drops a package on a Castle Rock driveway.

Sources: Town of Castle Rock Ordinance No. 2026-023, Castle Rock News Press, Denver Gazette, Axios Denver, Denver7, Citizen Portal.

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

DSPA Calls Congress Over Blue UAS Report as 15 States Sue FAA and Skydio Unveils the MegaDock

Greg Reverdiau — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:05:00 GMT

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update. We have four stories for you this week. DSPA asks Congress to look at the Blue UAS report. We have 15 states that are suing the FAA over drone delivery. We have DJI’s next enterprise drone leaking in China. And finally, Skydio unveils a new fixed-wing drone and a robotic dock. So, let’s get to it.

DSPA Wants Every Drone Pilot and First Responder to Call Congress

The Drone Service Providers Alliance is asking every drone pilot and first responder in the country to call Congress. Now, this is a group that normally lobbies for commercial drone operators. Its CEO, Vic Moss, says the issue here is big enough that they need to step outside of their lane a little bit.

If you haven’t seen the report yet, DHS tested six different Blue UAS listed drones and two Chinese drones in a New York City environment, where, as you can imagine, it’s pretty complex.

From the Blue UAS list, three of them actually could not hold position, one had a flyaway, and another one failed to pair with the controller for up to 15 minutes. The results for the Chinese drone testing were not publicly released, but we were still able to get that report through an anonymous source.

Of the six Blue UAS drones that were tested, the Skydio X10 came out with the best overall score of 3.7 out of 5. The only other aircraft that was able to be tested in the complex urban environment was the Parrot Anafi USA Gov edition, which got a 2.4 out of 5.

Now, the For Official Use Only report that tested the two DJI drones showed an overall score of 4.6 and 4.3 for the Matrice 4T and the Matrice 30T, respectively. One has to actually wonder why the assessment of these two specific drones was hidden from the general public, but you probably know the answer.

Problems with the Blue aircraft included latency, connection issues, slow boot-up time, and slow connection time as well. Based on the results from the public report, DSPA wants Congress to name an agency to test every manufacturer’s security the same exact way they’re testing usability in these reports, regardless of the country of origin.

If you fly commercially or if you’re flying for public safety, it’s probably worth five minutes for you to get on the phone with a representative, or even send an email, and let them know they should be taking action here.

15 States and Harris County Are Suing the FAA Over Drone Delivery

Next up, 15 states and Harris County, Texas are suing the FAA. New York’s Attorney General filed the case on September 28th. The target here is a nationwide environmental clearance the FAA issued in July. That clearance lets the FAA approve new drone delivery markets without having to do an environmental study for every single one of them.

The states are saying the FAA barely addressed the lithium battery fire risk, even after an Amazon drone battery burned here in Arizona, near a home, last October.

No stay has been requested yet, so drone deliveries are going to keep on flying for now, but it’s another hurdle for drone delivery.

DJI Matrice 5D Leaks in China, 750 Grams Heavier Than the Matrice 4TD

The DJI Matrice 5D has been leaked in China. It’s listed at just over 3 kg, which is about 750 grams heavier than the current Matrice 4TD, which is actually quite a bit of a jump. Keep in mind, these specs come from a leaker, not from DJI, so treat it as unconfirmed for right now. But this specific leaker has a pretty good track record with DJI specs, so it’s more than likely going to be true.

Now, the extra weight here means there’s probably LiDAR or a built-in RTK antenna in the drone itself directly.

This is unfortunately not one we’re going to see in the US, as DJI aircraft cannot get approval from the FCC, but it goes to show that DJI is just going to continue to innovate and produce new aircraft for the rest of the world.

Skydio Shows the Production F10 Lightrunner and the MegaDock

Skydio, at its yearly in-person event, showed the production version of its F10 Lightrunner that was introduced last year at the same event, with quite a bit more detail and refinement than the initial announcement. The company says it can hit 100 miles per hour, cover a 30-mile radius, and stay on mission for up to two hours.

It launches and lands from something they call the MegaDock. It uses a robotic arm to grab the aircraft out of the air right in front of that big dock. There’s no runway needed, no person standing there to catch the aircraft. They have a tray where a bunch of them are lined up, and then they can pick up the next one to go.

Skydio also announced new software that they call Asset Command for utility inspection, and Security Command for autonomous property patrols. The pitch here is fewer pilots watching individual drones, and more autonomous systems covering pretty much an entire county or utility corridor.

Skydio says the F10 will actually not reach customers until 2027, and pricing was not released at the time. Based on the infrastructure required for the MegaDock, it’s likely in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

This conversation is going to continue on Post Flight, where we’re going to talk about all of these stories uncensored in the premium community. Link is in the description. We’ll see you on the live Q&A on Monday. Have a great weekend, and don’t be that guy.

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

Hegseth Orders Four-Star Drone Command, Congress Has To Build It

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:51:00 GMT

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the creation of a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command on September 30, 2026, telling 600 O-3 officers and E-6 noncommissioned officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico that it will scale drones, robotics and AI across the entire military. He calls it AutoWarCom. It is to be a functional combatant command with service-like authorities, its own budget and manpower, and new military career fields for the people who fly and fight with unmanned systems.

It was the first of six announcements in the speech, and the only one built around hardware. The target date is October 1, 2027. Until then an interim effort called Project Agincourt, run out of the Pentagon’s unmanned systems office, is supposed to build the path to it.

The memo Hegseth signed the same day sets that date and directs his staff to go to Congress for the legislation the command needs. The speech named no commander, no budget line and no headcount.

Project Agincourt Turns the Drone Czar’s Office Into the Command’s Builder

The Project Agincourt memo directs the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, to lead the effort, and gives it 30 days to submit a plan of action and milestones with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That puts the first deadline at roughly October 30.

DRPM-UxS is the office DroneXL covered in July as the Pentagon’s drone czar memo, created June 29 with milestone decision authority over nearly every unmanned program in the department and a direct line to Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg. It already owns the Defense Innovation Unit, the counter-drone task force JIATF-401 and the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

Agincourt adds two missions on top of that portfolio. The first is the pathway: organizational shifts, the legislation, and career tracks for officers and enlisted. The second is a prototype of what Hegseth calls warfighting acquisition. The memo says the output it wants is not a particular drone but a repeatable procurement system that keeps adapting in combat on the right side of the cost exchange. Decisions and dollars move to combatant commands and frontline units, and systems get tested in exercises and, where possible, in combat.

The name is a 1415 reference. Hegseth’s version has the English winning with longbows and moving their fletchers, the arrow makers, up to the front to keep the rate of fire going. The fletchers in this analogy are engineers and startup founders embedded with operators.

Hegseth addresses roughly 600 O-3 officers and E-6 enlisted leaders at Quantico as screens flanking the flag display the Autonomous Warfare Command seal, a Reaper-style drone inside a letter A. Photo credit: Department of War

West And Strasiser Run It As CEO And COO, And DIU Loses Its Director

Hegseth named Owen West, director of the Defense Innovation Unit since March 2, chief executive of DRPM-UxS for the next year, with Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser as chief operating officer. West gets strategic risk, resources and scale. Strasiser gets operational problem solving and combat employment.

West is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and a former Goldman Sachs partner who ran its gas and power trading. He deployed twice to Iraq as a Marine on leave from the bank. Before DIU he was the department’s senior advisor on the Drone Dominance Program. Strasiser is described by the department as the first enlisted SEAL to graduate from Navy Test Pilot School.

DIU moved the next morning. On October 1 it named Travis Metz, its deputy director and chief operating officer and the program manager for Drone Dominance, as acting director, saying in a post on X that West “steps aside to kickstart Project Agincourt.” Metz came to DIU from the Secretary of War’s office, where he worked on Drone Dominance, after a career running venture and private equity funds. Inside Defense first reported the handover.

Drone Dominance Is The Template, And It Has A Year Of Results To Judge

Hegseth told the Quantico audience that Agincourt applies the Drone Dominance playbook to DIU and that the DRPM team has shipped thousands of autonomous systems to the Middle East and elsewhere for Operation Epic Fury. The “thousands” figure is the department’s own, repeated in its release, with no breakdown published.

The playbook is the one DroneXL has tracked since the March Gauntlet I results: a $1.1 billion, four-phase buy of one-way attack drones in which military operators fly and score vendors’ aircraft, and orders follow the leaderboard. Gauntlet I produced orders for about 30,000 drones. By August 25, the winners had delivered 13,440 of the 22,320 the first tranche required, about 60 percent. Gauntlet II at Fort Carson in August ended with Neros taking a $100 million order plus 800 drones its rivals failed to deliver, and the department opened a $450 million Phase 3 round with a 400-drone entry requirement the day before Hegseth spoke.

That program bans motors and batteries from China starting in Phase II. Whatever AutoWarCom buys will inherit that rule, and the suppliers who can meet it.

Hegseth framed the whole command around cost. For 40 years, he said, the United States bought quality over quantity. “The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it,” he said, before laying out a high-low mix in which exquisite weapons are the lightning and massed attritable drones are the wind and rain of the same storm. The full speech is on Rev.

Project Meridian Puts Anduril’s Founder On The Pentagon’s Futures Panel

Hegseth also commissioned Project Meridian, a 120-day future-warfare study co-directed by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich under Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael, ending in a public report with a classified annex. The three sat in the audience and met Hegseth in a secure facility right after the speech.

Luckey founded Anduril, which sells drones, counter-drone systems and autonomy software to the department whose future requirements he is now helping to write. The department’s release describes the panel as “the nation’s premier private-sector innovators” and says nothing about recusals or conflict rules. Meridian’s scope runs, in the department’s words, from the subterranean to the cislunar.

The Order Arrives Without A Commander, A Budget Or A Headcount

Hegseth said a four-star commander will soon be named to raise the AutoWarCom flag, and named nobody. The memo sets no dollar figure, no personnel number and no headquarters, and it conditions the whole structure on legislation that DRPM-UxS is told to go and secure from Congress.

Congress got there first, on paper. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s FY27 defense bill, approved 18-9 in June, creates a four-star Robotic and Autonomous Systems Combatant Command with test and evaluation powers and limited acquisition authority, as Breaking Defense reported. That bill has not passed, and the Senate’s limited acquisition authority is narrower than the service-like authority Hegseth described. Reconciling the two is the legislative work the memo assigns to DRPM-UxS, and it is why Hegseth spent part of the speech on Goldwater-Nichols, SOCOM and Space Force, three reorganizations the building fought before it executed them.

The money is already asked for. As DroneXL reported in July, the FY27 request seeks $75 billion across drones and counter-drone work, most of it routed through the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group that now sits under DRPM-UxS, and Hegseth used the speech to press Congress for a separate $350 billion reconciliation package. Whether AutoWarCom absorbs any of that, or gets a line of its own, is not in any document released this week.

DroneXL’s Take

Standing up a four-star command for drones is the right call, and I’d rather see the Pentagon over-rotate toward it than keep running autonomy as a side project inside three services that each want their own program. The idea is not what I’m skeptical of. The clock is.

“Fastest peacetime shift in modern military history” is Hegseth’s line, and the record he’s pointing to is one year of Drone Dominance. That year is real: orders for 30,000 drones from Gauntlet I, a $100 million order to Neros out of Gauntlet II, a Phase 3 round that demands 400 drones just to enter. It also includes a Gauntlet I tranche that was 60 percent delivered by late August and the 800 bonus aircraft Neros picked up because other winners could not deliver what they’d been awarded. My read is that the delivery gap, not the org chart, decides whether AutoWarCom means anything by October 2027. A combatant command with its own acquisition authority can write checks faster. It cannot make a startup with a China-free supply chain deliver the airframes it was awarded if the motors aren’t there.

Watch two dates. The 30-day plan due around October 30 will show whether the services are handing over force structure or just liaison officers. Meridian’s 120-day report, due around the end of January, will show whether a panel led by a drone vendor recommends buying more drones. If both land on schedule, Hegseth’s timeline is credible. If the first one slips, the 2027 flag-raising is a ceremony, and the real command will be whatever DRPM-UxS has become by then.

Sources: Department of War, Project Agincourt memorandum, Military Times, Inside Defense

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

Amazon Already Raised Its Texas Drones. 'Drone Warriors' Want Higher

Haye Kesteloo — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:16:00 GMT

A group of Richardson, Texas homeowners calling themselves the “Drone Warriors” told NBC’s TODAY last week that they want Amazon Prime Air to fly its drones higher over their neighborhood. Correspondent Ryan Chandler stood in Scott Bratcher’s backyard, where Bratcher, who has lived there 28 years, said hundreds of drones a day now cross what used to be his quiet spot.

Amazon answered with a statement calling Prime Air safe and reliable and the sound on the ground minimal and short-lived. The company announced in August that it plans to reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of the year.

Higher is exactly what Amazon already gave Richardson. In February, after complaints that started in January, Amazon lifted its average outbound altitude over Richardson to 225 feet (69 meters).

Amazon Raised Texas Drones After Complaints, Then Cited the FAA in Louisiana

Amazon changed its Richardson flight profile in February and explained it to the city council in March, with no new FAA rule involved. On September 9 in Baton Rouge, an Amazon spokesperson told a Rotary Club audience that altitude changes require Federal Aviation Administration approval.

Amazon’s Sam Bailey laid out the change at a March City Council meeting, along with rerouting some departures east over commercial land before they reach the Creek Hollow Estates neighborhood, Community Impact reported. He said making the MK30 itself quieter would take a hardware change that is not coming soon, which leaves altitude as the noise lever. The Baton Rouge exchange is in DroneXL’s report on that hub. If the Richardson change sat inside a flight envelope the FAA had already approved, both accounts can be true, and residents elsewhere have the same lever to ask for.

The TODAY segment is not the neighborhood’s first push. Residents from at least four neighborhoods protested outside Amazon’s Research Drive facility on June 13, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reported, and Amazon answered then that it had raised altitudes and adjusted flight paths. The tracking apps the Drone Warriors use show Walmart drones too, and Richardson’s drone delivery FAQ lists both operators over the city.

On February 4, an MK30 hit an apartment building on Routh Creek Parkway and smoked on the sidewalk. Nobody was hurt. Amazon told NBC 5 the cause was some type of GPS interference near tall buildings, and that it removed all buildings of similar height and size from its delivery portfolio.

Richardson Has No Say Over the Sky, and 15 States Are Now in Court

Richardson cannot order Amazon to fly higher. The city’s FAQ says cities cannot restrict drones above a certain altitude or create airspace limits that conflict with federal rules. Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas, petitioned a federal appeals court on September 28 to undo the FAA clearance behind Amazon’s expansion.

That clearance is the FAA’s July 28 nationwide environmental finding for Part 135 drone delivery, which lets most new hubs open without the local comment period Richardson’s neighbors once had. The petition, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James in the Second Circuit, states jurisdiction and makes no argument yet. DroneXL covered the filing the day it landed. Harris County is Houston, not Dallas: no North Texas government is among the petitioners.

One resident’s tracker logged 52 drones overhead on a single Friday in September, a figure from The New York Times that DroneXL reported on September 21. TODAY carried the story to a national morning audience, and the residents closed with advice for the next town: research first, and hold Amazon accountable. One of them put it more bluntly: “If they don’t follow the rules, take away their toys.” For residents in towns where a hub is coming, DroneXL keeps a running guide to what you can still do and how to reach Amazon.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon should give the Drone Warriors their altitude, and do it before the MK30 reaches 500 more towns. Altitude needs no new aircraft, and Amazon has moved it in Richardson before. Telling Baton Rouge that altitude is the FAA’s call reads to me as a dodge.

My bigger worry runs past Amazon. “Take away their toys” is a line about an 83-pound delivery drone with no parachute, but legislators don’t write rules that precise. When a street gets angry enough to name itself, I expect the bill that follows to say “drones,” and the hobbyist with a 249-gram Mini and the volunteer search and rescue crew pay for a problem neither of them caused. I think Amazon can still defuse Richardson with a flight-profile change. If it waits for a court or a statehouse to do it, every drone pilot in Texas inherits the result.

Sources: TODAY, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, City of Richardson, Community Impact, Second Circuit petition, The New York Times.

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

DHS Left DJI's Scores Out of Its Blue UAS Report. Here They Are

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:20:00 GMT

The Department of Homeland Security’s test lab scored the DJI Matrice 4T at 4.6 out of 5 and the DJI Matrice 30T at 4.3 when it flew them at Hudson Yards in July 2025, against 3.7 for the Skydio X10D and 2.4 for the Parrot ANAFI USA GOV. The figures come from a 12-page addendum to the National Urban Security Technology Laboratory’s Blue UAS assessment, numbered SAVER-T-R-40, dated July 2026 and marked For Official Use Only. DroneXL has obtained a copy. The public report DHS published in September described the comparison in one sentence, said evaluators found “significant differences,” and did not say in which direction.

The two DJI aircraft outscored both Blue UAS on all nine criteria the lab measured, from camera acuity to controller interface. The addendum also records one Matrice 30T losing its satellite and vision positioning at night in a narrow urban canyon, drifting into a structure and leaving the aircraft unusable. DHS lists two disadvantages for each DJI aircraft. Neither one concerns how it flew.

The scores land in departments that have been making this argument without the data. An Arizona fire chief told DroneXL last December that lives would be lost if the DJI ban took his department’s air capability away. Oregon’s aviation department counted 467 restricted drones across 25 states. Utah’s Weber County Search and Rescue flies DJI aircraft on its searches, and its drone team coordinator told the FCC in September that a ban would cost American lives. The addendum says the agencies DHS recruited fly “predominantly DJI.” Until now, the only public sign that DHS had scored those aircraft was one sentence in the September report; the SAVER program’s own Blue UAS page lists a 2023 TechNote and a 2024 focus group report and nothing else.

DJI Matrice 4T Scored Highest of Any Aircraft in the Series

The Matrice 4T’s overall 4.6 is the highest DHS recorded in any round of the Blue UAS series, and its 4.9s for both cameras and for link quality are the highest criterion scores in either document. The Matrice 30T’s 4.7 for time to redeploy is the best of any platform.

Criterion at Hudson Yards	DJI Matrice 4T	DJI Matrice 30T	Skydio X10D	Parrot ANAFI USA GOV
EO camera visual acuity	4.9	4.6	3.9	2.6
IR camera visual acuity	4.9	4.2	3.2	2.3
Flight duration	4.6	4.2	3.9	3.0
Command and control link quality	4.9	4.2	3.4	1.8
Latency	4.6	4.4	4.1	1.7
Time to redeploy	4.1	4.7	3.6	2.1
Deployability	4.3	4.0	3.4	2.7
Ease of use	4.6	4.4	4.0	3.0
Ground control station interface	4.4	4.1	4.0	2.8
Overall score	4.6	4.3	3.7	2.4

Complex urban round, Hudson Yards, July 2025. Scale: 1 means the product met none of the evaluator's expectations, 5 means it exceeded all of them. DJI figures from the DHS S&T SAVER-T-R-40 addendum obtained by DroneXL; Skydio and Parrot figures from the public SAVER-T-R-39 report, Table 4-2.

Evaluators wrote that the Matrice 4T held position and kept its video feed “where other systems failed,” including in areas with heavy RF interference and buildings blocking the sky. One evaluator saw the aircraft briefly lose GNSS near the ground, and reported that its vision-based positioning held it in place until it climbed to where more satellites were visible. They could read license plates at long range at night, the airframe did not overheat on assessment days above 90°F (32°C), and most redeployments took under a minute. Their complaints were about the controller: too many features up front, quick-access buttons that were hard to customize, and a screen with no raised lip to protect its edges.

A DJI Matrice 4 series aircraft with its auxiliary light on, in front of a fire engine. DHS evaluators gave the Matrice 4T a 4.9 for command and control link quality at Hudson Yards, the highest criterion score in either document. Photo credit: DJI

The Matrice 30T’s evaluators credited the hot-swappable aircraft and controller batteries for the fastest turnarounds in the series, and one said the thermal camera let them see where vehicles had been parked. Some found the aircraft sensitive to inputs in flight and said it suited experienced pilots. One said deploying it with a payload would take two people. Others found the controller screen cluttered and the zoom slider cumbersome.

A Weber County Search and Rescue volunteer in Utah seats batteries in a DJI Matrice 30T. The hot-swappable batteries earned the Matrice 30T a 4.7 for time to redeploy, the best redeployment score of any aircraft DHS tested. Photo credit: Weber County Search and Rescue / Pilot Institute

In the public report, the X10D’s 3.7 was the best Blue UAS result at Hudson Yards, and the Ascent AeroSystems Spirit, Freefly Astro and Teal 2 were not scored there because they could not hold position. DroneXL covered those findings in DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores. The addendum confirms that four of the seven aircraft DHS brought to Manhattan held position, and two of the four were DJI’s.

A Skydio X10D over Hudson Yards during the July 2025 complex urban assessment. Its 3.7 was the best Blue UAS score in that round, and its 3.4 for link quality compares with 4.9 for the Matrice 4T. Photo credit: NUSTL / DHS Science and Technology Directorate

One Matrice 30T Drifted Into a Structure After Losing GNSS at Night

The addendum’s link quality section for the Matrice 30T records one aircraft loss. At night in a narrow urban canyon it lost GNSS and, per the report’s footnote, vision positioning, and fell back to attitude mode. The evaluator lost control and it drifted into a structure, which left it unusable.

DHS describes attitude mode in a footnote as positioning based on the aircraft’s attitude alone, without GNSS or vision sensors, used as a fallback when both references are lost. The same section still gives the Matrice 30T a 4.2 for link quality and says evaluators described it as dependable for operational use, with occasional minor issues at the farthest distances and in the densest areas.

The two disadvantages DHS lists for each DJI aircraft are identical: cybersecurity concerns because the manufacturer is based in a covered nation, and that sales “benefit a covered nation and divert funds from investment in domestic manufacturers.” The advantages column for the Matrice 4T runs to nine items, including the highest-rated link, cameras and flight duration in the series. The addendum states, as the public report does, that SAVER examined operator experience only and did not evaluate national security risk under any statute.

The Matrice 4T cost DHS $12,958 and the Matrice 30T $18,608, both on procurement quotes. The public report priced the X10D at $28,382 at the time of the urban round, and put the six Blue UAS between $13,964 and $56,195. A footnote in the addendum says the DJI aircraft were bought “under specific clauses allowing the operation of foreign nation covered UAS for testing and evaluation purposes.”

DHS Dated the Comparison Two Months Before It Published the Report Without It

The addendum is dated July 2026 and numbered SAVER-T-R-40. The public report, SAVER-T-R-39, is dated September 2026 and says results for the covered-nation platforms “is available to public safety agencies upon request” through NUSTL@hq.dhs.gov. The addendum carries a date two months before the report that does not include it.

The addendum explains why the DJI aircraft were there at all. Throughout the three-round series, evaluators asked to compare their agencies’ existing aircraft, “predominantly DJI,” against the Blue platforms to understand the capability gaps. DHS added the two DJI models for the final round, chose them because they are what state and local responders deploy, and matched them to the selection criteria used for the Blue UAS. Its introduction adds a word the public version leaves out: agencies still rely on covered-nation drones for their “reliability, price, and overall performance.”

The cover sheet says the material is to be shared on a need-to-know basis and locked away when unattended. The public report says the results it contains are available to any public safety agency that emails to ask. The addendum names no evaluator or agency, and DroneXL is not publishing the document itself.

DroneXL sent questions to the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, DJI, Skydio and Parrot on the evening of September 29 with a deadline of 9 a.m. ET on October 1. Parrot answered. Marie Calleux, who handles investor relations and corporate communication for Parrot, said the company has not been given the test configuration, radio settings, operating conditions or methodology behind the comparison, and that the headline scores alone do not give it “sufficient information for us to meaningfully assess the comparison.” She said the ANAFI USA GOV remains a supported platform, that Parrot cannot establish whether the July 2025 configuration represents the software in use today, and that the aircraft is an earlier-generation platform; Parrot’s current defense and public safety offering is built around the ANAFI UKR. A DJI spokesperson told DroneXL the company had no comment before publication and would decide whether to respond after the story ran. Skydio had not responded by publication time.

DHS Science and Technology responded six hours after publication with a statement that did not address the four questions DroneXL asked and did not dispute any score or comment in the addendum. It said NUSTL conducts “impartial assessments” to help agencies make procurement decisions, that its assessments are “strictly aligned with federal security priorities” including the FCC Covered List and two 2025 executive orders, and that “NUSTL unequivocally does not endorse equipment on the FCC Covered List” because such equipment “poses an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security.” On background, a DHS official said certain NUSTL findings are marked For Official Use Only because they contain sensitive operational details. The addendum describes the same assessment as one that examined operator experience and “did not evaluate or determine risk to national security.” DroneXL will update this article if Skydio responds.

A Parrot ANAFI USA flying near buildings during DroneXL's 2021 review, where radio interference cut its range. The GOV variant DHS tested lost its link as close as 50 feet from launch at Hudson Yards and scored 2.4 overall. Photo credit: Wiebe de Jager / DroneXL

Those numbers arrive as Congress is being asked, by the Drone Service Providers Alliance among others, to replace the country-of-origin ban with a security test every manufacturer must pass. The test Congress ordered for DJI and Autel in the FY2025 NDAA was never conducted, and the FCC added foreign drones to its Covered List in December 2025 without it.

DroneXL’s Take

The DJI drones in most public safety fleets were not bought out of ignorance, and this addendum is the federal government’s own evidence for that. The public report told agencies to research the capabilities of available equipment before buying. This is the research, and DHS did it for them.

A few years ago I had lunch with a retired New York City firefighter who laughed at the idea of a drone on a fireground. To him they were toys. The thermal camera that scored 4.9 in this report shows a crew where the roof is hot before anyone walks on it, and the link that scored 4.9 keeps the aircraft over the scene while the pilot watches the feed instead of the sticks. A volunteer fire department or a county search team gets one budget line for that. The aircraft on it has to power on, hold between buildings and keep its video up, and DHS’s own evaluators have now scored which ones do.

The cybersecurity concern DHS lists is real and this test did not measure it; SAVER says so twice. One Matrice 30T also ended a flight against a building after losing both of its position references, which is the kind of failure that gets an aircraft grounded in a fleet review, and it belongs in any fair reading of these scores. Neither point changes the direction of the numbers.

My read is that the performance data should have been in the public report, next to the Blue UAS scores, so that the agencies spending the money and the members of Congress voting on bans could weigh it. Any public safety agency can request the covered-nation results from NUSTL today. If yours does, share what you get.

Sources: [Unmanned Aircraft Systems in a Complex Urban Environment, Assessment Report Addendum, SAVER-T-R-40, DHS S&T / NUSTL, July 2026, marked For Official Use Only, obtained by DroneXL]; Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026; DHS SAVER program, Blue UAS for First Responders

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

Hillsborough Blood Drones Launch in October, Flown From Sarasota

Haye Kesteloo — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 01:35:00 GMT

Hillsborough County Fire Rescue starts flying whole blood to trauma scenes by drone in October. County commissioners approved the program on September 2, and Fire Rescue demonstrated it for reporters on Monday, September 28. Two Archer First Response Systems (ArcherFRS) drones, one at Station 9 in Sabal Park and one at Station 37 in Riverview, cover 70 square miles (181 square km) of unincorporated Hillsborough County.

When DroneXL last reported on the program, on August 18, it was still waiting on that vote. Tampa General Hospital, the program’s hospital partner, said in its August 3 announcement that Fire Rescue would operate the drones. The county’s September 24 release says Fire Rescue has contracted ArcherFRS to pilot them.

ArcherFRS Pilots in Sarasota Fly Hillsborough’s Blood Drones

Fire Rescue holds the FAA’s Beyond Visual Line of Sight Certificate of Waiver for both aircraft. The people at the controls work for ArcherFRS, which the county contracted for piloting, monitoring and maintenance, and which flies the drones from its Sarasota flight operations center, according to Tampa Bay 28.

The county’s release lets either a 911 operator or a paramedic at the scene order a unit of whole blood. The drones fly largely on their own, with pilots watching around the clock and ready to change course, WFLA reported. ArcherFRS founder and CEO Gordon Folkes told Tampa Bay 28 that each drone waits at its station in a climate-controlled container, already loaded with blood. Over the scene it hovers at about 197 feet (60 meters), and “we lower the deployable payload to the ground on a tether line,” he said.

The drone's insulated payload module, which mounts under the aircraft and is lowered to the ground by tether over a scene. Photo credit: WFLA

The paramedic option targets a problem ArcherFRS has hit before. Its first deployment, with Tampa General in Manatee County, launched in May 2024 and went more than seven months without a 911 dispatcher using it, Government Technology reported that December. The one launch attempted in that stretch failed its pre-flight checks in bad weather.

Hillsborough’s Release Gives Three Delivery Times for One Drone

Hillsborough County’s September 24 release sets the expected average delivery at just under three minutes. It also promises blood on scene in three and a half minutes or less. A flight to the far edge of the coverage area, the same release says, takes five minutes.

A five-minute flight breaks a three-and-a-half-minute ceiling, so the shorter figure can only describe a typical run. WFLA’s Monday report turned it into the average. Tampa General’s August 3 announcement, which we covered on August 4, said under three minutes on average. Each operating area covers 35 square miles (91 square km), from Interstate 4 and Interstate 75 in the north to just south of Gibsonton Drive. All of these figures are projections, because the system has not flown a live call.

Two crew members carry the drone across the pavement at the September 28 demonstration. Photo credit: WFLA

Hillsborough Has Not Published What It Pays ArcherFRS

Neither the county’s September 24 release nor the August announcements from Tampa General and ArcherFRS say what Hillsborough County pays for the program. When Manatee County took up its ArcherFRS deal in 2020, the county’s share was one dollar a month for the first year.

Florida Health Sciences, which operates Tampa General, agreed to pay most of Manatee’s costs, Firehouse reported that September. Hillsborough commissioners approved their program at the September 2 regular meeting, and nothing the county has published since attaches a dollar figure to it. The county calls year one a proof of concept. After it, Fire Rescue wants each operating area grown to 50 square miles (130 square km), then coverage of the entire 900-square-mile (2,331 square km) county.

DroneXL’s Take

Blood on a tether over a Riverview roadside is exactly the drone delivery I argue for: cargo where minutes decide whether someone lives. In my August 18 report, my read was that the vote would pass and October would hold. The vote passed. I also have no problem with a contractor in Sarasota flying the aircraft. A fire department covering 900 square miles has no business staffing round-the-clock remote pilots for two drones, and the FAA waiver stays in Fire Rescue’s name.

The price is a different matter. ArcherFRS sells this through its Champion Hospital program, the model Manatee started with a hospital paying most of the bill, and Hillsborough is now the showcase every fire chief will study. If Tampa General is paying, the county should say so and say how much, because the next county to call ArcherFRS may not have a trauma hospital willing to write the check.

Sources: Hillsborough County, WFLA, Tampa Bay 28, Tampa General Hospital, Government Technology, Firehouse

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

Neros Wins $100M Pentagon Order, Plus 800 Drones Rivals Didn't Deliver

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:38:00 GMT

Neros Technologies announced on Wednesday, September 30, that the Department of War has ordered 14,000 drones and explosive payloads from it through Gauntlet II of the Drone Dominance Program, an award the Torrance, California, company values at more than $100 million. The order follows Neros’s first place in the Close Quarters Battle mission and third place in Deep Strike at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August.

The order covers Archer AI, Neros’s 10-inch FPV drone with terminal guidance that flies itself to an operator-selected target, and a 5-inch Archer built for urban and indoor fighting. Neros also received a second bonus order from Gauntlet I, 800 drones taken from competitors that missed their production deadline.

At the Gauntlet II unit prices the program set, $3,500 and $4,500, 14,000 drones cost between $49 million and $63 million.

Warheads Fill The Gap In Neros’s $100 Million Order

Explosive payloads are the only item besides drones that Neros names in the award, and the program’s $4,500 Deep Strike price excluded weaponization. Even if all 14,000 were Deep Strike drones, at least $37 million of the $100 million-plus sits outside the airframes’ list price.

Neros’s announcement gives no breakdown, but the total works out to more than $7,100 per drone (a figure the program’s price sheet never shows). Swarm Defense, fifth in Deep Strike, announced a 4,000-drone order last week with a minimum value of $25 million including munitions and control software, The Defense Post reported, or about $6,250 a drone. Tectonic Defense, which reported the 14,000 figure on September 23 before Neros confirmed it, had put the order at about $70 million on drone price alone. The program raised the Deep Strike price to $5,000 and cut Close Quarters Battle to $3,000 when it opened Phase 3 on September 28.

The quantity matches the order ladder in the program’s April Request for Solutions, which set 8,000 drones for first place and 6,000 for third in each mission area, Aviation Tech Today reported. Neros does not say how the 14,000 split between the two Archers, only that the department is prioritizing Archer AI, the model it launched with its $250 million Series C in August.

The shipment is also the first mass delivery of drones built to APEX, or Adaptive Payload Exchange, an open-source standard Neros introduced so operators can swap conventional, fiber and repeater payloads in the field.

Neros Collected 800 Drones Its Gauntlet I Rivals Did Not Ship

The 800-drone award is Neros’s second Gauntlet I bonus. Neros delivered and got acceptance for its full 2,400-drone March order by July, earning a first bonus of 2,000 drones, Inside Unmanned Systems reported. That brings its Gauntlet I total to 5,200.

Most of the field did not keep pace. Gauntlet I required the 11 winners to deliver half of 22,320 drones within two and a half months and the rest within four and a half. By August 25, 13,440 had arrived, about 60 percent. Only Neros, Ukrainian Defense Drones and Griffon Aerospace had delivered their full orders, and UDD’s batch was still awaiting inspection, as were deliveries from Skycutter and ModalAI. Inside Unmanned Systems traced the shortfall to NDAA-compliant motors, batteries, sensors and chips.

Neros’s announcement does not say which competitors lost the 800 drones. CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson called the program a test of whether companies can build good drones and “produce them in massive quantities with short notice.” He also says Neros is the only manufacturer with more than one Gauntlet I bonus. When I wrote up the Gauntlet II results on September 19, Skycutter, the March champion, had dropped to fourth, and its Gauntlet I order was one of two the program had flagged in July as neither ramping nor shipping.

DroneXL’s Take

The 800 drones are the best news in this release, and they have nothing to do with Neros’s score. The program took drones from companies that did not ship and gave them to one that did. That is merit-based competition, with delivery counted as merit.

Neros was building about 1,200 Archers a week in August, so a 14,000-drone order is under three months of output. The Gauntlet I stragglers were still short of finishing March’s order in late August. Any of them that wants a Gauntlet III slot must first clear the 400-drone delivery gate the program opened Monday, in about two months. Delivery is now the score that decides who stays in this program.

Sources: Neros Technologies, PR Newswire, Inside Unmanned Systems, The Defense Post, Tectonic Defense, Aviation Tech Today.

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

Amprius Gets $75M Pentagon Drone Battery Grant, Mostly Unfunded

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:11:00 GMT

Amprius Technologies will convert an American electric vehicle battery line into a drone cell factory with a Department of War grant of up to $75 million, the Fremont, California company announced on Monday, September 28. The line is run by an unnamed South Korean battery maker and is supposed to turn out 12 million silicon-anode cells a year for Group 1 through 3 drones starting in early 2028. The conversion costs about $100 million, with Amprius and its partner covering the rest in kind.

CEO Tom Stepien went on CNBC the same morning and called it a $75 million grant. The company’s own announcement says a majority of that award is unfunded.

Most Of The $75 Million Still Needs Congress To Appropriate It

Amprius’s announcement says a majority of the award remains unfunded and subject to future appropriations. Payments also depend on the government accepting specified milestones, which the company says it may not hit on time or at all. The money comes through the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program.

Amprius signed the deal, a fixed-price Other Transaction Agreement called Project acCELLerate, on September 23, its 8-K filing shows. The government has obligated about $22 million so far, from fiscal 2025 research and development funds, for a base period that runs to September 22, 2028. That is less than a third of the headline number.

The size of the bet is in Stepien’s own numbers. He told CNBC that the 12 million cells represent about $150 million in incremental annual revenue. In August, Amprius raised its full 2026 revenue guidance to at least $140 million. One converted line, fully funded and fully sold, would more than double the company.

Amprius Walked Away From Its Own Colorado Factory Before Choosing A Retrofit

Amprius announced in March 2023 that it would spend $190 million turning a 774,155-square-foot building in Brighton, Colorado, into a battery factory, and the Department of Energy later selected it for a $50 million grant toward the project. Amprius cancelled the plant in June 2025.

Earlier this year the company paid $20 million to end its Brighton lease, Manufacturing Dive reported from a securities filing. On CNBC, Stepien sold the new plan as the opposite of Brighton: “We’re not pouring concrete, we’re not putting steel up.” After Brighton, it reads as a lesson learned.

Amprius now builds through partners. One of its South Korean contract manufacturers has delivered cells since September 2025, and Nanotech Energy in Northern California is its U.S. partner for cylindrical cells. The new line adds pouch cells. A separate Defense Innovation Unit contract for NDAA-compliant drone batteries now totals $18.1 million. Stepien told CNBC that the anode, cathode, separator and electrolyte all have to come from outside a foreign entity of concern in about 15 months.

Stepien Says China Still Makes Cheaper Cells That Customers Want

Stepien told CNBC that Amprius still has cells made in China. He said the company is happy with their cost and production, and so are many customers. He expects a balance, with buyers chasing the best technology often buying Chinese and contract-bound buyers needing cells made elsewhere.

That second group is growing because the Pentagon wrote it into the rules. Prepared Senate testimony from the Drone Dominance Program in March said Phase II would ban systems using batteries or motors from covered countries. On the August earnings call, Stepien said about half of the 19 drone makers invited to the Fort Carson demonstration use Amprius cells. The program opened its $450 million Phase 3 this week.

The dependency is older than the program. A former senior defense official named batteries among the top three Chinese parts in Blue UAS aircraft, as DroneXL laid out in its NDAA-compliant drones guide. In October 2024, Beijing ordered Dongguan Poweramp, Skydio’s sole battery supplier, to cut the company off, and Skydio rationed batteries shipped with its drones.

On air, Stepien called the cells twice as energy dense as anything else out there. The announcement is narrower: up to twice the energy density of conventional graphite-anode cells.

DroneXL’s Take

Batteries are the right place for this money. When Beijing cut off Skydio’s battery supplier in 2024, America’s largest drone maker had to ration packs, and no American-made airframe fixed that. A domestic cell line closes that gap. It won’t close the price gap, and Stepien said as much on national TV when he praised his Chinese cells’ cost. My read is that the Korean-run American line sells first to buyers whose contracts leave no choice, while the police departments and delivery operators Stepien pitched on CNBC keep buying on price. That is how fair competition should work. I’d rather see the Pentagon pay for a factory than ban a supplier. The weak point is the money. A mostly unfunded grant is a promise that depends on Congress, and the early-2028 date only holds if those appropriations arrive.

Sources: Amprius Technologies, CNBC, Manufacturing Dive, Amprius 8-K, Amprius Q1 2026 results (SEC), Nasdaq.

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

DJI Avata 360 Can't Fly Acro. An FPV Pilot Still Calls It Enough

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:58:00 GMT

FPV pilot Kai Vertigoh, whose YouTube channel has 260,000 subscribers, published a test of the DJI Avata 360 on September 28 arguing that the 455-gram 360-degree drone can replace several drones for most buyers. He and his crew ran it through five jobs they normally split across different aircraft: a first-time pilot’s camera drone, an autonomous follow drone, a dual-operator rig, close-proximity FPV, and a chase camera for drift karts.

Vertigoh flies FPV first. The Avata 360 has no manual or acro mode, and its Sport mode tops out at 40 mph (18 m/s), against the roughly 100 mph he puts on the 5-inch quads he also flies.

Tracking Software Carries Vertigoh’s Case for a Drone Without Acro

Vertigoh’s case for an Avata 360 that can’t fly acro rests on its tracking software. ActiveTrack 360 and a mode DJI calls Spotlight Free let one pilot steer while the drone keeps a subject framed. He compares that to a dual-operator DJI Inspire 3, which he puts at about $16,000.

Spotlight Free is the feature he singles out. The pilot flies in any direction while the screen keeps an indicator on the tracked subject, so he can swing back to it like a beacon. In his video he says it sounded good on paper and won him over in the air.

The 360 capture also changes follow shots. The drone can fly nose-first toward its forward-facing LiDAR, which DJI’s specifications pair with an omnidirectional vision system, while recording a rider behind it. A single-camera follow drone has to fly backward to film a rider’s face, and Vertigoh says some he has used bumped into things doing it. At Battle Aero, a drift-kart builder run by his friend John, the Avata 360 simply hovered and logged the karts, and the exported clips came out already framed.

The beginner test produced the flip shot. A friend who had never flown a drone learned the stick inputs in a few minutes and flew the pass while Vertigoh backflipped over the prop-guarded aircraft. Shooting 8K at 60 fps let the crew slow the flip to 40% speed on a 24 fps timeline.

Vertigoh’s Own Verdict Keeps Specialists on Separate Drones

Vertigoh ranks the Avata 360 behind the best FPV drone and the best camera drone. Its 8K image is spread across two lenses, roughly 4K each by his count, behind a fixed ultrawide view, and anything beyond automatic tracking needs keyframing in DJI Studio afterward.

For image quality he points buyers to single-lens drones such as the Mini 5 Pro, Air 3S or Mavic 4. Sport mode also switches off obstacle avoidance, which is how his kart chase at golden hour was flown. On whether it is the best follow drone, his answer is “possibly.”

The video never puts the Avata 360 next to the Avata 2. Jeven Dovey did that in April, and DroneXL’s report on his back-to-back shootout found the 360’s obstacle avoidance made FPV footage stutter, while the 377-gram Avata 2 felt far sharper on the motion controller.

DroneXL’s Take

I’d call the Avata 360 a follow camera with prop guards, and a very good one. As an FPV replacement it comes up short on his numbers and on Dovey’s. For American buyers the choice is narrower than anywhere else. The FCC authorized the drone on November 19, 2025, 33 days before the FCC added DJI to its Covered List. In March, DroneXL called it likely the last new DJI drone US pilots can buy. A ban sold as security has left US hobbyists picking from a catalog that no longer grows. If you want one DJI drone that films you, this is it. If you want to learn FPV, a drone that won’t fly acro can’t teach you.

Sources: Kai Vertigoh on YouTube, DJI Avata 360 specifications

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

DoorDash Air Drone Lands Chipotle and Popeyes, but No Payload Number

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:53:00 GMT

DoorDash unveiled the aircraft behind DoorDash Air on Wednesday at Dash Forward, its annual product event. The drone flies on six slow-spinning propellers and lowers orders to the ground on a winch. Pilot deliveries will start in Northern California with Chipotle Mexican Grill, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and a local restaurant, Momo N Curry. DoorDash gave no start date and named no city.

When DoorDash earned its FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate on July 29, I wrote that three numbers would decide what kind of aircraft it had built: span, payload and maximum takeoff weight. Today’s announcement says the drone can carry about 80% of typical DoorDash restaurant orders. It gives no payload weight.

DoorDash Built The Kitchen Handoff Before It Built The Drone

DoorDash says it designed the loading systems, packaging and kitchen handoff first and the aircraft second. Crews pack and hand off an order as usual, and a winch handles both pickup and drop-off. Failsafe systems can lower the entire aircraft to the ground in rare events, the company says.

That sequence is the pitch to merchants. Popeyes chief digital officer James Huang said the drone works “without asking our restaurant teams to change a thing.” Mohan Khatiwada, who owns Momo N Curry, said his small front-of-house staff makes every minute of order handling count. Chipotle’s chief digital officer, Arlie Sisson, said the service gives guests more choice in how they get their food.

Dispatch runs through DoorDash’s Autonomous Delivery Platform, the same software that already assigns orders to Dashers and to Dot, the company’s sidewalk robot. It weighs weather, flight range and ground traffic before sending an order by air, according to DoorDash’s announcement. Harrison Shih, head of DoorDash Air, framed the goal as “Any local business should be able to reach consumers by air.”

The partner fleets stay. DoorDash spokesman Eli Scheinholtz told FreightWaves that Wing and Flytrex keep flying for DoorDash, and that more than one drone option adds resilience to its network. Wing started flying Lowe’s orders sold through the DoorDash app in Matthews, North Carolina, only six days ago, as DroneXL reported in Lowe’s Now Flies Painter’s Tape to Charlotte Yards in 20 Minutes.

The 80% figure is DoorDash’s estimate, drawn from U.S. restaurant deliveries of limited distance and size over a limited period, a footnote in the release says. Like DoorDash’s July post, the announcement lists no payload in pounds, no range, no cruise speed and no maximum takeoff weight.

Compare that with Wing. Lowe’s customers in Matthews are held to Wing’s limit of about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) per flight, a number anyone can plan an order around. A share of DoorDash’s own order history can’t be checked against anything.

The delivery-time claim has the same shape. DoorDash says initial tests averaged under five minutes from restaurant to door, footnoted as a sample of limited distance and size, with times not guaranteed. In July the company put its 2025 drone deliveries, all flown by partners, at a 25-minute average, described only as its latest estimate.

Noise gets a comparison instead of a measurement: cruising sound roughly like a passing car at delivery height, with neither the decibel level nor the height given. Co-founder Stanley Tang went further when he posted the launch video on X, calling the drones “as silent as a passing car.”

This is DoorDash Air.
- Stanley Tang (@stanleytang) September 30, 2026

Noise is already a Bay Area question for DoorDash. In August 2025 it leased a warehouse at 1960 Folsom St. in San Francisco’s Mission District to build and test aerial delivery systems. Teamsters Local 665 appealed the zoning approval over jobs, and residents quoted by Mission Local raised noise and privacy, as DroneXL covered in DoorDash’s Mission District Drone Test Faces Union Pushback.

The DoorDash Air drone hovers over a residential hillside and lowers an order on its winch tether. Photo credit: DoorDash

The one hard airframe detail, six propellers mounted at the ends of the arms, also corrects my own July read. In DoorDash Just Became An Airline, I took the pointed nose in DoorDash’s launch video for a winged hybrid VTOL. DoorDash’s own photo released today shows no wing: a pointed white fuselage sits on two cross booms, each carrying three rotors. The nose I saw was real. The wing I inferred from it was not.

DroneXL’s Take

DoorDash did the hard part in the right order. Starting from the restaurant counter instead of the airframe is how drone delivery gets past pilot programs, and a Popeyes crew that never changes its routine is the version merchants will actually adopt. I want this to work.

But “80% of orders” and “a passing car” are marketing units. The people who will live under these flights need a payload weight, a maximum takeoff weight and a decibel figure at a stated height, and DoorDash has now had two announcements to publish them. DroneXL sent 30 written safety questions to Wing, Zipline and Amazon when it launched its Drone Delivery Tracker. DoorDash is now an airline with its own aircraft, and it belongs on that list. Until it publishes those numbers, Northern California neighbors are being asked to accept a drone overhead on the strength of a comparison.

Sources: DoorDash (Business Wire), DoorDash, July 29, 2026, FreightWaves, Stanley Tang on X

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

Tallahassee Commissioner Urged Amazon Drone Rules. Florida Law Says No

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:02:00 GMT

Tallahassee City Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox was asked at a September 28 candidate forum whether Amazon Prime Air’s planned drone delivery service should be regulated. “So, absolutely, it needs to be regulated,” she answered. A day later she texted the Tallahassee Democrat that her understanding is the state legislature has preempted it.

The city’s own lawyer had already told the commission it can’t. City Attorney Amy Toman put that in a September 23 email to Commissioner Jack Porter, who had asked whether Tallahassee could regulate drone deliveries. Amazon, meanwhile, has set a date for a public showing in the city: a Prime Air meet-and-greet with an MK30 on display, October 20 from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center.

Williams-Cox named the city’s Flock license plate cameras as the lesson behind her answer. The commission voted on those cameras in August.

Tallahassee’s City Attorney Says Florida Law Rules Out a Drone Ordinance

Toman’s email cites Florida Statute 330.41, which vests the power to regulate drone operations in the state, except where federal rules say otherwise. Subsection (3)(b) bars any city ordinance on drone operation, airspace, altitude or flight paths. Toman wrote that drone delivery services are explicitly covered.

Under subsection (3)(d), the city keeps its general laws on nuisance, voyeurism, harassment, reckless endangerment and property damage, as long as they don’t single out drones. On the ground, subsection (3)(c) bars the city from withholding permits from a drone delivery service over where its drone port sits, which leaves it setbacks and landscaping. DroneXL laid out those limits when Amazon’s Tallahassee hub preparations surfaced on September 23.

Porter told the Tallahassee Democrat she knew the city was preempted because the city attorney said so. She said she wasn’t aware of the city’s involvement and didn’t know more than what had been reported. Commissioner Curtis Richardson and Mayor John Dailey did not respond to the paper.

Flock Is a City Contract. Amazon’s Drones Are Not

The commission can vote on Flock because the city pays for it. Tallahassee operates 80 Flock license plate cameras and 75 Vigilant cameras, and Commissioner Jeremy Matlow’s motion to end the Flock contract failed 3 to 2 in August, WCTV reported.

Amazon’s drones fly under FAA rules and a state statute, and neither gives the commission a vote. Williams-Cox said at the forum that she learned from the Flock issue, and that she made a motion to suspend the cameras over surveillance concerns.

The forum was a campaign event. Williams-Cox faces former mayor Dot Inman-Johnson in a November 3 runoff for Seat 5, and Amazon’s meet-and-greet lands two weeks before it.

Matlow Expects Tallahassee’s Tree Canopy to Push Amazon’s Drones Low

Matlow agrees the city is preempted from regulating drone flights. His objection is operational: he told the Democrat he imagines Tallahassee’s tree cover will make many neighborhoods hard to serve without flying dangerously low. He also cited complaints from other cities about noise, privacy and safety.

The MK30 descends as low as 13 feet over a yard to drop a package, a figure The New York Times reported and DroneXL cited in its guide to what residents can still do when Amazon arrives. How it does that under a live oak canopy is a question for October 20.

Amazon is billing the event, in Conference Room A at 505 W. Pensacola Street, as a free chance to see the drone up close and ask its team questions. At Amazon’s forum in Westborough, Massachusetts on September 23, which I attended, Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told residents there is no opting out of drones flying over their property.

DroneXL’s Take

Williams-Cox reached for the wrong comparison. Flock is a surveillance network the city pays for and its police run, so the commission gets to vote it down. The drones aren’t camera-free either: Amazon’s own Prime Air page says they may record people, pets and cars near the drop point, as DroneXL reported when Amazon told Pflugerville the opposite. That is a privacy fight for Florida’s legislature and the FAA, and a city ordinance on routes wouldn’t settle it.

A Prime Air drone is a delivery aircraft flying under FAA rules, and Florida wrote its statute so a city council can’t regulate its flights or zone its drone port out of town. I think Florida got that right. Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a count of every municipality inside its delivery zones. I don’t see how any operator runs a network across 500 sets of local altitude and route rules.

Matlow asked the better question. My guess is a drone that drops that low to deliver a package will meet a lot of Tallahassee oaks on the way down. Amazon has to solve that under FAA rules, not a city ordinance. If you live near the Mahan Drive warehouse, bring that question to the Civic Center on October 20 and ask for a route map.

Sources: Tallahassee Democrat, via Miami Herald, Florida Statute 330.41, WCTV, WTXL

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

Pentagon Opens $450M Attack-Drone Round With A 400-Drone Deadline

Haye Kesteloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:15:00 GMT

The Department of War opened Phase 3 of the Drone Dominance Program on Monday, September 28, with $450 million for roughly 60,000 attack drones and an option to buy up to 40,000 more. Companies compete in two mission sets: Deep Strike, at stand-off ranges out to about 12 miles (20 kilometers), and Close Quarter Battle. Each company that reaches Gauntlet III must first deliver a 400-drone production order in about two months.

The announcement lists Deep Strike drones at $5,000 each, not counting weaponization, and Close Quarter Battle drones at $3,000. At those prices, 60,000 drones cost at most $300 million.

The Listed Prices Cover At Most $300 Million Of The $450 Million

At the announced prices, 60,000 drones cost between $180 million (all Close Quarter Battle) and $300 million (all Deep Strike), or $240 million split evenly. The announcement puts $450 million behind them and does not say what covers the difference. Deep Strike’s price excludes weaponization.

The wording reads a second way. The announcement splits the money evenly across the two mission sets without saying whether it means dollars or drones. Split by dollars, $225 million buys 45,000 Deep Strike drones at $5,000 and 75,000 Close Quarter Battle drones at $3,000, or 120,000 in all, twice the stated count.

Payloads may explain part of the gap. Gauntlet II companies were each paired with one or more lethality providers, and Swarm Defense, fifth in Deep Strike, received a prototype order valued at a minimum of $25 million for 4,000 Kiwi drones plus munitions and control software, about $6,250 a drone at the floor. Even at that rate for every drone, 60,000 come to $375 million, $75 million under the $450 million.

Deep Strike Rises To $5,000 And 40,000 Drones Are Priced By Vendors

Deep Strike drones rise to $5,000 from $4,500, excluding weaponization, to pay for better compute, communications and sensing, the program says. Close Quarter Battle falls to $3,000 from $3,500. The program will also weigh offers for up to 40,000 more drones at company-set prices, for a total of 100,000.

The program says the 40,000-drone option exists to buy more drones and “better understand the pricing in the marketplace.”

The December 2025 plan was different. Washington Technology reported that the department’s request for information laid out Phase 3 as 100,000 drones at $3,000 each and Phase 4 as 150,000 at $2,300, with payment only for delivered drones. That was before Gauntlet I bought about 30,000 drones for up to $150 million. The 100,000 figure survives only as a ceiling, with 60,000 committed and 40,000 open to offers. The $3,000 price survives for Close Quarter Battle alone.

Ten Gauntlet II Awards Are Spoken For In A Field Capped At 14

The ten Gauntlet II awardees skip the pitch steps and go to Gauntlet III in the mission they won. Everyone else submits a pitch deck on NSTXL, and about eight companies get a November Pitch & Fly. The program caps Gauntlet III at 14 companies.

The announcement counts ten awardees. Neros placed on both Gauntlet II boards, as DefenseScoop listed them, so the two boards name nine distinct companies. The announcement does not say whether the 14-company cap counts companies or awards. Depending on the count, four or five of the roughly eight pitch companies fit.

Gauntlet II entrants had to fill a 120-drone order with lethality payloads in about five weeks to qualify. The Gauntlet III gate is more than three times that volume, in about two months.

Skycutter finished fourth in Deep Strike. The program’s status page listed it in July as neither ramping nor shipping its Gauntlet I order, Aviation Tech Today reported, and DroneXL covered the placement on September 19.

DroneXL’s Take

The 400-drone gate is the smartest requirement in this announcement, and Gauntlet II is the case for it. A leaderboard score says a drone flew well at Fort Carson in August. Four hundred delivered drones say a company can build them. When I wrote up the Gauntlet II results, I said Skycutter’s shipping status would show whether its fourth-place score was a bad week or a business problem. Skycutter has to clear it to reach Gauntlet III. My read is that the gate exists because of cases like that one, though the announcement never says so.

Watch November’s Pitch & Fly, then watch who ships.

Sources: Drone Dominance Program, Aviation Tech Today, Washington Technology, The Defense Post, Soldier Systems, DefenseScoop.

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

Amazon Drone Hub Faces Pause Call From Lawmakers as State Sues FAA

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:09:00 GMT

Three Massachusetts state lawmakers have asked Amazon to pause its proposed Prime Air drone delivery hub in Westborough until the company answers residents on operating hours, flight paths, service range and the number of flights a day. State Sen. Michael Moore, D-2nd Worcester, state Rep. Kate Donaghue, D-19th Worcester, and state Rep. Hannah Kane, R-11th Worcester, made the letter public on Tuesday, September 29. It is addressed to Tareq Wafaie, the Amazon economic development policy manager who presented the plan to a packed Westborough hotel ballroom on September 23.

I sat through that presentation. Wafaie told the room Amazon hopes to launch from its 64 Otis Street warehouse, possibly by the end of October, with about six MK30 drones and several hundred deliveries a day inside a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius.

The letter arrived one day after Massachusetts joined 14 other states in federal court against the Federal Aviation Administration over the environmental clearance new drone delivery hubs run on.

Lawmakers Say Amazon Left Hours, Routes and Flight Counts Undetermined

The letter says Amazon’s own outreach left the scope of the Westborough operation confused, with operating hours, flight paths, service range and daily flight counts still undetermined, and calls it unfair to ask the community to evaluate a proposal on those terms. It asks Amazon to pause until it answers.

The letter, as MassLive quoted it, credits Amazon with sharing information with officials and the public and says the sharing itself left the scope unclear. It lists the constituent concerns as noise, frequency of flights, flight path, operating hours, privacy, safety, drone cybersecurity and environmental impact, and calls them valid. The Shrewsbury Post, which also reviewed the letter, says it cites videos of a Prime Air drone dropping a package into a pool and of one crashing into a residential apartment building, plus news reports of noise complaints in Texas and Nebraska. It also puts Prime Air at 13 cities across 10 states and repeats Amazon’s plan to reach more than 500 communities by the end of the year.

Moore, in a statement released with the letter, drew the line between trucks on neighborhood streets and “flying dozens of camera-equipped drones in the skies above our homes.” He called Amazon’s Westborough warehouse a net benefit to the region and said launching over unresolved concerns could damage the company’s relationship with the community, Patch reported. Kane said people inside Amazon’s range “need to be able to trust that their questions will be answered.” Donaghue cited residents’ “serious concerns regarding the environmental impact of drones on wildlife, especially birds.” At the September 23 forum, Wafaie said Amazon ran no peer-reviewed wildlife study of its own and relies on the FAA’s review.

The letter’s sharpest line is about jurisdiction: “A federal permit does not reflect the community’s trust and support.”

Only Westborough’s Launch Pad Is Up for a Vote, and Amazon Set No Pause

The pause request has no legal hook. Westborough’s Planning Board, resuming its hearing on site-plan application 26-02275 on October 6, can rule only on the fenced pads and trailers in Amazon’s Otis Street parking lot. The FAA controls the flights, and Amazon hopes to hold every other approval by year-end.

Residents fill a Westborough meeting room, with more standing along the walls, for Amazon's Prime Air community meeting on September 23, 2026. The lawmakers' letter is addressed to Amazon's presenter that night, Tareq Wafaie. Photo credit: DroneXL

Those remaining approvals are the FAA’s site-specific environmental review, which a member of Amazon’s airspace team said the agency was still working on, and a MassDOT Aeronautics inspection and registration of the landing area. Wafaie said Amazon had none of them yet, and the Drone Delivery Tracker lists the hub as in review. He also said about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing, as DroneXL reported from the room in Amazon Tells Packed Westborough Room Its Drones Are Coming Anyway. Westborough is in the other 20%, and an independent resident survey DroneXL covered on September 28 had 92% of 853 respondents opposed.

Westborough’s Select Board has called a special meeting for Thursday, October 1, at 6 p.m. in the Forbes Municipal Building, with a 7 p.m. item on comments to send the Planning Board and a 7:45 p.m. item on next steps with the town’s legislative delegation, according to the agenda Patch published.

None of Tuesday’s reports carried an Amazon response to the letter, and WBZ-TV said it had asked. Amazon’s most recent statement on Westborough, from spokesperson Jack Stelzner earlier this month, said the company is working with local officials to bring the service to the area. Spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton told the Boston Globe this week that customer response in other markets has been overwhelmingly positive and that fewer than 1% of customer-service inquiries about Prime Air involve noise. In the ballroom, the only item Wafaie floated as negotiable was operating hours, and he said he was not committing to anything.

Massachusetts Joined a Lawsuit Against the FAA Clearance Amazon Needs

Massachusetts is one of 15 states, plus Harris County, Texas, that asked the Second Circuit on September 28 to set aside the FAA’s July 28 nationwide environmental finding for drone package delivery. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed for the coalition. The petition does not yet argue the case.

Every Part 135 delivery approval the FAA has issued since July 28 rests on the document the states want thrown out, and no stay has been requested, so approvals continue, as DroneXL reported in FAA Sued by 15 States Over Drone Delivery Clearance Amazon Runs On. Amazon told the September 23 room it does not yet hold the FAA’s sign-off for Westborough. The January comment letter that preceded the suit built its safety argument on the October 1, 2025, Tolleson, Arizona, crane collision, and DroneXL added the February 2026 strike on a Richardson, Texas, apartment building to that list. The lawmakers’ letter does not name the location of the apartment crash it cites, as reported. The filmed MK30 apartment strike in DroneXL’s file is Richardson, on February 4, 2026, and it is the one I asked Wafaie about on September 23. He did not address it.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon should grant this pause, and I say that as someone who wants delivery drones to succeed. Three of the four things the lawmakers asked for, hours, routes and flights per day, are things Wafaie would not pin down for a room of several hundred people on September 23, and the eight safety questions DroneXL sent Amazon on September 4 are still unanswered too. A company that has these answers for other cities and withholds them here looks worse than one that stops to produce them.

The pause request carries no force, and by Wafaie’s own count 80% of Amazon’s proposed hubs never faced a public hearing. But the letter’s argument, that a federal permit is not community consent, is close kin to the one Massachusetts is now making in the Second Circuit: that the FAA cleared drone delivery nationwide with no information about the communities underneath. Launching in October on an FAA sign-off that would rest on a clearance fifteen states are asking a court to vacate, over a town whose legislators asked you to wait, is how a company earns the moratoriums Castle Rock and Parker already passed. Watch Thursday’s Select Board meeting for whether Westborough asks its delegation for a state bill, and October 6 for whether the Planning Board votes on the pad before Amazon has answered the four questions.

Sources: MassLive, CBS Boston / WBZ-TV, Shrewsbury Post, Patch, Boston Globe, Petition for Review, New York et al. v. FAA.

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

Lodi NJ Drone Ban Is Preempted, Judge Rules, But Pilot Gets No Order

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:56:00 GMT

A federal judge in Newark held on September 24 that the Borough of Lodi, New Jersey cannot enforce its 2025 drone ordinance, which bans drones below 400 feet across the whole town, because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) already occupies that airspace. Judge Susan D. Wigenton denied Lodi’s motion to dismiss a suit brought by resident Paul Palange, who was written up three times in July 2025 for flying a drone with no camera on it from his own yard.

Palange represented himself. He had no lawyer, and he still got a ruling that the ordinance fails under both field preemption and conflict preemption, one of them the theory that killed Newton, Massachusetts’ drone law in 2017.

He did not get the restraining order he asked for. Lodi told the court he is not in violation of the ordinance. He was served with summonses under it on July 18, 22 and 30, 2025.

Lodi Wrote a 400-Foot Floor Under the FAA’s 400-Foot Ceiling

Lodi adopted Chapter 217, Drones and Unmanned Aircraft, on June 17, 2025 as Ordinance 2025-08. It bans any drone with a camera or sensor below 400 feet anywhere in the borough, and bans sensor-free aircraft below 400 feet over residential and commercial zones, roads, public buildings and parks.

FAA rules cap small drones at 400 feet above ground level. The court put the two side by side: “Read together, those restrictions leave no meaningful altitude band in which a UAS may lawfully operate.” Lodi is 2.27 square miles (5.9 square kilometers) of houses, roads and shops. The carve-out for sensor-free aircraft covers, in practice, nothing.

The ordinance carries fines of up to $500 for a first offense, $1,000 for a second, and $2,000 plus up to 90 days in jail for a third. Its stated purpose is privacy and public safety. Section 217-4D says lawful operation under FAA rules “shall be permitted,” which is the clause Lodi leaned on in court.

The timing is not a coincidence. Lodi sits in Bergen County, one of the counties at the center of the December 2024 drone panic that DroneXL covered in “Debunking the New Jersey drone rumors,” and the borough council passed its ban six months after the sightings that federal agencies later attributed to manned aircraft and hobby drones. Westwood, in the same county, tried the same below-400-foot rule in 2020, and DroneXL reported then that only the FAA regulates that airspace. Lodi did it anyway.

Judge Wigenton Rejected the Privacy Defense and the FAA Savings Clause

The court held the ordinance field preempted because it “in substance dictates where UAS may fly and at what altitude,” core questions of airspace management and aviation safety. Lodi’s privacy rationale failed on the ordinance’s own definitions: Palange’s aircraft has no sensor, so no privacy interest is in play.

Lodi’s fallback was Section 217-4D, the clause permitting FAA-compliant flight. The court rejected it in one sentence: “where Congress occupies a field, even complementary or parallel state regulation is impermissible.” A local law that copies federal law is still a local law regulating federal airspace.

On conflict preemption, the opinion tracks Singer v. City of Newton, the 2017 Massachusetts decision that struck a privacy-framed 400-foot ban as a de facto prohibition. DroneXL’s May 2026 piece on the Olathe, Kansas ordinance walked through the same precedent; Olathe pulled its rule before a judge had to. Lodi did not, and now has a written opinion against it. The ordinance, Wigenton wrote, “stands as an obstacle to the FAA and Congress’s objectives to integrate UAS into the national airspace.”

The opinion is eight pages, marked not for publication, and it is a letter opinion on a motion to dismiss. Palange has shown his claims are plausible and likely to succeed, not won a final judgment. Lodi’s answer and any appeal are still ahead.

The Borough Won the TRO Fight by Saying Its Own Tickets Don’t Count

Palange asked for a temporary restraining order to halt enforcement during the case. Judge Wigenton found he is likely to win on the merits, then denied it for lack of irreparable harm: recreational flying is not protected speech, hobby time can be priced, and Lodi says it is not enforcing.

The First Amendment argument failed because Palange called his flights recreational and never claimed they carry a message. “At most, enforcement of the Ordinance would temporarily limit Plaintiff’s recreational enjoyment,” the court wrote, and that is not expressive conduct. He also did not allege his livelihood depends on the drone.

Then came the borough’s own representation. Lodi told the court that Palange’s FAA-authorized flights are already permitted under the savings clause and that he is not violating the ordinance. The court took Lodi at its word: the record “does not show that Plaintiff faces imminent enforcement,” so any injury is “speculative rather than immediate.” The opinion records that Lodi police visited Palange’s property repeatedly from February through July 2025, served him with the ordinance in court on July 16, and issued three summonses in the two weeks after. What became of those summonses is not in the complaint.

DroneXL’s Take

Lodi told a federal judge that a hobbyist its own police ticketed three times is not in violation of its ordinance, and that concession is why Palange goes home without an injunction. I read that as a borough that knows its ordinance is dead and would rather it die quietly than under a court order. New Jersey’s legislature already settled this in 2018: N.J.S.A. 2C:40-29 preempts any municipal drone ordinance inconsistent with state law, and the state act contains no altitude rules for a town to be consistent with. Lodi’s council passed Chapter 217 seven years after that statute, six months after a drone panic that turned out to be manned aircraft and hobby drones, and it took a resident with no lawyer and no camera on his drone to get the first written finding that the thing is unenforceable. The consequence for every other New Jersey pilot is the useful part. Wigenton’s opinion is not precedent, but it is a federal judge applying Singer v. Newton to a New Jersey town, and the next council that reaches for a 400-foot ban will have to explain why its version survives when Lodi’s did not. Bergen County has 70 municipalities. Check yours.

Sources: Palange v. Borough of Lodi, D.N.J. No. 2:26-cv-02375, Letter Opinion (Sept. 24, 2026), Lodi Code Chapter 217, P.L.2017, c.315

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

FAA Sued by 15 States Over Drone Delivery Clearance Amazon Runs On

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:52:00 GMT

Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas sued the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday, September 28, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to throw out the agency’s nationwide environmental clearance for drone package delivery. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the petition on behalf of the coalition, which includes California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin. The target is the July 28 finding of no significant impact that lets the FAA approve new Part 135 delivery markets against one national study instead of a fresh environmental assessment for each one.

DroneXL covered that finding on July 31 under the headline “FAA Clears Drone Delivery’s Environmental Path Nationwide, Overriding 17 State Attorneys General.” Those seventeen had demanded a full environmental impact statement in January and lost.

The FAA’s decision document gave challengers 60 days from July 28. That window ran out on Saturday, September 26. The petition is dated Monday.

Zipline's second-generation Platform 2 aircraft at its docking tower, one of the Part 135 fleets covered by the finding the states want set aside. Photo credit: Zipline

The Petition Names 16 Plaintiffs and Makes No Argument Yet

Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas petitioned the Second Circuit on September 28 to set aside the FAA’s July 28 nationwide environmental finding for drone package delivery. New York Attorney General Letitia James is counsel for all petitioners. The petition states jurisdiction and venue and makes no argument.

The petition, signed by Assistant Solicitor General Blair Greenwald under Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, names the FAA, Administrator Bryan Bedford, the Department of Transportation and Secretary Sean Duffy as respondents. The full list of petitioners: New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin and Harris County. One early report named Travis County as the Texas plaintiff. The document says Harris.

A petition for review under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 15 is a notice, not a brief. The arguments arrive once the FAA files the administrative record and the court sets a schedule, and neither has happened. The substance so far comes from California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s press release, which says the assessment covers deliveries that will happen at unnamed future places and times with no information about the communities underneath and does not address the safety risks of a much larger rollout. Bonta’s line: the assessment “falls far short of properly analyzing the environmental impacts.” The FAA did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Wing's delivery drone at a Walmart launch in Houston, inside Harris County, the one local government on the petition. Photo credit: Wing

The Filing Landed on Day 62 Because Day 60 Was a Saturday

The deadline was Saturday, September 26, and the petition is dated Monday because Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 26(a) moves a deadline that falls on a weekend to the next business day. The coalition used every day allowed, sixty days after the FAA signed the finding on July 28.

The petition cites that rule by name, alongside 49 U.S.C. § 46110, the statute that routes challenges to FAA orders straight to a circuit court and skips the district courts. It also quotes the FAA back to itself: page F-18 of the final assessment declares the document “a final agency action and a final order” reviewable only in the courts of appeals. The agency wrote the sentence that opened the courthouse door.

Matternet's M2, the first delivery drone to earn an FAA type certificate, flies under the same Part 135 approvals now tied to the nationwide finding. Photo credit: Matternet

Two January Signers Stayed Out and the Case Skipped the Ninth Circuit

Seventeen attorneys general signed the January 23 comment letter demanding a full environmental impact statement. Fifteen signed the petition. Connecticut and Vermont are the two that did not, and neither attorney general’s newsroom carried a word about the case on the night it was filed. The lead also moved: Illinois led the letter, New York leads the case.

The venue choice is the more interesting change. The January letter built its legal argument on Ninth Circuit precedent, the friendliest NEPA case law in the country, and four of the petitioners (California, Arizona, Oregon and Washington) could have filed there. They filed in New York’s home circuit instead. Nothing in the petition explains the choice.

Connecticut’s absence has a live edge. Amazon wants up to 1,000 delivery flights a day from North Haven, and the state’s own coastal review comment window on that hub closes October 1. Attorney General William Tong signed the January letter and skipped the suit.

Harris County’s signature changed hands too. The letter was signed for County Attorney Jonathan Fombonne. The petition lists Abbie Kamin.

DoorDash Air announced its own Part 135 certificate on July 29, one day after the FAA signed the finding. Photo credit: DoorDash

Every Approval Since July 28 Rides on the Document Under Review

Every Part 135 delivery approval the FAA has issued since July 28 tiers to the document the states want set aside. No stay was requested, so approvals continue. A vacatur would send the agency back to per-market reviews it says took six to eight months each.

The FAA completed 23 of those one-off assessments between 2019 and July 2025, plus a statewide one for North Carolina. Amazon Prime Air needed separate sign-offs for Detroit and Florida this spring while it was already lining up Omaha and Baton Rouge, and DroneXL reported on September 27 that Amazon still won’t say when its Tracy, California drones fly. Bonta’s release names Tracy. Wing’s 270-store Walmart expansion and Zipline’s Seattle application run through the same finding.

Part 108 is untouched by the case. Package delivery stays under Part 135 until the delayed BVLOS rule is final, and the FAA’s own finding estimates Part 108 delivery one to two years after that. The Drone Delivery Tracker lists which hubs were approved before the July finding and which came after it.

A Flytrex delivery drone on a rooftop dock. Flytrex aircraft fly under Causey Aviation's Part 135 certificate in North Carolina and Texas. Photo credit: Flytrex

The Battery Fire Gap Is the Claim the FAA Answered Least

The claim the FAA answered least is lithium-battery fire in an unmanned aircraft. The final assessment dismissed hazardous materials from detailed review on the expectation that operators follow transport and disposal rules, ten months after an Amazon MK30 battery ejected and burned near Tolleson, Arizona.

The January letter put the October 1, 2025 Tolleson collision at the center of its safety argument, along with the delivery drone that cut an internet cable in Waco. DroneXL added the February crash into a Richardson, Texas apartment building to that list. The letter’s other complaints, a noise baseline that counts only aviation noise and wildlife analysis built on hub locations the FAA admits it does not know, were argued at length and answered in the final document’s comment appendix. Battery fire was not analyzed at all. That distinction matters because of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2025 decision telling lower courts to defer to agencies on how much NEPA analysis is enough. A brief that says the FAA should have written more starts behind under that ruling. A brief that says the FAA wrote nothing on a documented hazard has a path.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA earned this lawsuit on one page. It had the NTSB’s preliminary report on Tolleson in hand, it had Amazon’s own account of a battery burning on the ground, and it wrote that hazardous materials did not need detailed analysis because operators would follow the rules. That is the sentence the states will hang the case on, and my read is they’re right to.

None of that makes a vacatur the right outcome. I said in July that a conditional no-impact finding is a privilege the industry keeps only as long as it behaves like one, and the 600-foot setback and 1,150-delivery cap are real conditions, not paper ones. Send the FAA back to six-month reviews for every market and the people who pay are the operators who never crashed anything and the residents in Omaha and Baton Rouge whose hubs each needed a separate federal review for a service Texas already has. The remedy that fits the flaw is a supplemental battery analysis with enforceable mitigation, which is what the states asked for in January before they asked for everything.

Watch two things now that the case exists. Whether the coalition files a stay motion, which would freeze new approvals while the court decides, and the briefing schedule once the FAA lodges the record. Until then every hub the FAA signs off on carries a footnote that says a court may yet decide the signature was worth nothing.

Sources: Petition for Review, New York et al. v. FAA, California Attorney General, Federal Aviation Administration, Reuters.

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

Matternet M3 Drone Lifts 11 Pounds, Has No FAA Certificate Yet

Haye Kesteloo — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:12:00 GMT

Matternet unveiled M3 on Monday, a delivery drone that carries up to 11 pounds (5 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) radius and flies from a rooftop dock with nobody on site. The Mountain View company named Dave’s Hot Chicken as its first U.S. launch partner and Apian, which runs a National Health Service drone network in central London, as its U.K. partner.

The system has three pieces: the aircraft, a dock that stores and charges it, and a drop-box called the Portal where a restaurant or hospital worker leaves packages and walks away. Matternet plans to build the aircraft in the United States.

Commercial service is targeted for the second half of 2027. The M3 has no FAA type certificate, and Matternet’s own release lists certifying it among the things that could move that date.

M3 Carries 2.5 Times the M2 Payload on a Shorter Leash

The M3 lifts 11 pounds (5 kg) against the Matternet M2’s 4.4 pounds (2 kg), but its 10-mile (16 km) service radius sits under the M2’s roughly 12.4-mile (20 km) range. The cargo bay takes ordinary food and retail bags and boxes, with separate configurations for healthcare and industrial loads.

The dock installs on a roof or at ground level. The Portal is the new idea: Matternet describes it as low-cost and off-grid, holding several packages at once for the aircraft to collect later, so a sender never times a handoff to a flight. Everything after the drop is automated, per Monday’s release.

The Matternet M3 delivery drone sits in its rooftop dock with the doors open, ready for an autonomous flight. Photo credit: Matternet

Both launch partners already fly M2s. Dave’s Hot Chicken launched an M2 pilot from its Northridge, Los Angeles store in October 2025, with orders placed through the chain’s app. Apian added Matternet to its London hospital network in June 2025. Matternet says more M3 partners follow in the coming months, all aimed at high-volume instant delivery.

Founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said “Drone delivery should be a utility: largely invisible, dependable and low-cost.”

Matternet's M3 delivery drone carries up to 11 pounds (5 kg) within a 10-mile (16 km) radius, launching autonomously from a rooftop dock. Photo credit: Matternet

The M2 Took 22 Months From Proposed Criteria to Certificate

The M2 is the only delivery drone holding a standard FAA type certificate, issued in September 2022, plus a production certificate. The FAA published proposed airworthiness criteria for it in November 2020, 22 months before the certificate. A Federal Register search on Monday turns up criteria for the M2 and nothing for an M3.

That is the gap between the M3’s specs and its 2027 date. The release’s forward-looking statement names “the regulatory approvals required for M3” and the company’s ability to complete “development, testing and certification of M3” as risks. Testing and customer pilots are also still ahead. A drone with a bigger battery and a bigger cargo bay is a different aircraft in the FAA’s eyes, whatever the badge says.

The Matternet M3 delivery drone flies over rooftops near its rooftop dock, carrying packages up to 11 pounds within a 10-mile radius. Photo credit: Matternet

The timing fits a pattern DroneXL has tracked all year. Matternet went public in June through a $33 million reverse merger and began trading on the OTCQB as MTTN on September 21, one week before M3. It has named partners at a steady clip since April: SoftBank Robotics America, Amprius, Beeline UAS and, two weeks ago, AVI-SPL. None of those announcements carried flight volumes or revenue, and Monday’s carries no order count, no aircraft count and no price. The SoftBank deal is back in this release as the deployment engine for M3.

The Matternet M3 hovers above a residential area while lowering a package on a tether during a delivery flight. Photo credit: Matternet

DroneXL’s Take

The Portal is the smartest thing in this release, and it has nothing to do with flying. Matternet’s own pitch is that nobody has to be near the aircraft, which reads to me as an admission that the M2 stations, from the hospital routes to the Mountain View home deliveries, never got rid of that person. Remove the labor and the unit economics move more than any payload bump does. So I buy the product. I don’t buy the calendar. Matternet has already lived one certification, and it took 22 months for a 2 kg aircraft while the FAA wrote the rulebook alongside it. Nothing for the M3 has hit the Federal Register, and the company is targeting revenue service in roughly 12 months. Watch for M3 airworthiness criteria there, and watch the Q3 10-Q for whether the launch partners are paying anything. Until one of those shows up, the second half of 2027 is a date for shareholders, not for restaurants.

Source: Matternet via GlobeNewswire

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

Amazon Told Pflugerville Drones Take No Images. Its Own Site Disagrees

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:47:00 GMT

Amazon told the Pflugerville City Council on September 22 that its MK30 delivery drones cannot take pictures. Amazon’s own Prime Air operations page, live on Amazon.com as of September 28, says people, pets and cars near a delivery point may be recorded and that Amazon uses those images to improve its services.

Sam Bailey, Amazon’s senior manager of economic policy, made the pitch in a preliminary presentation that Community Impact reported on September 24. Council member Kimberly Holiday told him the city would need proof. Four weeks earlier, on August 25, the same council had voted unanimously not to renew its license-plate-reader contract with Flock Safety after learning outside agencies had searched Pflugerville’s camera data nearly 1.6 million times in six months.

Pflugerville sits inside the FAA’s February environmental decision covering 22 Texas delivery centers, and the document lists two addresses in the city. Council member David Rogers has since named the site: the parking lot north of Amazon’s STX6 warehouse at 18625 Schultz Lane, south of Toll Road 45. Richardson’s council asked Bailey the same camera question in March. Pflugerville’s had just ended a contract with a camera vendor.

Amazon’s Operations Page Says Its Drones May Record People

Amazon’s Prime Air operations page says MK30 cameras may record “people, pets, cars, and objects near the delivery or landing location” and that Amazon uses them to improve “drone delivery and other Amazon services.” It offers an opt-out at your own address, none for a neighbor’s.

That is the page Amazon publishes for pilots, air traffic personnel and public safety agencies. It does not match what Bailey told Pflugerville. Community Impact quoted him as saying the drones “can’t scan faces, look at license plates, or take pictures or images” and that flight monitors cannot see live footage. The two statements can both be true only if “take pictures” means something narrower than “record,” and Bailey did not draw that line for the council.

He drew a different one in Richardson. At the March 9 Richardson council meeting, Community Impact reported Bailey saying there are no downward-facing cameras collecting data on individuals, cars or license plates, and that sensor data stays on the drone. The New York Times then quoted Amazon spokeswoman Lindsay Hamilton in September saying the images sit on encrypted drives that only authorized staff can access. Encrypted drives hold images that were kept, not images that were never taken.

Holiday’s response was the one a council gets to give once. “We’re going to need you to prove that for us,” she said, tying it directly to the Flock decision. Amazon has already been asked the same question in Westborough, where the answer was that the drones are coming regardless of the town’s view.

The FAA Cleared Two Pflugerville Sites in February

The FAA signed the Finding of No Significant Impact and Record of Decision for Amazon’s Texas expansion on February 5, 2026. The final environmental assessment lists 22 delivery centers statewide, each cleared for 1,000 flights a day between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Two are in Pflugerville.

The sites are STX6 at 18625 Schultz Lane and AUS2 at 2000 East Pecan Street. A third Austin-area site, STX9, sits at 9900 Decker Lane in Austin, and the same document covers the Waco hub, where the FAA opened a second probe in November after an MK30 clipped a cable. The assessment has the MK30 cruising between roughly 180 and 377 feet (55 to 115 meters) and descending to 13 feet (4 meters) to drop a package. Community Impact’s report says Amazon filed a request for administrative interpretation with the city on June 15 for “the addition of the Prime Air drone delivery center,” singular. Rogers, writing on his council Facebook page three days after the September 22 work session, said Amazon wants the center in the parking lot north of STX6 on Schultz Lane, and that he wanted “facts on the table” rather than rumors. The FAA’s Texas record does not rank the two Pflugerville sites by launch order, so his post is what puts Schultz Lane ahead of East Pecan Street for now. The aircraft in the photo on his post is a fixed-wing Wing drone, not Amazon’s MK30.

The federal decision settles the airspace question, which is why Richardson dropped its rezoning threat in April on legal advice. That leaves the city the land-use file Amazon opened in June and the noise record. The FAA’s Texas assessment puts an MK30 overflight at 50 feet at roughly 74.2 decibels, which the document compares to a leaf blower at the same distance. Amazon’s Pflugerville slide called the noise “soft to moderate.” Bailey gave the council altitudes of 225 to 280 feet outbound and 300 to 380 feet back. Amazon’s own operations page lists 205 to 250 feet out and 325 to 370 feet back, and the FAA assessment tops out at 377. Three documents, three sets of numbers.

Amazon told Pflugerville it would do more community outreach before council takes the matter up again. No date was set.

Pflugerville Ended Its Flock Contract Over Who Could See the Data

On August 25, 2026, the Pflugerville council voted unanimously not to renew an $87,500-a-year lease for Flock Safety license-plate readers. A resident’s open-records request had shown outside law enforcement agencies searched the city’s plate data nearly 1.6 million times between February and August through a security flaw in Flock’s system.

Police Chief Willie Richards told the council he lacked clarity on how community data was protected, and council member Rudy Metayer said the city needed to get Flock “the hell out of here.” That vote came 28 days before Amazon’s presentation (August 25 to September 22). Holiday’s demand for proof reads differently with that arithmetic in front of it: the council had just learned, from its own records, that a vendor’s description of its cameras and the vendor’s actual data flows were two different things.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon has three descriptions of the same camera system in circulation, and Pflugerville got the narrowest one. The council pitch says no pictures. The Richardson pitch said no downward cameras on people. The published operations page says people near the drop point may be recorded and the images are used to improve Amazon services, and the spokeswoman’s encrypted-drive line confirms they are kept. My read is that each version is written for its audience rather than for accuracy, and a council that just caught Flock doing the same thing is the wrong room to try it in.

The fix is not complicated. Amazon can put the operations-page language on the council slide, say how long delivery-point images are retained and who can pull them, and let Pflugerville judge the actual policy instead of a paraphrase. Zipline answered DroneXL’s safety questions on the record this month; its own draft assessment for Austin, El Paso and three other Texas metros is open for public comment through October 11. Amazon’s Texas decision is already signed. Pflugerville still holds the land-use file Amazon opened in June and the question Holiday asked on September 22, and that is enough to get the retention policy on the record before a single flight.

Residents inside the 7.5-mile circle around Schultz Lane can find what still works, and what doesn’t, in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do. Amazon takes drone-delivery complaints and opt-out requests at 1-888-280-4331, or through the customer-service chat on Amazon’s site under “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.” DroneXL tracks every Prime Air hub, filing and incident on the Amazon Prime Air operator page.

Sources: Pflugerville Councilman David Rogers (Facebook, September 25, 2026), Community Impact (Pflugerville, September 24, 2026), Community Impact (Richardson, March 10, 2026), Community Impact (Pflugerville Flock vote), Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery Operations page, FAA Final Environmental Assessment for Drone Package Delivery in Texas, FAA FONSI/ROD, Amazon Multi-Metro Texas, FAA drone environmental review index

DroneXL may earn a commission from purchases made through the Amazon link in this article, at no extra cost to you.

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

North Haven Amazon Drones: How to File With CT DEEP Before Oct. 1

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:24:00 GMT

Residents of North Haven, Hamden, Wallingford and New Haven have until Thursday, October 1, to file a comment with Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection on Amazon’s plan to fly up to 1,000 MK30 delivery flights a day from its warehouse at 409 Washington Avenue. DEEP opened the 15-day window on September 16, when it published the Federal Aviation Administration’s request for a finding that the hub is consistent with the state’s Coastal Management Act, and it owes the FAA an answer by October 16.

It is the only public comment window DroneXL can find open on the project in Connecticut. North Haven’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved Amazon’s delivery building in May and has nothing further on its agenda, the Connecticut Airport Authority took a briefing whose minutes say “general update,” and the FAA has posted no environmental document for the site.

The review DEEP is running was built for docks and dredging, and the FAA’s own request says the warehouse sits outside the coastal boundary.

The 7.5-Mile Circle Reaches New Haven Harbor and the Edge of Tweed

The FAA document DEEP is reviewing sets a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery radius, about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), around 409 Washington Avenue. Measured from the warehouse, that circle takes in all of Hamden and North Haven, downtown New Haven and Yale at 5.6 miles, Wallingford’s center at 6.2 miles, and the centers of North Branford, East Haven and Branford between 5.8 and 6.9 miles.

Long Wharf on New Haven Harbor sits 6.3 miles out, inside the circle. Tweed New Haven Airport’s field sits at about 7.6 miles, on the line, and the FAA document does not mention it, as DroneXL reported when the comment window opened. Cheshire’s center is 9 miles out, so only its southern edge falls inside; Bethany, Woodbridge and West Haven each have a strip within reach. DroneXL measured those distances from the warehouse address. The FAA has not published the operating-area map, and Amazon’s actual delivery boundary can exclude any of them.

The circle’s coastal content is the Quinnipiac River, which runs tidal through North Haven and Hamden about a mile from the warehouse before it reaches the harbor. North Haven and Hamden are both named in the act’s definition of the coastal area, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 22a-94(a), as DEEP’s own coastal area map layer records, and the tidal marsh along the river is the coastal resource closest to the launch pad.

The aircraft is the same one Amazon flies everywhere: 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty, 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) payload, a cruise between 205 and 370 feet (62 to 113 meters), and a descent to about 13 feet (4 meters) to drop the package on the lawn. It carries no parachute in any FAA filing DroneXL has read. The FAA request gives operating hours of 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., seven days a week, with up to 100 of the 1,000 daily flights in the first hour and the last half hour.

North Haven Approved a Building in May, and the Next Date Is October 1

North Haven’s commissioners approved application P26-17, a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at the Washington Avenue warehouse, by a 5-0 vote on May 4, with three conditions: a revised site plan, replacing unusable parking spaces with lawn, and a $5,000 bond. The approved minutes record none of the flight details Amazon has given elsewhere.

The minutes list Amazon’s presenter, Sam Bailey, as “Project Manager, Amazon Services,” and have him describing 70-pound drones carrying packages of 5 pounds or less within seven miles. The Register Citizen’s account of the same meeting, carried by GovTech, identifies him as an economic development manager and adds the promise of a public information session, which the minutes do not record and which had not been announced when DroneXL searched for one on September 26.

Date	Action	Status
May 4, 2026	P&Z approves P26-17, 5-0, with conditions	Done
Aug. 3, 2026	P&Z accepts revised perimeter fence plans, 5-0	Done
Aug. 17, 2026	FAA sends DEEP its consistency request	Done
Sept. 16, 2026	DEEP publishes notice, opens 15-day comment window	Done
Sept. 23, 2026	CT Airport Authority board briefed; draft minutes say “general update”	Done
Oct. 1, 2026	DEEP comment window closes; North Haven Board of Selectmen regular meeting, 6:30 p.m., Town Hall	Open
Oct. 16, 2026	DEEP concurrence or objection due to FAA	Pending
No date	FAA site-specific environmental document	Not posted as of Sept. 28

The arithmetic is DEEP’s, as spokesperson Bill Flood gave it to the New Haven Register: 15 days from a September 16 publication runs to October 1, and 60 days from the FAA’s August 17 request runs to October 16. The Board of Selectmen meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at Memorial Town Hall, 18 Church Street, and October 1 is that Thursday. The town had not posted the October 1 agenda when DroneXL checked on September 28; the board’s regular meetings carry a public comment period, according to its minutes.

The FAA’s drone environmental review index listed no Connecticut, North Haven or New Haven document when DroneXL checked it on the morning of September 28. The page was last updated September 24. Whether the hub gets a site review of its own or is checked against the national finding the FAA signed on July 28, with no draft and no comment period, is the question no Connecticut document answers, and it is the question a comment to DEEP can raise.

DEEP Rules on Coastal Policy, Not on Noise or Hours

Under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act and the Connecticut Coastal Management Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. §§ 22a-90 through 22a-112, DEEP decides one thing: whether the FAA’s action is consistent with the state’s enforceable coastal policies. Its Land and Water Resources Division ends every review with a concurrence or an objection. It does not decide airspace, altitude, hours, noise limits, or whether Amazon may fly.

DEEP’s coastal consistency page lays out the process under 15 CFR part 930 and cites the statute. The FAA’s request already argues the answer: the site is inland, outside the coastal boundary, no construction takes place in the coastal zone, and drone overflights inside the radius are transitory, according to the document the Hartford Courant published on September 19. A comment that says “too loud” or “not over my house” gives DEEP nothing it can act on within that frame.

A comment lands when it ties to a coastal resource or to the record DEEP is being asked to sign. Flight paths over the Quinnipiac tidal wetlands and what an 83-pound aircraft does to waterfowl there. Where an MK30 puts down when it fails over the river or the marsh: Amazon told a Westborough, Massachusetts, forum that the aircraft picks the nearest open area that is not a road or a building, and that the company keeps no map of landing sites. The harbor inside the circle, which the document does not name. And the absence of any site-specific FAA environmental document for DEEP to review against, which means DEEP is being asked to concur with a national analysis that never looked at the Quinnipiac.

The noise numbers belong in the file too, because the FAA’s own figures for this Amazon aircraft come from another state. The FAA’s Baton Rouge filing, Appendix B, puts MK30 takeoff and landing at 90.5 and 91.8 decibels SEL measured 20 feet from the aircraft, the delivery hover at 92.1 decibels SEL measured 25 feet away, and a drone cruising overhead at 200 feet (61 meters) at 63.7 decibels SEL. Amazon’s Prime Air operations manager in Baton Rouge, Tyra Jones, told the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge on September 9 that the drones are quieter than an idling delivery truck, as DroneXL reported from The Advocate’s account. The FAA’s own reference point for the 92.1 figure is a diesel truck at 50 feet.

General noise objections go to the FAA’s noise inquiry page and to the town, not to DEEP. Amazon’s own channels are in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can still do.

Connecticut Law Bars Towns From Regulating Commercial Drones

Connecticut settled the local question in 2017. Public Act 17-52, codified at Conn. Gen. Stat. § 7-149b, says no municipality may enact or enforce an ordinance that regulates the ownership, possession, use, transportation or operation of a commercial unmanned aircraft. The one carve-out is for a municipality that is also a water company, over its public water supply and watershed land.

That closes the lever towns in other states still hold. A North Haven noise ordinance written for drones, or a Hamden flight-hours rule, would run into the state statute before it reached the federal preemption question, because the act’s language reaches “use” and “operation,” not only the aircraft itself.

Connecticut has no drone-specific trespass or privacy statute. The Judicial Branch’s law library page on drones lists Public Act 17-52, the 2025 weaponization ban, and the general statutes on privacy and nuisance; nothing there addresses low overflight of private property, and DroneXL found no such provision in the General Assembly’s public act index when it searched on September 28. The state has no aviation agency of its own with jurisdiction here: the Connecticut Airport Authority runs Bradley and five general aviation airports, Tweed is not among them, and airspace is federal.

Three Levers Remain: the DEEP File, the Ground, and the Records

The DEEP comment is the first and it closes Thursday. A comment filed before October 1 goes into the record the FAA receives with DEEP’s decision, whichever way DEEP rules, and DEEP sets no minimum length or format.

The second is the ground. Public Act 17-52 leaves the launch pad to the town: site plans, bonds, fencing, lighting, ground-operation hours at the pad, and the conditions the commission attached in May. P26-17’s $5,000 bond and revised-plan conditions are still the town’s to enforce, and the Board of Selectmen meets on the deadline day with a public-comment slot. In Westborough, Massachusetts, where Amazon told a packed room its drones were coming anyway, the Planning Board’s site-plan review of the pads is the one local vote left, and it resumes October 6.

The third is paper. Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 1-200 and following, reaches the town and the Connecticut Airport Authority alike. The records to ask for: the P26-17 application file and any correspondence between Amazon and the First Selectman’s office; whatever the Airport Authority’s executive director, Michael Shea, was shown before he told his board on September 23 that Amazon had “coordinated extensively with the FAA,” a briefing the draft minutes do not record; and DEEP’s own file, including the FAA’s August 17 request and every comment received.

DroneXL asked North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda’s office and Hamden Mayor Adam Sendroff’s office on the afternoon of September 28 whether their towns were notified of the DEEP review and whether they will comment; neither had answered at publication. Wallingford and New Haven had not been asked. This article will be updated with any reply.

Who to Contact Before October 1

The comment address circulating in North Haven, on a flyer posted to the Town of North Haven CT Community Forum on Facebook, is Karen.Michaels@ct.gov. DEEP’s own 2020 comment notice for its coastal program names Karen Michaels, Environmental Analyst, Planning Section, Land and Water Resources Division, CT DEEP, 79 Elm Street, Hartford, CT 06106-5127, at that email, and the division’s general permit inbox is DEEPLWRDPermitInfo@ct.gov. DroneXL asked DEEP on September 28 to confirm the address and the project name for this review and had no answer at publication; put “Amazon Prime Air, North Haven, federal consistency” in the subject line and copy the division inbox.

North Haven’s Board of Selectmen meets October 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Memorial Town Hall, 18 Church Street; the Town Clerk’s office at the same address, (203) 239-5321, takes records requests. State Senator Paul Cicarella’s 34th District covers all of North Haven and Wallingford and parts of East Haven and North Branford; State Representative Dave Yaccarino’s 87th District is North Haven alone. Hamden and New Haven residents can find their legislators through the General Assembly’s district lookup.

The FAA takes drone questions at UASHelp@faa.gov and 844-359-6982, and noise complaints through its inquiry page. Amazon takes drone-delivery calls at 1-888-280-4331; by chat, open the customer service page on Amazon, choose “Something Else,” then “Amazon Drone Delivery.”

For what Amazon’s neighbors have already learned elsewhere: Richardson, Texas, where one resident counted 52 overflights in a day and Amazon raised its altitude after complaints; Tolleson, Arizona, where two MK30s struck the same crane minutes apart; and every hub and incident on the record in DroneXL’s Amazon Prime Air tracker.

DroneXL’s Take

North Haven approved a building. Nobody in Connecticut has reviewed the flying, and the one office taking comment on it is being asked whether an inland warehouse harms the coast. My read is that the FAA sent the coastal request because the law requires it and for no other reason, and that if the North Haven hub is being checked against the July 28 national finding, DEEP’s file is the only public record Connecticut will ever have. That makes the file worth filling with the specific things DEEP can act on: the Quinnipiac marsh, the harbor, the missing site document. I’m for drone delivery when the cargo justifies the flight, and Zipline’s P2 shows how to do it: 55 pounds empty, a tethered drop from about 300 feet, two parachutes. The MK30 weighs 83 pounds to carry 5, descends to 13 feet over the lawn and has no parachute, and both Tolleson collisions ended in uncontrolled descents. That judgment is mine. The deadline is DEEP’s, and it is Thursday.

Sources: Connecticut DEEP, Coastal Consistency, Town of North Haven Planning and Zoning Commission minutes, May 4, 2026, FAA NEPA and Drones, FAA Baton Rouge Draft EA Appendix B, Connecticut Public Act 17-52, Connecticut Judicial Branch Law Library, The Register Citizen via GovTech, New Haven Register, Hartford Courant.

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

Northglenn Drafts Colorado's First Drone Rules. Wing Can Fly In Anyway

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:31:00 GMT

Northglenn, Colorado, is on track to become the first city in the state with an ordinance written specifically for drone delivery, and it is writing the rules before anyone has filed to fly. The Planning Commission voted on September 15 to recommend a new land-use category, the Commercial Drone Delivery Hub, and city staff expect a first reading before City Council on October 12 and a public hearing and final vote on October 26. Walmart has approached the city about flying orders from its Neighborhood Market at 10755 N. Washington St. with Wing, Alphabet’s drone unit, according to The Denver Post.

The draft keeps launch pads 200 feet (61 meters) from homes, schools and childcare centers, caps ground noise at 65 decibels at the property line, limits operations to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and requires a special use permit reviewed every year. Every one of those numbers applies to the fenced patch of parking lot. The city’s own staff memorandum says drones launched from a hub in the next town over can legally deliver to every address in Northglenn.

Northglenn’s Ordinance Regulates The Pad, And Nothing Above It

The proposed rules cover the ground facility only. Northglenn’s September 21 staff memorandum states that the Federal Aviation Administration has exclusive jurisdiction over flight paths, altitude and schedules, and that the city has no legal authority over a drone once it is airborne. The ordinance text repeats that limit in its own words.

A hub could operate as an accessory use in Commercial General, Commercial Auto-Oriented and Industrial districts, and as a primary use only in Industrial zones. It may take up no more than 10% of the lot or 10,000 square feet (929 square meters), whichever is smaller, and it cannot eat into the parking the main business is already required to keep. The 200-foot buffer is measured from the hub’s screening to the nearest property line of any residentially zoned parcel, licensed childcare center, school, or police, fire or utility site. Chain-link fencing is barred outside industrial zones unless it hides in a side or rear setback with a dark vinyl coat.

Applicants would have to file an operational narrative listing hours, maximum flight altitude, anticipated noise, maximum aircraft count and expected flight frequency, plus an Incident and Emergency Response Plan for an unplanned landing or crash inside the city. A crash triggers a 911 call and a written notice to the planning director within 24 hours. The memo says the flight information is collected for disclosure and compatibility analysis and gives the city no authority over the flights themselves.

The surveillance clause is one sentence. It makes it unlawful to operate a UAS to intentionally engage in surveillance of another person in a private place. The ordinance defines neither term. Wing has said its drones give controllers no live video feed, per the Post.

Becky Smith, the city’s planning and development director, asked the council to look hard at the numbers, naming the setback and buffer distances, facility size limit, hours and noise levels as figures that could still move before adoption.

A Hub Next Door Can Serve Every Address In Northglenn

Northglenn’s memo says operators design delivery networks to serve locations within roughly four to seven miles of each nest, and that denying a permit to a launch site in Northglenn does not prevent drone delivery activity from occurring in the city. That sentence is the reason the city wrote an ordinance instead of a moratorium: its land-use powers reach the pad and stop there.

Wing’s FAA authorizations put its nests at about six miles of range. The city’s August survey of ten metro-area peers found Thornton actively drafting its own “Launchpad” ordinance after one pre-application, and Longmont holding two Walmart pre-applications with no hearing scheduled because it treats an undefined use as not allowed. Boulder, Broomfield, Commerce City, Erie, Federal Heights and Littleton reported no applicable code and no filings. Eight of the ten said they would join a regional discussion.

South of Denver, Castle Rock and Parker went the other way. Castle Rock’s council passed an emergency ordinance on July 20 freezing drone delivery hub applications for six months after a pre-application for an 18-drone port, and Parker followed on July 21 with a nine-month pause, Colorado Community Media reported. Parker Councilmember Anne Barrington put it as “We’re not saying no, we’re just saying no today.” A moratorium on the pad has the same reach as Northglenn’s ordinance: none over the airspace.

Colorado was not on either of Wing and Walmart’s 2026 market lists. January named Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami; June added seven more metros, none of them in Colorado. As in Tacoma, Washington, the site surfaced in a local land-use process before either company said a word about the market.

Wing Claims A Clean Record, And Won’t Put It On Paper For DroneXL

Wing spokesperson Josh Bucci told The Denver Post the company is not aware of any collisions or mishaps involving its own fleet. Wing’s Hummingbird weighs 14 to 24 pounds (6.4 to 11 kilograms) at takeoff depending on the model, carries up to about 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), and lowers the package on a tether from a hover of roughly 23 feet (7 meters). It carries no parachute; the safety case in Wing’s FAA filings rests on the light airframe.

That record contrasts with the operator Northglenn’s neighbors have also been hearing from. Thornton has fielded inquiries from both Walmart and Amazon, the Post reported, and Amazon’s 83-pound MK30 has hit an apartment building in Richardson, Texas and two drones into a crane in Tolleson, Arizona in the past year. Wing has no US incident in DroneXL’s file.

Wing has also declined to put that record on paper. DroneXL sent Wing 30 written safety questions on September 8, covering weight, descent behavior after a lost motor, the incident list, sound levels and cameras. Zipline answered its set in full. Wing has sent nothing. Northglenn’s operational narrative asks for the same altitude, noise and frequency figures, and its ordinance would make them a condition of the permit.

DroneXL’s Take

Northglenn got the law right and the reader should not mistake that for control. A city can decide whether a Walmart parking lot gets a fenced 10,000-square-foot nest. It cannot decide whether Hummingbirds cross its yards at 150 feet, because that authority sits with the FAA and the FAA’s national environmental finding this July settled the noise question for the whole country. Northglenn’s staff wrote that limit into the memo in plain words. A moratorium on the pad does not stop the flights; it moves the pad.

The part of this ordinance worth copying is the operational narrative. It forces the operator to state, in a public filing, its altitude, its noise figure, its aircraft count and its flight frequency before the first delivery. Wing has spent three weeks not answering those exact questions from this publication. A permit condition in a Colorado suburb of 40,000 may be what finally gets them on the record, and I’d tell every city on Thornton’s and Longmont’s list to lift that clause word for word.

Sources: City of Northglenn staff memorandum #29-2026, The Denver Post, Colorado Community Media

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

Russia's Geran-4 Runs On A $25,000 Hobby Jet, Texas Instruments Chips

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:33:00 GMT

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative team Schemes took apart a Russian Geran-4 Seeker that came down almost intact in Ukraine and found a Chinese turbojet, a Chinese mesh modem, two cellular modems, a 16-channel anti-jamming antenna and Texas Instruments parts on the flight computer. The drone was assembled at the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan. Schemes published its report on September 19, 2026, and RFE/RL posted the four-minute English teardown video on September 25.

The specialists who opened the airframe study wreckage after Russian mass attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding region, and RFE/RL withheld their names for their safety. The report’s verdict on the drone’s national origin fits in one line: “What is Russian in this drone is the assembly.”

The stakes are in Kyiv’s own numbers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on September 26 that Russia launched more than 2,730 jet-powered Shaheds in September and Ukraine shot down or jammed just over 1,500 of them, a 55 percent rate. Against the propeller Shaheds the rate is above 90 percent.

The Geran-4 Climbs To 26,000 Feet On A Chinese Engine Sold For Model Aircraft

The turbojet takes the Geran-4 to 26,000 feet (8 km), twice the ceiling of the propeller Gerans, at 280 to 310 mph (450 to 500 km/h). Drones with the same engine have flown from occupied Crimea to Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, more than 435 miles (700 km), the specialists said.

The engine is a Chinese TJ-2000-class turbojet, and nothing about it is military. The specialists told Schemes it is the same class of engine sold for model aviation and sport flying, that the Chinese maker rates it for 30 hours of running, and that classified listings put it at $20,000 to $25,000 in China and about $65,000 in Ukraine. Anyone can order one. Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), which identified the Telefly TF-TJ2000A and LX-WP-160 in the Geran-4s it tore down in May, puts the price Russia pays at $35,000 to $40,000 per engine and says Russia has no domestic replacement.

One scrap of paper inside told the supply story better than the parts did. The engine’s components carried Chinese markings, but a slip left in a compartment recorded that it had been test-run at Alabuga and signed off as fit for use by a local technician. RFE/RL said it has investigated cases where these engines were put together in Russia from Chinese parts.

The 26,000-foot ceiling is 10,000 feet above the 16,400 feet (5,000 m) HUR published in its May assessment. The camera now sits in a molded bay instead of being bolted to the fuselage, offers day, night and infrared channels with 10x optical and 32x digital zoom, and its factory cover is stamped “Mini-buterbrod,” Russian for mini sandwich.

Two SIM Cards And A Mesh Modem Let An Operator In Bryansk Steer It To The Target

A Chinese mesh modem with a 186-mile (300 km) range sends live video back to an operator and can relay for other drones in the same wave, extending control beyond one link. Two GSM modems with different SIM cards report the drone’s position over cellular networks in flight.

Last year’s Gerans carried one modem; the Geran-4 has a built-in slot for two. The SIM cards recovered in recent months came from carriers in Ukraine, Russia and several EU countries, with the English video adding Belarus to that list and the Ukrainian-language report Kazakhstan. A 16-channel CRPA antenna shields the satellite navigation from jamming, up from the 12-element array HUR documented in the Geran-3 on its War & Sanctions portal. With a relay in the chain, the specialists said, an operator at a workstation in Bryansk, Oryol or Crimea guides the drone all the way in, and recent strikes have landed where they were aimed.

The flight computer’s boards carry Texas Instruments parts, which HUR lists on the portal’s Geran-4 page. The American presence is not new: half the 45 foreign parts in the Geran-3 came from US manufacturers, and a single Geran-5 recovered in January held six Texas Instruments chips.

The volume is. HUR told Militarnyi on August 12 that Russia builds about 3,000 Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones a month at Alabuga, has stopped making the Geran-3, and now turns out more jets than the roughly 2,800 propeller Geran-2s it builds monthly. On the night of September 18, Ukraine’s Air Force counted 93 attack drones, 46 of them jets. Ukraine’s Security Service released its first video of an interceptor killing a jet Shahed the following day.

DroneXL’s Take

The Texas Instruments chips will get the headlines, and they are the least important thing in this teardown. Western chips do keep arriving: the Geran-5 that came down in January carried oscillators built in 2024 and 2025, so the leak is live rather than a warehouse leftover. But a transceiver has a dozen substitutes. A 160-kilogram-force turbojet at model-airplane prices has one supplier, and it is in China. HUR’s own assessment is that Russia has no engine of its own and pays $35,000 to $40,000 for each Chinese one. At 3,000 airframes a month, that is $105 million to $120 million a month in engines alone, on HUR’s figures.

I think the sanctions effort is aimed at the wrong end of this drone. Western export controls can reach the Texas Instruments parts because they are Western, and the Geran keeps flying anyway. A Chinese civilian turbojet an aeromodeller can order is outside every one of those controls, and the one government that could shut that supply off has spent four years leaving it open. The 55 percent interception rate traces to a 30-hour hobby turbojet lifting a 198-pound (90 kg) warhead to 26,000 feet, and Beijing decides how many of those ship.

Sources: RFE/RL Schemes (Radio Svoboda), RFE/RL video, Militarnyi, United24 Media

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

DSPA Breaks Charter to Take DHS Blue UAS Report to Congress

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:31:00 GMT

The Drone Service Providers Alliance has gone outside its own charter to ask every drone pilot and first responder in the country to call Congress about the Department of Homeland Security’s Blue UAS test report. Vic Moss, DSPA’s CEO and co-founder, published the appeal on September 27, two days after DroneXL reported that three of the five Blue UAS DHS brought to Manhattan could not hold position there. DSPA exists to advocate for commercial drone service providers, and Moss opens his post by saying this is one of the times the group has to stray from that.

The ask is a country-agnostic security standard. Congress should name a federal agency to test the security of every drone flying in U.S. airspace, and the results, not the country of manufacture, should decide what public safety agencies may buy. Congress wrote almost exactly that instruction into law in December 2024. The deadline passed nine months ago with no agency having done the work.

DSPA Says a Blue List Checkmark Proves Nothing About Doing the Job

DSPA’s case rests on one line DHS wrote itself: a Blue UAS designation tells an agency a drone meets federal sourcing and cybersecurity rules, and says nothing about whether it can do the mission. Moss cites the report’s 50-foot link losses and $13,964 to $56,195 prices as the evidence.

The DSPA post hosts its own copy of the 47-page DHS report and walks through the same findings DroneXL covered in DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores: the three aircraft that could not hold position at Hudson Yards, the Parrot flyaway, and the Teal 2 pairing failures that kept it on the ground for up to 15 minutes. Moss is careful not to overreach. He writes that some Blue UAS performed considerably better than others, names the Skydio X10D as the standout, and lands on a single sentence: “a cybersecurity or procurement designation is not a substitute for operational capability.”

The part of the report Moss calls its most important sentence is the one about the drones DHS did not score in public. The lab flew covered-nation aircraft, its term for Chinese-made drones, alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards because agencies still rely on them for reliability and performance. Its executive summary says evaluators found large capability differences between the two groups. The numbers appear nowhere in the document. “Results related to the covered nation platforms is available to public safety agencies upon request,” the report says, and gives NUSTL@hq.dhs.gov as the address. Moss allows that DHS may have a reason for holding the comparison back, notes that the report does not say what it is, and asks why first responders and the members of Congress voting on drone bans should not see it too.

Congress Ordered the Security Test DSPA Wants in 2024 and Nobody Ran It

Section 1709 of the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December 2024, gave an unnamed national security agency one year to audit DJI and Autel, with both added to the FCC Covered List automatically if no audit happened. The deadline was December 23, 2025. No agency ran it.

The Drone Service Providers Alliance wants that provision fixed rather than repeated. Its post asks Congress to name the agency, broaden the audit to every manufacturer selling into the National Airspace System, and hold that agency to the deadline. The standards that come out of it would apply to aircraft, control links, apps, cloud services and data storage, and a drone that fails them gets no pass for being built in the United States or an allied country.

DJI’s head of global policy, Adam Welsh, described the 2024 provision to DroneXL last December as a trap door: a ban that triggered on nobody doing anything. The FCC did not wait for the trap to spring. On December 22, 2025, one day before the Section 1709 deadline, it added every foreign-made drone and critical component to the Covered List on the strength of an interagency national security determination issued the day before. The audit Congress had ordered a year earlier had not happened. Moss made the same argument against the FCC’s follow-on proposal to ban foreign military-grade drones in a 35-minute video in August, when he told the Commission that its seven capability categories would sweep up the aircraft firefighters and search teams already fly. The DHS report has now handed him the federal government’s own test data to attach to the same point.

DroneXL’s Take

Vic Moss is asking Congress for the policy DroneXL has argued for throughout the DJI ban debate: a security standard every manufacturer has to pass, in place of a ban keyed to a passport. He now has a DHS lab report to attach to it and is asking pilots to carry it into their senators’ offices. Do it. Agencies can already request the covered-nation scores from NUSTL, so the people spending the money are not locked out. The people who wrote the ban are. The Hudson Yards comparison was flown in July 2025, seven months after Section 1709 became law, and the FCC cited none of it when it acted on December 22. My read is that the comparison was never meant to inform the ban. The ban was designed to happen without one, which is what Welsh told DroneXL in December and what then happened. DSPA’s post links the USAGov page that finds your senators and representative. When you call, ask one question: which agency will run the test Section 1709 already ordered, and when.

Sources: DSPA, DHS Tested Blue UAS for First Responders. Why The Results Should Worry Everyone, September 27, 2026; Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026

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

Amazon Faces 92% Opposition in Westborough Drone Survey, Calls Urged

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:17:43 GMT

An independent survey of residents around Amazon’s proposed Prime Air drone hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, had 853 responses at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, September 28, and 92% of them oppose the operation. The count is live and keeps moving. Another 3% would support it only with added restrictions, 3% support it outright, and 93% say they are unlikely to use drone delivery if it reaches their address. The survey is not a scientific poll, and its organizers say so on the page.

By Sunday night residents were circulating a phone script aimed at three state legislators, Governor Maura Healey, both U.S. senators and Representative Jim McGovern. Hours earlier, a second resident had posted that he rebuilt the survey site’s document library into a reference shelf of FAA environmental reviews, NTSB crash reports and Massachusetts landing-area law.

Amazon told a packed hotel ballroom in Westborough on September 23 that it hopes to start flying from its Otis Street parking lot possibly by the end of October. By its own account that night, it had none of the three approvals that would let it.

The Survey Counts 853 Responses and Calls Itself Unscientific

The Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey at dronefeedback.com is run by a Westborough resident, with no tie to Amazon or the town. It asks for a name, email, street name and town, no house number, and accepts one response per email address. At 8:30 a.m. on September 28 it counted 853 accepted responses: 477 from Westborough, 86 from Grafton, 82 from Northborough, 74 from Hopkinton and 32 from Marlborough. The site publishes opposition as one figure across all towns, not town by town.

The 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) circle reaches well past those five. Mass Blue Skies maps it as all of Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton and Northborough, large parts of Worcester, Hopkinton, Upton, Millbury, Boylston, Marlborough and Southborough, and small corners of Hudson, Berlin, Ashland and West Boylston, 15 cities and towns in all. Wafaie put it at parts of 13 on September 23. Amazon’s own August 18 map showed Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Only Westborough gets a vote, because the pad sits on its land. Worcester, Upton, Millbury and Boylston, each with a large share of its territory under the circle by Mass Blue Skies’ reading, are absent from the survey’s top-five counts.

The survey's live results card at 851 responses, shortly before this article's 853 count: 92% of respondents oppose Amazon Prime Air's proposed drone delivery operation from 64 Otis Street in Westborough. Image: dronefeedback.com

The site’s methodology note says residency is self-reported and the results are feedback from people who chose to answer, not a sample of the population. Amazon can say the same thing, and it would be right. The count does show speed. Amazon presented the plan to the Select Board on August 18. Six weeks later, 477 people in a town of 21,567 have put their name and street on the form, and across all towns 92% of those who did marked oppose.

Alessio Burgio, who maintains the site’s Documents & Sources section, posted in a Westborough Facebook group on Sunday afternoon that he had reorganized it into sections for local and state review, FAA documents, environmental and wildlife material, noise, documented safety incidents and other Prime Air communities, and asked residents to send him anything he had missed. The library links the NTSB reports on the MK30, from the two Pendleton test collisions in 2024 to the two drones that hit a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, on October 1, 2025, along with the FAA’s College Station and Texas environmental assessments and the Connecticut permit notice for North Haven’s 1,000-flights-a-day envelope.

Residents Have a Phone Script for Moore, Kane and Donaghue

Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik posted the script on Facebook on Sunday night, asking residents to call or email their representatives Monday morning and to use the same wording so the offices know the callers are organized. The script registers “strong opposition” to commercial drone delivery in Westborough and surrounding areas, cites noise, safety, privacy, the environment and property values across the 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) delivery zone, and asks officials to prohibit the service, slow the approvals, and back noise limits, altitude restrictions, no-fly zones near homes and privacy rules. It lists State Senator Michael O. Moore, State Representatives Hannah Kane and Kate Donaghue, Governor Healey, U.S. Representative Jim McGovern and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, with office numbers for each.

The post puts the survey at “93% of area respondents” with more than 800 responses. The site’s own figure for opposition is 92%; 93% is the share who say they are unlikely to use the service.

The three state legislators have already been in the room, in a sense. The survey site says that in correspondence shared with the project, Moore, Kane and Donaghue said they had met with Amazon, discussed constituent concerns and the limits of state authority with MassDOT, and raised the issue with other state and federal officials. That matches what Amazon’s Tareq Wafaie told the September 23 forum: a virtual briefing for town managers and state legislators, with no public meeting before each town’s board.

The script points callers to Mass Blue Skies, the grassroots group behind that 15-town map. Its position page says most members are Amazon customers who want to keep the vans and skip the drones. Residents who want to tell Amazon directly can use the phone number and chat route in DroneXL’s guide to what residents can do.

Amazon’s October Target Still Rests on Three Missing Approvals

Westborough’s Planning Board continued its September 15 hearing on site-plan application 26-02275 to October 6, MassLive reported, and that vote covers only the fenced launch pad and trailers on the parking lot. The October 6 agenda the town posted on September 11 does not list the item yet, and Boston.com gave the date as October 7. MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division has not issued the landing-area approval Massachusetts requires for a commercial pad, and Amazon was still waiting on it with no timeline as of September 24, Boston.com reported. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 28, five days after a member of Amazon’s airspace team told the forum the FAA was reviewing Westborough now. An empty page is not proof of no review: since July 28 the FAA can clear a new hub against its national environmental assessment without posting a site document.

The survey site keeps its own status board, and it is mostly blank. Operating hours, a flight-density map, emergency-response coordination, a Westborough-specific FAA determination and any wildlife review are each marked “not publicly identified,” which the site defines as no Westborough document found, not proof that none exists. The one number on the board is Amazon’s: up to 1,000 deliveries a day, the eventual goal Amazon gave the Planning Board on September 15, with existing sites averaging 500 to 600, per Boston.com.

Wafaie also told that room that about 80% of the communities where Amazon has proposed a hub approved it administratively, with no public hearing. Westborough is the other 20%. Southborough learned it was on Amazon’s map from a blogger and Shrewsbury from the police. By then a resident in Richardson, Texas, had already counted 52 drones over her yard in a day.

DroneXL’s Take

The 92% does not surprise me. Five days ago I watched a ballroom full of Amazon customers in Westborough raise their hands against Amazon’s drones. A self-selected survey measures who cares enough to answer. In a service area whose anchor town has 21,567 people, 853 answers is a lot of people who care. The number Amazon should worry about is 93%: the share who say they would not use the service even if it came. A hub that 93% of the people who answered say they won’t order from is a hub that flies over them for someone else’s benefit.

The document library is the sharper weapon. Amazon’s pitch in every town rests on the FAA having done the homework, and Westborough residents are now reading the homework: the NTSB reports, the Texas assessment, the College Station eagle buffer, the Connecticut permit that spells out 1,000 flights a day in writing. Amazon has given no written answer to the eight safety questions DroneXL sent on September 4. Leaving a Planning Board that holds NTSB report numbers unanswered on October 6 is a harder trick.

My read is that the end-of-October date is already gone. There was no MassDOT approval as of last week’s reporting, there is no FAA document and no site-plan vote, and the state legislators the residents are calling this morning have already been asking MassDOT where the state’s authority ends, according to the survey site. Amazon can still get its pad. It will not get it quietly.

Sources: Westborough Area Drone Delivery Survey, MassLive, Documents & Sources, Mass Blue Skies, Boston.com, Town of Westborough Planning Board agendas, FAA environmental review page, Facebook posts by Stephanie Lawrence Stuchlik and Alessio Burgio.

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

Amazon Won't Say When Tracy Drones Fly. It Said Within a Month

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:28:00 GMT

Amazon did not give Tracy, California a start date for Prime Air drone deliveries when a newspaper asked for one. The Stockton Record asked the company when flights from its East Grant Line Road fulfillment center would begin, and the answer the paper published on September 24 covered pricing, package limits, a 70% growth figure and the company’s excitement at coming back to California. It did not include a date or a timeline.

Amazon told the Los Angeles Times and ABC10 in late August that Tracy would be flying within a month. The Times story ran on August 29, and that month ends on Tuesday.

Amazon Gave Tracy Every Detail Except a Date

Amazon’s statement to the Record restated the terms it publishes for every MK30 site: packages up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, free Prime delivery on orders over $50, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 for non-members. A start date appeared nowhere in it.

The statement listed the metro areas where Prime Air already flies as Phoenix, Detroit, San Antonio, Dallas, Tampa, Waco, Kansas City, Baton Rouge, Omaha and Houston, the same ten on Amazon’s August 19 expansion page, with more metro areas promised before the end of the year. It added one figure that page does not carry: a 70% year-over-year increase in items delivered in under a day, which Amazon offered as the reason it wants Tracy. There is no separate sign-up, Amazon told the Record. Eligible items carry a label in the app, and the drone option shows at checkout for addresses inside the circle.

“We’re genuinely excited to bring Prime Air back to California,” the company said. Back, because Amazon left Lockeford, 35 miles (56 kilometers) up the road in the same county, in April 2024 without publicly saying why.

Cleveland Got Its Launch the Same Day Tracy Got a Statement

Amazon started flying from North Randall, Ohio on September 24, the day the Record ran its Tracy answer, using 21 drones. Cleveland was on Amazon’s August 19 list of metros coming next. Tracy never made that list, and on September 27 Amazon’s newsroom and locations page listed no California site.

The one-month timeline ran in the Times on August 29, built on an interview with Erik Robertson, Prime Air’s regional operations manager for the West, and DroneXL reported it the same morning. ABC10 carried the same timeline, attributed to the company. Tracy Press, working from Amazon’s own announcement, reported the start as “within the next few months.” Two timelines, both attributed to Amazon, in the same week.

Cleveland’s path ran the other way. It got a “soon” on Amazon’s own website, then a launch on September 24 with 21 aircraft, as DroneXL reported on September 25. Tracy got a drone on Front Street Plaza at a car show on August 29, and since then statements carrying prices, privacy assurances and a growth figure, and no date.

The federal record has not moved either. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, checked September 27, lists California once, for Lockeford in 2022, and nothing for Tracy. Since July 28 a site can be cleared against the FAA’s national assessment with no public document, as DroneXL laid out on September 14, so an empty page does not mean Tracy is stuck. Amazon says the Tracy operation is FAA-authorized, as it says of every Prime Air site. Whether Tracy was reviewed against that national assessment or is waiting on a document of its own is something neither Amazon nor the FAA had said as of September 27.

DroneXL’s Take

An Amazon drone date is worth exactly what Amazon publishes, and “within a month” was never published. The newsroom’s August 19 page said “soon” for Cleveland, and Cleveland flew five weeks later. Amazon said “a month” for Tracy to a newspaper and a TV station, its own site never repeated it, and four weeks later the same company did not produce a date when a reporter asked for one. I don’t think the Tracy timeline was ever a commitment. It was a conversation, and the difference is the whole story, because from where I sit Amazon is announcing sites through whoever happens to be holding a microphone, then letting its website decide which promises count. For anyone inside the 7.5-mile circle around East Grant Line Road, that leaves two reliable signals and neither is a press quote: a drone option appearing at checkout, or a Tracy ZIP code showing up on Amazon’s locations page. The company that put an MK30 on Front Street Plaza for a Saturday morning can put a date on its own website.

Sources: The Stockton Record, Los Angeles Times, ABC10, Amazon, Tracy Press, FAA

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

Ukraine Air-Drops Kamikaze Robots 12 Miles Behind Russian Lines

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:48:00 GMT

Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps is flying explosive ground robots across the front line under heavy bomber drones and dropping them as far as 12 miles (19 kilometers) into Russian-held territory in northern Donetsk. The corps calls the offensive Operation Vivaldi, went public with it on September 15, and on September 20 put its results at 48 square miles (125 square kilometers) retaken and more than 3,000 Russian soldiers killed since it began.

The Telegraph published a frontline account of the tactic on September 26, from the corps’ 2nd Mechanised Battalion. Its commander, who goes by the call sign Darwin, told the paper no other army had air-dropped ground robots behind enemy lines until now, and that the robots had reached targets so deep that a Russian officer, in an intercepted exchange, refused to believe a Ukrainian machine had hit his men.

The kill figure and the 48 square miles come from the corps’ own Telegram channel. The Institute for the Study of War, which tracks the same stretch of front from geolocated footage, has confirmed that the three villages the corps names changed hands. It has confirmed nothing about the toll.

Ukraine Blinds Russian Drones Before Every Robot Drop

Each drop begins with jamming. The battalion blinds Russian reconnaissance drones over the sector, drives Russian infantry into cover with drones and artillery, then flies the carrier across at night. “The most difficult part is to reach the point where you should lift the drone,” Darwin told The Telegraph.

The sequence exists because the carrier is the weak point. A drone large enough to lift a robot is large enough for Russian troops to see, and Darwin said a machine gun is enough to bring one down. Three or four Russian drones sit over his positions at any moment and up to 100 pass over the battalion in a day, so the window for a drop has to be manufactured.

The corps has not named the carrier. Its commander, Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, described the aircraft as heavy bomber drones and said they deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) into the Russian rear, per the corps’ Telegram posts as carried by United24 Media. Darwin’s 12 miles is the deepest run the battalion described. The robots themselves range from flatbed carriers for ammunition and casualties to machine-gun mounts and one-way vehicles packed with explosives, and Ukrainian soldiers call the model used on this front Gryphon.

The tactic escalates what DroneXL reported in March, when the K2 Brigade stood up the first battalion built around armed ground robots, and in April, when Ukraine’s defense ministry said armed ground robots were running 9,000 frontline missions a month. Those robots drove to their targets. These are flown there.

The 3rd Army Corps’ Numbers Rest On Its Own Telegram Posts

Operation Vivaldi ran in two phases the corps calls seasons. The first, per Biletskyi, retook 29 square miles (75 square kilometers) and killed about 1,500 Russians. The second, announced September 20, added 19 square miles (50 square kilometers), 800 killed, and the villages of Shandryholove, Derylove and Drobysheve near Lyman.

The Institute for the Study of War’s September 20 assessment repeats those figures as the corps’ claims and credits the operation with a limited break out of positional warfare. It does not confirm the area or the casualties. Euromaidan Press, reading the same ISW mapping, reports that the operation broke up Russia’s planned pincer on Lyman. Newsweek asked the Russian defense ministry for comment on September 21 and printed none. Ukrainian outlet RBC Ukraine also narrowed Biletskyi’s world-first claim: air delivery of ground robots is not new, it reported, but doing it with kamikaze robots at this range is.

The other units under the corps for Vivaldi were the 60th Mechanized Brigade, the 21st Kraken regiment, the HUR special unit Artan and the Dozor border detachment, against Russia’s 20th Army, 25th Army and 1st Tank Army.

DroneXL’s Take

The 3,000 is the least important number in this story, and I’d treat it the way ISW does: as a claim by the unit that has every reason to make it. The part that is verified, by geolocated footage and by a Russian officer who wouldn’t believe his own intercept, is the delivery method. A heavy bomber quad is now a truck for ground robots, and the range of a tracked robot stopped mattering the moment someone else flies it to the target. What decides whether the tactic keeps working is not the robot, it’s the jamming that blinds the Russian drones long enough for the carrier to cross, and Darwin says as much. Watch the next Vivaldi update from the corps for the drop distance, not the body count: if the 10 kilometers becomes 20, the Russian rear on this front has no safe depth left.

Sources: The Telegraph, 3rd Army Corps via United24 Media, Institute for the Study of War, Newsweek

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

DJI Matrice 5TD Surfaces In China Filing, 750 g Heavier Than 4TD

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:32:00 GMT

The DJI Matrice 5TD now has a name in an official record. A registration entry on China’s civil drone platform lists the aircraft as “DJI Matrice 5TD,” model code M5TD, at 2.6 kg (5.7 lb) empty and 3.05 kg (6.7 lb) maximum takeoff weight, filed under the light category for power line and oil pipeline inspection.

Leaker Igor Bogdanov posted the screenshots on September 21 and followed on September 25 with a product render that prints “DJI Matrice 5TD” under a white airframe, then on September 26 with a new photo of the gray prototype, arms folded, on asphalt. The TD suffix is the one DJI uses for the thermal, dock-based version of an enterprise drone: the Matrice 4TD is the aircraft that lives in Dock 3.

The Matrice 4TD weighs 1,850 g with its battery and tops out at 2,090 g. The successor’s registered figures put 750 g on the airframe and 960 g on the takeoff limit.

Registration Entry Puts The Matrice 5TD In China’s Light Class

The listing sits on the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s UOM platform, the national drone registry. It names SZ DJI Technology Co. as manufacturer, M5TD as model, and power line patrol and oil pipeline inspection as intended use. The class field reads light, China’s 250 g to 4 kg band.

Bogdanov posted the entry on X alongside a matching one for the DJI Neo 3, whose 192.7 g weight and September 21 production date DroneXL had not seen before the Neo 3 box leak of September 15. The Matrice 5TD entry leaves the serial number and production date blank, so the aircraft it describes had not yet been built when the form was filled in, or the screenshot was taken before those fields were completed.

The weight gain has a plausible home. The Matrice 5 prototype photographed in July carried a dome on the top deck consistent with integrated LiDAR and a cylinder consistent with a built-in RTK antenna, both of which the Matrice 4 series sells as external add-ons. The Matrice 4D and 4TD launched with Dock 3 on February 27, 2025, at 54 minutes of forward flight, and a heavier airframe carrying the same battery class does not fly longer. Nothing in the registration entry lists flight time, so which way DJI went is not on the record.

DJI’s Own Support Bot And A Leaker Both Point To A Dock 4

DJI’s support chatbot now offers “Matrice 5” as an enterprise model. A screenshot Flyby Guys’ Stephen Sutton posted on September 25 shows the bot asking a customer to name their drone, “e.g., Matrice 4, Matrice 5, or other series.” The reply carries DJI’s “Generated by AI intelligence” label.

A language model filling in an example is weaker evidence than a product page. Bogdanov’s September 25 post went further than the render. He wrote that there will be a DJI Dock 4 and that it “will be used in stores soon.” He has given no source for the dock, and DJI has said nothing about either product. His track record on this platform is good: he put the Matrice 400A on the record before launch and fed accurate Matrice 4 specifications ahead of the January 2025 debut.

A Dock 4 is the part American operators should read twice. Dock 3 and the Matrice 4TD cleared the FCC before the December 22, 2025 Covered List action blocked new authorizations for DJI hardware. A Dock 4 and a Matrice 5TD have no such grant, and none can be issued while the designation stands.

DroneXL’s Take

Every police department and utility that bought into Dock 3 since February 2025 just found out where the ceiling is. The Matrice 4TD’s drone-as-first-responder pitch was a box on a roof that gets a better aircraft every couple of years without anyone climbing a ladder. That upgrade path now ends at the U.S. border: the agencies that standardized on Dock 3 will run a 2025 aircraft while European and Asian departments drop a heavier, better-sensed successor into a Dock 4. My read is that the 750 g is LiDAR and RTK moving into the airframe, which is the exact capability an inspection crew wants closest to a power line. The Covered List does not protect those crews from anything. It freezes them, and DJI’s Ninth Circuit case is the only thing on a calendar that can thaw them.

Sources: Igor Bogdanov on X (September 21, September 25, September 26), Stephen Sutton on X, DJI Enterprise Dock 3 specifications

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

Redfin Just Handed Drone Pilots a Client Checklist. Use It

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:52:00 GMT

Redfin, one of the largest real estate brokerages in the United States, published a guide on September 22 telling home sellers how to get a property ready for a drone photo shoot. Not whether to hire a pilot. How to prepare for one: clear the roof, move the cars, roll the bins out of sight, leave the airspace to the pilot.

Redfin quoted me on the roof. From 150 feet up it is the biggest surface in the frame, so I told them to treat it like the lawn. The guide ends with a 12-point pre-shoot checklist written for the seller, and its last item tells the seller to confirm the pilot’s Part 107 certificate before the shoot.

Sellers reading a brokerage blog are now being told to check a pilot’s paperwork. Most pilots have never sent a seller a checklist of their own.

Redfin tells sellers the roof, the driveway and the paperwork are their job

Redfin’s guide, written by Carson Sperry, collects prep advice from Justin Phillips of American Guerilla Marketing, Karl Roskamp of Launchpad Home Group, Jeffrey R. Theisler of Imaging in the Sky, and DroneXL. It ends with the checklist the seller works through the evening before the shoot.

The framing is what changes. From the sidewalk a buyer sees the front door and the landscaping. From 150 or 200 feet up, Redfin writes, the roof becomes a continent and the recycling bin beside the garage becomes part of the listing photo. So the guide walks sellers through the surfaces a ground-level shoot never showed them: gutters, moss streaks, tarps and dead satellite dishes on the roof, then the top-down view of driveways, patios, pool decks and side yards, then the branches. On that last point it is blunt: do not go chopping the day before, because fresh cuts and piles of limbs photograph worse than the branches did.

Pilots get their own paragraph. Redfin tells sellers to confirm the operator holds an FAA Part 107 certificate, to ask whether they carry liability insurance, and to leave airspace authorization, weather and safety calls to the pilot. Then it tells them what to look at in a portfolio: “recent real estate listing work, not just scenic clips or social-media reels.”

The advice is not new to anyone who does this for a living. Billy Kyle put a near-identical list (cars out of the driveway, trash cans tucked away, cushions in place, umbrellas up, pool cleaner removed) into his aerial real estate video guide on DroneXL in December 2022. What is new is who is saying it. When the brokerage tells the seller, the pilot no longer has to.

Half of Realtors already use drones, so sellers are catching up to the market

The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Technology Survey, released September 18, 2025, found that 52 percent of Realtors use drone photography or video. Only e-signature (79 percent) and social media (75 percent) ranked higher, which puts aerials ahead of AI-generated listing text at 46 percent.

At that adoption rate the pilot’s sales problem has flipped. The question an agent asks is no longer whether to add aerials but which of the pilots in her phone to book, and Redfin has just told her clients what to check: a Part 107 certificate, insurance, and a portfolio of listings rather than sunsets. Pilots who cannot show all three will be asked for them by a seller who read a brokerage blog. Pilot Institute, a DroneXL partner, runs the Part 107 course for the first item.

The checklist to paste into your next booking confirmation

The version below rewrites Redfin’s seller list for a pilot to send 48 hours before every shoot, so there is a shared reference when a client asks why the trash cans are in the shot. Two items, pets and the weather line, are additions from the pilot’s side.

Getting your home ready for the drone shoot

Aerial photos show your property from above, so a few things that are invisible from the street become very visible. Please take care of the following before we arrive:

Roof and gutters

Clear leaves, pine needles and debris from the roof and gutters

Remove tarps, unused satellite dishes and anything stored on the roof

Driveway and street

Move all vehicles off the driveway and, if possible, out of the street in front of the house

Roll trash, recycling and yard-waste bins out of sight

Close the garage door and any gates

Yard, patio and pool

Mow and edge the lawn, sweep patios and walkways

Put away hoses, toys, lawn tools, ladders and pool equipment

Clean the pool, straighten outdoor furniture, and open umbrellas only if they are in good shape

The morning of

Turn off sprinklers so pavement and hardscaping are dry

Let your immediate neighbors know the approximate time

Keep pets indoors during the flight

I am an FAA Part 107 certified pilot and carry liability insurance. I handle airspace authorization, weather calls and all flight safety. If the weather does not cooperate, I will reschedule at no charge.

Billy Kyle and Ken Dono built businesses on the shoot Redfin describes

Two friends of DroneXL shoot exactly the homes Redfin’s guide is written for. Ken Dono, known online as OriginaldoBo, shoots listings across Tampa Bay and Orlando through Apex Imaging Media. Billy Kyle, a longtime DroneXL contributor, shoots Main Line estates and Jersey Shore properties through his commercial services business.

Both teach the Real Estate Photo and Video course at Pilot Institute, nine hours of video covering the shoot, the edit and the client work behind it.

Ask either of them which drone to buy for this work and the answer is not DJI’s most expensive one. Ken and Billy both told me the DJI Mavic 4 Pro is a poor fit for real estate: its main camera is a 28 mm equivalent, not the 24 mm on the rest of DJI’s lineup, and those 4 mm are the difference between getting a house and its lot in one frame and backing the drone off the property to do it. I hit the same wall in my Mavic 4 Pro review in May 2025. The drones they recommend are the ones with the 24 mm lens and the lower price: the Mini 4 Pro, the Mini 5 Pro and the Air 3S.

Ken’s photo below is the frame Redfin is telling sellers to prepare for: roof, driveway and the neighbors’ yards in one shot.

Aerial view of a listing at 104 Adriatic Avenue in the Tampa area, with the neighbors' roofs and driveways in the same frame. Photo: Ken Dono / Apex Imaging Media

DroneXL’s Take

Redfin’s guide is good news for professional pilots and bad news for the guy with a Mini 4 Pro and no certificate undercutting them on Facebook Marketplace. When the brokerage tells sellers to ask for Part 107 and insurance, the amateur end of the market gets squeezed, and it should.

The sharper signal is what Redfin left out. There is no section on whether aerials are worth the money. That argument is over: 52 percent of Realtors already fly, and the seller-facing question has moved to logistics. My read is that the pilot-facing question has moved with it, from price to process. The pilots who keep the agent’s business are the ones who show up with the prep list sent ahead, the reel of actual listings, and the certificate and insurance ready to show. Redfin just wrote the seller’s half of that process. Send them the other half.

Sources: Redfin, National Association of Realtors

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

Manna Pitches Tulsa Fire Drone AEDs, an Idea Dublin Never Launched

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:48:45 GMT

The Tulsa Fire Department will get drone-delivered defibrillators and trauma kits from Manna Air Delivery under a pilot program the two presented on September 23 at Tulsa Tech’s Lemley Memorial Campus, and the city pays nothing for it. TFD Captain Conrad Collison and Manna head of operations Stuart O’Callaghan presented it at the Tulsa Tech Week event. The target, per KJRH’s report, is a start by early 2027, if not by the end of this year.

Manna has flown consumer deliveries in Tulsa since August 12 from a single hub on Cherry Street, what Manna calls its first full-scale US operation after smaller Texas flights, years in Dublin and roughly 380,000 deliveries worldwide. Manna community and stakeholder relations manager Vincent Murray told Fox23 the emergency work has always been part of the plan and pointed to trials Manna ran with Ireland’s National Ambulance Service. That ambulance service closed its talks with Manna last year, and the Dublin defibrillator service Manna proposed never launched.

Tulsa Fire Pays Nothing for a Pilot That Runs Through Its Own Dispatch

The pilot costs the City of Tulsa nothing, a TFD official told KJRH on September 23. A 911 call goes through dispatch as usual, Murray said, and the fire department then calls Manna when a truck cannot get there fast enough or a crew has run out of trauma kits.

Murray gave Fox23 the clock: 90 seconds of pre-flight checks, two to three minutes in the air, about four and a half minutes from the call to the drone landing. Collison, whose department already flies Skydio aircraft as first responders and put seven drones over a West Tulsa tank-farm fire in November 2024, told KJRH the appeal is speed: “They can be dropped into a situation where somebody needs it quick.” TFD announced the partnership on September 15, eight days before the presentation.

The aircraft stops flying in heavy rain and sits out winds above 20 knots (23 mph, 37 km/h), with a 33-knot (38 mph, 61 km/h) gust ceiling, per KJRH. Manna’s Tulsa page caps any item at 8.8 lb (4 kg).

Manna’s Tulsa Network Is One Hub Flying and Three on Paper

Manna’s one operating Tulsa base is the Cherry Street hub opened August 12. On August 25 it filed City of Tulsa permits for three more, at 21st and Sheridan, South Garnett Road and East 31st Street, each with a one-to-two-mile (1.6 to 3.2 km) radius, the Tulsa Flyer reported.

Murray said the drones travel two miles (3.2 km) from base today and that Manna hopes to open 10 to 20 bases across the metro so a fire department call can be served as a network. In August the Tulsa Flyer reported the ambition as 20 to 30 bases across Tulsa and Broken Arrow. The jobs figure has moved the same way: Manna’s July 8 announcement commits to more than 1,000 Tulsa jobs over three years, and two months earlier, on the XPONENTIAL stage in Detroit, CEO Bobby Healy told the room 2,000 to 3,000. On Tulsa, Manna’s numbers arrive large and settle later.

The Irish “Trials” Were One Simulated AED Drop From a Hub Manna Is Closing

Manna and the National Ambulance Service have one exercise on record. On December 6, 2024, a Manna drone flew a defibrillator from its Blanchardstown hub to a garden 10 minutes away by car in about two minutes, a simulation Dr. Glenn Curtin ran with the service, the Irish Times reported.

Manna’s newsroom and Irish press coverage through September 27 turn up no second one. Manna then proposed a Dublin 15 defibrillator service in November 2025. The National Ambulance Service told the Dublin Inquirer in December that it had held informal discussions with Manna and closed them out because the service did not progress. Manna said it would turn to Dublin Fire Brigade instead, which told the paper it had received no formal project details. Cardiologist Joseph Galvin of the HSE, who backed the proposal, put the potential at up to 900 lives a year if rolled out nationally. The March 2026 Rotunda-to-Connolly hospital flight DroneXL covered carried no blood; it was a second demonstration.

The hub the defibrillator flew from is closing with the rest of Manna’s Dublin 15 operation. Fingal County Council refused Manna’s Coolmine hub on May 19, 2026, over noise evidence, a refusal Manna answered with a Trinity College acoustic study in June, and by July 1 the company had announced it was ceasing operations across Dublin 15, Blanchardstown included, blaming Ireland’s planning process and the absence of a national drone delivery framework, Dublin People reported. Murray’s word for it in Tulsa was “trials.” “We’re not here to take anyone by surprise,” he told Fox23.

DroneXL’s Take

A defibrillator in a back garden in under five minutes is the drone delivery I’ll defend all day. Nobody needs a burrito by air. A cardiac arrest patient needs a shock before the engine arrives, and a fire department that already runs Skydio as a first responder is the right partner to put one on the other end of the dispatch line. What killed the idea in Dublin was planning and noise, never the medicine: Fingal’s planners did not find the drones too loud, only that Manna hadn’t proved they weren’t. Tulsa is about to run the same test: the three east Tulsa hubs need City of Tulsa permits like Coolmine needed Fingal’s, and until those clear, a free pilot covers whatever sits within two miles of Cherry Street.

My read is that the AED is doing double duty here. O’Callaghan said at the presentation that the emergency work could improve public acceptance of the drones, and that is the plainer version of Murray’s “always part of the plan.” Fine. Then earn it in Tulsa: the Irish trial produced one simulated drop and a hub Manna is walking away from, so the number that matters to Tulsans is the first response time on a real call, not Blanchardstown’s. Watch the three permits before you watch anything else.

Sources: Fox23, KJRH, KTUL, Manna Air Delivery, Tulsa Flyer, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Dublin People

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

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

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

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

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

Connecticut’s Airport Authority Runs Six Airports and No Airspace

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

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

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

North Haven Approved the Ground in May, Not This Month

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

Utah Rescue Captain Tells DC the FCC Drone Ban Will Cost Lives

Nordfors Puts a Price on the Fleet and on the Alternative

The Record Shows 16 Comments in Support of the FCC

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon Asks Westborough to Delay Drone Pad Vote as Board Says No

Amazon Wants Five More Weeks on the Only Vote Westborough Controls

Westborough’s Select Board Voted to Take the Drones to the State House

North Reading’s Bylaw Regulates Hobbyists, Not a Part 135 Carrier

DroneXL’s Take

Castle Rock Froze Walmart's Drone Hub 7-0. Its Clock Runs Out Jan 21

Castle Rock Wrote A Definition Before It Wrote A Rule

Parker Paused For Nine Months The Night Before

Walmart Has Hit Three Local Stop Signs This Year

DroneXL’s Take

DSPA Calls Congress Over Blue UAS Report as 15 States Sue FAA and Skydio Unveils the MegaDock

DSPA Wants Every Drone Pilot and First Responder to Call Congress

15 States and Harris County Are Suing the FAA Over Drone Delivery

DJI Matrice 5D Leaks in China, 750 Grams Heavier Than the Matrice 4TD

Skydio Shows the Production F10 Lightrunner and the MegaDock

Hegseth Orders Four-Star Drone Command, Congress Has To Build It

Project Agincourt Turns the Drone Czar’s Office Into the Command’s Builder

West And Strasiser Run It As CEO And COO, And DIU Loses Its Director

Drone Dominance Is The Template, And It Has A Year Of Results To Judge

Project Meridian Puts Anduril’s Founder On The Pentagon’s Futures Panel

The Order Arrives Without A Commander, A Budget Or A Headcount

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon Already Raised Its Texas Drones. 'Drone Warriors' Want Higher

Amazon Raised Texas Drones After Complaints, Then Cited the FAA in Louisiana

Richardson Has No Say Over the Sky, and 15 States Are Now in Court

DroneXL’s Take

DHS Left DJI's Scores Out of Its Blue UAS Report. Here They Are

DJI Matrice 4T Scored Highest of Any Aircraft in the Series

One Matrice 30T Drifted Into a Structure After Losing GNSS at Night

DHS Dated the Comparison Two Months Before It Published the Report Without It

DroneXL’s Take

Hillsborough Blood Drones Launch in October, Flown From Sarasota

ArcherFRS Pilots in Sarasota Fly Hillsborough’s Blood Drones

Hillsborough’s Release Gives Three Delivery Times for One Drone

Hillsborough Has Not Published What It Pays ArcherFRS

DroneXL’s Take

Neros Wins $100M Pentagon Order, Plus 800 Drones Rivals Didn't Deliver

Warheads Fill The Gap In Neros’s $100 Million Order

Neros Collected 800 Drones Its Gauntlet I Rivals Did Not Ship

DroneXL’s Take

Amprius Gets $75M Pentagon Drone Battery Grant, Mostly Unfunded

Most Of The $75 Million Still Needs Congress To Appropriate It

Amprius Walked Away From Its Own Colorado Factory Before Choosing A Retrofit

Stepien Says China Still Makes Cheaper Cells That Customers Want

DroneXL’s Take

DJI Avata 360 Can't Fly Acro. An FPV Pilot Still Calls It Enough

Tracking Software Carries Vertigoh’s Case for a Drone Without Acro

Vertigoh’s Own Verdict Keeps Specialists on Separate Drones

DroneXL’s Take

DoorDash Air Drone Lands Chipotle and Popeyes, but No Payload Number

DoorDash Built The Kitchen Handoff Before It Built The Drone

DoorDash Air’s Only Capacity Figure Is A Share Of Orders

DroneXL’s Take

Tallahassee Commissioner Urged Amazon Drone Rules. Florida Law Says No

Tallahassee’s City Attorney Says Florida Law Rules Out a Drone Ordinance

Flock Is a City Contract. Amazon’s Drones Are Not

Matlow Expects Tallahassee’s Tree Canopy to Push Amazon’s Drones Low

DroneXL’s Take

Pentagon Opens $450M Attack-Drone Round With A 400-Drone Deadline

The Listed Prices Cover At Most $300 Million Of The $450 Million

Deep Strike Rises To $5,000 And 40,000 Drones Are Priced By Vendors

Ten Gauntlet II Awards Are Spoken For In A Field Capped At 14

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon Drone Hub Faces Pause Call From Lawmakers as State Sues FAA

Lawmakers Say Amazon Left Hours, Routes and Flight Counts Undetermined

Only Westborough’s Launch Pad Is Up for a Vote, and Amazon Set No Pause

Massachusetts Joined a Lawsuit Against the FAA Clearance Amazon Needs

DroneXL’s Take

Lodi NJ Drone Ban Is Preempted, Judge Rules, But Pilot Gets No Order

Lodi Wrote a 400-Foot Floor Under the FAA’s 400-Foot Ceiling

Judge Wigenton Rejected the Privacy Defense and the FAA Savings Clause

The Borough Won the TRO Fight by Saying Its Own Tickets Don’t Count

DroneXL’s Take

FAA Sued by 15 States Over Drone Delivery Clearance Amazon Runs On

The Petition Names 16 Plaintiffs and Makes No Argument Yet