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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wing Has Answered None of DroneXL’s 30 Safety Questions

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

Amazon Tells Packed Westborough Room Its Drones Are Coming Anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon’s Answers on Drone Cameras Changed Over One Evening

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

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

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

Amazon Explained the Tolleson Crane Crash and Skipped Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Mundo Ties the Warning to Ratcliffe’s Moscow Trip

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

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

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

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

Macron Denies the CIA Alert but Calls a Russian Attack Plausible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skydio F10 Lightrunner Flies From A Dock That Holds Five Aircraft

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

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

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

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

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

The product page lists no price and no ship date.

Skydio’s F10 Hangs Its Cameras Off One Wingtip

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

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

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

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

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

Skydio Is Updating Its Software To See Power Lines

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

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

Skydio’s Thermal Boost Repeats What FLIR Shipped In 2007

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

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

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

Skydio’s Livestream Chat Removed A Comment About Lobbying

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tekever Raises Money to Buy Companies, and Has Already Started

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H.R. 10304 repeals that requirement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically a Luna Ultra Without the Second Camera

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

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

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

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

Tracking and Slow Motion

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

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

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

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

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

Should You Shoot in 8K?

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

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

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

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

The Detachable Face Plate Steals the Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Light and PureVideo

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

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

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

Is the Insta360 Luna Pro Worth It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington Buys The Buildings, Abidjan Buys The Flying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rule Reaches Parts, Not Countries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drones Were the Template the FCC Applied Everywhere Else

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

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

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

Drone Conditional Approvals No Longer Carry an Expiry Date

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battery Vents Are What Marked the Image Out

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

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

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

Readers Split on Whether the RC Mini Is a Downgrade

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

Jasper Ellens (@JasperEllens), September 21, 2026

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

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

Dolomites Parks Ban Hobby Drones, DJI Mini 5 Pro Included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

South Tyrol Bans Drones Under 25 kg in Its Dolomites Parks

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

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

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

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

The Ampezzo Park Around Cortina Requires Written Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

DJI Spinoff Livox Halves Point Rate to Cut Robot LiDAR Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livox Ships the Mid-360 by the Hundred Thousand

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

Source: Livox, Livox on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroneXL’s Take

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air Force Loses Shahed Clone Off Eglin, Fishing Charter Reels It In

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:10:57 GMT

A Pensacola fishing charter hauled a US Air Force drone out of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, and the drone is a copy of Iran’s Shahed-136. Hot Spots Charters captain Daniel Arsenault spotted the gray delta-wing airframe floating offshore near Eglin Air Force Base, pulled a mahi-mahi out from under it, and had his passengers help drag it onto the bow.

The airframe matches the FLM-136, the SpektreWorks target drone the Pentagon turned into the LUCAS attack drone that has been flying combat missions against Iran since February. Eglin says a test article went down. It won’t say which one.

Eglin Confirms a Lost Test Article but Won’t Name the Drone

An Eglin Air Force Base spokesperson told The War Zone the base recently lost a drone during a test. The spokesperson would not confirm it was the one Hot Spots Charters recovered, name the type, or say when or where it went down, and referred further questions to the Pentagon.

“I can confirm that we were doing a test and the test article went down,” the spokesperson told The War Zone, which broke the story Sunday. CNN has asked Eglin for comment.

The type is not much of a secret. Photos Hot Spots posted to Facebook show the drone missing its nose cone and rear propeller, both common losses in a water impact, but the delta wing and fuselage match the FLM-136 that Arizona-based SpektreWorks built as a Shahed stand-in for counter-drone training. Local charter captain and aviation photographer Charlie Green told The War Zone that Arsenault notified local agencies and one of them collected the drone. Hot Spots put it more plainly on Facebook: “The black suvs came and got their drone, all is good!”

The recovered drone stands nose-up on a Pensacola dock on September 19, 2026. The nose cone is gone and the fuselage shows exposed fittings where components separated on impact. Photo credit: Hot Spots Charters

Eglin’s 96th Test Wing runs the Eglin Gulf Test Range, about 120,000 square miles of overwater airspace covering the eastern third of the Gulf. The Air Force keeps a handful of 120-foot boats there, crewed by contractor Florida Offshore, to retrieve roughly 100 downed target drones a year. This one got past them and ended up on a dock in Pensacola with a boat-rental phone number on the sign behind it. One commenter on the Hot Spots page had the verdict: “Fun fight but they’re super bony and taste like avgas.”

Hot Spots Charters lines up the day's catch next to the drone at the Pensacola dock on September 19, 2026. Photo credit: Hot Spots Charters

LUCAS Losses Are Priced In at $35,000 an Airframe

A LUCAS attack drone costs about $35,000, the figure CENTCOM gave when it stood up Task Force Scorpion Strike in December 2025. The drone first flew in combat on February 28, opening day of Operation Epic Fury. Within days, one came down almost intact in Iraq.

The Pentagon unveiled the design in July 2025 as an American answer to the Shahed, and CENTCOM announced the first combat use the same day the strikes on Iran began. The drone is 9.8 feet (2.9 meters) long with an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) wingspan and weighs about 70 pounds (32 kilograms), light enough for a charter crew to lift aboard. DroneXL’s comparison of the two airframes in March covered how SpektreWorks reverse-engineered the Shahed and what $35,000 buys against the Iranian original.

Losing airframes is part of the design. Open-source accounts photographed a nearly complete LUCAS on the ground in Iraq on March 2, and The War Zone reported multiple intact losses during the Iran campaign. Florida has seen this before too: in March 2021, beachcombers in Palm Beach County found a BQM-167A target drone washed ashore, another Air Force target drone flown from the Florida ranges.

DroneXL’s Take

The fishing story is the fun part. The useful part is that this weapon works because losing one doesn’t matter. A $35,000 airframe on a fishing boat, or in an Iraqi field, is an accounting line. The target version carries no warhead and the design is Iran’s to begin with. This one did not even keep its nose section. There is nothing on that dock Tehran hasn’t already seen.

Which makes Eglin’s refusal to name the type, after CNN identified it from a photo taken on a public dock, habit rather than security. My read is this won’t be the last one anglers find. The Air Force already fishes about 100 targets a year out of those waters, a BQM-167A washed up in 2021, and LUCAS development has moved on to swarming work that needs ranges like Eglin’s. Some of it is going to float.

Sources: The War Zone, CNN

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

Amazon Wants Drones Over 6 Massachusetts Towns. Not All Have Been Told

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:50:00 GMT

Amazon wants to launch MK30 delivery drones from the parking lot of its warehouse at 64 Otis Street in Westborough, Massachusetts, to homes within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers), an area of about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers), and it hopes to be flying by the end of the year. The circle takes in Westborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, most of Southborough and parts of Marlborough and Worcester. Amazon presented the plan to the Westborough Select Board on August 18, opened a Planning Board hearing on September 15 that has been continued to October 6, and is holding a public meet-and-greet at the DoubleTree by Hilton on Computer Drive this Wednesday, September 23, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The towns under the flight paths did not all hear about it from Amazon. Shrewsbury’s town manager told his Select Board on August 12 that the town had been alerted by regional law enforcement. Southborough, which sits almost entirely inside the service area on Amazon’s own map, had not been contacted by the company as of September 16, according to the town’s Select Board chair and administrator.

It is the first Prime Air hub DroneXL has seen proposed in Massachusetts, and the second New England hub to surface in a week, after Connecticut opened a 15-day comment window on Amazon’s North Haven site. Massachusetts is one of the 17 states whose attorneys general told the FAA in January that its national environmental review of drone delivery was a paper exercise. The FAA signed it anyway on July 28, and there is no FAA document of any kind posted for Westborough.

Amazon Wants a 6,800-Square-Foot Drone Pad on a Westborough Parking Lot

Amazon is asking Westborough for a fenced 6,800-square-foot (632-square-meter) launch-and-landing area on the east side of the parking lot at its SMA1 same-day facility, taking out about 27 parking spaces. Jonathan Greeley, Amazon’s head of economic development for New England, made the pitch on August 18.

The pad holds landing circles, with battery vaults and flight monitors beside them. Tareq Wafaie, who leads Amazon’s drone program in the region, described the aircraft the company flies everywhere: a six-rotor MK30 about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across, autonomous and electric, cruising at 60 to 75 mph (97 to 121 km/h) with up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) in a shoebox-sized package, which Amazon says covers about 60% of what its fulfillment centers stock. Customers opt in, pay an extra fee for the one-hour service, and mark a landing spot on their property that Amazon describes as a cylinder 18 feet (5.5 meters) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) tall. The drone scans the spot for anyone or anything in the way, then releases the package from about 13 feet (4 meters). Amazon’s national page puts the fee at nothing for Prime members on orders of $50 or more, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 for everyone else.

On noise, Amazon told Westborough the drone peaks below its own trucks and sits around a delivery van; the Community Advocate reported the pitch as no louder than a toothbrush at arm’s length. Amazon’s own FAA filing for Baton Rouge records the MK30 at 90.5 to 91.8 decibels SEL at takeoff and landing, measured 20 feet from the aircraft, with the delivery hover at 92.1, for an aircraft a Baton Rouge resident said passes about 20 times an hour.

The application sits on the Planning Board’s September 15 agenda as a site-plan review, number 26-02275, filed by engineering firm Kimley-Horn, not as a special permit: the building commissioner and town counsel treat the pad as accessory to the warehouse rather than an airport under the zoning bylaw, a reading a Select Board member questioned on August 18, according to Citizen Portal’s summary of the meeting recording. Residents at the September 15 hearing asked whether the flights were worth the risk and how loud a steady stream of them would be, CBS Boston reported. The same Citizen Portal summary has Amazon and town staff telling the board that an FAA environmental review and a landing-area approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division are also required before any flight, with the FAA filing to follow the local review.

Shrewsbury Learned About the Flights From Police, Not Amazon

Shrewsbury Town Manager Kevin Mizikar briefed his Select Board on August 12 and said the town heard about the plan from regional law enforcement, My Southborough reported. The drones reach almost all of Shrewsbury, he told the board: “We can’t control flight altitude or delivery corridors.”

Select Board member Gregg Richards put it in plainer terms, telling the Community Advocate there will be unlucky residents with a flight path over their house that the town cannot stop, and that it stinks. Mizikar’s answer was the ground: the town keeps authority over the land end of the operation, and it could bar drones from taking off on municipal property. Board member Anand Sharma said the town needs a bylaw; Vice Chair Carlos Garcia wanted a proposal drafted before the flights arrive, not after.

What a flight path over the house looks like is on the record in Richardson, Texas, where a hub sits less than a mile from homes: one resident’s tracker logged 52 Amazon drones over her yard in a single day, the New York Times reported on Monday, and the city concluded in April that it has no legal handle on the flights. Amazon’s Westborough presentation showed a service-area map, not the routes its drones would fly.

The MK30 at Amazon's Prime Air booth at XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit. The aircraft weighs 83 pounds at takeoff and carries a 5-pound package. Photo credit: Haye Kesteloo / DroneXL

Southborough had less than that. Beth Melo, who publishes My Southborough, spotted the town inside Amazon’s service map on the August 18 meeting video and checked with the Select Board chair and town administrator on September 16. Neither the board nor Southborough police had heard from Amazon. Melo notified them herself. Wafaie had told Westborough the map included communities Amazon was still talking to, or would be, and that stakeholder outreach was the main message.

Amazon’s statement to CBS Boston, from spokesperson Jack Stelzner, said the company is working with local officials and “exploring opportunities to expand” in the Westborough area and elsewhere. Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement, which named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as the next launches on the way to nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end, did not mention Massachusetts.

Massachusetts Adds a State Landing-Area Permit the FAA Route Does Not

Massachusetts bars anyone from establishing a restricted landing area without a certificate of approval from MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division, under 702 CMR 5.01 and Chapter 90, Section 39B of the General Laws. The division inspects the site first, and the applicant must notify the local police and fire departments in writing.

The regulation exempts private landing areas, but only for non-commercial use, which a Prime Air pad is not. That is a layer most Amazon hubs never see. The Texas, Florida, Kansas City and Detroit hubs each got an FAA environmental assessment with a 30-day comment period and a local site-plan vote, and nothing from the state. Since July 28 the FAA can also skip the site assessment and check a new hub against its national finding inside the agency, the path DroneXL described when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. Tracy, California got a launch date and no document; Portland got a city permit and no document. The FAA’s drone environmental review page, last updated September 11, listed no Massachusetts document when DroneXL checked it on September 21.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office signed the January 23 letter from 17 attorneys general asking the FAA for a full environmental impact statement instead of the national assessment. The 60-day window to challenge the July 28 finding in court runs out September 26, three days after Amazon’s Westborough forum.

The towns also have more ground to stand on than Shrewsbury’s briefing suggested. The one federal ruling DroneXL’s 35-state review of drop laws found on point came out of this state: in Singer v. City of Newton, a federal judge in Boston struck four provisions of Newton’s drone ordinance in 2017 but rejected the argument that federal law leaves no room for any local rule. In 2018 the state’s Supreme Judicial Court held in Roma III v. Rockport that the aeronautics code does not wipe out local zoning over a private landing area. Newton is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of the Otis Street lot.

DroneXL’s Take

Amazon had this backwards, and Southborough is the proof. The service map went up on August 18 with a town on it whose officials say Amazon had not contacted them, and a local blogger did the outreach the company called its main message. Shrewsbury’s manager found out from the police.

That is not community engagement, it is a land-use application with a 174-square-mile shadow, and the towns in the shadow got the news secondhand. The pro-drone position here is the one I hold on every hub: a 30-minute Motrin run without a van on Route 9 is the industry this site exists to cover, and the hubs Amazon already runs deliver it daily. On the pad itself Amazon holds the stronger hand, because it owns the lot and the FAA’s own page says hub siting is the operator’s call within local zoning.

What Massachusetts has that Texas did not is a state aeronautics permit with written notice to the fire and police chiefs, an attorney general on the record, and a court decision from 20 miles away that says local rules survive. My read is that none of that stops a single flight. It does decide whether anyone outside Westborough gets asked before the first one leaves Otis Street. Anyone who wants to take the July 28 finding to court has five days left, and Massachusetts is the state with the case law to test it. Wednesday at the DoubleTree is where the towns find out whether Amazon has a plan for Southborough or a map with Southborough on it.

Sources: Community Advocate (Westborough), Community Advocate (Shrewsbury), My Southborough, CBS Boston, Citizen Portal, 702 CMR 5.00, FAA NEPA and Drones, Comments of 17 Attorneys General, January 23, 2026, Amazon.

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

Amazon Drones Overwhelm Texas Suburb, NYT Says. FAA Signed Off In July

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:36:53 GMT

The New York Times went to the backyard pools of Richardson, Texas, and published the result Monday under the headline “It’s Raining Boxes.” One resident’s drone tracker logged 52 Amazon Prime Air drones overhead on Friday, three of them between 150 and 170 feet up, and she called it a slow day. Amazon told the paper that fewer than 1% of inquiries about the program this year concern noise.

DroneXL has covered Richardson’s Prime Air hub since an MK30 hit an apartment building there in February, through Amazon’s March altitude change and the city’s April conclusion that it has no legal handle on the flights. The Times account adds what those stories could not: named families, a pool, and a homeowners’ association president who says the Federal Aviation Administration has failed the city. The FAA answered the noise question for the whole country on July 28, and the answer was that it does not count as a “significant impact.”

Richardson Residents Are Counting The Drones Themselves

Stephanie Puri, a video game industry researcher in Richardson, set up a drone tracker and recorded 52 overflights on Friday, September 18, the Times reported. Amazon told the Richardson City Council in March the hub filled about 150 orders a day. Its FAA approval allows 1,000.

The hub sits less than a mile from the Anderson family’s pool, and every package it flies can go anywhere inside a 7.5-mile (12-kilometer) radius, so the neighborhoods closest to it sit under every departure. Residents there call the corridor a drone highway. Scott Bratcher, who runs the homeowners’ association in one of them, told the paper: “The government and the F.A.A. have failed us.” City rules allow deliveries from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Nikki Anderson said she asked the city to trim the hours or the days and got nowhere.

Amazon has already pulled the one lever it controls. After residents complained in January, the company raised the average outbound altitude to 225 feet (69 meters) and rerouted some departures over commercial land, changes it presented to the council on March 9 and DroneXL laid out this month when Baton Rouge residents raised the same complaint. Kristi Graham told the Times that after she complained about drones over her backyard, Amazon moved the route to the front of her house.

This is not the first time Richardson has made the news for a Prime Air drone. An MK30 struck an apartment building on Routh Creek Parkway in February, two months after the hub opened, and smoked on the sidewalk until Amazon staff dismantled it.

Richardson Tells Residents The Drones Don’t Record. Amazon Says They Do

Richardson’s own drone delivery FAQ says the Amazon and Walmart drones overhead do not record video or capture images, and navigate with low-resolution sensors only. Amazon’s Prime Air operations page says people, pets, cars and objects near a delivery point may be recorded, and that the images improve Amazon’s services.

Amazon spokeswoman Lindsay Hamilton gave the Times the same account: the drones use multiple cameras and sensors, the images sit on encrypted drives that only authorized staff can access, and the data goes to safety and customer service. That is a defensible policy. It is not what the city is telling the people who ask.

Puri does not take Amazon’s word for it. “But, oh, Amazon can see you,” she told the paper, after saying that what people do in their own backyard is their business.

The FAA Answered The Noise Question Nationwide In July

The FAA signed a national Finding of No Significant Impact for Part 135 drone delivery on July 28. The condition is physical: a hub flying 1,150 deliveries a day must sit 600 feet (183 meters) from homes, a figure derived from the fleet’s loudest aircraft at 78 decibels en route.

That math works on annual day-night averages, which is how federal noise law measures airports. It says nothing about what a single pass sounds like from a pool float. The FAA’s own filing for Amazon’s Baton Rouge hub puts the delivery hover, 13 feet (4 meters) over the drop point, at 92.1 decibels measured from 25 feet, and offers a diesel truck at 50 feet as the comparison. Hamilton told the Times the drones are quieter than a passing car during delivery.

The July finding also ended the market-by-market environmental reviews that gave towns a 30-day comment window, a change DroneXL documented when it landed. Richardson’s FAQ now tells residents that cities cannot set altitude or create airspace limits and points them at their senators. The council dropped a rezoning threat in April on legal advice.

Richardson Is Now Writing To El Paso And Richmond

Richardson residents are emailing officials in El Paso and Richmond, Virginia, calling the drones “a disaster for the City of Richardson,” the Times reported. Both are on Amazon’s map: El Paso is among 22 sites in the FAA’s January Texas assessment, and Richmond’s approvals came through in August.

Amazon said on August 19 that Prime Air will reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of the year, up from 11 hubs in seven states. The towns added after July 28 will not get the comment period Richardson’s neighbors used to have.

DroneXL’s Take

The Times did in an afternoon what the FAA’s national finding cannot: it measured the noise the way a person hears it, from the yard. A day-night average under the federal threshold and a 52-drone Friday can both be true. Richardson lives with the second one.

Richardson is a worst case, and Amazon has a point about that. The families in the story live under the departure corridor of a hub less than a mile away. A house at the far end of the 7.5-mile radius hears one drone drop one box, and most of the 500 towns Amazon is counting sit out there, not next to the pad.

What Amazon does not have a point about is the aircraft. I stood next to an MK30 in Dusseldorf this spring, and it comes up to my shoulder: 83 pounds at takeoff to move a 5-pound box, where Zipline’s P2 carries 8 pounds at 55 and Wing’s aircraft carries 2.6 at about 12. Amazon has shown altitude is its lever, because it pulled it in Richardson. In Baton Rouge it told residents that altitude is the FAA’s call, and it has not answered a single one of DroneXL’s written safety questions, sound level included, on a list Zipline has already answered in part. The hover noise in the Baton Rouge filing is Amazon’s number for Amazon’s aircraft, and it follows the MK30 into every one of those 500 towns.

September 26 closes the window to challenge the national finding in court. El Paso already sits inside the FAA’s Texas assessment, so the emails from Richardson are reaching a city with one move left, the one Richardson made: push Amazon to fly a different profile inside the envelope it already has.

Sources: The New York Times, City of Richardson, Amazon Prime Air, FAA.

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

Ben Biggs Built The 626 km/h Blackbird On 14-Cell Packs Few Pilots Use

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:56:54 GMT

Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs has published the full build story of the Blackbird, the quadcopter that took the Guinness World Record for fastest battery-powered RC drone at 626.42 km/h (389 mph) on December 8, 2025. The video, released on his own YouTube channel nine months after the record fell, covers the two years of work behind it, from a June 2024 start to the record day.

The headline choice is the power system. Biggs ran the Blackbird on 14 lithium polymer cells, two custom 7-cell packs in series for more than 60 volts fully charged, against the 6 cells a typical FPV drone uses. His first speed controller went up in smoke. He then soldered four APD 200 F3 controllers side by side with a 3 mm copper rod and gave them no cooling at all, on the logic that 10 seconds at full throttle would not be long enough to cook them.

The Blackbird was designed around a propeller that barely stays subsonic

Biggs built the Blackbird around APC’s 7x15 propeller, a 7-inch blade with 15 inches of pitch, and calculated that 30,000 rpm would give him 617 km/h (383 mph). The blade tips would be at 95 percent of the speed of sound, so he cut the props to about 6 inches.

Custom-wound Amax 2826 motors, rated to 4.6 kW, have their windings soldered straight to the speed controllers. The propellers sit ahead of the arms in a puller layout Biggs says no other high-speed quad used at the time. CNC-machined aluminium spinners double as prop nuts and duct air over the motor windings, a copy of the P-51 Mustang’s Meredith-effect radiator. Biggs says they cooled the motors and cut drag, and doubts they add thrust.

Benjamin Biggs at his desk with the record-breaking Blackbird speed drone. Photo credit: Benjamin Biggs / YouTube

Biggs started after watching Luke and Mike Bell’s 480 km/h record video. His first prototype maxed out at 450 km/h. The Blackbird passed 600 on its second day out. On record day the first pair of runs averaged 604 km/h; for the second pair Biggs charged the packs to 4.3 volts per cell, above the normal 4.2, and flew 599 upwind and 655 downwind for the certified 626.42. Three days later the Bells took the record back at 657.59 km/h.

The video dropout that killed a Blackbird in May was there from the first prototype

Biggs’ video feed cut out almost every time the prototype flew past him in early 2025, once leaving him staring into the sun with no picture. Voltage regulators, a separate transmitter battery and analog video all failed to fix it. The record day ended with two more dropouts.

Benjamin Biggs holds his 3D-printed Blackbird speed drone, the quadcopter that set a 626 km/h Guinness World Record in December 2025. Photo credit: Benjamin Biggs / YouTube

That is the fault that cost the team an airframe at 630 km/h in May 2026, when Biggs offered Doppler shift on the digital link as an unproven theory. In the new video he calls it only a glitch that happens when you fly fast past yourself, and closes by promising a part two on the climb from 626 to “well over 700 km/h.” DroneXL reported the 690 km/h pass in February and the 730 peak in May, neither with Guinness witnesses on site.

DroneXL’s Take

The useful thing here is the date on the dropout, not the spinners. Biggs was losing his picture on close passes in early 2025, a year before it cost him a Blackbird, and every fix he tried was a power fix for what looks like a radio fault.

The Bells hold the record because they turned up with witnesses and four clean passes. Biggs has beaten 657 km/h on his own telemetry twice since. What he has not done is walk into a certified attempt with a spare drone in the case, and I don’t see how he does that while the feed still drops on the fastest pass of the day. The next 15 km/h will come from props. The record will come from the video link.

Source: Benjamin Biggs (YouTube), Guinness World Records.

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

Belvedere Puts Drone Delivery on the Books Before Wing Names a City

Haye Kesteloo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:49:53 GMT

Belvedere, a city of 2,126 people on two islands in San Francisco Bay, voted 3-2 on September 14 to give first-reading approval to Marin County’s first ordinance on commercial drone delivery. No delivery drone has carried a package to a Belvedere doorstep yet. The city is writing the rules for the day one does.

The two no votes, from Councilmembers Pat Carapiet and Jane Cooper, were not against regulating drones. They wanted a shorter delivery window than the one the ordinance borrows from the city’s noise code. A second reading is expected in October; the council’s next regular meeting is October 12.

Belvedere Regulates the Ground Because It Cannot Touch the Sky

The ordinance leaves flight paths, altitude and overflight to the Federal Aviation Administration, which preempts local rules in the air. It regulates what happens on the ground instead: where drones may land, stage, load and drop packages, and where a company can put a delivery facility inside city limits.

A commercial drone facility, defined as a site set up to send or receive 20 or more drone deliveries a month, is allowed only in the city’s mixed-use zones and only with a conditional use permit from the Planning Commission. Medical deliveries do not count toward the 20. Deliveries to a home require the resident’s prior consent. Delivery activity is barred from public access areas unless the city authorizes it, and nothing may block emergency access routes. The ordinance adds nuisance rules covering privacy, noise, lights and trash, according to the Marin Independent Journal, which covered the hearing.

Delivery hours track Section 8.10.050 of the Belvedere Municipal Code, which sets quiet time at 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Drones can deliver the rest of the day.

City Manager Robert Zadnik told the council the geography is the argument. “Belvedere is compact with narrow streets, steep hills and constrained emergency access routes,” he said. Staff put the same case in writing in July: routine drone delivery would bring package retrieval, support vehicles, repeated noise, trespass and litter to streets with few emergency alternatives.

That July 13 meeting is why this took two tries. Staff asked the council to waive the first reading and adopt the ordinance in one sitting. Cooper called the language vague enough for delivery companies to exploit, Carapiet asked how it would be enforced, and the city attorney answered that the vagueness was deliberate, to keep the law flexible while the technology settled. The council sent it back to be simplified, The Ark reported. Mayor Sally Wilkinson, who helped staff draft it, made the case for moving anyway: “We want something on the books before this comes to life.”

The Only Fight on September 14 Was Over the Hours

Cooper proposed 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Carapiet backed shorter hours to head off complaints. Wilkinson answered that Amazon and FedEx trucks already run Belvedere’s streets with their lights on until 11 p.m. or midnight, and drones could replace some of that traffic rather than add to it.

Councilmember Peter Mark went further. Cutting drone hours tighter than the noise ordinance would send the community a message about drones, he said, and he called that message fear mongering. The majority held the hours, and the council directed staff to make minor wording changes before the second reading.

Wing Has Named the Bay Area Twice and No City Once

Wing announced on March 23 that delivery would reach the Bay Area “in the coming months,” with no date and no cities. On June 8 it named the region again, as one of seven Walmart markets to come online by 2027. Wing’s newsroom listed no Bay Area launch as of September 21.

The March announcement is what put drones on Belvedere’s agenda, the Press Democrat reported in July, and DroneXL flagged at the time that the Bay Area’s stacked Class B and Class C airspace makes it a harder operating environment than anywhere Wing flies in the US. The June expansion folded the region into a 270-store Walmart network with a 2027 horizon, per Wing.

The Bay Area’s loudest drone-delivery fight so far was over a test site, not a doorstep. DoorDash leased a warehouse at 1960 Folsom Street in San Francisco’s Mission District for drone research, the Teamsters pushed back, and on December 16, 2025 the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to require Planning Commission approval for outdoor laboratory uses in the Mission-area industrial zones for 18 months, Mission Local reported. That was a zoning and jobs fight. Belvedere’s ordinance is aimed at the delivery itself.

DroneXL’s Take

Belvedere did the thing Papillion, Nebraska, never got to do. When a reporter counted about 50 Prime Air drone movements in one hour over that suburb this month, the city council had never voted on any of it. Richardson, Texas, declined to pursue a rezoning of Amazon’s site on legal advice and pointed residents to the FAA. Belvedere read the same preemption map and found the part it owns: the driveway, the sidewalk, the launch pad and the clock. A town of 2,126 with zero drones has more say over drone delivery than a suburb with 50 flights an hour, because it wrote the rules before the first one landed.

Carapiet is right that the complaints will come. Amazon left College Station after two years of noise complaints, announcing the move in 2024. Belvedere’s answer is the consent requirement and the nuisance rules, not a curfew stricter than the one its own residents live under, and that is the right answer. Cooper’s 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. window would have banned the dinner orders DoorDash and Wing actually deliver while the FedEx van kept idling at 10 p.m. A rule that gives a drone a shorter day than a diesel truck is the local overreach that invites the preemption fights cities lose. Belvedere stopped one vote short of it. The October 12 meeting decides whether the second reading holds that line.

Sources: Marin Independent Journal, The Ark, City of Belvedere September 14 agenda, Belvedere Municipal Code, Wing

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

Quadmovr Flies A Drone On 3D Printed Impellers Instead Of Propellers

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:45:22 GMT

FPV builder quadmovr posted a video on Sunday of a quadcopter flying on four 3D printed radial impellers in place of propellers. Each motor spins a centrifugal wheel inside a white PETG housing, and the airframe underneath is a plain carbon X frame with a flight controller and an XT60 lead. The impellers went on the drone exactly as they came off the printer: not balanced, not cleaned up, as quadmovr states in the video description.

The parts are not a one-off. Quadmovr published the files on MakerWorld in May under the name Experimental Radial Impeller for Drones (T-Mount), free under a Creative Commons noncommercial license, with a print profile that runs about seven hours across two plates. The listing counted 82 downloads and 25 logged prints on Sunday. The design has already been raced: a pilot in the comments says quadmovr’s remix convinced him to print the original impellers and fly them on a 5-inch quad at the first MultiGP race of the season.

The Impeller Draws Air In From The Top And Throws It Outward

A radial impeller works like a leaf blower wheel. Air enters through the open center on top, the curved vanes fling it outward as the wheel spins, and the housing catches that flow. Quadmovr’s case has swept vanes that turn the air downward, and that column lifts the drone.

The numbers on the MakerWorld listing show how much housing that takes. The spinning impeller is 60 mm (2.4 inches) across. The complete unit is 90 mm (3.5 inches) in diameter and 28 mm (1.1 inches) tall, and the case bolts in between the motor and the frame arm so the wheel sits inside it. The gap between impeller and case is 0.3 mm, which quadmovr flags as tight enough that some prints will need sanding to spin freely.

Quadmovr tested the set on NewBeeDrone FLOW 2004 1750KV motors on a 6S battery. The impeller mounts with the standard T-mount, two M2 screws and a 1.5 mm center hole, so it goes onto the same motors that normally carry a 3-inch prop. The design assumes a motor height of 12.8 mm; a taller or shorter stator moves the wheel out of position in the case and the model has to be edited to match.

A freshly printed batch of Quadmovr's 3D printed radial impellers and vaned housings sits on the printer bed. Photo credit: quadmovr

The Design Started As Baba’s 2024 MakerWorld Model

Quadmovr’s files are a remix. The original, Drone radial Impeller Propeller, was posted on MakerWorld in August 2024 by a designer named Baba, fitted to Fettec 2004 1800KV motors, with a flight clip on Instagram. Quadmovr reworked it for T-mount motors and changed the mounting, stability and cable routing.

Baba’s listing is the one with the tuning guidance. For the 60 mm wheel it recommends roughly 3000KV motors on 3S, 2400 to 3000KV on 4S and 1700 to 2200KV on 6S, which is where quadmovr’s 1750KV FLOW motors land. Baba also offers a smaller 45 mm impeller for higher-KV motors, and says the top of the 60 mm wheel should sit level with the top of the duct or recessed about 1 mm.

Both designers give the same print advice. Print each impeller on its own plate so the layers come out clean, use PETG rather than PLA for toughness, and go to the finest layer height the printer will do. Quadmovr’s profile uses 0.16 mm layers, five perimeter walls and zero infill. MakerWorld is Bambu Lab’s model library, and the listing carries profiles for the H2S, X1 Carbon and H2D printers. The remix stays under Baba’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike terms, so anyone can print, modify and republish it, but nobody can sell it.

One Racer Already Flew The Impellers At A MultiGP Event

The best evidence on the listing is a comment from a pilot posting as WillpowerFPV. He flew Baba’s original impellers on a 5-inch quad at the first MultiGP race of the season, and says quadmovr’s remix and flight GIF sent him back to a file he had doubted would work.

They flew. He calls the result hilarious, says he will print quadmovr’s T-mount version for a 242 gram ultralight freestyle rig next, and links a YouTube clip of the attempt. That is one pilot’s account and one race, not a benchmark, but it is an independent build of the same rotor design that got airborne on a different frame and different motors. (Quadmovr’s channel describes its author as designing, building and flying high-performance drones since 2008, so the remix did not come from a beginner either.)

Quadmovr's experimental quad flies with four 3D printed radial impellers replacing traditional propellers. Photo credit: quadmovr

3D Printing Keeps Producing Propulsion Experiments Outside The Lab

The impeller quad joins a line of printed propulsion experiments DroneXL has covered. In 2021, a builder flew an FPV racing drone on 64 propeller blades, stacking printed multi-blade props. In April, British engineer Tom Stanton flew a 15.6 gram printed plane on a hand-cranked supercapacitor.

The commercial side has chased the same question of how air leaves a rotor. Delson Aeronautics demonstrated ultra-quiet propellers in 2021, and Zipline’s silent propellers are shaped to cut delivery-drone noise. Printed airframes have moved from novelty to product too: the Lace frame folds a large 3D printed quad into a backpack, and Unusual Machines has used HP’s industrial printers for FPV parts since 2024.

DroneXL’s Take

Quadmovr’s video is titled as a completely new propulsion system, and I’d knock the “completely” off that. Centrifugal blowers are more than a century old, and Baba flew the design this remix is built on in 2024. What is new is the distribution: a flyable rotor design that a stranger downloaded, printed on a desktop machine, bolted to a race quad and flew at a sanctioned event because a second builder’s remix convinced him it would work, with the whole chain documented in a comment thread. No manufacturer ships a propulsion experiment with the sanding instructions and the “it wasn’t balanced” disclaimer attached. The FPV community does, and it is the reason the interesting propeller ideas keep showing up on MakerWorld before they show up in a DJI spec sheet.

An open propeller moves a large volume of air at low speed, which is the efficient way to make lift, and this design turns the flow twice inside a plastic case before it ever points down. My read is that an impeller quad will always hover shorter than the same frame on 3-inch props, and quadmovr labels it experimental for a reason. That does not make it pointless. The 90 mm housing is also a full shroud around every moving part, the flow exits through vanes rather than an open disc, and the whole thing prints in PETG on a desktop machine. If anyone has a noise or a safety application for a rotor whose blades sit inside a case, this is the file to start from, and Baba’s license allows it for anything noncommercial.

The number to watch is the print count on quadmovr’s listing. Twenty-five logged prints in four months is a curiosity. If the racer’s 242 gram build lands and a few more pilots post flights, the remix count is where this either becomes a niche or stays a video.

Sources: quadmovr on YouTube, quadmovr on MakerWorld, Baba on MakerWorld

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

Cleveland Police Drone Policy Bans What Ohio's New Law Still Allows

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:33:20 GMT

Ohio’s first statewide police drone law takes effect October 6, and Cleveland’s own drone policy already outlaws four things the state law leaves legal: facial recognition, gait analysis, surveillance of demonstrations, and any weapon on a police drone. House Bill 251, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine on July 7, requires a warrant when police would need one to enter a building in person and use a drone to look inside instead. Cleveland’s rules, in force since July 11, 2025, go further on nearly every point the state law touches.

The comparison comes from a cleveland.com review of both documents and of a year of Cleveland flight records. The city’s Skydio X10 fleet logged 200 flight entries between September 10, 2025, and September 10, 2026. Most were sports events and call-ups for suspect searches and SWAT support, plus a block of manufacturer training.

DroneXL has followed this policy since Cleveland police flew a drone over a protest in November 2024 while their draft rules were still awaiting Department of Justice review. Nearly two years later, that incident’s fingerprints are all over the final document.

Cleveland Bans Identification Tech and All Weapons on Police Drones

Cleveland’s policy prohibits automated analytics that can identify individuals or groups, naming facial recognition and gait analysis, and bans any weapon system on a police drone. Ohio’s HB 251 bans only lethal weapons on law enforcement drones and says nothing about identification technology.

The city’s general police order, GPO 4.06.17, directs pilots to minimize collecting information on people and places unrelated to a mission. Anything captured anyway must be deleted within 30 days under the city’s retention schedule. HB 251 makes surveillance and flight data a public record but sets no comparable clock on destroying footage of bystanders.

On warrants, the two documents point the same direction with different wording. The state law, codified at Ohio Revised Code 4561.60 through 4561.64, requires a warrant when a drone enters or observes the interior of a house or another place where an in-person search would need one. Cleveland requires a warrant wherever someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy, including yards and enclosures, and bars officers from intentionally recording those places without one.

Cleveland also regulates what the policy calls “Blackout Mode,” a setting that switches off the aircraft’s lights and electronic markers while the cameras keep recording. The city permits it only after police obtain a search warrant. The state law does not mention it.

Cleveland Restricts Drone Flights Over Demonstrations

HB 251 lists nine circumstances in which Ohio police may fly a drone without a warrant, among them a threat assessment before a large event. Cleveland’s policy prohibits using drones to surveil individuals or groups at public demonstrations or other large gatherings, and prohibits any drone use for crowd control.

The city does allow drones in written safety plans for outdoor public events with command-level approval, and it allows some flights over large crowds when police have probable cause that a crime is occurring or when public safety is endangered, provided the circumstances meet Fourth Amendment requirements for a warrantless search.

That carve-out was written after the November 24, 2024, flight over a protest outside Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne’s home, which DroneXL covered in Cleveland Police Deploy Drone at Pro-Palestine Protest Despite Lacking DOJ Approval. The fleet had already been sitting idle pending policy approval, and after the protest flight Police Chief Dorothy Todd committed to keeping it grounded until the policy cleared the Community Police Commission and the federal consent decree monitors. The drones did not fly again on official business until August 10, 2025, more than eight months later, when Cleveland’s Skydio X10 program finally launched.

The broadest state exception drew the most fire in Columbus. HB 251 lets police fly without a warrant in navigable airspace, in a physically nonintrusive manner, to observe what is otherwise visible to the naked eye. Gary Daniels, legislative director of the ACLU of Ohio, told lawmakers the provision “is a blank check for law enforcement,” according to cleveland.com’s report on the signing. Cleveland’s policy contains no naked-eye exception.

Cleveland Logged 200 Drone Flights in Its First Year

Cleveland requires a public map showing the date, time and flight path of every deployment within 48 hours. Ohio’s law requires agencies to document and verify flight data for surveillance flights, and makes those records public unless an exemption applies. It sets no posting deadline and requires no map.

Cleveland.com’s review of the city’s UAS Team Flights dashboard found 200 entries with distinct timestamps over the year to September 10, after removing duplicates created by overlapping dashboard views. The dashboard shows no more than 25 flights at a time, so the count took some assembly.

Three categories covered 190 of the 200 entries: 71 “Event Action Plan” flights, 63 “Assignment Call-Up” flights and 56 training flights. Event flights included sports and other public gatherings. Call-ups included suspect searches and SWAT support.

One operation can produce many entries. The dashboard shows 11 separately timed flights during a Browns event on December 21, 2025, and nine during a Browns detail on August 27, 2026. Training clustered too: 37 of the 56 training entries fell on four days of manufacturer training, September 22 through 25, 2025, right after the program launched with nine aircraft and seven Part 107 pilots.

The policy also requires quarterly reports to the police chief and the Community Police Commission covering all drone use by incident type, and says those reports will be posted on the city website. Asked where they were, the Cleveland Division of Police Office of Public Affairs pointed cleveland.com to the flight dashboard and did not identify a separate report.

HB 251 Delays Its Chinese Drone Purchase Ban Until 2030

HB 251 also bars Ohio public entities from buying drones made or assembled by a foreign adversary, and cleveland.com reported in July that the law gives them four years to comply. The enrolled text is narrower: the ban starts 48 months after October 6 and touches nothing bought before then.

Section 3 of the enrolled act makes the new Ohio Revised Code 5501.84 effective 48 months after the rest of the law, which lands in October 2030. From that date a public entity may not purchase or otherwise acquire a foreign-adversary drone system, no state funds may go toward one, and no public entity may operate one that was purchased on or after that date. Aircraft bought before October 2030 are not mentioned, so nothing already in an Ohio hangar is grounded by this law. The section also stands down entirely if federal law or regulations allow continued purchase and operation of the equipment.

“Foreign adversary” means a country on a registry the Ohio secretary of state must compile every six months from four federal lists, including the Commerce Department’s Executive Order 13873 list, which names China. Cleveland’s all-Skydio fleet is untouched either way. The two Ohio DFR programs DroneXL compared in December went opposite ways on hardware: Dublin chose DJI docks and Columbus chose Skydio. Under the enrolled text, Ohio law lets Dublin keep buying DJI for four more years, and Ohio’s statewide drone as first responder pilot, launched in February, faces no state-level hardware constraint before 2030.

DroneXL’s Take

Cleveland got the hard part right, and it got there the embarrassing way. The demonstration ban, the 48-hour map, the 30-day deletion rule and the Blackout Mode warrant requirement all exist because the department flew a drone over a protest in November 2024 under a policy the Department of Justice had not yet approved.

A civilian commission with real authority then wrote the rules the department had resisted. The Community Police Commission has final say over Cleveland police policy under the consent decree, and that is the only reason this document reads the way it does. Most departments that buy an X10 answer to a chief and a council, not to a commission with veto power over policy.

Ohio’s law is a floor, and a low one. The warrant requirement for looking inside a house is fine. The naked-eye exception swallows most of what a police drone actually does, because a drone at 400 feet (122 meters) sees what a helicopter at 400 feet sees, and the Supreme Court has treated that as public view since Florida v. Riley in 1989. Daniels called it a blank check. My read is that it is a blank check with a public records requirement attached, and that requirement is the only part with teeth. If the flight logs are public, a reporter can do what cleveland.com just did: pull a year of records and count.

Two hundred flights, 190 of them in three routine categories, nine of them during a single Browns game. The 10 entries outside those categories are not described in cleveland.com’s report, and that report, which set out to test the policy against the records, describes none over a demonstration. That is the pro-drone case made with the department’s own data: give police a capable aircraft, publish every flight, ban the uses that poison public trust, and the program runs. The 48-hour map did not stop a single suspect search.

The reports are the loose thread. Cleveland’s own policy promises quarterly reports by incident type on the city website, and when a reporter asked for them, the department pointed at the dashboard. A dashboard that shows 25 flights at a time and needs deduplication is not a quarterly report. The commission wrote that requirement for a reason, and when cleveland.com asked, the department could not point to one. Cleveland.com asked once. The commission should ask next, in public, before October 6.

The foreign-adversary clause is the part most likely to be misread. A four-year window to comply sounds like a replacement mandate. What Ohio passed is a four-year delay before a purchase ban that grandfathers every aircraft bought in the meantime and defers to Washington if federal rules ever loosen. As far as Ohio law is concerned, Dublin can order DJI docks through September 2030 and fly them for the rest of their service life. The FCC Covered List, not Columbus, is the constraint that decides what Ohio agencies fly, and the legislature wrote that deference into the statute. I suspect lawmakers wanted a China clause in the bill without a replacement bill for the counties, and the 48-month fuse is how they got both. Even the registry of adversary countries sits inside the delayed section, so Ohio will not publish its own list until 2030 either. Whether the General Assembly tightens the fuse before then is the thing to watch, and the 137th General Assembly that convenes in January 2027 is the first chance.

Sources: cleveland.com, via GovTech; Ohio General Assembly, House Bill 251 and the enrolled act; Cleveland Division of Police, GPO 4.06.17

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

Amazon Wants 1,000 Drone Flights a Day in CT. Comments Close Oct. 1

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:57:00 GMT

Amazon wants to fly up to 1,000 MK30 delivery flights a day out of its North Haven, Connecticut warehouse, roughly 365,000 a year, to addresses within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) of the building, and Connecticut residents have until October 1 to say what they think of it. The state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection published a notice on September 16 that the Federal Aviation Administration wants its concurrence on the plan, and opened a 15-day comment window on the same day. The New Haven Register reported the notice on Thursday and the Hartford Courant followed with the FAA document on Saturday.

A 7.5-mile circle around the warehouse covers about 174 square miles (451 square kilometers) and takes in Hamden and Wallingford and reaches into New Haven. It is the first federal paperwork DroneXL has seen for any Prime Air hub in the Northeast, and the first comment window DroneXL has seen open on one.

The 1,000 reads like a Connecticut forecast, and it is nothing of the kind. One thousand flights a day, 365,000 a year, 174 square miles: Amazon writes the same ceiling into every MK30 filing it makes, from Chicago to Baton Rouge to Florida. What Connecticut has is the standard envelope, 11 days to comment on it, and a question the FAA has not answered: whether North Haven gets a site review of its own or rides the national finding the agency signed in July.

Amazon’s Connecticut Numbers Are the Same Numbers It Files Everywhere

Every MK30 environmental filing on the FAA’s public review page carries the same proposal: up to 1,000 delivery flights a day, seven days a week, about 365,000 a year, from a 7.5-mile radius covering 174 square miles. Chicago, Baton Rouge, Omaha, Detroit, Kansas City, Florida and Texas all say it.

The one exception is the oldest MK30 hub. Amazon asked the FAA for 469 flights a day at Tolleson, Arizona, in 2024, about 171,000 a year. Every filing since has asked for the round number, and the FAA’s public review page repeats it seven times over. Connecticut’s document carries the operating window the 2026 filings share: 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., with up to 100 of the 1,000 daily flights falling in the first hour and the last half hour.

What the hubs actually fly sits well under that. Sam Bailey, Amazon’s economic development manager, told the Richardson, Texas city council in March that its hub was filling about 150 orders a day against a permitted 1,000. A Baton Rouge resident told a Rotary Club audience this month that the neighborhood hears about 20 drones an hour, the same story where Amazon’s manager called the aircraft quieter than an idling truck. Amazon says it reaches those levels gradually, as demand builds.

The ceiling still matters, because the ceiling is what gets analyzed. The noise model and the FAA’s finding on a site both run at the proposed maximum, and the national environmental document the agency signed on July 28 works the same way: it covers a hub up to 1,150 deliveries a day, provided a hub running that volume sits at least 600 feet (183 meters) from homes. A 1,000-flight North Haven proposal fits inside that number by design.

Connecticut Opened a 15-Day Comment Window the FAA Never Advertised

The FAA asked Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection on August 17 to concur that approving Prime Air’s beyond-visual-line-of-sight deliveries around New Haven is consistent with the state’s Coastal Management Act. DEEP published the notice on September 16, takes comment through October 1, and must decide by October 16.

DEEP spokesperson Bill Flood laid out the timetable for the New Haven Register: 15 days of comment from publication and a 60-day clock from receipt for the department’s decision. The federal Coastal Zone Management Act gives a coastal state that review over federal actions that could affect its coast, and the FAA’s own document says this one will not: the site is inland, outside the coastal boundary, with no construction in the coastal zone, and the drone overflights inside the 7.5-mile radius are transitory. Texas ran the same review for Amazon’s Pasadena hub last fall and gave the public 30 days. Connecticut is giving 15. The Register’s report does not say how comments are to be filed. DEEP’s coastal consistency page says its Land and Water Resources Division runs these reviews and ends each one with a concurrence or an objection, and neither that page nor the department’s public-notices listing showed the Prime Air notice when DroneXL checked both on September 20.

That state notice is the only public trace of the federal side of the project. The FAA’s drone environmental review page listed no Connecticut document of any kind when DroneXL checked it on September 20; the page was last updated September 11. Coastal consistency has appeared on that page before, as an appendix to a site-specific assessment: the Texas, Florida and Chicago filings each carry one. It has never, on that page, appeared on its own.

Which route North Haven takes is the open question. Chicago, Baton Rouge and Omaha each got a draft assessment with a 30-day federal comment period. Tracy, California got a launch date and no document. Since July 28 the FAA has had the option of checking a new hub against the national finding inside the agency, with no draft published and no comment window, as DroneXL laid out when Washington cleared the runway for 500 cities. If that is the path New Haven is on, the 15 days DEEP is offering are the only days Connecticut will get, and they are running on a review the FAA itself says has nothing to find.

Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, is one of 17 who told the FAA in January that its national review was a paper exercise and asked for a full impact statement. The FAA signed the finding anyway. The 60-day window to challenge it in court under 49 U.S.C. 46110 closes September 26. Oregon signed the same letter, and Amazon’s Portland hub surfaced this weekend under the same finding. Connecticut joins Oregon and New York among signatory states with a Prime Air hub in the pipeline and no federal document posted for it.

Amazon confirmed the plan without adding to it. Amazon is “always exploring new ways to get customers a wider selection at faster speeds,” spokesperson Mike Murphy told the Courant, and is working with local officials on Connecticut. The company’s website now lists 13 operating locations in nine states and four more coming soon, according to the Register, up from the 11 sites Amazon counted on August 19. Its stated goal is nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, and its August list of next markets named Syracuse, the other Northeast site, and not New Haven.

North Haven Approved the Ground in May, With a Noise Pitch Attached

North Haven’s commissioners approved a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at Amazon’s 409 Washington Avenue warehouse, a 142-acre site cleared for warehouse use in 2019, plus a perimeter fence. Sam Bailey previewed the plan in early May, and the minutes describe preprogrammed flights to fixed points within seven miles.

The commission noted what every planning board eventually notes: the FAA has sole jurisdiction over altitude and flight patterns. The town approved a building. Bailey used the meeting to describe the flights anyway, and the Register Citizen’s account of it, carried by GovTech, has him putting takeoff and landing noise at a little over 60 decibels, a little louder than a dishwasher. He promised a public information session and said Amazon was reaching out to neighboring towns.

Amazon’s own FAA filings put different numbers on the same aircraft. The Baton Rouge noise appendix records takeoff and landing at 90.5 and 91.8 decibels SEL measured 20 feet from the aircraft, about 70 decibels Lmax at 75 feet, and 63.7 decibels SEL for a drone cruising overhead at 200 feet (61 meters). The FAA compares the takeoff figure to a household vacuum cleaner at 10 feet. Bailey’s 60 came with no distance and no metric, and which of the filing’s readings it corresponds to is not something the Register Citizen’s account resolves. The loudest moment in the filing, 92.1 decibels, is the delivery itself: a hover at about 13 feet (4 meters) while the payload doors open and the package falls to the lawn.

Connecticut is one of 21 states with no statute on dropping objects from aircraft beyond the federal hazard standard, as DroneXL’s 35-state review found on Sunday, so the drop raises no state-law issue here of the kind it raises in Arizona or Michigan. What it raises is the same one it raises everywhere: the MK30 releases a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) package in free fall, carries no parachute in any FAA filing DroneXL has read, and Amazon has answered none of DroneXL’s 25 written safety questions about it since the first set went out on September 3.

The FAA’s document describes the aircraft North Haven will host in plain terms: 78 pounds (35 kilograms) empty, 83.2 pounds (38 kilograms) at takeoff, a 5-pound payload, cruise between 205 and 370 feet (62 to 113 meters), 73 mph (117 km/h) at the top end, and a vertical descent to the drop. The document does not mention Tweed New Haven Airport, which lies south of the site, and whether Amazon’s approved area reaches its airspace depends on boundaries the FAA has not published. Deliveries would cost $5 for Prime members and $10 for everyone else, the pricing Bailey gave the commission in May.

DroneXL’s Take

North Haven is about 55 miles (90 kilometers) from my house, the first Prime Air hub I could drive to in an afternoon. A drone that gets children’s Motrin to a house in Hamden in 30 minutes without a van on the Wilbur Cross is the industry DroneXL exists to cover, and Amazon’s 13 hubs deliver that daily.

The 1,000 is a ceiling and Amazon will fly under it for years, the way Richardson flies at 150 and Baton Rouge at a rate its own manager won’t put a number on. Anyone reading 365,000 as next year’s traffic over Wallingford is reading it wrong. It is also the only number the FAA will ever analyze for this site, and the number the noise model and the finding will be built on. A resident who wants a say gets it on the ceiling or not at all.

The number is Amazon’s boilerplate. The process is the story, and I suspect the reason two Connecticut newspapers found this in a state environmental office and not on an FAA page is that there is nothing on an FAA page to find: the New Haven application is being checked against the July 28 national finding, in which case DEEP’s coastal review is the only public document Connecticut ever gets. I can’t confirm that, and the FAA hasn’t said. The pattern holds, though. Tracy got nothing. Portland got a city permit and nothing. North Haven got a coastal consistency letter for a site the letter itself says is nowhere near the coast, and 15 days to answer it.

Connecticut’s attorney general put his name on the January letter that said this is exactly what would happen. The letter lost. The 60-day clock runs out September 26, and if nobody files, the towns Amazon adds after New Haven inherit whatever process New Haven gets. That makes the next 11 days the ones that count, and Connecticut has more in hand than it thinks. A coastal consistency comment does not have to be about the coast. DEEP is being asked to concur with a federal action, and anything a resident, a first selectman or the attorney general puts in that file before October 1 is on the record when the FAA decides whether New Haven needs a review of its own. The 92.1-decibel delivery hover from Amazon’s Baton Rouge noise appendix belongs in it. So does the question of which environmental path the application is on, and the public session Bailey promised North Haven in May. The town cannot touch the airspace. Connecticut can decide what gets said on the record before the first MK30 leaves Washington Avenue, and right now the record says 60 decibels and 1,000 flights, both Amazon’s numbers, while the one the FAA wrote down, 92.1, sits in an appendix filed in Louisiana.

Sources: New Haven Register, Hartford Courant, The Register Citizen via GovTech, FAA NEPA and Drones, Comments of 17 Attorneys General, January 23, 2026, Texas General Land Office, Amazon.

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

Amazon Drones Drop Packages Where State Law Calls It a Crime

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:05:08 GMT

Amazon’s MK30 releases packages from about 13 feet over customers’ yards in Arizona, where dropping an object from an aircraft over a populated area is a misdemeanor, and in Michigan, where a state rule requires a city’s written permission before anything is dropped in flight. Illinois, where Amazon has named Chicago among its next launches, requires a state permit for every drop, filed 14 days ahead and naming the date, time and place.

DroneXL analyzed the aeronautics codes of 35 states this week, every state with a live or announced drone delivery operation among them. Ten regulate the release of objects from aircraft more strictly than the Federal Aviation Administration does. Of the three operators in DroneXL’s delivery tracker, Amazon is the only one whose aircraft lets go of the package in flight; Wing and Zipline lower theirs on tethers.

The argument available to Amazon is that the FAA owns the airspace and a 1920s state statute cannot reach a federally certificated air carrier. DroneXL found no court ruling that tests that argument against a drone delivery drop, and the FAA’s own guidance points both ways.

Federal law treats a delivery drone as an aircraft

Federal law defines an aircraft as any contrivance invented, used, or designed to navigate or fly in the air, and the U.S. Code defines an unmanned aircraft as an aircraft operated without the possibility of direct human intervention. An 83-pound MK30 is an aircraft wherever a statute uses the word.

The definition sits in 49 U.S.C. § 40102, and Congress removed any doubt about drones in 2018 when it wrote § 44801 into the same title. The National Transportation Safety Board had already settled the point in 2014, reversing an administrative law judge who ruled in Huerta v. Pirker that a small drone was not an aircraft.

The federal government enforces that reading when it suits it. Shooting at a drone is prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 32, the aircraft sabotage statute, and the FAA said during the New Jersey sightings of December 2024 that a person who fires at one can face FAA civil penalties and criminal charges. A 249-gram quadcopter is an aircraft when someone points a shotgun at it. The states’ aeronautics codes use the same word, and they used it first.

The federal rule on releasing things from that aircraft is short. 14 CFR 91.15 bars a pilot from letting anything be dropped that creates a hazard to persons or property, and then says the section does not prohibit dropping an object if reasonable precautions are taken. That is a standard. No federal permit exists for it. Part 107 carries the same language for small drones, and Amazon flies under Part 135 as an air carrier.

Ten states go further than the FAA on dropping objects

Of the 35 state aeronautics codes DroneXL reviewed, three require a state permit before anything is dropped from an aircraft, six make it a misdemeanor over populated areas with no permit available, and one requires written permission from the local government. Twenty-one have no rule beyond careless-or-reckless operation.

The permit states are Illinois, Minnesota and Oregon. Illinois bars dropping any object from an aircraft without a dropping permit from the Department of Transportation, a Class A misdemeanor under the Aeronautics Act’s penalty section, 620 ILCS 5/79, and IDOT’s rule requires the form 14 days before the scheduled drop, specifying the person, the date, the time, the place and the object. Minnesota requires two written consents, from the commissioner of transportation and from the municipality or property owner where objects may land. Oregon requires a permit from its aviation director under ORS 837.085, a statute that came up this weekend in Amazon’s plans for a Portland hub.

The flat-ban states inherited the 1922 Uniform State Law for Aeronautics almost word for word: a misdemeanor for anyone who, over a thickly inhabited area or a public gathering, drops any object except loose water or loose sand ballast. Arizona grades it a class 1 misdemeanor. North Carolina, Hawaii, Delaware, New Jersey and Missouri carry the same clause. South Carolina carried it too, until a 2012 rewrite of its aeronautics chapter deleted the section. None of the six offers a permit. Either the statute does not reach the aircraft, or the flight violates it.

Michigan is its own case. MCL 750.44 makes it a misdemeanor to drop or release any object that may endanger life or injure property, a harm-qualified test Amazon could argue it meets. The Aeronautics Commission’s rule R 259.308 adds that a pilot shall not permit an object to be dropped from an aircraft in flight except upon written permission of the political subdivision having jurisdiction. The rule sits in the commission’s airport field rules, which gives Amazon an argument that it was written for airport grounds, though its text says aircraft in flight and names no airport.

Three states mirror the federal hazard standard and add nothing Amazon does not already meet: New York, Indiana and Nevada, which rewrote its drop clause around reckless disregard. Wisconsin bans drops and then exempts the delivery of packages or mail by dropping from airplanes when done under federal regulations. Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Louisiana, Ohio, Idaho, California, Virginia, Utah, Alabama, Montana, Wyoming, Maryland, Arkansas, South Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Connecticut, where Amazon’s North Haven site awaits FAA sign-off, have no general drop rule at all. Connecticut’s careless-or-reckless statute was amended in 2024 to name unmanned aircraft, and Tennessee’s one drone-specific rule bars dropping items into ticketed open-air events.

Amazon’s drop method is the one the statutes describe

Amazon’s MK30 descends to about 13 feet, checks the ground and releases the package into free fall. Wing lowers its package on a tether from a 23-foot hover and Zipline’s Platform 2 winches a droid down from about 330 feet. Only Amazon’s method matches the word the statutes use: drop.

Amazon describes the method the same way, in a federal filing. The flight profile Amazon supplied for the FAA’s Kansas City environmental assessment shows the MK30 cruising at 205 to 250 feet inbound and 325 to 370 feet outbound at 58 knots, descending vertically over the customer’s yard, and releasing the package at 13 feet during a six-second hover. Its how-it-works page gives the same height, and at XPONENTIAL Europe a Prime Air executive told Inside Unmanned Systems the aircraft descends to about three and a half meters and “releases the package, which drops to the ground.” The figures on DroneXL’s aircraft comparison page come from FAA filings: the MK30 weighs 83.2 pounds at takeoff, 78 pounds empty, and carries five. It has no parachute, a design choice Amazon has not explained since September 3.

Amazon's own flight profile for the MK30, from the FAA's environmental assessment for Kansas City: cruise at 205 to 250 feet inbound and 325 to 370 feet outbound at 58 knots, a vertical descent over the customer's yard, and a package release from 13 feet in a six-second hover. Photo credit: Amazon Prime Air, 2025, via FAA.

A customer’s own footage shows the whole sequence. Tamara Hancock, an Arizona Prime Air customer who posts as Teaching Mrs H, filmed an MK30 hovering over her backyard, opening its cargo bay and letting a box fall to the grass. She had ordered a bottle of syrup to see what a drop does to a breakable item, and the video’s title gives her verdict: it didn’t go well.

Tamara Hancock's video of an Amazon MK30 delivery in her Arizona backyard. Video: Teaching Mrs H / YouTube

Whether a package lowered to the ground on a tether and released there is a “drop” under a 1929 statute is a question for a lawyer. Whether a package released from 13 feet is a drop is not. On the statutes’ plain words the exposure is Amazon’s, and the tether is one reason Zipline’s design keeps winning the comparison.

Illinois, Michigan and Arizona put Amazon’s method against live statutes

Amazon delivers in Tolleson, Arizona, where dropping an object over a densely inhabited area is a class 1 misdemeanor, and in Hazel Park and Pontiac, Michigan, where a state rule requires written permission from the city. Its Chicago launch lands in Illinois, which issues per-drop permits with 14 days’ notice.

Illinois is the sharpest conflict because Illinois has a working permit desk. The statute and the rule were written for a banner plane dropping leaflets on a fair: one pilot, one afternoon. A permit that names the time and place of each drop cannot be issued 14 days ahead for a 30-minute delivery to an address nobody knows yet. Either IDOT reads its own statute as not reaching a Part 135 drone, or Amazon flies Chicago without a permit the rule was never written to issue. Amazon’s August 19 announcement lists Chicago among the next five metros.

Michigan is the live one. Amazon flies from Hazel Park and Pontiac under a state rule that, on its face, requires each city’s written permission before an object is dropped. Whether either city was asked is a public-records question, and DroneXL is asking it.

Arizona is the oldest. Amazon began deliveries in Tolleson in 2024, paused after two MK30s struck a crane in October 2025, and resumed. No prosecution under ARS 28-8279 involving a delivery drone appears in any record DroneXL has found, which tells you either that the statute is a dead letter or that nobody has tried. Minnesota, with the strictest text in the country, has no operator yet and therefore no test.

Amazon's Prime Air MK30 delivery drone flies over a desert suburban neighborhood. Photo credit: Amazon.

The FAA’s preemption guidance points both ways

The FAA says Congress gave it exclusive authority over aviation safety and airspace efficiency, and that laws aimed at delivery drones are likely preempted under the Airline Deregulation Act. The same 2023 fact sheet says states may regulate how aircraft are used, as opposed to where they fly.

The fact sheet, issued in July 2023, is the closest thing to a federal position. It lists state rules that face field preemption, including mandating geofencing and imposing licensing regimes, and says laws affecting commercial delivery drones are “more likely to be preempted under the Airline Deregulation Act,” which bars states from regulating an air carrier’s routes and services. Amazon holds a Part 135 certificate, so that argument is available to it.

The fact sheet then hands the states their ground. Restrictions on how UAS can be used rather than where they operate within airspace, it says, are more likely to survive, and it repeats that municipalities may generally determine the location of aircraft landing sites through their land use powers. A permit to release cargo over a city is a rule about how, or a rule about airspace, depending on who is reading it. Nobody has asked a judge.

A fact sheet is not law, and the 2015 version said the same things without stopping 44 states from passing drone statutes. The states that adopted the 1922 uniform act wrote it, in its own words, to harmonize as far as possible with federal laws and regulations on the subject of aeronautics. In 1922 that meant nothing, because there were no federal aviation regulations. In 2026 it is the sentence Amazon’s lawyers will read first.

DroneXL’s Take

I am for drone delivery and against a state-by-state patchwork for aircraft that cross county lines in minutes. The FAA should own the airspace. The statutes are real and unrepealed, and the company they describe has let two deadlines pass this month without saying whether its aircraft has a parachute.

The record cuts in Amazon’s favor. Seven incidents in the tracker, no injuries, and statutes written when the aircraft in question was a Curtiss Jenny dropping handbills on a county fair. A legislature in 1923 was not thinking about a hexacopter with detect-and-avoid, and reading its words onto one is a stretch a court might refuse.

But the states are not writing new rules. They are finding old ones, and they are finding them because much of the public record of what Amazon’s aircraft does over a neighborhood sits in the tracker DroneXL built after Amazon let two deadlines pass. A town clerk who cannot get an engineer to a meeting reaches for whatever statute the state gave her. Illinois gave her a permit form.

Chicago is the nearest test, because Illinois has a statute that names the process, a rule that names the deadline and an agency that issues the permit. If Amazon applies, the permit itself becomes a written state position on drone delivery drops, the first DroneXL has found. If Amazon launches without one, IDOT either enforces or explains in writing why it will not. Either answer is news.

The court test will come from somewhere else. The 1922 act did not stop at making the drop a crime. It also made the aircraft owner absolutely liable for injuries to persons or property on the land beneath caused by the dropping or falling of any object therefrom, whether such owner was negligent or not. That clause survives in Delaware, Minnesota and South Carolina, which kept its liability section in the 2012 rewrite that dropped the crime, and Hawaii sharpened it so that a commercial operator is absolutely liable while a private owner is only presumed so. Wisconsin presumes liability for anything that falls from an aircraft and puts the burden of proof on the operator. None of that needs a prosecutor or an attorney general. It needs one homeowner under a 5-pound box released from 13 feet and a lawyer who reads the statute book. Amazon has already put a package into a Richmond, Texas swimming pool. None of those five states is on Amazon’s map yet. A 500-city map is how it gets there.

The only federal ruling on point cuts less cleanly than Amazon would like. In Singer v. City of Newton, decided in September 2017, a Massachusetts federal judge struck down four provisions of a city drone ordinance, but he did it on conflict preemption, finding that the federal government had not claimed exclusive regulatory authority over drones. Field preemption, the argument that leaves no room for any state rule at all, lost. A state permit for releasing cargo over a neighborhood is closer to the land-use power the FAA’s own fact sheet concedes than to the altitude limits Newton lost on. My read is that a challenge to Illinois or Michigan is a coin flip. Amazon has not made the preemption argument in any filing DroneXL has read, and neither its August announcement nor its how-it-works page mentions state or local permission for the release.

Zipline, which answered every safety question on the record, lowers its packages, and the statutes’ word does not describe its method. Neither does it describe Wing’s. Amazon’s fix is a tether or a permit, and both cost less than the test case a plaintiff will eventually bring.

The state-by-state table, with the statute, the tier and a source link for every state checked, lives on the Drone Delivery Tracker; the 15 states with no delivery operation follow in the weekly sweep. DroneXL is putting the permit question to Amazon and to the aviation offices of Illinois, Michigan, Arizona and Minnesota this week. Their answers publish when they arrive.

Sources: Illinois Compiled Statutes 620 ILCS 5/43b and 92 Ill. Adm. Code 14.440; Minnesota Statutes 360.075; Oregon Revised Statutes 837.085; Arizona Revised Statutes 28-8279; North Carolina G.S. 63-18; Hawaii Revised Statutes 263-9; Delaware Code Title 2 § 309; Michigan Compiled Laws 750.44; Connecticut General Statutes 15-72; 74 Pa.C.S. ch. 55; Tennessee Code 42-1-202 and 39-13-903; 620 ILCS 5/79; 14 CFR 107.23; Wisconsin Statutes 114.095; Nevada Revised Statutes 493.100; New York General Business Law § 245; Indiana Code 8-21-4-8; 49 U.S.C. §§ 40102 and 44801; 18 U.S.C. § 32; 14 CFR 91.15; FAA, State and Local Regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Fact Sheet (July 2023); Singer v. City of Newton, No. 17-10071-WGY (D. Mass. Sept. 21, 2017); Delaware Code Title 2 § 307; Hawaii Revised Statutes 263-5; Minnesota Statutes 360.012; Wisconsin Statutes 114.05; Amazon, Prime Air expansion announcement (August 19, 2026); FAA, Environmental Assessment for Amazon Prime Air Package Delivery Operations in Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS (May 2026), Figure 2-5; Inside Unmanned Systems; Tamara Hancock (Teaching Mrs H), YouTube.

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

Army Has 40,000 Drones and Too Few Pilots. FAA Data Shows Why

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:06:00 GMT

The U.S. Army says it now has enough small one-way attack drones to put them in every squad, ten days before the Pentagon’s deadline to do exactly that. What it does not have is enough soldiers qualified to fly them. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Drone Dominance director, told reporters on September 17 that 10,000 drones are already fielded and another 30,000 are arriving, and that the remaining gap between the Army and squad-level drone warfare is trained pilots.

The same week, a LinkedIn post by DroneSports president Eric Richard declared the solo drone operator headed for extinction, blaming the FCC’s ban on new DJI models and the new Section 232 tariffs for pricing individuals out of the trade. It drew more than 50 comments from working pilots in three days.

The two stories are the same story. I’ve followed the Drone Dominance program since the Department of War issued its first request for solutions in December, and every one of its early winners came out of the racing and hobby scene. That scene starts with a kid and a model airplane, runs through a first camera drone, and ends in a cockpit, a Part 107 job, or an Army squad. The FAA’s own registration data, published this year, shows the hobby end of that pipeline shrinking since 2023. Washington has now made the hardware that feeds it more expensive and harder to buy.

The Army Says Training Is the Squad-Level Bottleneck

The Army has fielded 10,000 small one-way attack drones under the Drone Dominance program and is receiving 30,000 more, a volume Col. Gregory Merkl called sufficient for every squad. The gap he named is qualified pilots: the capability exists in every platoon, not yet one level down.

“Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained,” Merkl said at a September 17 briefing, reported by Military Times. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 drone dominance memo set the end of fiscal 2026, which is September 30, as the date for every Army squad to carry small attack drones. Merkl said the training push now centers on flying in a contested electromagnetic spectrum, where the enemy is jamming the link.

The Army has already seen where that training comes from. During Project Flytrap at Hohenfels, Germany, in mid-2025, junior soldiers picked up new small drones in under eight hours while senior officers struggled to work the data and software those drones produce, as DroneXL reported at the time. Col. Donald Neal Jr., commander of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, credited the rookies’ STEM-heavy schooling: “they have a lot of these skill sets already.” The pilots the Army needs are the ones who arrive already flying.

The scale behind that training problem keeps growing. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Reuters in November that the service, which had been buying roughly 50,000 drones a year, plans to buy at least one million within two to three years. In February he told Military Times he hoped to be positioned to buy that million within 18 to 24 months. Every one of those aircraft needs someone who can fly it under jamming into a two-foot target box. The Pentagon has bet that skill comes from the hobby world: as DroneXL reported in June, the Drone Dominance field is built on racers, hobbyists, and Ukrainian firms, with Neros founder and former racing champion Soren Monroe-Anderson at the front of it.

FAA Data Shows the Hobbyist Pool Shrinking Before the Ban

The FAA’s Aerospace Forecast for fiscal years 2026 to 2046 records a recreational market in decline through December 2025, before any tariff and with the Covered List nine days old. The registry covers RC models and drones alike. Registrations fell and the active fleet shrank for a second year.

New recreational owner registrations averaged 4,782 per month in 2025, down from 5,810 in 2024 and 6,053 in 2023, according to the FAA forecast document. Cancellations and expirations still outnumber new registrants, so the registry lost 2,907 registrations a month in 2025. The FAA estimates the active recreational fleet fell 11 percent in one year, from 1.79 million aircraft in 2024 to 1.59 million in 2025, and it expects the fleet to keep falling until it bottoms out in 2027.

The FAA’s 2025 operator survey shows who is in that registry. Of recreational respondents who identified themselves, 71 percent flew only drones, 17 percent flew only model aircraft, and 10 percent flew both. The model aircraft crowd is the smaller group and the more serious one: model-only flyers reported 141 flights a year and owned 13.5 aircraft on average, against 25 flights and 1.8 aircraft for drone-only flyers. That is the club field, the same place American aviation has recruited from since before anyone called a quadcopter a drone. It sits inside the same shrinking registry, and DroneXL warned last October that the American drone hobby was heading into an accessibility crisis as bans, Remote ID, and a vanishing consumer market converged.

The commercial side is slowing too. New Part 107 aircraft registrations peaked in 2024 at about 11,300 a month and dropped to roughly 10,500 a month in 2025. The FAA’s language is that new registrations “peaked in 2024 and are now trending downward.” Remote pilot certificates are the one metric still climbing, at 493,396 issued by December 2025, up more than 70,000 in a year. Twenty-two percent of those certificate holders also hold a Part 61 crewed pilot certificate, which is as clean a measure as exists of how often the drone is the on-ramp to the rest of aviation.

The FAA wrote that forecast assuming no rule changes. It got two.

Eric Richard’s Extinction Thesis Uses the Wrong Numbers

Richard’s post argues that centralized fleets are replacing the solo operator and that the labor market was already oversupplied. The direction of his argument holds up better than his figures, which mix stale certificate counts with cumulative registrations and treat one small, loss-making roll-up as proof of an industry shift.

He cites more than 405,000 remote pilot certificates against roughly 966,000 registered commercial drones. The 405,000 figure is the FAA’s December 2024 count; the current number is 493,396. The 966,000 is the cumulative total ever registered in the Part 107 registry, not aircraft in service. The FAA counts about 424,000 active commercial registrations at the end of 2025. There are more certificated pilots than active commercial drones, which is a different problem than the one Richard describes.

The real oversupply is in certificates that never get used. The FAA’s 2025 operator survey found 65.5 percent of Part 107 holders flew at least one nonrecreational flight, 26.7 percent flew only for fun, and 7.8 percent did not fly at all. A third of the people holding the credential are not working with it.

His fleet evidence is thinner still. He credits ZenaTech with buying roughly 27 U.S. surveying firms and running 78 percent of its revenue through drone services. ZenaTech’s own filings put the count at 25 acquisitions and 26 locations, with drone services at about 93 percent of first-quarter 2026 revenue. That revenue was C$8.4 million for the quarter, and the company lost $45.2 million in 2025, $18.1 million of it non-cash charges on the convertible debt that funded the buying spree. A roll-up burning cash is a bet that consolidation will happen. It is no evidence that it has.

Zeitview, his other example, does not own the fleet he describes. Its pilot app tells network pilots to “fly your DJI drone seamlessly” through its DJI integration. The dispatch network runs on solo Part 107 holders bringing their own Mavics. In a reply to Vic Moss in the thread, Richard wrote that Skydio has returned to the consumer market. It has not, and Moss said so. Adam Bry’s position on consumer drones has not changed since DroneXL covered his April interview.

Where Richard is right is the price of admission. “That’s not a price increase. That’s a different business,” he wrote of the jump from a $2,200 DJI kit to an American-made equivalent he puts at $11,000 to $16,000. That number is his, and DroneXL has not priced the comparison, but the direction is not in dispute.

Tariffs and the Covered List Hit the Entry Point Hardest

Both federal actions Richard blames land on the hardware a beginner buys. The FCC’s December 22, 2025, Covered List designation blocks new authorizations for foreign-made drones. The Section 232 tariffs in force since September 3 put 25 percent on drones of 25 kilograms or less, which covers every consumer model.

DroneXL reported the FCC’s decision to sweep all foreign drones onto the Covered List on the day it happened. Previously authorized DJI models remain legal to buy and fly, though the FCC has already shown, with an import cutoff on older Covered List equipment, exactly how DJI’s grandfathering could end. The Section 232 proclamation adds a 100 percent duty on drones over 25 kilograms, on any drone with a thermal camera, and on docking stations, with a further 25 percent on components from February 9, 2027.

None of that touches a Skydio X10 or a Neros Archer. It touches the $759 Mini that a 16-year-old buys with summer-job money, passes the Part 107 test on at the minimum age, and flies for a roofing company the next spring. The Drone Service Providers Alliance made the same point to the FCC ahead of the September 2 comment deadline, and Vic Moss dropped the diplomatic tone doing it. In Richard’s thread, Moss put the blame on elected officials and on companies like Skydio and BRINC, with AUVSI “carrying their water in front of Congress,” and called the result a plan to legislate rather than innovate.

Some states are trying to build the pipeline by other means. Oklahoma runs a four-year high school track that ends in a Part 107 certificate, which DroneXL covered in March. Those programs need aircraft students can afford to crash.

DroneXL’s Take

The Army spent a year and about a billion dollars proving America can build cheap attack drones fast, by recruiting people who learned on a $300 quad in a parking lot. Now the same government calls that kid’s next drone a security threat and taxes its replacement at 25 percent.

Data security on drones flown for the military and police is a real concern, and DroneXL has argued for years that the answer is a security standard any manufacturer has to meet, tested and enforced, whatever country the company sits in. Washington chose the other route and banned by passport. The result is a Covered List that treats a Mini 5 Pro as a national security threat while the law behind Blue UAS, Section 848 of the 2020 NDAA, defines critical components as the flight controller, radios, cameras, gimbal, ground station, software, and data storage. Batteries and motors are not on that list. In October 2024, Beijing ordered Skydio’s sole battery supplier, TDK subsidiary Dongguan Poweramp, to cut the company off, and Skydio rationed batteries for months while it found another source. The most “American” drone on the Pentagon’s approved list could not fly without a Chinese cell, and the rule that put it there did not care. A standard that tested what a drone does with its data would have caught a bad drone from anywhere. A ban by country of origin caught the hobbyist, waved through the battery, and never needed a tariff on a 249-gram camera drone with no thermal sensor. The Covered List and Section 232 treat the hobbyist as collateral, and the FAA’s own data says the hobbyist was already leaving. The recreational registry has shrunk every month for two years. The FAA thinks it bottoms in 2027, and that forecast was written before the tariff.

Richard’s LinkedIn post got the diagnosis half right. The solo operator is not going extinct; there are 493,000 certificate holders and a third of them never fly a paying job. That is a glut of paper. What is disappearing is the cheap first aircraft, the foam RC plane and the $300 quad, and that is the thing that produced Soren Monroe-Anderson, Joshua Bardwell, the Ukrainian FPV pilots the Army is now copying, and a fair share of the 22 percent of remote pilots who also hold a crewed certificate. Nobody decides at 22 to become a fighter pilot. They decide at 14, in a Blue Angels flight suit at a flying field, holding a Blue Angels model they could afford. My read is that the fleet-consolidation story Richard repeats comes from a Nasdaq-listed roll-up’s own press releases; ZenaTech lost $45 million last year to acquire 25 surveying shops, and Zeitview’s “fleet” is a dispatch app for freelancers flying their own DJI gear. The talent-pipeline story is the one with a federal agency’s numbers behind it.

Watch two dates. September 30 is Hegseth’s squad-level deadline, and Merkl has already said the Army will hit the hardware target and miss the training one. February 9, 2027, is when the 25 percent component tariff lands on the props and frames the FPV community builds with. If recreational registrations are still falling in next spring’s FAA forecast, the Pentagon will be buying a million drones for a country that has stopped producing the people who fly them for fun.

Sources: FAA Aerospace Forecast FY 2026–2046, Emerging Aviation Entrants, Military Times, Defense News, ZenaTech, KPMG on the Section 232 proclamation, Eric Richard on LinkedIn.

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

DJI Neo 3 Box Lists Nine Items. The Neo 2's Transceiver Isn't One

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:25:00 GMT

Leaker Igor Bogdanov posted four more DJI Neo 3 photos on Saturday, and one of them is the back of the box. The Fly More Combo’s in-the-box panel lists nine items: the aircraft, three flight batteries, a charging hub, the DJI RC Mini, an RC Mini expansion cover, an RC Mini anti-loosening pad, spare propellers, a screwdriver and a USB-C cable.

Missing from that list is the Digital Transceiver, the clip-on module every DJI Neo 2 needs before it will talk to a controller or a pair of goggles. The same panel prints China’s two new mandatory drone standards, in force since May 1, 2026, next to a 2026 copyright line. Another photo shows the box held up beside a store display of the Neo 2, the drone this one replaces.

DroneXL covered the front of this box on Tuesday, when Bogdanov first showed it.

DJI Neo 3 Fly More Combo Drops the Neo 2’s Transceiver

The Neo 3 Fly More Combo box lists no Digital Transceiver. The Neo 2 combo includes one: a 9-gram module that bolts onto the aircraft and carries DJI’s O4 video link to a controller or goggles. Without it, a Neo 2 streams only over Wi-Fi to a phone.

The back of the DJI Neo 3 retail box lists its contents, including the aircraft, three flight batteries, charging hub and DJI RC Mini controller. Photo: Igor Bogdanov.

The Neo 2’s combo, by comparison, is a 13-item kit on DJI’s contents list. Retail listings for that combo count the aircraft, the RC-N3, two RC-N phone cables, three batteries, the hub, spare props, four spare screws, a screwdriver, a pair of propeller guards, the Digital Transceiver, a gimbal protector and a USB-C cable. DJI’s Neo 2 spec sheet gives the aircraft’s takeoff weight as 151 g without the transceiver and 160 g with it. DroneXL’s Neo 2 FPV guide walks new owners through attaching the module before the drone will pair with a Motion 3 or FPV Remote Controller 3.

Four of those 13 items have no counterpart on the Neo 3 panel, which draws icons rather than printing DJI’s full contents list. The transceiver is gone. So is the gimbal protector. The separate pair of propeller guards is gone too, and the Neo 3’s aircraft icon draws the spoked cages as part of the airframe. The two phone cables are gone as well, which follows from a controller with its own screen.

Two items are new. The box names an “RC Mini Expansion Cover” and an “RC Mini Anti-Loosening Pad,” each with its own icon, and says nothing about what either does. The battery count and the charging hub carry over from the Neo 2 combo unchanged.

Neo 3 Box Prints China’s Registration and Remote ID Standards

The panel lists the Chinese national standards the kit is built to: GB 42590-2023 plus two newer ones, GB 46761-2025 and GB 46750-2025. The 2025 pair are mandatory rules on real-name registration and activation and on operational identification, China’s version of Remote ID. Both took effect May 1, 2026.

China’s market regulator approved both standards in late 2025, and Xinhua reported that the registration standard requires a drone to be incapable of flight before it is activated and after activation is cancelled. GB 42590-2023 is the older safety-requirements standard for civil drones. A Neo 2 box printed in 2025 could not have carried the two new numbers, so this panel dates the packaging to a market where those rules already bind.

The product name reads “DJI Neo 3 畅飞套装 (DJI RC Mini),” which is Fly More Combo (DJI RC Mini), and the service hotline is 400-700-0303, a mainland Chinese number. A separate notice marked for mainland China only cites the country’s interim regulations on unmanned aircraft flight management. The EU contact line names DJI GmbH at Industriestrasse 12 in Niederlauer, Germany. The copyright reads 2026, and a trademark line states that DJI and DJI NEO are marks of DJI.

The rest of the panel is standard DJI. A DJI Care Refresh block promises affordable replacements, flyaway coverage, DJI Care Express and free shipping, with the fine print that the plan is sold separately. A red 16+ age mark sits beside a row of warnings in several languages, including Dutch and Russian. The bottom edge of the front carries CE and UKCA marks and Made for iPhone and Final Cut Pro badges.

Neo 3 Box Photographed Beside a Neo 2 Display Model in a Store

Bogdanov shot the box in a store stocked with DJI products, holding it beside a DJI Neo 2 display model on a stand above an RC-N3 controller. The Neo 2 is the drone the Neo 3 replaces, and the side-by-side shows the change: closed guard rings against spoked cages.

The Neo 2 on the stand is the grey retail unit DJI sells today, with the RC-N3 that ships in its Fly More Combo. The Neo 3 on the box art is white, with a dome on top of the fuselage that the Neo 2 lacks and rows of vent slots along the body. Both put a gimbal camera in the nose. Bogdanov, who posted the four photos on X on Saturday afternoon Eastern time, did not say where the store is.

The RC Mini on the box has its own screen and, as DroneXL reported on Tuesday, a U.S. FCC grant issued December 19, 2025, three days before the FCC put foreign-made drones on its Covered List. The aircraft has no such grant, and DJI never gave the Neo 2 an official U.S. launch either.

The red “Not For Sale” sticker, cropped in Tuesday’s photo, is fully legible this time. The front of the box is otherwise unchanged from the one that surfaced on Tuesday.

DroneXL’s Take

The missing transceiver is the detail I care about. DroneXL’s Neo 2 FPV guide exists partly because of that module: the drone-only box didn’t include it, and the drone won’t pair with a controller or goggles until it’s screwed on. My read of the nine-item panel is that DJI moved the O4 radio inside the airframe, which is where it belonged on a drone marketed to people who have never flown anything. I can’t prove that from a box. A panel that bothers to draw a screwdriver and an anti-loosening pad isn’t skipping a 9-gram module by accident, though.

A retail box with a Not For Sale sticker, photographed in a store that already stocks the Neo 2, is about as close to a launch as a leak gets without a date.

This box is printed for a market where a drone cannot take off until it is registered to a named person and broadcasts its identity in flight, under rules Beijing made mandatory in May. The standards line says DJI built that compliance into a 2026 consumer product, the way it built FAA Remote ID into the ones it sold here. The FCC’s answer, since December, is that no new DJI aircraft gets authorized at all, and so this one, with a controller the FCC already approved, will ship wherever DJI can sell it, and the FCC’s own record says that excludes the United States. American beginners get the year-old Neo 2 with a radio you screw on, or a no-name toy with no sensing. That protects nobody’s airspace.

When DJI announces this drone, expect no U.S. store page for it unless the Covered List changes first, and nothing in the record says it will.

Sources: Igor Bogdanov on X, Xinhua

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

Amazon Plans Portland Drone Hub in a State That Fought FAA Review

Haye Kesteloo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:01:00 GMT

Amazon wants to fly delivery drones out of North Portland. A pre-application conference request filed with the city’s permitting department shows the company proposing a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center at its sub-same-day fulfillment center at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with service planned for early 2027. This is Portland, Oregon, not Maine: the address is the former Portland Meadows racetrack beside Interstate 5, in the Delta Park industrial strip a few minutes north of downtown.

It would be the first Prime Air hub serving customers in Oregon, or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. Amazon has flown in the state for years, at the Pendleton UAS Range in Eastern Oregon, where its test program has an FAA environmental assessment of its own. Portland appears in none of Amazon’s published expansion plans, and, as of the Drone Delivery Tracker’s September 16 sweep, in none of the 40 Amazon delivery hubs DroneXL has pulled from FAA filings. A city permit surfaced it, the same way a Tacoma Walmart permit surfaced Wing’s first Washington hub four days ago.

Oregon’s attorney general is one of 17 who told the FAA in January that its national drone delivery review was “a paper exercise.” The FAA signed it anyway in July. If the FAA decides the Portland site fits inside that national review, no Portland-specific federal environmental document and no federal comment period follows. Portland’s own land-use process is separate, and it is the only public step the city controls.

Amazon’s Portland Request Covers a Building, Not the Flights

A pre-application conference is a meeting with city planners that Portland requires before certain land-use applications. It approves nothing. Amazon’s request describes a Prime Air Drone Delivery Center added to the existing warehouse at 1001 N. Schmeer Road, with drone delivery from the site planned for early 2027.

The Portland Business Journal reported the filing first, and Amazon confirmed the plan without adding to it. “We are currently working with local officials and exploring opportunities,” spokesperson Farah Jad told the paper, describing Portland as one of several locations the company is looking at.

What a city gets to review in this process is the ground. In Richardson, Texas, the equivalent step covered a fenced launch pad and two modular buildings for battery charging, maintenance and storage, and the city first updated its zoning so applicants could seek a special permit for drone operations. Portland’s conference will sort out the same kind of questions: structures, parking, stormwater, whether the industrial zoning already allows what Amazon wants to build.

The air is federal. Prime Air flies under a Part 135 air carrier certificate, and a new operating area needs FAA approval, typically an amendment to Amazon’s operations specifications plus whatever environmental determination the agency attaches to it. Portland can shape the pad. It cannot decide whether 83-pound (38-kilogram) aircraft cross Kenton and Bridgeton on the way to a customer’s yard.

The same public records show Amazon leased two more Portland warehouses in August, at 4444 S.E. 27th Avenue and 2405 N. Albina Avenue, for Amazon Now, its 30-minute delivery service that runs from small urban sites without drones. The drone center is one piece of a wider Portland build-out.

Portland Appears in None of Amazon’s Public Plans or FAA Filings

Amazon’s August 19 expansion announcement listed 11 operating sites in seven states and named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as next. Oregon was absent. DroneXL’s Drone Delivery Tracker holds 40 Amazon hubs drawn from FAA filings, and at its September 16 sweep Portland was not among them.

DroneXL found no Portland document of any kind on the FAA’s drone environmental review page on September 19; the page was last updated September 11. The company says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold jump from the current footprint, with each site covering about 175 square miles (453 square kilometers). An early-2027 Portland launch falls just outside that window, which is consistent with a hub that has not yet reached the FAA paperwork stage.

The permit-before-announcement pattern is becoming the way new hubs get found. Wing’s first Washington hub showed up in a Tacoma Walmart permit on September 15, in a state that had appeared on none of Wing’s announced market lists. Tracy, California got a car show booth and a launch date before any federal document appeared for the site. Portland now has a land-use filing and a launch quarter, and nothing else on the public record.

Oregon is not new ground for Amazon, only Portland is. Prime Air has flown at the Pendleton UAS Range at Eastern Oregon Regional Airport since 2019, and the FAA signed an environmental assessment for those test operations in November 2022, then re-evaluated it in August 2025 to let the MK30 fly there for testing and training. Pendleton is also where the aircraft’s development record was written. OPB and the Northwest News Network counted 10 crashes serious enough to be reported to federal authorities at the range by mid-2022, nearly all of them Amazon’s delivery drone, and Bloomberg reported that spring on current and former employees who said the program had prioritized speed over safety. Amazon said at the time that the move to customer deliveries showed the technology was safe and no longer experimental.

Pendleton is a test range, not a delivery hub, which is why it does not appear in the tracker’s hub count. Portland will be added as an announced hub with no FAA decision found, and the entry gets checked at Monday’s weekly sweep. (The tracker updates the day a story publishes; the sweep catches what the stories miss.)

Oregon Signed the Letter Calling the FAA’s Drone Review a Paper Exercise

On January 23, attorneys general from 17 states, Oregon included, told the FAA its draft national assessment for Part 135 drone delivery could not support a no-impact finding and asked for a full impact statement. The FAA signed the finding on July 28. New hubs are measured against it.

DroneXL covered the nationwide finding when it landed. It holds only if operators implement the noise mitigation written into the assessment, and the core of that is physical: at the analyzed ceiling of 1,150 average daily deliveries, a hub is sited with a 600-foot (183-meter) setback from noise-sensitive uses, and a proposal outside the national envelope tiers off into a narrower supplemental review. Oregon’s signature on the January letter does not change any of that for Portland. The state asked for a bigger process and did not get one.

Whether Portland gets a site document of its own is now an FAA choice made without a public step. Chicago’s draft assessment ran a comment period. Baton Rouge’s did too, and Amazon started commercial service there 15 days before it closed. Tracy has nothing. Under the statute governing review of FAA orders, 49 U.S.C. 46110, a challenge to the July 28 decision has to be filed within 60 days, which runs out on September 26, one week from today. After that the default for the next several hundred towns is settled in the agency’s favor.

Washington’s attorney general fought the same finding, and Wing’s Tacoma hub is arriving under it regardless. Oregon and Washington are the two Pacific Northwest signatories, and both now have a drone delivery hub coming that neither state’s legal position slowed by a day.

The Schmeer Road Site Sits Inside Portland International’s Airspace

The warehouse sits about 4 miles (6.8 kilometers) west of Portland International Airport and 2 miles (3.1 kilometers) south of Pearson Field in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River. PDX’s Class C airspace runs from the surface to 4,000 feet within 5 nautical miles, and Schmeer Road is inside it.

The Class C description in 14 CFR Part 71 carves out only two areas near the site: a low-altitude box over Pearson Field on the north shore of the Columbia, and everything west of the Willamette’s east bank. Delta Park is east of the Willamette and south of the Columbia, so neither exclusion applies. The FAA describes Pearson’s runway 8 threshold as sitting directly under the instrument approach to PDX runway 10L, which is why it wrote Pearson its own special flight rules area. What Class C means for a Part 135 drone operation from this address is set by Amazon’s FAA authorization, and nothing about that authorization is public yet.

Amazon’s MK30 cruises between 180 and 377 feet (55 to 115 meters) above ground in its FAA filings and carries up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), with existing hubs serving a radius of about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers). A circle that size drawn around Schmeer Road would reach most of North and Northeast Portland, part of Vancouver, Washington, and the approach paths into PDX. Whether Portland’s service area looks anything like that circle depends on the routes and boundaries the FAA approves, and none of them are public. The Portland filing describes a building.

The safety record Portland is being asked to host is on the tracker. Seven Amazon incidents in DroneXL’s files, among them the October 2025 crane strikes in Tolleson, a cable strike in Waco, an apartment crash in Richardson, a package dropped into a Richmond, Texas pool in August, and an MK30 that set itself down beside a Baton Rouge road on September 11, two months into service there. The MK30 carries no parachute or ballistic recovery system in any of Amazon’s FAA filings, and it releases packages from about 13 feet (4 meters).

DroneXL sent Amazon 25 written safety questions about the MK30 between September 3 and September 10, including its fleet flight hours and what changed after Tolleson. The final deadline was September 15. Zipline answered its set in part. Amazon has answered none.

DroneXL’s Take

I want Prime Air in Portland. A drone hub that gets a package across North Portland in 30 minutes without a van on I-5 is the kind of drone use DroneXL exists to cover, and Amazon’s 11 sites move thousands of packages a day, most of them without incident. Thirteen years of engineering went into that aircraft, by its own account, and the record of it flying is mostly a record of it working.

The record also has seven entries in it, and Amazon has now let two DroneXL deadlines pass without answering a single written question about any of them. That is the company Portland is dealing with. Not the community team with the static display and the free tacos, who are excellent, but the one that decides which questions get answered on the record, which so far is none.

Portland holds less than it thinks and more than Amazon would like. The city cannot touch the airspace. What it does hold, my read of the process rather than a legal opinion, is the timetable for the ground: the pad, the buildings, the permits Amazon needs before anything flies. A pre-application conference is the one moment when Amazon has to sit across a table from a public body and explain the building, and the planners in that room can ask for the operating documents that go with it: the noise modeling, the delivery area map, the FAA correspondence, and whether the site will get its own environmental assessment or ride the national one. Baton Rouge’s FAA filing had a wildlife appendix a resident could open. Portland should ask for the same before it agrees to anything about a parking lot.

The January letter Oregon signed was right about the review and lost anyway, and the loss is now Portland’s problem to manage locally. I don’t know what weight, if any, the finding carried in Amazon’s site selection, and Amazon has not said. What I can see is the sequence: a signatory state, a finding signed in July, a land-use filing in September, and a launch quarter that lands before any court has ruled on whether the states had a point. Watch September 26. If no challenge is filed by then, the only public process Portland gets is the one its own permitting office runs, and the tracker will show whether Amazon files anything with the FAA before the first MK30 leaves Schmeer Road.

Sources: Portland Business Journal via KGW, Amazon, Community Impact, Federal Register, FAA NEPA and Drones, OPB.

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 After 3 Months: The Best and Worst of Flying 360

Greg Reverdiau — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:20:00 GMT

Is 360-degree footage worth the editing headache, or is it just going to eat up your entire weekend? The DJI Avata 360 is DJI’s first 360-degree drone, and we have spent about the last three months testing it, flying it, and editing footage from it. Today I want to talk about the best and the worst parts of this drone, the pros and the cons. We will cover the editing workflow, the camera quality, and everything else we have tested.

I’m Greg from Pilot Institute. We have trained over 150,000 remote pilots and reviewed dozens of drones already. Joining me for this one is Ben, our head of production. Ben actually bought an Avata 360 himself, has been flying it a lot, and has been editing a ton of footage while getting used to the whole workflow. These are all the things you should know about the Avata 360 before you buy it.

The Worst Part: Editing Is a Bigger Deal Than Most People Expect

Let’s start with the worst, the editing, because it is a bigger part of the experience than most people expect. If you stick with the camera’s default view, you can use the footage right away, just like a regular camera. But if you want to take advantage of everything a 360 camera has to offer, you are going to need to spend some time reframing your shots before exporting them. That takes real time.

Ben’s counterpoint is that the time buys you something a traditional camera drone simply cannot offer. You have full control to decide every angle and change the camera movement after you have already flown. You get extreme flexibility to grab a camera angle anywhere at any time from a single shot. I see that as a pro too. It is one of the biggest elements of this drone and a huge part of the selling package.

There is a catch, though. You still have to fly the shot. Some people think they can fly from a distance and zoom into a place the drone never went. You can’t. If you are flying over a river on the right side and you look over, you cannot turn the camera to the left side of the river if your drone was never there.

The editing does get faster with practice. When Ben started, he had only edited a little bit of 360 footage before, and certainly not to this extent. His learning curve was one to two hours to get basic-level knowledge, and after that the more advanced things came quicker as he picked up the command sets. You can also choose how much time you spend depending on how creative you want to be. You can get a straight shot out of the camera pretty quickly if you just want the kind of shot you would normally get with a drone. The creative stuff is what takes more time. You can do a couple of little keyframes, maybe a flip, or you can go crazy and pull a bunch of shots out of one clip.

Once you have done some editing, you start thinking about your shots differently because you know what you can do in post. When we first started testing, we were flying at Watson Lake next to a paddleboarder wondering what we could do with the shot later. After editing those clips, Ben went back out flying with a plan for exactly what he would do with each clip. It really helps you plan your shots and get the most out of them.

Another pro is that you can film for both horizontal and vertical video in one flight with easy cropping in post. That is a big deal if you are producing for different types of social media. For us, we may film a long-form video in horizontal but want to pull pieces out for short content, and we can crop vertical in post.

DJI Studio: Free, but With Limitations

Ben has been using DJI Studio primarily. There are other options. You can edit in Final Cut, and there is a plugin for Adobe, and we tested both a little, but he really wanted to get familiar with DJI Studio and find out what it is like. It is also free, which is a big deal. People always ask what software they should use to edit their videos. This one comes for free, and if you find it too limiting you can spend the money on something like Final Cut, which is what we use in the office alongside the occasional Adobe product.

Ben found a couple of limitations. There is no histogram, so you cannot check your luma values, and he uses that as a guide more often than not rather than eyeballing it. Copying and pasting attributes is also less flexible. There is an option to copy attributes across all the clips in the project, say if you change a color value or apply a LUT, but it is not a simple command-C, command-V onto one clip. It spreads across everything, so you have less control. Still, it is free and it gets you started.

The power you have in the edit is real, even if it takes more time. We have one clip where we fly over a river and see some people out by the water. We can orbit around them, turn the camera as we come back to get a view of the mountains in the background, and then keep editing that same flight as we go under a bridge and do some creative stuff there. All from one clip. Ben doesn’t think he could have pulled that off with a regular camera in one flight, and if he could, it would have taken several takes. That creative flexibility is just really fun to play with.

Image Quality: Unbeatable on Paper, With Some Buts

On paper, this drone sounds unbeatable. 8K at 60 frames per second. Dual 1/1.1-inch sensors, which is fairly big, almost a 1-inch sensor. 120-megapixel stills. But there are some buts.

That 8K describes the full sphere of footage. The moment you start cropping into a single angle, which is what you want to do for almost every usable shot, the image can start to get soft or a little muddy at times, especially around the edges of the frame, because you are cropping in so much.

We have a tip that might sound counterintuitive but really helps: drop the in-camera sharpening all the way down to -1 or -2. That sounds like it would make your footage worse, but it actually cleans it up, because otherwise the footage is oversharpened and overprocessed, and turning it down makes it easier to work with afterwards. This is not just this drone. It is a common technique with newer cameras that tend to oversharpen, and I personally don’t like the look. The nice thing is you can adjust the sharpening in your editing software later, so you still have that flexibility.

Something to keep in mind: this is not your Air 3S. This is not your Mini 5 Pro. The image quality is not going to look as good as those drones, and we said this when the Avata 360 came out. This is not a drone designed to replace the Air 3S. It is an action camera you are going to fly close to the ground doing crazy maneuvers. It is an FPV drone. It is not designed to be the fixed-frame real estate camera.

And again, you can alter the angle as much as you want in post, but if you didn’t fly close enough to your subject, you are not going to be able to zoom in and scale correctly. You will have to punch in more, and you will lose more image quality. It all comes down to your flight and doing the right thing from the get-go. You are going to do a couple of passes, do some testing, and figure out how close you need to be.

A big pro is the 10-bit D-Log M. That is actually unusual for 360 cameras, and it really helps in post to bring life to the footage. You shoot in D-Log M, apply a LUT, and you have more flexibility. In DJI Studio, when you add a LUT you can dial it back from 100 percent, which is not always an option in editing software, and there is a color recovery slider as well. You have a lot of options for how saturated you make the footage.

One unique feature is the tiny planet view. It is very clear and it is an angle you cannot get with other drones. But I think it is a pro as much as it is a con. That angle gets old pretty quickly. It was really cool when it first came out, and like a lot of things it got overused. Use it sparingly, maybe once per video and that is it. Ben’s suggestion is to use the tiny planet view as a starting point to push into the footage rather than sitting on it.

Tracking Might Be What This Drone Does Best

Just like other DJI drones, you can use Spotlight or ActiveTrack to lock onto a subject while you fly. But with 360 footage, you can also track during your edit, which is a pretty big deal, because tracking a subject is not always easy and doing it in post is a lot easier.

When you use ActiveTrack 360° in flight, it locks onto a subject and keeps it centered no matter which direction the drone turns. And because you are reframing from a full sphere, that same tracking carries into post-production. It is not perfect yet, don’t get us wrong, but it is probably the most advanced tracking we have seen, especially with the ability to track in post. For people who struggle with chasing a subject and predicting where it will go, this solves a lot of that.

One of the cool things is that ActiveTrack comes with a secondary window, a dual view with picture-in-picture, so you can still watch where you are flying while the drone tracks. You can swap the views so the big window shows where you are actually flying, and the small window shows what the drone is tracking, which can be directly behind you. That is exactly what Ben and Jason did when they were tracking the Wildcat, and it is such a cool tool.

Tracking in post through DJI Studio is intuitive and pretty easy. DJI Studio often recognizes subjects like people or cars and gives you the little plus sign, just like ActiveTrack on the controller. Sometimes it struggles, but a lot of the time you can manually draw a box, just like the Spotlight feature, hit go, and it tracks that subject the whole time. You still have the option to track manually as well.

The Flight Experience Is a Matter of Preference

The flight experience might be the best part for some and the worst for others. Flying FPV with the Avata 360 really comes down to personal preference. You can fly with a standard controller and joysticks, or go full FPV with the motion controller and the goggles. Well, not full FPV entirely, because you are not going to flip it around like an FPV quad, but you are steering with your wrist movements instead of the sticks. You can also use the FPV Remote Controller 3 or the RC-N3 with the goggles if you don’t like the motion controller.

There is no manual mode, so it is not real FPV in that sense. I don’t think that is what this drone was designed for. A lot of people probably wanted it, but Ben isn’t missing it personally, and FPV flyers typically don’t buy DJI drones. They build their own. That said, imagine being able to do all those tricks with a 360 camera on top. That is possible if you build your own drone, just not with this one.

A bit of a con is the power. It doesn’t seem to be as strong as it could be. It is heavier than the Avata 2 and heavier than any sub-250-gram drone, obviously. It is rated Level 5 for wind, which is up to 24 miles per hour, so it can struggle in some cases. There is certain weather Ben still won’t take it out in, like light rain. He also put it up in roughly 20 mph wind, without a barometer or windsock to confirm, and it definitely struggled from time to time. When you let go of the sticks in heavy wind, there is some drift and it takes a little bit to settle.

With all the options to fly, my favorite is honestly the DJI RC 2 without the goggles. I know that sounds weird for an FPV drone. But the RC 2 means I can clearly see the footage just like I would with my Air 3S, and I don’t need a visual observer, which means I can go out by myself.

Head tracking is available, but personally it felt a little weird, and as I mentioned in our review, it made me queasy pretty quickly. That is going to depend on you. Be careful with it, too. The drone is moving in one direction while you look around, and even though there is obstacle avoidance, you could still hit something because you are looking elsewhere. It is like driving your car and turning your head to talk to a passenger for five minutes like they do in old movies.

Obstacle Avoidance: Yes, We Crashed a Couple of Times

We want to give you our honest hands-on experience here rather than repeating the spec sheet DJI gave us. Ben crashed a couple of times. He took his daughter up to Mingus Mountain above Jerome, an area with a lot of pine trees, and was flying around with obstacle avoidance set to Bypass. Coming down into the tree line, he was trying to avoid a tree and expecting the drone to shift a little. It absolutely did not. It ran straight into that tree. He took his hands off the sticks right away so it could catch itself and adjust, but there were so many obstacles around it that it had nowhere to go. It hit a few pine needles and fell.

That speaks to the durability of this drone. We got a couple of scratches, but the lenses are still in good shape. And those lenses can be replaced with a kit, though we haven’t had to do that yet. We have put it on the ground a couple of times, and that wasn’t the only time.

With Bypass enabled, we also flew big orbits around trees and around solar panels at a school, and it handled really well and avoided everything. If it had been set to Brake in that tree line, Ben thinks it would have stopped. Because there were so many obstacles, it just didn’t know what to do. I had the same experience with the Neo 2 when I was running fast with it on Bypass. It doesn’t stop, it just bypasses, and when I was going too fast it clipped trees trying to get in front of me. Same thing with this drone. Pick it up, put it back up, and it just flies again, which is amazing. Usually when you hit something you break props or legs, and this doesn’t really have either exposed. The props are there, but they are tucked away.

If you are trying to fly through small gaps, turn obstacle avoidance off, and obviously be careful. It comes down to piloting skill. Ben was trying to fly through a doorway three and a half to four feet wide, and it wouldn’t do it on Brake or Bypass. He had to turn obstacle avoidance off to get through.

Two Lenses Means Twice the Glass Exposed to Everything

Here is an issue you can’t really avoid. With two lenses facing opposite directions, there is more glass exposed to the elements than on any other drone. That means more chances for dirt, moisture, and lens flare, and all of that shows up in your footage like a sore thumb.

That exposure also means the lenses are easier to damage. We have crashed it a couple of times, and a hard landing or even a small bump can crack a lens. You have to protect it more. It has been quite durable in our testing, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way. The replacement lens kit is fairly cheap, so buy a couple and you are good to go. The combo pack we purchased also came with a lens wipe and a little blower bulb. Wiping the lenses and clearing any dirt or debris should be on your checklist before every flight.

On lens flare: you can look around 360 degrees in post, but for the angles pointing directly at the sun, the flares are going to be pretty intense. It is not the nice star flare you sometimes want with a camera. Sometimes it just ruins the angle you are looking for. And if you are flying in person, you may not notice it because you weren’t looking at that angle until you got to the edit.

Also, because the camera is trying to expose for everything in the sphere at once, you have to be careful outdoors. You only have so much dynamic range. If you have bright sun on one side and heavy shadows on the other, the camera eventually has to average them out, and you may not get the best result everywhere. You can play with exposure in post, but keep in mind that this drone handles exposure differently than a traditional camera.

One way to keep dust and debris off those lenses is a landing pad. I cannot recommend it enough. We are in Arizona and we take off from dirt a lot. Pilot Institute sells one, and we spent a lot of time sourcing and testing it, so you can find it linked in the video description.

Night Footage and Where to Put the Strobe

A lot of you have been asking about the strobe light: where to put it and what it looks like in the footage. If you put it on top of the drone, it will show up, which makes sense because the camera records above and below the drone and stitches the body out. So we have been telling people to put it on the back.

Ben tested this in the studio. With the camera facing forward and the strobe on top, it doesn’t really get into the shot, though you will see the light flashing off the studio ceiling, which we couldn’t avoid. But rotate the camera to look behind the drone and you absolutely see the strobe, with no way to get rid of it. With the strobe on the back of the battery, you rotate the camera backward, up, and down and really can’t see it anywhere. That worked. What Ben doesn’t like is that you have to tape it over the battery’s power button, which is not ideal, but if you make it removable you can use it when you need it. You could also find a really tiny one to fit in there, but then it won’t be visible from three statute miles.

Night flying is going to be tougher with this drone, and it is probably not what it was designed for. Unless you are in a very bright city environment, I don’t know what footage you would get. ISO coverage is limited and it gets grainy. We have already had people asking why their footage is so grainy. Limit your maximum ISO when you fly at night.

Price, Batteries, and the Weight Problem

The pricing is actually really good, especially compared to the competitor we haven’t reviewed, the Antigravity, which is almost twice the price. The combo pack on the Avata 360 is somewhere around $900, so you get a lot for the money.

You will want extra batteries. With any drone, Ben never wants a single battery, and with this one, if you are really buzzing around, you are getting maybe about 20 minutes or so. For the fun he wants to have and the shots he wants to play with in post, he swaps batteries every time. He has never taken it out and flown only one.

The last bit is weight. This drone is not under 250 grams. It might look like it is, but it isn’t, which means it is not a Category 1 drone. It has the prop guards, which would help with Category 1 classification for flying over people, but this drone is not approved to fly over people. It is also bigger than it needs to be to get a waiver from the FAA without a parachute, so it will be very difficult to convince the FAA to let you fly it over people. And if you put a parachute on top, it ruins the 360-degree view. If you want to fly over people, I recommend a Mini-type drone right around 250 grams. Under 400 grams, you can apply to the FAA for a waiver to fly over people.

The weight also means you have to register the drone, which has consequences in other areas as well. The nice thing is that it has Remote ID built in, so you don’t need a module strapped to the drone somewhere risking it showing up in the 360 footage.

Who Is the Avata 360 Actually For?

After everything we have covered, you might be asking who this drone is actually for. My honest answer is that this is not a general-purpose drone, and it isn’t trying to be. It is built for people who want to be creative and get some really cool footage. If that is your use case, the tracking, the editing flexibility, and the ability to shoot once and pull multiple angles later make it the perfect tool. DJI has never released anything like this.

But if you want pixel-perfect image quality straight out of the drone, or if you are chasing true manual FPV, this is not the drone for you. And that is fine. It doesn’t have to do everything.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Greg Reverdiau. Watch the full Avata 360 review on the Pilot Institute YouTube channel, and find more of Greg’s work on his DroneXL author page.