Near-misses, crashes, airspace violations, and arrests — when drone flights go wrong.
Drone incidents are where the hobby meets consequences, and this desk keeps the record: incursions, crashes, forced-downs and the enforcement that follows.
The recurring worst case is fire season. Spokane’s drone incursions grounded firefighting aircraft 26 times — every grounding a fire burning unfought — and the response escalated to an FBI counter-drone task force forcing hobby drones down over those same fires. The wildfire desk covers the other side: drones as the firefighting tool.
Attribution is getting harder to escape. Cellebrite locked down SkySafe as its only drone-forensics partner, betting big on the counter-drone evidence chain, and the FAA’s DETER program shortened the road from a reported violation to a real penalty.
And half this desk’s job is saying what did not happen: the IISS work separating real Russian drone incidents from phantom ones is the model — incident inflation feeds bad policy as surely as real incidents do. The counter-drone desk tracks the defensive hardware. Every incident story lands in the feed below.
Last updated August 23, 2026 — the feed below updates with every new story.
An FBI-led counter-drone unit built for the FIFA World Cup detected 41 unauthorized drones over the Spokane wildfires in four days and used electronic countermeasures to force them down. No pilots were arrested; the cases went to the FAA with fines of up to $100,000 each.
Civilian drones entered restricted airspace over the Spokane County wildfires at least 26 times in three days, repeatedly grounding helicopters and air tankers while three uncontained fires burned homes below. Two operators have been cited, and the cases have been referred to the FAA.
Cellebrite has become the exclusive digital forensics partner to SkySafe, expanding a relationship the two companies first built out through Cellebrite’s March 2026 acquisition of SCG Canada. The deal, announced Tuesday, ties Cellebrite’s mobile-device extraction platform directly into SkySafe’s drone detection and airspace intelligence feeds, giving investigators a single workflow that spans what
A London think tank has assembled the fullest picture yet of the drone incursions that rattled European airbases, airports and nuclear sites since late 2024, and its central claim is serious: Russian intelligence ran a coordinated surveillance campaign launched from vessels in Moscow’s sanctions-dodging “shadow fleet.” The 144-incident dataset is real, the pattern is unsettling,…
A Romanian Navy official lost two fingers and fractured a third on May 12 when her hand was caught in the propeller of a Shield AI V-BAT drone during a training exercise on a boat off the Texas coast. Romania’s Ministry of National Defence confirmed the injury to Reuters, which reported it Thursday as part…
The trigger was a single radar signature picked up over Belarus, with characteristics matching an unmanned aerial vehicle. The drone
The aircraft that once made aviation history by circumnavigating the globe on sunlight alone is now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Solar Impulse 2, the record-setting solar plane built by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, crashed during an autonomous test flight on May 4 after losing power. No one was on board,…
DIRT picks up where that training ends. A drone that has crashed, been shot down, been abandoned, or been found near sensitive infrastructure
You ground the aircraft actually fighting the fire — Spokane logged 26 groundings in one season — and increasingly you meet federal enforcement: an FBI counter-drone task force forced down hobby drones over those same fires. 'If you fly, we can't' is policy, not a slogan.
No, and the record matters: panics have chased aircraft, planets and nothing at all. We report what is documented — forensics, radio evidence, recovered hardware — and label the rest as unverified, because incident inflation feeds bad policy.
More than they used to. The FAA's DETER program shortened the path from report to penalty, criminal charges now follow the serious cases, and counter-drone forensics — the Cellebrite-SkySafe partnership, for instance — makes attribution far harder to escape.
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.
