Recent Updates

While drones are increasingly used near crowds, the FAA still prohibits their flight directly over people. As a means of gaining FAA approval to fly drones over crowds, a company called Indemnis has developed a fast-deploying ballistic parachute that’s designed to resist entanglement if the aircraft is tumbling or spinning, thus making crowd flights safer. […]

The NTSB has opened the docket on Air Canada Flight 759, which mistakenly overflew a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport, barely missing four other airplanes. Information released by the NTSB included the video below, showing Flight 759 in the upper left, and more than 500 pages of reports, interviews, documents and data on the […]

UPDATED: An Air National Guard WC-130 Hercules crashed near the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) in Savannah, Georgia, on Wednesday. It has been confirmed that there were nine people onboard, all of whom were killed in the accident. A press release from the National Guard 165th Airlift Wing stated that the aircraft was on training […]

The rollout of the FAA’s streamlined low-altitude airspace approval for drones rolled out this week with few hiccups, according to an FAA official at the AUVSI XPONENTIAL show in Denver. Wider deployment is expected later this year. The program is called Low Altitude Authorization Notification Capability—LAANC—and is the product of a cooperative effort between the […]

You may never have heard of a company called Flying-Cam, but you’ve seen its work in films like the James Bond series and the Harry Potter films. In this video shot at AUVSI’s XPONENTIAL 2018, the company’s Emmanuel Previnaire gives us a tour of the company’s entire history of helicopter-mounted cameras. view on YouTube

Following an intense hurricane season the Atlantic coast, drones were widely deployed to assist in recovery and damage assessment. But using them to best advantage requires much more effort and preparation than many in both the drone industry and local governments might grasp. In this podcast recorded at the AUVSI XPONENTIAL event in Denver, Chris […]

Build A Plane, the nonprofit that offers kids a chance to restore an airplane using donated aircraft, now is expanding into rocketry, and with help from a major unnamed donor, recently bought up the assets of XCOR, the bankrupt company that had been working to build the Lynx spaceplane, for $1.1 million. “Our donor heard […]

Following a major natural disaster, there’s no better way to quickly assess damage than by aerial survey. But companies doing that work following 2017’s intense hurricane season found that while flying the drones is easy, preparing the operation and sorting the data is anything but. At a panel program on drone use during last season’s […]

In the drone industry, operation beyond visual line of sight—BVLOS—is a holy grail of sorts. At AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2018 in Denver, a company called PrecisionHawk says it’s ready to market a drone that can safely detect and avoid other aircraft, making BVLOS practical now. view on YouTube

It’s a small step, but the Transportation Department on Monday took what could be the first move toward allowing the widespread commercial use of drones to transport cargo, and eventually, passengers as well. The DOT—the parent of the FAA—published a “notification of procedures” (PDF) on Monday stating that it will provide “certificate or exemption authority” […]