Bruce Crumley

Global UAV company Skyports Drone Services is preparing to expand both its geographical footprint and the specialized aerial fleet it uses during trials of beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) deliveries across the Yeosu City area of South Korea, where it will deploy Swiss startup RigiTech craft for the first time.

Global airspace security specialist Dedrone has unveiled a solution it’s calling DedroneBeyond, designed to facilitate public safety agency deployment of UAVs as first responder assets in beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.

French automated aircraft inspection specialist Donecle has moved to strengthen its position in an activity it was among the first drone startups to pioneer with its recently completed second round of fund raising that attracted €5.6 million ($5.9 million), and a leading industrial backer in Dutch paint giant AkzoNobel.

Just three weeks after Skydio’s release of its new, tech-amped X10 drone, the company is now rolling out its Remote Flight Deck solution permitting users to operate the craft from a simple browser – providing a potentially invaluable asset for police, fire, first responder, and other intended operators.

DroneUp has launched the first of its dedicated drone deliveries of medicine to patients’ homes in eastern Virginia – the first in a potentially broad range of aerial activities organized by a collective of businesses, universities, and non-profit associations to improve healthcare in the region.

In an application that fails to qualify – by several time zones – for the vaunted “drones for good” category, a startup in Monaco has celebrated its maiden mission of delivering a luxury payload, including Champagne worth several hundred dollars, to an offshore luxury super yacht.

Deliveries of banned materials to prison inmates by drone have gotten more ambitious and audacious around the world as their frequency multiplied, but the aerial smuggling ring police in western France broke up stands out for its quasi-startup organization and efficiency.

Defense and security UAV specialist Teledyne FLIR Defense has unveiled the upgraded fourth-generation model of its highly touted Black Hornet drone, an aerial asset that has proven vital in surveillance and intelligence gathering work for Ukraine defense forces, among others.

Like most successful startups that preceded them, many drone companies – and above all, the advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft developers first inspired by UAVs – factored in stock flotations as an essential source of their financing (and possibly self-perceptions as leading sector forces). Now, however, some are finding being traded on Wall Street can generate as much distraction and drag as it has capital to soar from.

Innovative Swiss UAV-glider company Jedsy is partnering with German medical group Asklepios Kliniken in a project to create a broad network of drone delivery routes between hospitals and labs that analyze patient blood, tissue, and other samples.

Militias battling Myanmar’s military junta have been applying the lessons learned from Ukraine about deftly using small drones against a larger and far-better-equipped army and have now also increased their odds of completing aerial strikes by cracking the army’s UAV jamming tech.

Zipline, which established its reputation as the leader in drone instant logistics services by quickly transporting medical supplies in nations around the globe, is now reinforcing its commercial UAV activities through a new partnership delivering meals for restaurant chain Mendocino Farms in western US states, using its new P2 platform.

Sustainable next-generation aircraft developer REGENT has taken another major step toward the manufacturing and marketing of its all-electric seagliders for advanced air mobility (AAM) services by securing $60 million in Series A Round funding round.

The UK UAV company Skyports Drone Services didn’t wait long to put its decision to acquire Pyka heavy-lift cargo craft into action, announcing this week it had successfully completed a trial of their aerial applications during a Royal Navy tech demonstration event.

With the anticipated start of air taxi services in the US set for 2025, it’s not exactly premature for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to have issued its first approval of a vertiport – a conditional greenlight that nevertheless permits development and research of nearing advanced air mobility (AAM) activity.

New or expanded drone operation by police is always a sensitive, when not controversial proposition and one requiring careful examination. And that’s just what Philadelphia City Council members did in discussing the idea when they got an up-close-and-personal gander at a UAV flown inside the meeting hall.

Only a week after DJI introduced its new Mini 4 Pro consumer drone – whose full visual and tech details had been unearthed in months prior by online sleuths – the company’s rumored Matrice 3D docked enterprise UAV has taken over the central position in the crosshairs of reactivated leakers, who appear to have nabbed footage of the craft shot through the windows of the firm’s headquarters.

Inventive drone hardware and systems company FIXAR has announced a new flight capability for its fixed-wing 007 UAVs with the unveiling of its Surface Follow automated navigation feature, which both identifies and avoids low-altitude obstacles that many satellite maps fail to account for.

With Ukraine battling dozens of incoming, explosive-packed Russian drones assaulting its cities every night, one additional concern in shooting those craft down is the considerable cost to the nation’s financially strapped defense reserves that involves – a pinch an Australian counter-UAV tech producer is now acting to solve.

Police in the popular UK coastal city of Brighton have begun flying late-night drone patrols of the beachfront in an effort to halt a recent series of sexual assaults in the area.

Among all the cases of drones deployed to deliver drugs and other contraband into prisons around the globe that DroneDJ has reported over the months, the plot busted by Louisiana police this month is one of the largest and most audacious of those aerial criminal enterprises.