Bruce Crumley

South Korea’s Doosan Mobility Innovation has struck a triangular partnership with utility Southern California Gas Co. and clean energy firm GTI to develop the use of hydrogen-powered drones for pipeline inspections and other long-flying business and public services.

Many companies have factored measures to combat global warming into their business plans. But for Australian startup AirSeed Technologies, reducing carbon levels is its business plan – and one driving the company’s ambition to plant 100 million trees using drones by 2024.

French police believe three men accused of stealing well over a half-million dollars worth of luxury cars used a drone to find their targets in several posh towns along France’s Normandy coast. The only hitch in the case is the UAV has flown the coop.

Martin Warner, the millionaire entrepreneur and CEO of UK urban air mobility (UAM) startup Autonomous Flight, says his rollout of air taxi service in the country could come as soon as 2024, and cost no more than a (somewhat pricey) Uber ride.

Disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused Melbourne’s planned New Year’s Eve drone show to be canceled, but Sydney found a work-around to the complications it encountered to host an Intel orchestrated UAV performance purported to be the largest ever in the southern hemisphere.

The governments of Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario have announced a joint feasibility study for a drone corridor permitting aerial transport of goods between the two neighbors – and, of course, over the international border between them.

Taking inspiration from recent moves by US government agencies to blacklist Chinese tech companies – including global drone giant DJI – over potential security concerns, Japan has discreetly nurtured development of a home-grown alternative to UAVs from China that dominate its market – a top-down version of America’s Blue sUAS.

The Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance (NUAIR) says it has gotten approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights over a vastly expanded 35-mile swath of New York’s UAS Test Site drone corridor.

Specialized Swedish drone services company Everdrone has long been an innovator in public UAV operations, but last month it actually made history when one of its craft flew an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) to a man in Sweden who’d suffered a cardiac arrest, saving his life.

This just might be pushing the convenience store concept a tad too far. According to news reports, the ubiquitous, always-open 7-Eleven chain is preparing to launch an app-facilitated drone delivery service in Japan. Soon, there may be nothing left for consumers to do but pay online, tip the old head back, and open their mouths.

In launching the new Skydio 2+, Redwood City-based Skydio is not limiting itself to rolling out a cool autonomous drone with groundbreaking KeyFrame filming technology, but also introducing the Skydio Care protection option to cover mishaps that eventually befall those new craft.

Have a weighty payload you need to spirit across the sky farther than other UAVs can handle? You might want to check out the Firefly heavy-lift drone, which can lug 100 lbs. of gear cargo up to two full hours.

There’s already reason for hope that this year may well be better 2021. Almost impossibly, it seems, aerial arts specialist SKYMAGIC managed to put on an even more spectacular drone show for London’s 2022 New Year’s celebration than the gem it staged last year.

A UK company that had been specializing in counter-drone systems is now proposing to deploy UAVs to protect women from street assaults, using an emergency app leading craft to where calls for help were made, according to British media reports.

Drone data collection company Soaring Eagle Technologies is getting close to operating beyond line of visual sight (BVLOS) missions as a regular way of doing work. Late in December, the inspection service provider to critical infrastructure owners across the US received yet another Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) waiver to fly such missions, pushing its total to over 60.

A UK Royal Navy research ship is on a mission in one of the most remote and isolated spots on the planet using camera and sensor-equipped drones to study the effects of climate change on penguin populations of Antarctica’s South Sandwich Islands.

Anyone who dreams of what it will be like to throw a few switches in their car that enable it to take off into the skies should probably swing by stand 3535 LVCC at next month’s CES 2022 tech conference in Las Vegas, where they can get an immersive cockpit preview of the ASKA Drive and Fly vehicle.

Leading autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) manufacturer EHang has unveiled its new, fully integrated 5G flight center in the Chinese city Guangzhou, from which it will trial air taxi and other urban air mobility (UAM) services awaiting their commercial launch in coming months.

UAV pilots, both tested veterans and uninitiated neophytes, cannot be reminded enough that flying too close to wildlife can be tantamount to harassment when the creatures react in fear. That message was reiterated again this week after conservationists in Cornwall, England, witnessed a drone spooking a group of resting seals to bolt into the sea.

Okay, any way you slice it, this story is really weird. News reports in Mississippi say a woman was struck and injured by a decorative boat anchor dropped on her by a drone in what was not an isolated incident. How could that ever be a thing?

COVID-19-related complications have forced the city of Melbourne to cancel its much-anticipated New Year’s Eve drone show – a 350-craft spectacle that had been touted as the largest ever planned in Australia.