Haye Kesteloo is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at DroneDJ, where he covers all drone-related news and writes product reviews. He also contributes to the other sites in the 9to5Mac group such as; 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, and Electrek.
Haye can be reached at haye@dronedj.com or @hayekesteloo
Take to the skies with DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon), DJI’s lightest and smallest foldable drone. The ultra-light Mavic Mini makes drone flight easier and safer than ever.
The new Ultra-Light DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon) is officially introduced by the world’s largest drone marker this morning. And it weighs only 249 grams! And that is with the micro-SD card included! You can preorder the drone starting right now. It’s $399 for the Standard Version and $499 for the Fly More Combo.
It feels like we’ve known this drone a long time already with all the photos that were leaked over the last week or so. Anyway, we have a lot of information to go over, so let’s get started.
A hiker and dog became disoriented and lost in a terrain laden with swamps and marshes in Canada on Thursday night. A drone from the Renfrew County Paramedic team played a key part in the dramatic rescue of the duo.
Updated with drone video footage of the actual rescue.
This year’s fire season in California has started out with massive fires in Los Angeles and near San Francisco. PG&E’s aging transmission lines form a huge risk as failing equipment can potentially start wildfires as was the case last year. The Camp Fire in 2018 was started by a powerline that came down from a transmission tower after one of the hooks that hold up the lines broke. An article in the Wall Street Journal investigates the status of the PG&E towers and lines in California and uses drone footage to show the aging equipment.
On September 27, 2019, UPS Flight Forward was the only company to date to receive FAA approval under Part 135 Standard to operate a drone airline business. Since then, we have learned of UPS’s plans to partner with CVS to deliver healthcare products and over-the-counter medications to residents by drone. That information came out soon after we learned of the partnership between FedEx, Wing Aviation, and Walgreens. Today, however, I would like to bring some attention to UPS’s all-female drone flight crew: Sherri Roberts, Candice McHargue, and Caroline Furse. Because the drone industry is dominated by men, that team might help to inspire the next generation of female drone pilots.
Check out the Uber Eats delivery drone that was showcased during the Forbes 30 under 30 Summit yesterday. The design of this delivery drone looks way more advanced than the one mentioned in the WSJ article from only a few days ago. Instead of being a traditional quadcopter, this drone has six propellers on rotating wings “for increased speed and efficiency” and can land and take off vertically (VTOL).
Today, we have some exciting news for you from Drone Nerds. They are the largest enterprise drone dealer in the US and they just announced a new partnership with Skydio for the new and mind-blowing Skydio 2 drone. So, if you are thinking about getting the new Skydio 2 drone (And really you should. I ordered two myself) but you missed the boat at Skydio’s website. Make sure you check in with Drone Nerds in Florida as they may be able to help you out. And, if you are planning to go to Commercial UAV Expo this week, make sure that you go to the Drone Nerds booth 701 to see this new self-flying drone for yourself.
Today, the Ultra-Light DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon) shows up in a “video review” on YouTube ahead of the official product launch. After various online retailers such as Newegg and BestBuy already disclosed official marketing photos and specs of the new DJI Mavic Mini, we now get to see one of the first videos. Don’t get too excited; this is not one of those amazing reviews from iPhonedo. This is really just a series of short clips put together in one video. However, it still provides us with some new angles and gives us a better idea of the size of this new unmanned aircraft.
The specifications for the DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon) have been reconfirmed in a public listing from yet another retailer that disclosed this information prior to the launch of this new DJI drone. The listing confirms that the DJI Mavic Mini will indeed weigh only 249 grams making it an ultra-light drone. Furthermore, it also confirms a 30-minute maximum flight time, which is incredible considering the size and weight of this little drone.
As more retailers are gearing up for the inevitable launch of the new DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon), we keep finding new photos and specs on websites that are publicly available. Today, we found a listing of the DJI Mavic Mini Fly More Combo, as well as another confirmation of the specs that we had reported on before.
Drones are being used by the Vermont Agency of Transportation as part of a statewide emergency preparedness exercise that is designed around a pretend flooding that resulted from a catastrophic tropical storm. During the three-day exercise this week, the agency used drones and special software to project damage estimates in real time.
We’ve learned more about how missing six-year-old Ethan was found with help of more than 700 volunteers and a commercial drone pilot with a DJI Matrice 210 outfitted with a Zenmuse XT2 thermal camera. This morning the Washington Post has a detailed article about what it took and how a community came together to rescue the missing child, Ethan Haus. He would not have been found without the help of the hundreds of volunteers but the drone with the thermal camera played a crucial role in this successful search and rescue mission.
This morning the Wall Street Journal has a detailed article about deliveries by drone. They take a closer look at Amazon, Wing Aviation and Uber Technologies. For some reason, UPS with their Matternet drones are not getting that same amount of attention in this article, even though they recently were awarded a Part 135 certification by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
New photos and updated specs for the palm-sized, DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon). We’ve seen it before that when we get closer to a product’s release date more and more specifications and photos start to surface online. Sometimes the specifications are slightly different than what we have heard from industry insiders or have seen in pre-production models. And such is the case with the DJI Mavic Mini. We have some good and some less good news for you.
In a world-first study, university researchers from Adelaide, Australia, and Iraq have been working on drones with special cameras and software that can tell if a person is dead or alive, for instance in disaster-stricken areas.
DJI just sent out an announcement via email. It is titled: ‘Fly as you are’ and mentions October 30th at 9 am EDT as the day and time the Chinese drone-maker will release a new product. We can only guess (wink) as to what it is that DJI will introduce this time, but looking at the title it seems fair to say that it will likely fly. Will this be the first drone DJI releases this year?
This morning, our old friend and DJI leaker OsitaLV tweeted a short video showing the DJI Mavic Mini (from DJI or Amazon) listed on a Chinese website with a confirmed price tag of $399. If that number looks familiar, it is probably because of our article more than two months ago. The listing also shows us a few new photos of the sub-250-gram foldable mini drone.
Here’s the second keynote from DJI Airworks 2019 from Wednesday morning with Mario Rebello, Jan Gasparic, Dinesh Narayanan, Brendan Schulman, Cynthia Huang, Suzanne Lemieux, and Greg Aldrich talking about topics ranging from DJI’s Qualified Entities Program, ADS-B, edge computing, safety and more.
DJI Airworks 2019 took place in LA this year. DroneDJ was invited and we recorded a number of the keynotes, panel discussions, and sessions that we think are worth sharing with you. We used automated transcription software on the videos to capture all that was spoken in text, however, this method is far from perfect. It does, however, offer you the benefit of searching through the text and skipping to the parts that are relevant to you. I will put a link to the entire text in a Google Doc so that in case you’d like to help clean up the text, you can. Actually that would be much appreciated because it is simply too much work for one person to do. We will update the articles on DroneDJ if better quality text becomes available. This is a bit of an experiment so we will see how it goes. More videos from DJI Airworks 2019 will go live soon. Let us know if we should keep doing this or if we are wasting our time.
The program allows enterprises to test Parrot’s professional ANAFI platform within a working environment for six weeks. Professional partners will receive a complete set of hardware (drone, controller, batteries) and software (piloting app, SDK documentation, third-party apps, and services)– providing them the opportunity to discover how Parrot’s professional drones can be integrated into their businesses. At the conclusion of the program, Parrot is looking to receive feedback from its program partners on how ANAFI professional drones perform in real use-case scenarios.
Not to be outdone by its longtime rival FedEx, UPS has announced a partnership with CVS Pharmacy to deliver prescriptions by drone. The logistics giant has reached an agreement with CVS to use drones for a variety of deliveries.
Alphabet’s Wing Aviation has partnered with FedEx and Walgreens to deliver packages by drone. The deliveries by drone are expected to start this fall in Christiansburg, Virginia.
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) is looking to significantly increase its drone fleet. The LAFD is one of the largest fire departments in the United States next to New York City and Chicago. With an annual budget of about $691 million and 3,500 employees, the department responded to 492,717 calls in 2018.
Justin Brannan, who represents Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach in the City Council, argues in the New York Daily News that “it’s time for New York to craft common-sense regulations for drones.” I couldn’t agree with him more. However, Brannan also mentions new legislation that he has drafted to allow drones to be flown in the city. He mentions registration and insurance requirements as well as a form of Remote ID. It is unclear whether his drafted legislation is in line with what the FAA is doing, or whether Brannan is proposing legislation purely for drone flying in New York City. I would argue against the latter, as it will contribute to an impossibly hard-to-navigate patchwork of drone laws around the country, similar to what Mike Lee is suggesting with the Drone Integration and Zoning Act.