Haye Kesteloo

Israel started to use amateur drone racers to take down ‘kite bombs’ and burning kites, flown from Gaza into their country, where oftentimes they start small bushfires. According to the Israeli army, it was the first time that a kite outfitted with an explosive device actually landed in Israeli territory after being launched from Gaza. The race drones, operated by amateur drone pilots can reach speeds of up to 110 miles per hour and were first deployed last Friday to shred kites to pieces or to take them down with fishhooks. So far about 40 kites have been taken down.

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Have you ever wanted to work for a fast-growing company in a rapidly developing industry? Well, then this may be your chance. DJI is looking to hire an operations coordinator to organize and coordinate administrative duties and office procedures of their Marketing and Policy offices in New York and Washington D.C. The Chinese drone maker is not only looking to hire on the East Coast. There are plenty more jobs available for instance in Frankfurt, Palo Alto, Burbank and elsewhere. Working for DJI may turn out to be lucrative if the company issues stock options and goes public next year as has been rumored.

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A research team used an off-the-shelf DJI Phantom 4 and AI software to identify 7 different tree species in a forest in Kyoto, Japan. After some tweaking of the algorithm, the drone and software were able to identify the tree in the forest with an 89% accuracy. This is notable because the team was able to achieve these results with a consumer drone and regular RGB images instead of expensive hardware, such as multispectral imagers and thus represents a significant cost-savings for forest researchers and managers.

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Good morning, have you seen DJI’s new headquarters already? The Chinese drone-maker is currently in the process of building a very modern and spacious new office building, consisting of two towers that are connected by a sky bridge from which you can launch drones. Very cool. Furthermore, we have more details on the UAS Integration Pilot Program and a pretty good deal on a Parrot Mambo Quadcopter. Enjoy!

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The architectural design firm, Foster + Partners unveiled the new head offices for Chinese drone-maker, DJI that is currently being built in Shenzhen. The new building consists of two towers connected by a sky bridge from which drones can be launched directly. The idea behind the design is to move away from a traditional office space and instead build a creative community in the sky. The building is currently under construction.

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Yesterday the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the 10 pilot programmes that have been approved under President Trump’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP) in an effort to bring the country up to speed when it comes to drone experimentation. Yesterday we published the list of awardees and today we are reporting on the companies that made the list such as Airbus, Alphabet (Google), Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, FedEx, Uber, and others. As well as the ones that did not make the list, most notably Amazon and DJI.

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Good morning, Yesterday the 10 awardees of the UAS Integration Pilot Program were announced by the US DOT. Many big name companies were happy to be included but two glaring omissions are Chinese drone manufacturer, DJI and online retail giant, Amazon. We can only speculate as to why this is. Apparently, DJI was part of a dozen or so applications and still didn’t make the cut. Does this have to do with the concerns that were expressed by government officials last year, that DJI may be sending information to China? As far as Amazon is concerned, President Trump has not been a fan of the online retailer and that may have had something to do with it. We will delve into all this later today, but before we do that, here are yesterday’s headlines.

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Today, Secretary, Elaine L. Chao of the Department of Transportation announced the 10 applications that have been selected to start as part of the UAS Integration Pilot Program, that was introduced by President Trump late last year. Reportedly 200 businesses submitted a total of 149 applications for the program. Initially, only five applications were going to be selected as part of the UAS IPP, but because of the strong interest from states, local governments, tribes, and businesses around the country that number was increased to 10. Furthermore, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said that the agency will work with the other applicants to “operationalize their proposed projects.”

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Earlier today we reported that Apple is one of the 200 companies that are vying to participate in the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Some of the other big-name companies that compete for a spot in the program are well-known ones such as Intel, Amazon, Airbus, and Qualcomm. For most of these, it is pretty obvious why they would be interested to participate. Amazon and Airbus are interested in making deliveries by drone. Intel and Qualcomm are focussed on the fast-growing drone market because of the possibilities it offers for their chip products. Apple, however, seems to be the outlier. Why would the tech giant have an interest in the drone market?

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Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of talking to Matthew Benson, one of the co-founders of Windhover Labs. The Texas-based startup was founded a few years ago by NASA software engineers and participated in the Phase II NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Recently Windhover made their first successful drone test flight and today they are introducing their open-source software built on the backbone of NASA’s core Flight System (cFS) framework. The opensource software, built to meet the FAA standards, enables operators to control, command an unmanned aerial vehicle and provides a way of communicating with the drone. Windhover aims to make safe Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS) drone operations a reality by offering a software solution for drone manufacturers.

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Today, DJI quietly releases the new Phantom 4 Pro V2.0. It is no surprise really, as we have been reporting on this new quadcopter from the Chines drone maker for some time now. The P4P V2.0 retails for $1,499, or more depending on options, and is available for purchase starting today. Here are all the highlights.

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Good morning, Here are the headlines you may have missed, covering news such as the new DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 with ‘silent props’ as well as DJI’s announced partnership with Microsoft, a Mavic Air and some very large ships, and lastly flower fields in The Netherlands. Furthermore today will be the day that the Department of Transportation will be announcing the 10 drone tests that will take place under President Trump’s plans that were announced late last year. Stay tuned!

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It was only yesterday that we showed you a screenshot of what seems to be the new DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0. Today we are excited to share with you what seems to be a first official image of new drone.  It appears that the official launch date of this new product is May 8th, which of course at the time of me writing this, in China it already is. It is very hard to tell, but based on the lo-res photo it seems that this new drone may, in fact, have the silent propellers we first saw on the DJI Mavic Pro Platinum Edition. We later saw these new props also surface in an FCC filing.

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The world’s biggest drone company, DJI and tech giant, Microsoft have partnered up to create a new software development kit (SDK) that will allow developers to build “full-flight control and real-time data transfer capabilities” into Windows 10 computers. The partnership between both companies aims to create new drone services for a number of industries, including agriculture, construction, and public safety. Furthermore, the Chinese drone maker has adopted Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to deliver its own commercial drone services.

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Dutch landscape photographer Albert Dros uses his drone to capture the tulip fields from the sky. Depending on the weather, the tulips and other flowers will show themselves from late April into early May. Especially in the Western part of the country, around Lisse, the fields of flowers can seem endless and people traveling from all over the world to see their beauty.

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We have seen many videos where people flew their drones in pursuit of cruise ships in Florida, but never have we seen a video quite like this. This drone pilot flies his DJI Mavic Air right in front off and over three different bulk carriers that are making their way through the Bosporus strait in Turkey. You would think that with all that metal around, the little Mavic Air would have some trouble, but apparently, that was not the case.

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Good morning, Among the headlines you may have missed over the weekend, are a Chinese announcement of the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0,  the Hawaiian volcano eruption filmed by a drone, DJI Care Refresh +, and a swarm of drones used by a criminal game to ruin an FBI hostage rate. Today’s video shows Miami by night. It’s a really cool drone video, but keep in mind that flying at night is only allowed if you have an FAA waiver.

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The same person who brought us the photos of the silver DJI Phantom 5 or 4 Pro V2.0, has now uploaded what seems to be an announcement of the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0. The text is in Chinese, a language, I, unfortunately, cannot read, speak or write, but some of the specs seem to be obvious.

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A drone video shows Mount Kilauea erupting and spewing fountains of lava into the sky in a residential area. The volcano eruption in Hawaii has caused a large-scale evacuation in the Leilani estates residential area, home to about 1,500 people. The footage from the unmanned aerial vehicle shows the lava oozing through the local forest. Yesterday afternoon the FAA issued a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) for the area to prevent drones from interfering with first aid responders.

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