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The Alliance for Drone Innovation, in coordination with the Drone Operators Federation, is launching the "Drone Operator Insight Series" to highlight America's growing small business drone economy.

Here's a new category for the drone industry: therapy drones.  Could learning to pilot a sUAS be a new and effective form of adaptive therapy?

Numerous delays in the rollout of FAA's remote identification rulemaking for unmanned aerial vehicles have caused the agency to fall behind EASA, FAA's European counterpart, in efforts to implement a comprehensive UAV traffic management (UTM) system, an industry expert said.

As drones become more commonplace—the FAA says there will be 4.3 million of them in the hands of hobbyists by 2020— it's no surprise that automakers have taken an interest. Ford has been proclaiming its interest in new approaches to "mobility," and one of those is a patent for a programmable drone that drivers can deploy from a vehicle.

In our 2019 drone industry survey, we sought out to understand how the U.S. drone industry is doing — are pilots making money? What industries are they in? How often are they flying?

Adam Goldberg, a full-time architecture and real estate photographer, got involved in the drone industry as a way to share a different perspective of a property to his clients. With his commercial drone license, Adam was able to transform his business into a full-service company providing both aerial and on-the-ground photography and video.

As a hobbyist (and occasional professional) drone pilot, I have often wondered what Hollywood filmmakers are flying with. This information is often kept under wraps, as many pilots are not allowed to discuss what films they work on or what equipment they use. We found one drone operator at AUVSI 2019 that was more than willing to share. Some of the cameras they use are surprising, and the drones that lift those cameras are some of the biggest in the business.

Drones may potentially be as disruptive to society as the advent of the internet.

That's one of the claims made in a new short documentary about drones called Elevation (link to film on second page). The film is produced by Dezeen, a popular design and architecture website and magazine. Coming in at just under 18 minutes, the doco interviews futurists, architects and other experts about positive and negative implications that UAVs are having on society today.

Jim Ballard had hopes for Blue Chip UAS, an area drone service company that the former EagleMed owner is a key investor in. Formed in 2014 by a group of young military veterans with extensive backgrounds in unmanned aircraft, Blue Chip aimed to provide imaging, three-dimensional mapping and other aerial services to the agriculture, oil and gas, construction and filmmaking industries, using commercial grade fixed-wing and multi-rotor drones.

Metro Technology Center in Oklahoma City will be hosting the UAS Business & Contracting Symposium on August 8. The event has several sponsors, including KOKH FOX 25 and the UAS Cluster Initiative of Oklahoma and Kansas. The event brings government and private industry stakeholders who recognize the potential of the UAS industry and are interested in UAS considerations, challenges and answers.

Mike Gearin's drone company, PhotoFlight Aerial Media, based in Manchester, Conn., is tapping into the commercial potential of drones for real estate, surveying, marketing and cinematography. The Boston Globe spoke with Gearin about whether the sky's the limit for drones.

Mike Gearin has a tendency to drone on and on. But it's OK — because he's droning about drones.
Gearin is a sky diver, airline pilot, and former flight school instructor who has taken to the skies in a new way: flying commercial drones capable of carrying cinema cameras that shoot amazing shots at low altitudes.

Just a few days after DJI issued a warning to drone owners they would have to register their machines or have its capabilities drastically hindered, one of the world' largest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) companies launched its first mini-drone. Spark is a small camera drone that lifts off from the palm of your hand to capture images and video and can be controlled by hand gestures, eliminating the barrier of a bulky, sometimes hard to operate remote controller.

If you can't wait for the day drones plop packages on your porch or a flying car whisks you to work, you should know that the hold-up isn't technological, but technocratic. Before these future flyers can take off, they must learn to play by the rules of the sky.That means communicating with air traffic control and other aircraft, spotting and avoiding threats, and generally knowing what to do when things go sideways. Making all of this happen demands whole new levels of capability—not just from the aircraft, but from the sprawling system that oversees them. The good news is, change is coming.

Tulsa Community College announced that it will offer a new pilot training program tailored for commercial users of unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. TCC's UAS pilot training class will take place April 25-27 at the college's Riverside Community Campus and Aviation Center at Jones Riverside Airport.