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Air6, Consortiq, Wonder Robotics win "Pitch the Press" at Commercial UAV Expo 2022

Colorado-based P3 Tech Consulting LLC announces the launch of its inaugural Law-Tech Connect™ Workshop, co-located with AUVSI XPONENTIAL '22, on Monday, April 25th at the Orange County Convention Center-West, Orlando, Florida.

Oklahoma lawmakers could consider regulating drones on a state level when they return to session next month. The proposed legislation is based on North Carolina's regulation of unmanned aircraft systems.

People insist they have spotted fleets of large drones crisscrossing rural America's night sky, their mission mysterious, raising questions that have veered into conspiracy theories and launching an investigation. Authorities in Colorado have tried to put those theories to rest, announcing they were mostly hobbyist drones, commercial aircraft, stars, planets and weather phenomena.

Throughout the U.S., partnerships between UAS service providers and state agencies continue to grow, including Huntsville, AL-based UAS company Avion Unmanned has agreed to work with the state of Connecticut.

The timeline for launching a drone traffic management system (UTM) continues to see delays, but recent FAA demonstrations give us a boost in confidence that drone operators will have such a system to operate within in the near future.

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?

Op-Ed from aviation attorney Mark Dombroff: "For those of us who care about the hard-won safety of the U.S. aviation system, as well as the extraordinary potential of the fast-growing commercial drone sector, the time has come to accept an unfortunate truth: We are flirting with disaster by making Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) so accessible to untrained, unskilled, less- than-serious "pilots" who treat them as toys."

In this op-ed, the writer implores UAS industry stakeholders to seriously start defending the commercial drone industry when they hear media pundits, government officials and others predict how one accident between a UAV and a commercial airliner will wreck the entire commercial UAS industry.

Several years ago, drones began appearing in emergency response situations, conducting surveillance and assessing damage. Today, utilities use drones regularly. Every agency involved in disaster responses may somehow deploy a drone as a primary tool, whether for damage assessment, search and rescue, overall surveillance and more. 

Tether-powered drone manufacturer Hoverfly Technologies Inc. has unveiled a new all-weather, military-grade unmanned aircraft system called the LiveSky SENTRY.

Drones are often celebrated for their ability to capture a new vantage point on the world, revealing the beauty of our planet from high above. But they are only the latest development in a long history of aerial photography. For hundreds of years, airborne cameras have made awe-inspiring images of our planet, revealed the devastating scale of natural disasters, and tipped the scales in combat. And in some surprising ways, the history of aerial photography dovetails with the last century of human history more broadly.

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.

IT researchers have developed a virtual reality-based system that lets drones navigate rooms while avoiding virtual obstacles. 
The "Flight Goggles" system, developed by MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems along with its Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory, reportedly allows the unmanned aerial vehicle to "see" a complete virtual environment and navigate around intangible objects.

The expansion of drone use brings with it inherent safety threats, including security breaches at state prisons. Those scenarios led to the invention of the "Drone Defender." It comes from the Columbus-based research and development firm Battelle, designed to be an effective way to counter drone flights. The mechanism looks like a shotgun with a few parts from a TV antenna but it does not blast anything more than radio waves. Co-inventor Dan Stamm of Battelle said the signals from the Drone Defender interfere with the control signals coming from the pilot.

House Bill 1643, which went into effect Sept. 1, makes it a crime to operate a drone over "concentrated animal feeding operations," as well as telecommunication facilities and certain oil and gas facilities. It also bars Texas cities and towns from making their own rules regulating drone usage — a measure that has become controversial in its own right.

As the effects of Hurricane Harvey continue to torment southeastern Texas and parts of Louisiana, remote-controlled drone aircraft have offered a bird's-eye view of the devastation in real time. However, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other government agencies issued terse warnings for civilians to keep their drones out of areas where official rescue operations are using low-flying aircraft to locate and evacuate Harvey's victims.

Last Thursday, San Francisco's Aerial Sports League — one of the first groups in the country to organize drone competitions — turned the Palace of Fine Arts Theater into a looping, quarter-mile indoor drone drag race course, filled with the loud whiney buzz of drones speeding more than 100 mph. The event drew 16 pilots from throughout California, from ages 11 to 45.

DARTdrones, a provider of drone training and consulting, has announced four separate workshops on deploying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for mapping, journalism, search and rescue (SAR), and roof inspections. DARTdrones, whose founder and CEO, Abby Speicher, grabbed a deal with Mark Cuban on ABC's "Shark Tank" earlier this year, is rolling out the workshops this fall.

In the aftermath of some of Oklahoma's strongest storms this spring, the need to rescue the trapped and get a sense of tole can't happen fast enough. In the aftermath of Oklahoma's most recent storms something different can be seen above the wreckage – drones. College students all the way from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, were hired by the state to make the 21-hour drive to Elk City to survey damage.

After an initial flurry of activity that saw the proliferation of drone law practice groups several years ago, the anticipated steep trajectory of drone-related legal work failed to come to pass as regulations on the commercial use of the unmanned aerial vehicles restricted industry growth. But with the unmanned aerial vehicle industry continuing to evolve, law firms with drone practices are finally getting off the ground.

Unmanned aerial vehicles — UAVs or "drones" — have been used for years by hobbyists and aircraft enthusiasts, but the field is now seeing rapidly expanding development in commercial applications. One new use is for the collection of RF signal measurements from broadcast television and radio stations, as is being developed by consulting engineering firm Cavell Mertz & Associates.

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.

The dream of the flying car could come down to earth before it gets off the ground. Rising in its place: a network of self-flying drones big enough to ferry individual commuters around town. That's the future envisioned by several start-ups that are developing so-called "passenger drones," which could shrink commute times from hours to minutes.

We all know drones are used for photography, videography, mapping – the joy of recreational flying – and more. But a new report suggests the most important function served by drones is saving lives. The report is the first-ever survey to examine life-saving drone activity. Researchers scoured news reports from around the globe for any events where drones were used to help find or rescue people who were in jeopardy. And it found that "drones have rescued at least 59 people from life-threatening conditions in 18 separate incidents around the globe."

The author of a new book that takes a comprehensive look at unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) laws and regulations across the U.S. believes the country is a long way from having a coherent legal and regulatory system for drones.

Assessing the health of an entire industry is not an easy task, but talking with industry leaders and looking for examples of growth and investment can help. Our "State of the UAS/UAV Industry" inquiries have lead to discussions with General Atomics, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), Aeryon Labs and SensoFusion. SensoFusion might be a little well less known that the others, but we felt the need to include the views of an anti-drone system supplier to counterbalance the industry's perception of itself.

Sunday's Super Bowl halftime light show featuring Lady Gaga -- prerecorded to comply with prohibitions on flying drones over people -- was choreographed by Intel Corp. It provided a dramatic backdrop for the performance and also illustrated the ways large companies are embracing unmanned aircraft in sometimes unexpected ways.

Last November, an aerial drone flown by a member of the resistance camp opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline captured dramatic footage of riot police blasting crowds with water cannons as temperatures dipped below freezing, sending 17 of the camp's occupants to the hospital with injuries and hypothermia.
The video quickly spread on social media, spurring global news coverage of the fight against the oil pipeline, which saw activists clash with police and security forces in tense standoffs last year. A few weeks later, the Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of the pipeline, which had encroached on Native American sacred lands and threatened water supplies near North Dakota's Standing Rock reservation.It was another example of how drones have become a crucial technology, allowing activists and journalists to document protests and hold police accountable for abuses. But as a new era of civil resistance dawns under the Trump administration, at the Standing Rock site and in anti-Trump demonstrations across the country, drone experts say police and government have made it unnecessarily difficult — sometimes impossible — for civilians to deploy drones at large protests.