Accidents
The Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe has lost contact with a Schiebel S-100 Camcopter unmanned air vehicle that was carrying out surveillance missions over Ukraine. The OSCE confirms that on 3 February the Ukrainian Special Monitoring Mission lost contact with the vehicle 16km (10 miles) north
Commercial
DJI recently an update that added some new safety features, including GPS geofencing that stops the drone flying about near sensitive places: like the White House. However, it has paused the roll-out of the update after a few reports that "unanticipated flight behaviour after updating" to Phantom
Military
NATO's new MQ-9 Reaper Users Group met for the first time in Paris last week to share cooperative ISR capabilities, French air force officials announced.USAF Reaper operators along with Britain's Royal Air Force, the French Armee de l'Air, and Italian Aeronautica Militare
Military
The Obama administration has denied a request from a leading U.S. defence contractor for a license to market its unarmed Predator to Jordan, whose requests for U.S.-made weapons are viewed as more urgent due its participation in the fight against the Islamic State. The contractor, General Atomics,
The United States will donate the ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system to the Czech military to help protect the U.S. Bagram base in Afghanistan within the Foreign Military Funding programme, daily Lidové noviny (LN) writes. “One set is comprised of 10 aircraft. It is a reconnaissance device without
Video
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was a World War II American fighter aircraft built by Lockheed. Developed to a United States Army Air Corps requirement, the P-38 had distinctive twin booms and a single, central nacelle containing the cockpit and armament. Named "fork-tailed devil" (Zwieselsteißteufel) by
A new course at Fort Rucker, Alabama, will pair up Air Cavalry leaders with the operators of unmanned aerial systems. The Aviation Reconnaissance Course, scheduled to launch this spring, was discussed at the Association of the U.S. Army's "Hot Topics" conference on aviation in Arlington,
A French national security and defence agency under the prime minister closed the books on a call for bids to fund a drone interception system. It hopes to have at least some drone defences operational in the next 18 months. “We have made a proposal to the scientific community to
Commercial
If you want to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the
Testing
Turkish Aerospace Industries has begun flight testing of the Block B variant of its Anka medium-altitude, long-endurance unmanned air vehicle, local news sources have reported. A $300 million order for ten of the type in 2013 saw the Turkish air force become the first customer for the UAV.
Commercial
When a team from MIT’s Senseable City Lab flew to Dubai this weekend to participate in Drones for Good, a contest hosted by the UAE government, they brought a swarm of five amphibious drones in tow. Their project, dubbed “Waterfly,” mimics a swarm of dragonflies. Each Frisbee-like device
Testing
Alibaba, the Chinese online marketplace, is conducting a three-day test to deliver packages using quadcopters within an hour. The initial scope of Alibaba’s experiment is small. The company’s online Taobao bazaar is inviting 450 shoppers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to try parcel deliveries by drones. They