FAA
Every UASFeed story on FAA — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
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Commercial & Delivery
How Drones Are Displacing Helicopters, Scaffold Crews, and Rope Teams in Infrastructure Inspection
UAVs now survey transmission lines, wind turbine blades, bridges, pipelines, and solar farms at a fraction of the cost of legacy methods. Here's the sensor stack, the economics, and the regulatory framework making autonomous inspection possible.
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Policy & Regulation
Who Can Legally Shoot Down a Drone in the US — and Why the Answer Is Complicated
Federal aircraft law, the Aircraft Sabotage Act, and overlapping wiretapping statutes mean that almost nobody — not state police, not sheriffs, not private citizens — had clear legal authority to neutralize a rogue drone until Congress began carving out narrow exceptions.
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Commercial & Delivery
Agricultural Spray Drones: Machinery, Markets, and the FAA's Dual-Regime Gauntlet
From Japan's 1997 Yamaha RMax to today's 40-liter multirotor platforms, agricultural spray drones are reshaping crop protection across Asia and slowly entering U.S. fields — once operators survive a 4-to-6-month federal certification maze bridging Part 107 and Part 137.
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Policy & Regulation
The BVLOS Bottleneck: How Drone Delivery Regulation Varies Across the World
Wing has logged over 400,000 deliveries. Meituan runs 28,000 daily flights across 12 Chinese cities. Yet for most of the world, the fundamental question of who can fly autonomously over populated areas remains unresolved — a regulatory coordination problem, not an engineering one.
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Commercial & Delivery
Drone-in-a-Box: How Autonomous Docking Systems Are Redefining Unmanned Operations
Drone-in-a-box systems launch, fly missions, and recharge without anyone on site. From American Robotics' first BVLOS waiver in 2021 to Percepto's 30-drone fleet approvals and Part 108's 2026 compliance framework, the technology and regulation are converging at scale.
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Commercial & Delivery
How Drone Light Shows Work: GPS, Software, and the FAA Gauntlet
From centimeter-accurate RTK positioning to 90-day FAA waiver packages, drone light shows are precision aerospace operations disguised as entertainment. A technical look at the systems, operators, regulations, and failure modes behind the art form.
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Policy & Regulation
Drone Privacy Law in the US: A Jurisdictional Patchwork Built on 1980s Cases
The FAA controls where drones fly but explicitly disclaims authority over what they see. What fills that gap is a collision of 1940s property doctrine, Supreme Court aviation precedents from the Reagan era, 24 divergent state statutes, and a 2024 Michigan ruling that may define the legal terrain for years.
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Commercial & Delivery
Drone as First Responder: How Autonomous UAVs Are Reshaping Emergency Dispatch
From a single FAA pilot program in Chula Vista to more than 6,000 police drone programs nationwide, the Drone as First Responder model is rewriting response-time math — and forcing a serious civil-liberties reckoning.
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Policy & Regulation
FAA Part 107 Explained: The Commercial Drone Certificate That Governs U.S. Airspace
14 CFR Part 107 sets the floor for every commercial UAS operation in the United States — and the FAA evaluates the purpose of your flight, not your intent. Here is what certification requires, what the operating rules permit, and what Part 108 changes next.
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Commercial & Delivery
Matternet Goes Public: The First Pure-Play Drone Delivery Stock
Matternet completed a reverse merger in late May and closed a $33M oversubscribed placement, becoming the first publicly traded pure-play drone delivery company — a structural first that finally lets investors own the sector directly, not as a footnote inside Amazon or Alphabet.
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Policy & Regulation
Is DJI Banned in the U.S.? A Precise Map of Six Overlapping Restrictions
"DJI is banned" is both true and false depending on which of six distinct legal instruments you mean. This explainer maps each layer — export controls, federal procurement, the DoD blacklist, the FCC Covered List, state laws, and the BVLOS draft rule — with its exact scope and status as of June 2026.
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Commercial & Delivery
Drone Delivery Economics, Explained: The Math Behind the Milestone
Walmart hit one million drone deliveries on May 29, 2026 — proof the technology works. But Amazon still spends roughly $63 to drop off a $10 order. Here is a clear-eyed breakdown of where the money goes, who has cracked the model, and what has to change before drones threaten the delivery van.
