News

At Amsterdam Drone Week today, the EASA High Level Conference on Drones discussed critical issues for regulation and the drone industry – and one of them is how the public perceives drones, as that perception influences regulation around the globe. A panel of aviation regulators and thought leaders took the …

Two players in the commercial drone space have just announced a partnership to help reduce insurance costs for commercial drone pilots.  It’s a partnership that makes sense – an InsurTech platform that’s all about quantifying risks, and a developer of drone safety systems proven to significantly reduce those risks: these …

SimActive has just announced some additional functionality removes some of the manual processes currently needed to process softificated imagery.  From their press release below: “Removing the need to manually tag GCPs facilitates the integration of LiDAR data with imagery”, said Dr Philippe Simard, President of SimActive. “Our clients can benefit …

Courtesy of Purdue University An agbioscience startup is helping Purdue University develop more and better biofuel yields. GRYFN is partnering with Purdue under a $4.5 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy. The research will help in the rapid genetic improvement and production …

Amsterdam Drone Week opened this morning, and urban air mobility (UAM) – usually treated as an edge case, somewhere far in the future – took center stage. Philip Butterworth Hayes, the editor of Urban Air Mobility News, appropriately kicked things off: creating a vision not only of a world where …

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a major theme at Amsterdam Drone Week (ADW).  These discussions are about big, high level ideas – but ideas that have the potential to change the way that everyday people get to and from work and move from place to place in their daily lives.  Anyone …

Courtesy Surf Life Saving NSW Doctors told Bevan Lyons he’d be dead by Christmas 2018. They were wrong. The 67-year-old Australian is still here, and he’s crossed an item off his Bucket List – to become a licensed drone pilot. Despite being diagnosed with a rare respiratory disease, Lyons thumbed …

The registration deadline has now passed for drone pilots in the UK. As of November 30th, the CAA’s registration and education scheme is mandatory. The new rules apply to drones and model aircraft that weigh between 250g and 20kg and are used outdoors. Drone owners must visit Register-drones.caa.co.uk to register their …

Since first displaying the prototype to huge hype at CES in 2015, Chinese company eHang has created a vision of passenger taxis. Now, Andreas Perotti of eHang says that the company has not only moved beyond prototypes and proof of concept, they’re very close to full commercial applications.  In China, …

Patrique Zaman, CEO of Avy, a European long-range drone company, sees magic in the skies.  “When I hear people talk about a new revolution, I think it’s true,” says Zaman.  “There is an aviation revolution.  Just look up.” Avy focuses on long range drones for lifesaving missions: medical, conservation, and …