Drone News: Senate Drone Ban, Commercial UAV, WingtraCloud, and Two New Pilot Institute Courses!

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update, we have four stories for you this week: NDAA Markup, Commercial UAV Workshops, WingtraCloud, and two new courses from Pilot Institute!

Now is the time to make our voices heard in the US Senate. The Senate Armed Services Committee is considering its version of the National Defense Authorization Act. The House’s NDAA bill includes the Countering CCP Drones Act, which would ban DJI Drones. It’s also important to ensure the Drones for First Responders Act or the Countering CCP Drones Act isn’t included in the bill’s language. As a reminder, the Countering CCP Drones Act plans to ban Chinese drones by revoking to preventing new FCC approvals, which would affect EVERYONE, including public safety agencies. The DFR Act would ban Chinese drones in 5 years after creating an incremental tariff, which would affect everyone, including public safety agencies that would lose financial aid after 5 years and have to pay for expensive drones without subsidies. The Senate will vote on their version of the act next week, between June 11th and June 13th, so the time to act is NOW. Please visit the DAA’s website to contact your senator! https://droneadvocacyalliance.com/ Next up, Commercial UAV Expo is around the corner! I’ll be on a panel with Desiree Ekstein, Jared, Janacek, Vic Moss, Kenji Sugahara, and Amy T Wiegand discussing Regulations and Compliance, BVLOS, Airspace Management, Remote I, Operations Over People and Vehicles, and more. The talk is on Tuesday, September 3rd from 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM and I hope to see you there! https://www.expouav.com/session/now-beyond-2024-essentials-for-every-drone-pilot/ Last up, Wingtra released WingtraCLOUD this week! WingtraCLOUD is a new software solution for flight planning, site-based file organization, 3D Planning, and coordinate systems. The primary goal of the new software is to streamline surveyors' workflows and enable more data capture. It doesn’t look like WingtraCLOUD currently integrates an image processing system but integrations are available according to Wingtra’s website. We’ll keep you updated if we see more! https://wingtra.com/wingtracloud/ Lastly, two new courses: LiDAR and Search and Rescue. Have a great week, and we’ll see you on Monday for the Live!