Drone News: A Secret Announcement, AUVSI Drone Ban, NASA's Ingenuity, New Alpha Drone, & RID Update

Welcome to your weekly UAS news update, we have 4 stories for you this week: A Secret Announcement, AUVSI jumps on anti-Chinese drone bandwagon, NASA’s Ingenuity ends mission with 72 flights, Autel releases the Alpha, and Mini 3 and 4 RID update.

AUVSI appears to be alienating a large number of the folks they claim to represent. AUVSI released a video this week calling for US Lawmakers to “take measured actions to strengthen the U.S. drone industry”. If you’ve followed us before, you know we’d love to use US made drones, but there are none available for the same cost with the same capabilities as DJI or Autel. AUVSI’s stance particularly affects Public Safety, who has recently seen restrictions on country of origin in a number of states including Florida, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, California, Nevada, Texas, and the 2024 NDAA. We’ve also seen a recent bill from Oklahoma to ban the use of Chinese drones for public safety. So far, the industry’s response hasn’t been in favor of what AUVSI and other American drone manufacturers are pushing, with many companies including us pulling out of AUVSI’s conference. There hasn’t been a better time than now to re-evaluate who is advocating for you and your hobby/profession and where you may be donating. If we can make a recommendation, the Drone Service Providers Alliance is a great group to join. We commonly talk with Vic, Kenji, and Dave Messina about advocacy including fighting local bills that restrict us from flying and those that restrict our Public Safety agencies from using the best tools available to save lives. Next up this week is an update to NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter. Ingenuity suffered a “Hard landing” on January 18th, which damaged one or more of the rotor blades, making it no longer capable of flight. NASA’s goal for Ingenuity was 5 total flights on Mars, instead 72 flights for a total flight time of over 2 hours were completed, with over 10 miles covered It seems Ingenuity’s mission was a success and hopefully we’ll see another version of the helicopter headed to the red planet soon! Last up this week is the Autel Alpha release! The Alpha appears to be a medium sized industry/public safety drone with a wide camera, zoom camera, laser range finder, and two thermal cameras with up to 56X hybrid thermal zoom. The alpha is much bigger than the Max series and boasts a ton of features, including hot-swappable batteries, mesh networking, 4K 35X optical zoom, IP55 weather rating, and obstacle avoidance. Looks like a pretty cool new aircraft, hopefully we’ll be able to get our hands on one to test! Alright, that’s it, have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/auvsi_auvsi-is-calling-on-us-lawmakers-to-take-activity-7156338684651327488-TGQC/# https://dspalliance.org/ https://dronexl.co/2024/01/25/autel-introduces-alpha-drone/ https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/nasas-ingenuity-mars-copter-ends-a-remarkable-run