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