All articles
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Counter-UAS
Geofencing and No-Fly Zones Explained: How Drone Airspace Controls Actually Work
On January 13, 2025, DJI stopped blocking its drones from flying into restricted airspace—ending a decade of hard firmware locks. Here is what replaced them: the FAA airspace stack, Remote ID enforcement, and where every layer of the system breaks down.
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Counter-UAS
Leonidas Explained: How Epirus's High-Power Microwave System Kills Drone Swarms
Epirus's Leonidas achieved a 100% kill rate against 61 drones — including 49 in a single pulse — in a DoD demonstration. Here is how its solid-state GaN architecture works, what the Army and Marine Corps have bought, and where the technology stands today.
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Industry & Contracts
AeroVironment: How a Glider Champion Built America's Tactical Drone Empire
From Paul MacCready's human-powered aircraft to a $990 million Switchblade contract and a $4.1 billion BlueHalo merger, AeroVironment has quietly become the backbone of U.S. tactical UAS — and is now reshaping itself into a multi-domain defense-tech mid-prime.
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Industry & Contracts
Anduril Industries: The Software Company Rebuilding the Defense Industrial Base
Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and four co-founders, Anduril Industries has grown from a border-surveillance startup into a $30.5 billion defense technology company producing autonomous systems across air, sea, and ground domains on its Lattice AI platform.
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Industry & Contracts
Baykar: How a Turkish Family Firm Cornered the Global UCAV Export Market
Turkey's Baykar — family-owned, Istanbul-based — built the Bayraktar TB2 from a domestic-independence program into a combat-proven juggernaut with 1.25 million flight hours, agreements with 36 countries, and an estimated 65 percent share of the global UCAV export market.
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Industry & Contracts
DJI Dominates the Drone Market — And Washington Wants It Out
DJI controls over 70% of the global commercial drone market and 90% of consumer sales, yet faces an effective US ban after a cascade of legislative and regulatory actions. Six independent audits have found no evidence of covert data exfiltration — but the structural debate is far from resolved.
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Industry & Contracts
DroneShield: The Counter-UAS Company Redefining Drone Defense at Scale
From a 2014 Virginia startup to an ASX200-listed company with 4,000+ systems deployed in 70 nations, DroneShield has built the counter-UAS industry’s most comprehensive product line—and is now betting that software subscriptions, not hardware sales, define its next decade.
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Industry & Contracts
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems: The Company That Built the Armed Drone Era
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is the private, family-controlled company that built the Predator, Reaper, and Gray Eagle — and is now in production on the FQ-42A, one of the first uncrewed aircraft to carry a fighter designation in U.S. military history.
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Tech & Builds
Shield AI's Hivemind: The AI Pilot Built for GPS-Denied War
Shield AI's Hivemind AI pilot stack has been in continuous combat use since 2018 — from SOCOM building clearances to Ukraine ISR sorties to a live F-16 dogfight with the Air Force Secretary on board.
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Industry & Contracts
Skydio Explained: The Autonomy-First Company Built to Replace DJI in American Defense
Founded by MIT researchers who trained on Google's Project Wing, Skydio built America's leading small-drone platform by betting on AI autonomy before the defense market existed. Congressional bans on Chinese hardware turned that bet into a franchise—then China struck back.
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Industry & Contracts
Wing Aviation, Explained: From Google X Moonshot to 40 Million American Customers
Wing Aviation — Alphabet's drone delivery spinout — holds the first FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate ever issued to a drone company, operates across three continents, and is on course to reach more than 40 million Americans through Walmart by 2027.
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Industry & Contracts
Zipline: How a Drone Startup Became the World's Largest Autonomous Delivery Network
Founded in 2014 to route blood and vaccines around failed road infrastructure in Rwanda, Zipline has logged 100 million autonomous miles, serves 4,000-plus health facilities across seven countries, and is now deploying its second-generation tethered-Droid delivery system in American suburbs.
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