Welcome to Your Weekly UAS News Update

We have four stories for you this week: the DJI Air 3S finally released, jail time for flying over a Naval Shipyard, drones over a military base, and lastly, DJI import issues. Let’s get to it.

DJI Air 3S Release

First up, the DJI Air 3S was finally released this week. The new drone comes with a dual camera setup including an upgraded 50 megapixel 1-inch wide-angle camera and a 48 megapixel 1/1.3-inch zoom camera, each having 14 stops of dynamic range, which is actually quite impressive.

The DJI Air 3S supports both HLG and D-Log M, 4K 60 and 4K 120 depending on the camera for video recording, and a new encoding algorithm that will reduce the sizes by 30%, so they claim, compared to the Air 2 with no image quality loss.

New obstacle avoidance includes a forward-facing LiDAR unit, an infrared sensor for night ops, and a new smart RTH feature that creates and stores the map of the area as it flies. The Air 3S also comes with 42 gigs of internal storage, which is impressive, O4 image transmission, ActiveTrack 360, Local Data Mode, and finally 45 minutes of flight time.

The Local Data Mode is actually kind of a surprising thing because this was only reserved for much larger drones in the past, so it’s good to see that DJI is adding that to even smaller consumer drones now. We don’t have one just yet, but we’ll release some content as soon as we do.

Chinese Student Jailed for Naval Shipyard Photos

Next up, a Chinese student was jailed for taking photos of a Naval Shipyard. In January of this year, the student – we actually reported on that – the student Feng Run Shei flew over the Newport News shipbuilding facility in Norfolk, Virginia.

While he was flying, the drone crashed into a tree, leading the Police to get involved. He fled the scene, if I remember correctly from the story, and then kind of got in trouble after that. Now he was charged under a World War II Espionage Act and will spend six months in federal prison. There is no restricted airspace over the shipyard, so the flight may have been Legal, but the image capture was definitely not.

We’ll keep you updated on this one. It’s definitely a very interesting story. When we first heard about it, the student had not pled guilty at the time. I think he eventually pled guilty, which is what led to the 6 months of prison.

Drone Incursions Over Military Base

Third up, another kind of weird story: drone incursions over a military base, interestingly again in Norfolk, Virginia. This was last December for 17 straight days. Large drones flew over Langley Air Force Base just north of Norfolk, Virginia. U.S. Air Force General Mark Kelly described the drones as 20 feet long – this is not your typical consumer drone here – flying at more than 100 miles an hour between 3,000 and 4,000 ft.

He stated that there were smaller quadcopters that accompanied the larger drone and that they flew from north to south following a very consistent route. Military and law enforcement tried to follow the drone and consider jamming or even shooting them down, but they were not allowed to do that because the drones did not pose any imminent threat.

The Air Force does not believe that this is recreational or even commercial operators in the U.S., but rather a foreign country. We’ll keep you updated if we see more on this topic, but yeah, this is not good.

DJI Import Issues

And last up, again a story about DJI drones that are being stopped at Customs. DJI published information this week about U.S. Customs limiting DJI’s ability to import select drones in the U.S. This is not related to the current proposed ban.

This is not a ban in effect because all of the proposed ones have failed so far, but instead it comes directly from Customs and Border Protection. Now CBP has cited the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act as the reason why DJI drones are being held.

DJI stated that it is not and has never been on the UFLPA Entity List on the CBP website. This is the list that is related to the Uyghur thing, so it’s unclear exactly why these drones are suddenly being prevented from entering the United States.

Now this is financially impacting American resellers across the country, so whoever is behind this, well, good job, you’re hurting American businesses. We’ll keep you updated with more info on this when it becomes available, but I’m sure this is a story that we are going to continue talking about over the next few weeks.

And that’s all for this week. We’ll see you later in the community for a happy hour tonight if you’re watching this on Friday, and otherwise we’ll see you on Monday for the live Q&A.