November 03, 2023

Drone News: New Bill to Ban Chinese Drones, DJI Matrice 3D Leaks, and Zipline's New Partnerships.

4 minutes

Welcome to your weekly news update, we have 3 stories for you this week, New bill proposes banning Chinese drones for the Federal Government, DJI Matrice 3D leaks, and Zipline’s new partnerships with Healthcare in Ohio.

Make your voice heard:

https://droneadvocacyalliance.com/?vvsrc=%2Fcampaigns%2F105982%2Frespond

First up this week is a “new” bill that would prohibit the Federal Government from purchasing Chinese Drones, again…

To be clear, this is a reintroduction of a past, failed bill. Florida Senator Rick Scott introduced the American Safety Drone Act in the Senate and now Representative Gallagher from Wisconsin is now doing the same in the House.

This new bill is set to be announced this week, and would prohibit the federal government from using any tax dollars to purchase UAV equipment from China.

The bill would require a federal report detailing the number of foreign commercial drones and “Covered” unmanned aircraft procured by federal departments.

At the non-federal level, the bill would also bar local and state governments from purchasing Chinese drones using federal grants.

Both Scott, in the past, and Gallagher now are trying to attach this to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the only likely way for it to advance since it’s highly unlikely to move on its own.

Once again we see a country of origin ban rather than a set of comprehensive standards that any drone used for government purposes must conform to.

The best way to fight this is to use the DAA’s link in the description for instructions on reaching out to your representatives and oppose the National Defense Authorization Act.

Next up this week are some DJI leaks, for the Matrice 3D.

New pictures of the drone and new pictures of the rumored DJI Dock Mini.

As we covered previously, the Matrice 3D appears to be a simplified DJI Mavic 3 Thermal with fixed arms, top-mounted SDK port and mounting, and built-in RTK.

New leaks about the Mini Dock appears to shows an angled channel that the Matrice 3D would fit into in contrast to the flat landing pad of the existing DJI dock.

The M3D also appears to be slightly larger than the Mavic 3 with much thicker arms and larger propellers.

Pretty cool innovations coming from DJI, we’ll see if this is released any time soon!

Lastly this week is an announcement from Zipline, who has partnered with a number of healthcare providers in Ohio and Michigan.

Zipline announced in September that they’d gotten FAA permission to operate BVLOS without visual observers, and now they appear to be ready to use that permission.

Partnerships include the Cleveland Clinic, Michigan Medicine, Intermountain Healthcare, and Ohio Health.

With these new partnerships, Zipline aims to deliver prescriptions directly to a home’s front door by 2025.

The Zipline P2 system cruises at 70 mph, an altitude of 300 feet and uses a small “droid” to drop packages in places where the main aircraft can’t get to.

Pretty cool tech!

That’s it! Have a great week and we’ll see you for our live on Monday on our airplane channel!

https://dronexl.co/2023/10/31/zipline-drones-deliver-meds/

https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/news/announcements/faa-authorizes-zipline-to-fly-bvlos

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-house-panel-seeks-ban-federal-purchases-chinese-drones-ft-2023-11-01/

https://dronexl.co/2023/10/30/dji-matrice-3d-dock-mini/

https://dronexl.co/2023/10/31/dji-dock-mini-matrice-3d-photos/

https://droneadvocacyalliance.com/?vvsrc=%2Fcampaigns%2F105982%2Frespond

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