The NDAA Took My Drone Away
*If you want to know my position on the non-ban and or just want to poach my solutions, scroll down now.
Lots of braying on the boards; without them Chinese Communist Party subsidized drones
New China Life Insurance VC Bling Oh, golly, I’ll be out of business. Or, as the heartstring tuggers like to frame it, we won’t be able to save lives or any of the other applications we as a community have known about for at least fifty-plus years. It all loosely translates to I’ll be out of pushbutton relevance.
If you listen to the influencers, you’ll be thinking those meanies over at Skydio are lobbying to take my drone stick-touching job away. While it is true that Skydio is doing some lobbying, DJI is outspending them by huge margins. If that doesn’t give you pause, the notion that Skydio is a credible threat to DJI should. Yet, few voice concerns about the anti-American DJI devotee subpar attack propaganda. Out of desperation and lack of conscience, the lowlife shill will stoop to racism while shielding the totalitarian
human rights-abusing Winnie the Pooh, banning Chinese Communist Party from besmirchment.
Skydio does make an excellent low-hanging scapegoat for the dummies. However, somebody could make a solid case for an American company to lobby its government, especially in a dysfunctional regulated industry. And no, I am not only talking about the airspace integration effort but also DoD procurement.
Whatever the case, Skydio leadership’s recent moves echo the same VC visionary-inspired decisions that brought 3DR down like a rock, and they had free IP.
You want a safe and easy low-IQ Scooby-Doo answer regarding who we can pin the blame on. The blame for this economic and national security issue is directly attributable to the abysmal FAA airspace integration debacle. The dual-use crowd is paying a premium to fly in drone prisons, and there are few paths to market for new designs.
In case you were wondering, statements like these will get you muted or even possibly hung up on during the Drone Safety Team meeting call. Apparently, those shilling for the Chinese still get the red carpet treatment.
Drone Safety Team meeting takeaway as one attended aptly surmised it, “Turd in the punch bowl!”
The other culprit has lots of money, high praise for their products, and corporate credibility lower than a veritable snake’s belly. Who is it, you ask? Why it is none other than NDAA darling and shallow lie master’s in training, DJI. How can you blame them?
They make bloody good drones.
DJI should have just come clean instead of trying that political reeducation camp stuff on Western audiences. It’s like this: The laws in China mandate X, Y, and Z. We comply with the regulations to keep the New China Life Insurance Company good-time CC Party sovereign fund investment money rolling in and our kidneys, okay?
As an aside, and as a public service, if you’re going to collect all of that good flight data, why not use it to prove to the various CAAs that consumer drones are safe? They might open the flight envelope for the rest of us. You say you don’t want our data, but we do.
Anyway, I’ll elaborate on the economic security issue first. The DJI “experts” are cobbling together a conspiracy with Skydio at the helm. Lest we forget, Skydio isn’t even in the commercial or hobby drone space dominated by DJI. Skydio is in the military and government space. And before you get yourself wrapped around the axle, I am not on the Skydio, Teal, Brinc, or anyone else’s dole. I am only considering the USA warfighter national security and domestic economic viability in the aerospace sector, all without shaking anyone down.
Advice for the government.
Be open-minded. Don’t only emulate the CCP/PRC when it comes to totalitarianism and controlling a weak-minded population. Invest in industries that will result in your country’s dominance on the world stage. Give your aviation authority the leeway to implement rules and policies allowing dual-use military technology and capabilities by products from the commercial sector. Heck, that might even serve as a shot in the arm for a domestic aerospace industry trying to get the AAM thing off the Vertiport.
Why hold the bag of broken dreams; head over to the PRC website, as they have a whole mess of initiatives they are working on to dominate the planet. I am not suggesting we go nuts and suspend human rights, environmental, or labor laws. Poke around; there’s a lot to work with.
https://english.www.gov.cn/2016special/madeinchina2025/
DoD –
The twentieth-century laurel riding has got to stop. There is a lot of hand-wringing, as
the geopolitical situation is not pretty. Finding new solutions while hamstrung by
outdated procurement models is a challenging task. We all know viable aerospace
solutions don’t come cheap. Start throwing money at the problem, not at the legacy
OEMs. Oh, and you had better get the C-UAS thing moving, or our troops will be
running around the tank chased down by $450 FPV drones.
FAA
We should have provisions for companies building and end-users employing domestically produced systems to get front-of-the-line service for arbitrary and capricious waivers and exemptions. Employing the waiver and exemption model at this point smacks of a pay-to-play model used in developing countries, so throw those of us who can’t afford lobbyists a bone. Regulation and policy are, in this case, only put in place to lock out competition, and I am concerned that we are beyond any failsafe point.
Who did a lot of the lobbying and assisted with the rulemaking and policy?
Yes, it was DJI. They lobbied for and got leadership slots and backroom deals for FAA rulemaking and policy efforts. It was a very cozy relationship indeed—such a comfortable relationship that Classified DoD documents were purportedly shared with representatives of a CCP/PRC-funded company. Any rules and policies enacted with participation from DJI, their lobbyists, or companies they were in partnership with should be audited.
I do not favor a complete ban on DJI, Autel, or any other Chinese drone company, regardless of investment from the CCP/PRC. We should not be naive about the public aims and goals of a totalitarian class A adversary. If you want to take selfies, make movies and entertainment, sell real estate, estimate fencing jobs, fight forest fires, sell 4K TV sets, etc., go for it. Critical infrastructure, police investigations gather evidence, military or national security, etc., not so much.
In my estimation, the current or evolving scheme is almost worthless and will only hurt Anzu, DJI, and the New China Life Insurance Company’s potential ROI.
