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Hot Shoe

Commercial UAV News

16 stories

Commercial UAV NewsDronesDJI Launches Matrice 5T With Lidar, mmWave Radar and 1K Thermal Camera On Thursday, DJI announced the launch of its latest airframe, the DJI Matrice 5T. The company’s new compact enterprise flagship drone integrates lidar, mmWave radar, and vision sensing, alongside 1K…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesTrimble Adds Cloud Drone Data Processing to WorksManager Software On Thursday, Trimble announced that its Trimble WorksManager software is adding new capabilities with new drone processing software.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesEASA Annual Safety Review Counts 39 Drone Accidents and Serious Incidents in 2025 The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recorded 39 accidents and serious incidents involving unmanned aircraft systems in EASA Member States in 2025, and none were fatal, according to the…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesAirData and Pilot Institute Integration Syncs Drone Pilot Training Records On Wednesday, commercial drone operations platform AirData UAV announced a new integration with Pilot Institute, a drone training school and Commercial UAV Expo event partner.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesDryad’s Silvanet Network Wins Second Place in XPRIZE Wildfire Competition In a matter of minutes, a tiny spark can escalate into a potentially catastrophic wildfire. Wildfires have become a growing problem due to climate change, and drone technology has stepped up over the…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesPlanning Inspection and Mapping Missions When Your Fleet Isn’t All One Brand Contributed by Pro4Aerials LLC More drone service companies are running mixed fleets. Some of that is due to import rules pushing U.S. operators to add or switch aircraft.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesAround the Commercial Drone Industry: Healthcare Logistics, Infrastructure Protection, Autonomous Fire Suppression This week’s news round up includes stories on a new partnership between Matternet and Swisslog for drone delivery between hospitals, research aimed towards detecting drones around critical…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesThe FAA is Helping Design Vertiports. But Who Will Change the Batteries? On October 22, 2026, the FAA published Draft Advisory Circular 150/5390-4, Vertical Flight Aircraft Infrastructure Design, another important step toward making Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) a…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesFCC to Vote on Rules for Drone Communications, Detection and Satellite Connectivity On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendon Carr announced that the Commission will consider final rules to authorize what it calls as “critical technologies” that will advance UAS and AAM applications.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesWho Actually Hires Drone Operators? What the FAA's Survey Shows, and What It Doesn't Contributed by Mark Santos, founder of Mark Studios Ask who hires drone operators, and you'll usually get a confident percentage - some share of commercial pilots working in real estate, or some…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesFrom Ground Support to Ground-Up Innovation: Meet UAV Empower Scholarship Winner Tatenda Gondo Commercial UAV Expo once again opened its doors to newcomers this year with the UAV Empower Path to Leadership Event Scholarship, now in its second year and sponsored by CubePilot and NW Blue.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesPercepto Launches Axion, a Hardware-Agnostic AI Platform for Drone Inspection Data On Tuesday, Percepto announced the launch of Axion, the company’s new hardware-agnostic Physical AI platform.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesWhat Does Your Drone Really Cost Per Flight Hour? Contributed by Bashar Qawas Half an hour in the air. Easy job, right? Perhaps, until you count the driving, setup, and staff time that goes into that short flight.

Commercial UAV NewsDronesAmerica Has the Pieces. Who Will Put Its Low-Altitude Airspace Awareness System Together? The Gap Between Diagnosis and Action My August article, America’s Low-Altitude Awareness Gap: The Path to Safer, More Secure, and More Prosperous Skies,1 described a nation entering the low-altitude…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesAround the Commercial Drone Industry: Delivery Opposition, ZenaTech’s Arizona Facility, Agriculture Drones This week’s news round up features a story about how the town of Westborough, Massachusetts feels about Amazon Drone Delivery, a new facility in Mesa Arizona for ZenaTech’s Drones as a Service…

Commercial UAV NewsDronesParallel Flight Brings Its Heavy-Lift Hybrid Drone to Asia-Pacific For decades, Australia has represented a unique challenge for aviation. An enormous country with vast distances between population centers, extensive mining operations, isolated communities, and some…

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· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

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About

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo