Drone News Roundup: Rocket Drone Reaches Almost 200 MPH, Surfing by Drone in Portugal, and More!

This week we’re covering a video of a homemade rocket drone that reaches a top speed of over 190 miles per hour, with the tips of the drone’s propellers almost breaking the sound barrier.

We’re also covering a drone video of professional surfers riding massive waves in Portugal, an FPV drone video shot by Jay Christensen for the University of Florida’s football team, DJI’s recent success with an independent data security review for several of its drones, and a new test site for 5G and drones that will be overseen by researchers at North Carolina State.

Now let’s get to those links!

Rocket Drone Reaches Almost 200 Miles Per Hour

The YouTube creator known as Quadmovr has made a name by building drones and then pushing them to their limits. One of these drones is called the SUB400speed drone—a rocket drone made to go incredibly fast. In this video, Quadmovr pushes the SUB400speed up to 194 mph (313 kmh). To achieve this speed, the tip of the drone’s prop blades got all the way up to 640 mph (1,030 kmh)—or Mach .834, which is edging close to breaking the sound barrier.

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Drone Surfing Video from Portugal

Cold weather got you down? This drone video of world-class surfers riding huge waves in Nazaré, Portugal may be just what you need. And when we say huge, we mean the kind that require surfers to be pulled in by jet ski. All the footage in the video was shot on a single day last month—Monday, November 7. According to the video description, this is just the start of the surf season in Portugal.

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This is the kind of shot you can’t mess up. The team is running onto the field, the stadium is packed with well over 50,000 cheering fans, barrels are shooting plumes of fire into the air, and you only have one chance to get the shot. No problem for cinewhoop master Jay Christensen, who has been instrumental in popularizing cinewhoops and continues to push out high quality work over and over again, the majority of it captured in single shots. Follow the link below for behind-the-scenes footage from the work Christensen did to make this video for the University of Florida’s football team, the Florida Gators.

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DJI Drones Clear Major Independent Privacy Review

DJI, long the focus of U.S. concerns about data privacy, recently received the all clear on privacy concerns from the German testing and certification firm TÜV SÜD. The firm did an in-depth review of security features on DJI’s Mavic 3, Mini 2, and Air 2S drones, as well as the DJI Fly app for iOS and Android. To do the drone reviews, TÜV SÜD’s bought DJI drone models on their own through common commercial channels. For the software reviews, they downloaded the Fly app on both iOS and Android without notifying DJI in advance. DJI had another privacy-related win recently, with its DJI Core Crypto Engine passing a key security benchmark through a program established jointly by the US Department of Commerce and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.

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NC State to Test 5G Drone Ops

In the coming year, researchers at North Carolina State will be building experimental testbeds for 5G drone operations using funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) . The researchers will start by conducting experiments in a virtual environment, using 3D digital twins of the actual sites where they plan to test drone operations with 5G technology. The NC State 5G program is one of four city-scale research testbeds investigating the potential for wireless devices and networks, and it’s the only one that will study 5G and autonomous drones together.

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