There is currently what amounts to a “war” between the U.S. federal and state governments against specific Chinese drone makers, with the big target being DJI. And a major issue has been what would happen if the many organizations — law enforcement, search and rescue, other public safety, farmers, utilities, on and on — couldn’t continue to obtain or use the DJI drones in particular that they have depended on for years.
And the discussion has been largely theoretical for most of this period because DJI drones, repairs, parts, and service have continued to be available. But now that’s changing and moving beyond the theoretical and into real world effects, and yeah the situation is deteriorating even faster than even most pessimistic observers anticipated.
I’m not going to try review here all the deep details of how we got to this point, except to note that there are multiple aspects. Confusion over rapidly changing tariff rates is one factor. There have been claims that DJI drones have, or maybe in the future could have security issues, though this has never been demonstrated — apparently DJI has passed every security audit conducted on their products.
Many observers have long suspected that what’s really going on is politically-motivated protectionism from politicians in both parties, because the organizations that buy DJI drones apparently consider them to be more affordable, reliable, and rapid to obtain compared with currently available U.S. made alternatives. And remember we’re not talking just about little DJI drones you can hold on your hand, they also have very large drones that farmers use to spray crops, and big drones that can lower or gather heavy payloads in rescue situations in isolated, rugged areas and so on.
But now, with this confluence of factors, including U.S. Customs reportedly pretty much choking off the supply of DJI products into the U.S., we’ve reached a point where the rest of the world can buy these advanced DJI drones, including new ones just recently released and others likely to be very soon released, but the U.S. is cut off. The supply of DJI products has dried up in the U.S. Out of stock virtually everywhere. Repairs are reportedly taking longer, and parts are difficult or impossible to obtain.
DJI is still trying to get a government agency to do the security review mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act as passed by Congress, and the deadline that would trigger an associated DJI drone ban is at the end of this year. The whole situation is completely nuts.
In Florida, the state government ordered official usage of DJI drones stopped. That means grounding 200 million taxpayer dollars of drones used for police work, fire fighting, mosquito control and more. And the state is apparently only willing to provide a tenth of that much to replace them with U.S. made drones that are typically many times more expensive than DJI drones, and sometimes take months rather than days to obtain.
In some states 90% of public safety drones are DJI. Their drones are known to be exceptionally reliable. An Orlando police department indicated that they had five failures of “approved” U.S. made drones over a year and half, but no failures among the DJI drones they’d been using.
We could keep going through the statistics and more of these cases but you get the idea. We all want a strong domestic drone industry, but agencies and other groups who rely on DJI drones in the U.S. are being cut off from vital technology that the rest of the world can still easily obtain. There haven’t been publicly demonstrated security problems with DJI drones despite the alarmist hype from the politicians.
This entire mess does appear to be politically driven and BOTH parties are to blame. These politicians need to stop this craziness, because they’re not just putting important U.S. businesses and other organizations at risk with this drone ban nonsense, they’ll be putting U.S. lives at risk as well. That’s irresponsible and it really needs to stop, RIGHT NOW!
–Lauren–