An NDAA Shopping List I Wasn’t Planning to Make (Yet)

We’ve had some time to digest the last-minute FCC notice released right before the December 23 deadline. Under normal circumstances, it would feel a little wild—but honestly, it fits right in with the broader climate we’re navigating across a lot of fronts right now. This clearly reads like a “we’ll fix this later” document. It reaches well beyond the FCC’s traditional scope, which strongly suggests revisions and clarifications are coming once cooler heads (and lawyers) get involved.

That said—if I’d been quietly setting aside some DJI revenue for an NDAA-compliant, American-made platform, I’d be leaning toward the Freefly Astro Max… assuming we could work something out 😄
The IF800 Tomcat and Skydio X10 are absolutely serious tools as well, but the Astro keeps checking boxes for real-world survey and inspection workflows.

I’m sure we’ll all be laughing about this next year when DJI merges with an American company—but for now, I’m curious where everyone’s landing:

• Waiting for the FCC cleanup pass
• Already migrating to NDAA-compliant platforms
• Running parallel fleets until things stabilize