Some interesting developments on drones have emerged lately, to where I think it's appropriate to call it a season rather than a one-time event. Sen. Graham recently visited a drone factory, Skyfall, in Ukraine, describing it as “state-of-the-art” and “far more advanced than anyone else on the planet.” Next week, a selection of competitors will be flying in a competition to see who can demonstrate the highest payload weight to unladen airframe weight ratio to win $6.5M in prizes. The DARPA Lift ChallengeThe Challenge rules were designed to make it nearly impossible to meet DARPA's goal of seeing drone designs achieve greater than a 4:1 ratio of payload weight to unladen weight of the drone. Yeah — it's 60 feet wide and 1,060 feet long, whereas a nm is 6,076 feet.