To shine a different light on this, governments prohibiting drone flights has a political use as well. In Hungary, a tool the government uses to misrepresent attendance of popular opposition events is to fly a police drone and picture the event before it starts, to have a picture with fewer people than actually attending. It then prohibits flying drones to take any conflicting photo, then pays US social media firms to put their footage in all their ads.
I still think you should get a license and registration for these, but free flight zones should exist below 500 feet that only require declaration of intent to fly and maybe ADSB in/out.
I assumed that our (Finland) rules are EU wide, but apparently there’s some differences. In here, if you’re flying a drone with a camera, you’ll need a registration and license (~30€/year, online course) which grants you “free flight” below 120 meters. But there’s exclusions around airports, military and some government locations, nearby country borders and things like that which make sense. Also if you’re having a bigger event you can request a no-fly zone above it for various reasons (safety mostly but it’s possible to get that to stop non-event managed drone footage as well). And with camera you also need to pay attention for privacy, but that’s no different than carrying an DSLR, like it’s illegal to take photos trough your neighbors bedroom window no matter what kind of camera you use. Other rules dictate that you can’t fly over crowds and other reasonable safety measures.
At least my DJI won’t even attempt to fly on these zones unless I spesifically get a permit from local authorities and send a copy to them to revoke the zone on my profile.
I love when my ability to use things I own depends on a team of remote babysitters to give me permission.
People around you are entitled to peace and privacy.
Your rights end where other people’s begins.
Your rights end where other people’s begins.
Damn right. There’s a ton of things on our everyday lives which limit our ability to use the things we own. And flying a drone is not that different than driving on a street, at least on a very fundamental level. There’s a set of agreed rules we (mostly) can trust in order to keep things running and keep everyone safe. You’re not allowed to drive anywhere you physically could, you need to keep your vehicle in a decent condition, drive on the correct lane within a speed limit and so on.
I’ve had my drone for 3 or 4 years now and I’ve taken a crapload of pictures with it all around and there’s been three cases where the zone limitations were an issue of any kind. One was when I tried to film my daughters sports game where the field was next door to an active airport, other was a bigger local event where police had denied all drones as a safety measure (one might argue if that was necessary on this case, but rules are rules) and third one was nearby Russian border.
And I can perfectly understand each and every one of those. Me getting a few neat photos from something is far less important than safety of other people. Plus I could still take all the photos I want from each of those locations with my cellphone or mount a telescope on my DSLR and use that.
That’s unrelated. I don’t want the manufacturer of my devices to have a kill switch on them.
What do you even do if you get a fine like that? Die? That shit is life ruining…
Never go back to Spain
It’s called a mortgage… Mort…life ruining yeah.
That’s pretty high, but they are mighty annoying.
Drones aren’t that annoying when they are pretty high.
Unfortunately, most of the people flying drones do it at a height where the annoying buzz disturbs the people below.
Never a bad time to start a fiber optic build.
Are there no kite flying zones?
Relevant xkcd
british
Justified
