Ahhh, progress. Used to be you had to let your dog run loose or skateboard up some geezer’s driveway to get some old fart riled up.
Now technologywill allow you to bother folks at more than arm’s length.
I’ve always had R/C planes and helicopters, but the new remote-camera drones are way cool.
My question lies in my/your aerial rights. Just this week, an animal rights group tried to video a pigeon hunt in South Carolina with drastic but forseeable results.
Here in the suburbs, shooting anything from the sky is frowned upon by the local gendarmerie, but what about the country? If I have land that is legal for shooting and hunting, do I have aerial rights above my property?
If those meddling kids try to snoop around my place from the sky, can I take out a drone or R/C plane? What about the police? Police helos routinely fly around the county in support of the guys on the ground, but can they use a small R/C unit to scan a neighborhood in search of backyard pot/un-fenced pools/other shenanigans?
No, as a former LEO, pilot, and all-round nice guy I’m not suggesting shooting down the fuzz when they buzz; I just want to know if I can shoot down little Johnny’s AR drone when it flies over scaring my chickens. I’ll tell the cops I thought it was a chicken hawk.
Actually, that’s less drastic than the results I envisioned; I thought it was going to be “pigeons caught in propeller blades of drone and killed”, which would have been interestingly ironic.
My understanding is you have no rights in this respect. Now where that line is I’m not so sure if they can hover a craft 5 ft off the ground and have it wander around your property at head level.
Actually property owners (at least in the US and Canada) have rights to the airspace above their property insofar as it affects their use and enjoyment of the land, up to the point of navigable airspace, which is public use.
It seems to me like that incident ought to boomerang to the activists’ advantage. I doubt the pigeon hunters had thought ahead to obtain a drone license. As far as I know, it’s not legal to just shoot at anything that moves. The article does say a “malicious damage to property incident report” was filed.
Even if not, one has to consider that “taking one for the team” is one of the most important roles of drones. In the military, drones may be lost so that no pilot dies…in this case, the drone perished but no pigeon died that day.
I would imagine that if you have the right to shoot on your property, you’ve got the right to shoot down drones if you can do so in a way that doesn’t result in a bullet landing off of your property. Shotguns may be the best way for those who own fewer than a thousand acres. I’m sure that people who live within city limits are out of luck, though I’d likewise imagine that there’d be few penalties for the lucky homeowner who gets a good swat in with a bat.
Whether you can be sued for property damage, I don’t know. If those noisy neighbor kids throw a Frisbee into my yard, does it become my Frisbee? If so, I imagine I can do with it what I like, and the same would go for a drone.
Also, the video is really boring, and is probably not worth your minute to watch.
I bet that’s what the shooter was worried about…
I suspect the animal rights group would be trespassing if they had flown their drone over the pigeon hunter’s property*. Whether that would give the property owner the right to shoot it down (assuming discharging a firearm was otherwise legal), hard to say.
If they have “no trespassing” signs posted, which I’d assume they would, you’d think that would give them a stronger case.
Yes, I realize they didn’t get that far, and may have never intended to cross the property line.
