You Can’t Fly a Drone Here, Here, and Here

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in charge of
regulating unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. Sort of. Their
regulations aren’t totally comprehensible (when they
actually exist), and a federal court has affirmed that the
FAA’s case-by-case judgment calls
aren’t actually legally binding.

This lack of clarity about what is allowed where has made flying
drones—which is in many cases a glorified term for
remote-controlled toys—difficult and legally tricky for a lot of
people. Services ranging from a beer
delivery business to a
charitable search-and-rescue team have been hassled and shut
down by the FAA. The administration sometimes even throws
hissy fits over people filming their own weddings with
drones.

Bobby Sudekum, a data analyst and engineer for the mapmaking
site MapBox, can’t cure FAA ineptitude and pettiness, but as
consumer sales of drones continue to grow
he is trying “to help people find safe places to fly.” To do so, he
created the above map and published it this week. Click on it, and
it will lead you to an interactive version on which you can zoom
and see more precise locations.

He explains that this
map is “just a start” and that anyone can submit information about
more no-fly spots. So far, the off-limits areas marked are only
national parks, military bases, and 5-mile radii around medium and
large airports. Wired points
out that “you’ll see on the map … that there isn’t a no-fly
area over Berkeley Lab,” which is a secure
national laboratory. “Similarly, there is no zone marked around
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country’s two
nuclear weapons labs.”