Can I stop drone delivery companies flying over my property?

>almost nothing is going to stop them

Except for those 4-8 prop blades spinning at high rpm. Then multiple layers of packaging to get the item. It'll be interesting to see if it actually happens, my prediction is that trash bags will still be preferable risk/reward.

Crows are smart, and seem to for relationship with "friendly" humans, and are "trainable".

I wonder how long it'd take to befriend a few crows, and teach them there's valuable stuff in delivery drones?

A friend of mine suggested that being able to stop eagles attacking his drones used for land surveying would be worth a lot of money, they often come back with scratches and damage. I'm not sure if he's lost any drones (yet).

I wonder what's stopping them from erecting random wire mesh that will damage drone flying through them.

actually, I've been thinking that with the encroachment of man, birds are up off the ground and are the survivors that coexist with us.

But now I wonder if we will "silent spring" them too.

Have they learned same happens when car delivers food?

I can definitely see a future time when small autonomous air vehicles start to have problems with the local wildlife, either from the thick flocks of grackles in winter or from the more mischievous neighborhood corvids.

The NYPD drones buzz my neighborhood repeatedly during the summer months, and they are relatively small drones. Incredibly loud and distracting. I'm not looking forward to deliveries via heavier, louder drones.

Delivery drones are larger and therefore quieter (larger propellor = more pleasant tone and lower RPM) and fly higher than the consumer drones you’re probably familiar with.

yes. and how long before they start injuring or killing people because of software bugs or running out of petrol or other fuel?

For what it's worth, shooting at aircraft (including drones) is a federal offense, and the FAA takes that one pretty seriously. Drones also have cameras.

That could easily be grounds for prosecution in Canada for negligent discharge of a firearm. You'd be lucky if the court didn't take your firearms license away for life.

> there are going to have to be regulations about which air corridors they can use (altitude and routes) or it will be chaos

Agree. But a good way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to have folks shooting at drones.

I would hope so. The temptation to strap unknown sensors to map and analyze the customers they fly over will be impossible for them to ignore. Let the drone hunting season commence.

Why would the drone be hovering over a property where it's not making a delivery?

> a drone hovering over someone's property would be likely used as target practice

A long time ago I got to spend some time doing this and it was trickier than one might think. You have to lead over 3 dimensions instead of 2 and the vehicle speed is more variable than most things.

There are regulations about what air corridors they can use in the US.

In the US, shooting a drone is the same as shooting an aircraft and that means federal law enforcement attention, especially when the drone is owned by one of the largest, richest companies in the world, with lots of data and video footage.

If another drone shot the offending drone, would that be okay?

In my neighborhood (rural) a drone hovering over someone's property would be likely used as target practice.

Just yesterday, I told a drone operator that it was illegal to fly where he was.

He told me that because he clicked "I agree" on some setup software that made it legal.

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Imagine shooting down a helicopter above your house, people r crazy

With all the money behind it that’s probably going to a criminally punished similar to hijacking a goods truck n the highway.

Not at all. Politicians will carve out a law which protects them only. They've done it (or the inverse) before: https://www.propublica.org/article/do-as-we-say-congress-say...

Yep, but it will backfire as they just write laws to protect their own interests; drone companies’ donations can’t protect them from annoying politicians but probably can for everyone else.

I read an article about the folks in College Station who live close to the amazon warehouse that was testing out drone deliveries. Drones would pass by their houses about once every three minutes at low ~50-150 feet above ground and people complained about how loud and frequent they were.

This article is from Ireland, but at least here in the US local governments cannot create laws governing anything that is airborne.

I live in Iowa where the governor just signed a bill that outlaws drone surveillance of private farms and farmland. I haven't read the full bill yet, so it's possible that it also outlaws surveillance of homes that aren't on farmland, but would at least be illegal to do what you're describing if you own a farm in Iowa.

I’ll never understand people who oppose new technology because it could hypothetically be used a negative way. These people just seem to have a chronically cynical outlook on everything.

The logical thing to do is to regulate things when they become a problem, not speculatively.

Exactly! The majority of drone enthusiasts are insufferable, repeating the old mantra, "FAA allows to do what we like". I can't wait for some of these cases to hit the supreme court where they can put a stop to applying laws that were meant to govern manned aircraft applying to someone with a drone.

> Has a very easy answer in the US: No.

While you're not wrong in practice, it's actually a surprisingly complicated area of law.

The FAA doesn't "own" the airspace, it's a public right-of-way and every citizen has the right to transit it. See 49 USC §40103: "A citizen of the United States has a public right of transit through the navigable airspace".

The FAA gets to set policy on how to ensure safety, just like the Coast Guard sets rules for the safe navigation of public waterways (but neither "owns" the air/water): "the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration shall develop plans and policy for the use of the navigable airspace and assign by regulation or order the use of the airspace necessary to ensure the safety of aircraft and the efficient use of airspace."

Now, where it gets complicated is the definition of "navigable airspace". A common definition is either 360 feet or 500 feet above the tallest structure on a parcel of land, but the case law isn't consistent on this - especially when you consider that some aircraft (like helicopters) can legally navigate lower than that. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights#United_States

>You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

Makes sense. If castle doctrine applied to the skies, people could take potshots at low flying aircraft above their house. I guess that's one way to prevent becoming a flyover state...

In Ireland?

Not quite. The height of a structure, antenna, tower, etc., can be limited by the FAA based upon the distance of the structure from a nearby airport. Beyond a certain distance, the height is no longer an FAA issue.

The domain is .IE, the FAA has little relevance.

True, the article is talking about Ireland, and I don't know what the current laws are there. But for the States, normal aircraft are supposed to stay 500 ft away: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...

That's not true for helicopters and UAVs within sight of their controllers, but I feel sorry for the people who bought a house not near and airport, and now have to deal with a buzzing swarm overhead.

> You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

This kinda begs the question of what is meant by "airspace." If the term means a geometric volume that is generally occupied by materials in a gaseous state, then does the FAA own the airspace within one's home? Does the FAA control how cars drive down the airspace of a road? No, that is absurd.

The common use of aircraft smaller than humans and capable of performing navigation faster than humans is expanding a previously relatively stable boundary of what Federal law and rules call "navigable airspace." Thus, I think it is incorrect to say "The FAA owns your airspace." since the FAA explicitly does not control airspace below a certain altitude over most people's houses.

So who pays your medical bills when one of those falls on your head. FAA or the delivery company?

> drones have minimum distance and altitude regulations as well as restrictions from operating above people.

1. What does "minimum distance... regulations" even mean?

2. Drones do not have minimum altitude regulations, except in cases where ALL air traffic is limited.

3. Drones have a few restrictions from operating above people, but hardly enough to prevent interactions. See FAA's Operations Over People rule.

I like the fishing line idea a lot but wouldn’t that get birds as well

A Wing delivery drones can lift 5 lbs and travel upwards of 12 miles at up to 70 mph.

If a single operator can pilot 20 drones simultaneously, delivering say 50+ packages/hour, then it starts to make sense.

there are niches in places where the roads are bad/congested/otherwise and the cargo is particularly high value. I remember reading about a delivery use case for blood bags in the African countryside.

Not sure how profitable they are today but I think it’s obvious that the long term play is to eliminate the contract workers entirely

The drone operator need not be in the location you're delivering in. If you put on the hat of an executive, the job can even be outsourced to mexico :-)

I'm also not thrilled about the added strain on wildlife and nature, and also scared of what it means to have drones operated by the companies who just can't seem to consume enough data. Amazon drones would be like the Skeksis Crystal Bats from the Dark Crystal, creepy evil little bastards that you shouldn't let spot you :P

The article isn't about the US.

However, even the US, that isn't entirely true.

United States v. Causby (1946) sets the precedent that property owners own the airspace above their property to (at least) 83 feet.

The FAA has exclusive sovereignty over "navigable airspace", which is considered a public highway. This navigable airspace generally begins at 500 feet above the surface in uncongested areas and 1000 feet above the highest obstacle in congested areas. Aircraft flying within this navigable airspace are generally not considered to be trespassing.

There is a "gray area" between the immediate airspace controlled by the landowner and the federally controlled navigable airspace. While the FAA asserts its authority to regulate all airspace, including this lower stratum, the exact delineation of private airspace rights within this zone, particularly concerning new technologies like drones, is not clear.

Not entirely true. I believe there are laws determining how high you own. I believe it's 100' for my state.

I empathize with this, at the moment it seems pretty obnoxious.

I hope the current strategy is to prove demand and when it's time lean into efficiency and hopefully non-obtrusiveness. If they don't, the volume of complaints is a threat to the whole business model. A drone delivering lunch potentially takes a combustion engine off the road for dozens of minutes and leaves more room on congested streets for other traffic. If the tech can be optimized to sound like a bird (essentially inaudible), we've probably gained something overall.

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"Hear me out, we need more murders"

The looney part is you pretending a van driving in front of your house is nearly as invasive as drone flying over your yard...

I semi-interested in drones, and my social media algorithm repeatedly shows me both EMP devices and drone jamming countermeasures. Aliexpress style vendors, factory assembly videos. I would guess that both of these are illegal in the US.

That would be very relevant, were the article not about Ireland.

The FAA isn't the only relevant authority, even if it were you'd still find low-altitude flights often illegal, even if legal you'd still find some activities like trapping the drone with a net situationally legal, and none of your comment or mine applies anyway because we're talking about the wrong continent.

I remember growing up in the rural midwest, people with bitch about Ultra light aircraft. It’s just a glider with an engine strapped to it. They’re super noisy and fly low to the ground (relatively speaking), so they annoy people who like the peace and quiet of the countryside. They’ve been around for a lot longer than drones

I bought my house years ago, and as such, need to do things like replace the roof and windows every few decades. I recently had a quote done, which involved the salesman flying a drone up to look at my roof... or would have, because his app disabled the launch, because I live in restricted airspace (which I was unaware of despite living here for many years). That neatly explains why I haven't seen a single drone in my neighborhood.

The law is divorced from the new reality. The law is intended to protect lives and the commercial airline industry. It did not envision such simple automated nuisances arising from licensed operations. The FAA has also shown itself quite willing to disrupt or alter aircraft operations in order to reduce the amount of noise around an airport.

I would not expect the federally charged drone free for all to last very long once this activity picks up in earnest.

So basically: Screw you peasants, your corporate lords can do whatever they please. That's about par for the course now.