Andy_474
New
United States
Offline
|
Hi all - had a similar experience to the OP recently, hoping for some insight. I just got a Mavic Air 2, am FAA hobbyist registered. A search for any city or parks department ordinances against RC/drone flight yielded no restrictions, county parks (not city or other agency parks) are restricted, but that’s all. Also, I live in Michigan, and we have no statewide restrictions applying to cities/municipalities, in fact, it appears there is a law banning municipalities from enacting their own drone restrictions.
I took my Mavic to a local city park next to the river, it’s a large/long park down the riverside with some walking trails but lots of open space, and especially being dead of winter, there are not many people in the park aside from a few walkers on the paved trails. I flew two 6-7 minute flights from where I was parked, out over the immediately adjacent large frozen pond. Although this time of year the ice is safe to walk on, there was no one on the pond, in fact there were only perhaps 5-10 people who had passed through walking during my flights, and those trails are beyond where I was flying, so I was not over any people. Toward the end of flight 2, as I was packing up I noticed a city park department vehicle parked near me and perhaps watching me. Today, I flew at a different large park, but a very similar situation with being parked/takeoff near a pond and flying over the pond, and then over an unoccupied pool and sports field area. Again noticed a city parks vehicle show up at the end of my flight and follow me out of the parking lot. Following all FAA regulations as far as I know. Also, the parking lots were sparsely scattered with parked cars, mostly people on lunch break staying in their vehicles, and again I didn’t fly over moving vehicles or people, crowds, etc, in fact I was able to proceed directly over the pond from takeoff.
I placed a call to the parks department, which was automatically forwarded to city hall, and the gentleman I spoke to told me drone use within city limits and/or at parks is prohibited per FAA regulations both due to being in vicinity of people and also the FAA bans flights inside any city limits. This sounds wrong to me, but as a new pilot, I don’t want to be in violation of the law due to misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. My suspicion is that the city and parks department know they don’t have authority to do anything, so they use this as a tactic to intimidate pilots out of the parks. I would’ve appreciated if they just asked, because I’m not out to ruffle feathers. Hopefully they aren’t trying to file a bogus FAA case against me. |
|