Imagine a peaceful summer afternoon at home with your family. You’re inside preparing food for a barbeque while the rest of your family sunbathes and plays by the backyard pool. Suddenly, your teenage daughter runs into the house, hysterical. Something is hovering in the air just above your pool and moving around your backyard. You run outside to investigate, but it has already vanished. What was it? Where did it come from, and where did it go? What photos, recordings, or other data did it take with it? Perhaps more importantly, what is your recourse to prevent this from happening again? After all, you certainly have the right to prevent such trespass into the airspace directly above your property, don’t you? Unfortunately, definitive answers to questions about airspace rights above private property are currently lacking. And this not-so-hypothetical situation is an increasingly common occurrence for property owners across the county—each incident varying in detail, but each equally unnerving—as a result of the rapidly increasing use of small unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS” or “drones”). Once reserved for military use or science fiction novels, drones have in recent years become both highly popular and widely affordable to commercial and hobby purchasers alike. Combined with powerful state-of-the-art cameras and communications technology, drones are capable of efficiently and economically photographing, videotaping, and gathering other information for applications and in manners previously undreamed of.

Originally published in California Real Property Journal on August 16th, 2016.