I’ve been having a bit of fun with my DJI quadcopter lately, but there is something that is annoying me and stressing me in the back of my head, and that’s surrounding the legality of flying quadcopters.

Basically, it’s impossible to determine with any certainty whether flying your quadcopter in any particular place is legal.

Consider my very first time flying with the DJI Phantom 2:

Within minutes of putting birds in the air, the police roll up and inform us that it’s illegal to fly in East Bay Regional Parks. You might imagine that you’d be able to find this rule somewhere: go ahead and read their rules and regulations. This webpage makes the claim that drones are illegal under Ordinance 38, but I was unable to locate any mention of that in the actual ordinance. The term “drone” doesn’t appear in the ordinance. The word video only appears once in section 702, which covers commercial filming, which I was uninterested in. There doesn’t seem to be any regulations covering remote controlled aircraft in Eastbay Parks at all.

Is it illegal? I don’t know. I’m really not interested in engaging in a confrontation with a police officer about it though, so I’m not flying there. Even if it isn’t illegal, you could probably be stupidly cited under some noise ordinance or failing to cooperate with police. Who needs that headache?

So, the question is, where can you actually fly? And where can you be sure that flying is legal?

For those who would argue against spying or presenting a hazard to pedestrians or other park goers, look at the video again. We chose this park and venue precisely because it was far from residential properties, and from other park users. The parking lot was convenient to launch from, but we launched far from other cars, and our flight path was out over unoccupied park land. We want to operate safely and responsibly, and just have some fun snapping some nice pics of the beautiful landscape that surrounds the Bay Area.

Oh, and by the way, what I have isn’t a drone. It’s a model aircraft, in particular, a quadcopter. It is an unmanned aircraft only in the sense that your RC car is a remotely operated motor vehicle. It weighs 2.2 pounds. Call it a toy. Do not call it a drone.