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The FAA has proposed a rule that would let power plants, dams, refineries, and other "critical infrastructure" sites ask to have the airspace above them closed to drones. By the agency's own estimate, roughly 125,000 facilities could qualify to ask. Almost no one has said anything about it — 578 public comments as of July 13 — and the window closes August 5.
The rule finally implements Section 2209 of the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016 — a provision Congress passed a decade ago that has been sitting unbuilt ever since. Under it, a qualifying "fixed site facility" could request an unmanned aircraft flight restriction over itself, in two flavors: a standard restriction, and a special one that needs sign-off from both the FAA and a sponsoring federal agency. Eligibility reaches across all 16 federally designated critical-infrastructure sectors — chemical, energy, dams, nuclear, transportation, water, communications, food and agriculture, emergency services, financial services, and the rest of the list.
The National Press Photographers Association filed comments, and it is worth being precise about what it actually argued, because it is not "this is unconstitutional." The NPPA concedes the FAA's authority outright: it "does not challenge the FAA's authority to impose appropriate narrowly tailored restrictions where necessary to address documented safety and security concerns." Its objection is procedural — that the rule sets up a process by which "potentially significant portions of the NAS may be subject to long-term or effectively permanent restrictions without sufficient transparency, public participation, documented findings, procedural safeguards, or consideration of the impact on First Amendment-protected newsgathering activity." What it wants added is unglamorous and specific: published findings, periodic review, expiration dates.
A separate coalition — the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and EPIC — filed on July 9, and made a point you can check yourself in about ten seconds. Search the proposed rule for the words "journalist," "reporter," "journalism," or "newsgathering." None of them appear. Neither does "First Amendment." The trigger for a restriction is whether a drone would have a "debilitating impact" on the facility — language inherited from federal statute — and the FAA never spells out what it will actually treat as debilitating.
This is not a simple good-guys-versus-bad-guys rule, and it would be dishonest to sell it that way. The Commercial Drone Alliance welcomed the proposal; the industry has wanted a 2209 rule for years to replace the patchwork of local ordinances that currently substitutes for one. Even the civil-liberties coalition allows that prisons and nuclear plants are perfectly legitimate applicants. The complaint is narrower than that: as drafted, the rule simply has no place in it where anyone weighs a facility's security request against the public's interest in seeing the flood, the derailment, the refinery fire. "History has shown that restrictions adopted in the name of security can gradually expand beyond their original purpose," NPPA general counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher said. NPPA president Alex Garcia put the other half of it: drones have become "an indispensable tool for documenting natural disasters, environmental incidents, public demonstrations, emergency response activities, and other matters of profound public concern."
If you fly, this is the rare one where an opinion costs you five minutes and actually lands somewhere. It is docket FAA-2026-4558, and it is open until August 5. Five hundred and seventy-eight comments is not a lot of people speaking for a rule that could redraw where you are allowed to put a camera.
Image credit: "No Drone Zone" sign by Paul Brennan, released into the public domain.
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