Two questions come up on almost every residential job. Can you legally fly over my neighbour's house, and can they legally stop you. The answers live in different bodies of law, which is exactly why the subject stays confused.

The airspace belongs to the federal government

Navigable airspace is regulated by the FAA, and that authority reaches down to the surface. A city cannot make a rule about how high an aircraft may fly, and a homeowner does not own a column of air stretching upward from their lot.

What survives from older property law is a narrow idea that a landowner controls the immediate reaches above their land, enough that they can use and enjoy it. Nobody has drawn a clean line at a specific altitude, and the case law that exists mostly involves manned aircraft at low level. A drone hovering at fifteen feet outside a bedroom window is a different proposition from one transiting at three hundred feet, and courts have shown every sign of treating them differently.

Georgia preempted local drone rules

Georgia law removed the power of cities and counties to write their own drone ordinances, with limited exceptions for a local government's own property. The practical effect is that a patchwork of two hundred different municipal rules never developed here, which is good for anyone operating across the metro.

What local governments retain is control over their own land. A city can prohibit launching and landing from its parks, and several do. That is a land use rule rather than an airspace rule, and it means the answer to can I fly here often depends on where you are standing rather than where the aircraft is.

What actually creates liability

Not the flight itself, in most cases. The exposure comes from what is recorded and what is done with it. Georgia has laws on invasion of privacy and on surveillance, and general tort claims for intrusion upon seclusion exist independently of any aviation rule.

The test that matters is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Photographing a house from three hundred feet as part of a listing is not an intrusion, because the exterior of a building is visible to anybody in the street or in a passing aircraft. Loitering over a fenced back garden with a long lens is a different act, and calling it aerial photography does not change what it is.

How we work

A few habits handle almost all of it. We get written permission from the property owner who hired us, and we tell neighbours what we are doing before we launch on residential jobs. We do not hover over neighbouring properties, and where a flight path has to cross one we transit at a sensible altitude rather than lingering. We frame to exclude neighbouring gardens and windows, and if something private ends up in a frame it gets deleted rather than delivered.

None of that is required by the FAA. All of it prevents the phone call that turns a two hour job into a week of correspondence.

For clients

If you are commissioning aerial work over a residential area, the risk you are managing is reputational as much as legal. A neighbour who is told what is happening is a curious bystander. The same neighbour, surprised, becomes a complaint to the city, a post in a neighbourhood group, and occasionally a police call, and all of that attaches to your project rather than to the pilot.

We touched on the public mood side of this in mystery drones and public nerves. The short version is that a five minute conversation before takeoff is the cheapest insurance available.

Tell us about your site and we will tell you what is straightforward, what needs permission, and what we would rather not do at all.