DJI wyjaśnia, dlaczego nie zabroni dronom latać nad Białym Domem — i co się stanie, jeżeli USA wprowadzi zakaz

Time is not on DJI’s side.

The world’s largest drone maker has less than a year to convince the Trump administration to save its products from an automatic US ban — at a time erstwhile drone fears have been stoked more than ever.

Some of those fears were exacerbated by DJI’s own bad timing: days after a tiny DJI drone took out a plane fighting the LA wildfires, the company chose to announce it would no longer enforce the “no-fly zones” it designed to keep specified things from happening. The company will no longer halt its drones from flying over airports, power plants, or even the White House, a decision it says it planned months ago and already rolled out in Europe and the UK.

How does getting free of no-fly zones make drones safer? What can DJI do to escape a US ban? And what might happen if that ban comes into effect?

We sat down with DJI head of global policy Adam Welsh and DJI public safety integration manager Wayne Baker, and the answers seem to boil down to:

• No-fly zones don’t make drones safer, but they might make lifesaving flights easier;
• DJI stands to save any money in staffing costs by eliminating no-fly zones;
• DJI has an awful lot of convincing to do in a short amount of time;
• DJI will be fine, even as it prepares to leave the US marketplace stagnant if given no alternative.

Below, you’ll find DJI’s detailed answers to our questions, condensed and edited for clarity.

How does removing DJI’s no-fly zones make drones safer?

Adam Welsh: First off, geofencing has been in place for more than 10 years, and we admit any change to something that’s been in place for 10 years can come as a bit of a shock to people, so we admit that your first reaction and the reaction of any others is valid. We’re not trying to dismiss the concern. But let’s talk a small bit about why geofencing was first put in place and the limitations of that geofencing system.

We were the first people to put a drone in a box on a shelf that you could buy at Best Buy; anybody could go to a consumer electronic store and virtually in 30 minutes be up in the sky. Regulators were not prepared for that, and that’s not a ding against the regulator. That’s just [to say] that regulation takes time to formulate.

In the intervening 10 to 11 years, no of the regulatory agencies have chosen to mandate geofencing, and I think there’s good reason behind that. It was never going to halt a bad actor from doing something wrong. You could disable the GPS; you could wrap it in tin foil. That drone no longer knows where it is vis-à-vis the uploaded map onto the drone and you could fly wherever you wanted to.

To your point, it was a way of stopping fresh entrants from entering certain areas. But the regulators have fundamentally decided to go a different route. They have not mandated geofencing. They have mandated for consumers to do community-based organization safety training. They have mandated LAANC permissions to access controlled airspace around airports, and they have mandated Remote ID. They have stuck to the basic rule that the operator should be in control of the drone, the airplane, or any another kind of aviation object at all times.

What we’ve done is we’ve switched to a strategy that means the operator has more accurate information but besides maintains control of the drone at all times.

The FAA and regulatory bodies have utilized that language about the operator being in control of the drone at all times, but I’ve always taken it to mean there needs to be a pilot operating the craft who can see where the craft is so that it doesn’t hit something, not that the pilot should be able to freely go wherever they want. Would you disagree?

AW: But your Cessna [plane] does not prevent you from flying anywhere. It’s the pilot’s work to know where they’re legally allowed to fly. So the same rule would apply to an operator of a drone. It is their legal work to fly where they have been given permission.

Is it possible regulators decided not to mandate geofencing simply due to the fact that DJI had already provided geofencing, and so the majority of drones already had it?

AW: I think saying that due to the fact that the largest maker has done something, there’s no reason to regulate, is not a good argument. You can’t say it’s fine that a drone made by a French or American maker can fly where it wants with no safety issue and there’s only a safety issue if 1 of ours flies there. My suspicion is that erstwhile regulators have looked at this, they’ve realized how complicated it is.

To give you an example, we have done everything we can to effort to smooth the process [for pilots to request access to a no-fly zone], yet it inactive requires that a human being look at all single application. You can imagine we process a immense volume of absolutely legitimate unlocking applications on a weekly and yearly basis. You would have an tremendous burden on any regulator to go through that process.

Was that a large cost for DJI, and will there be a large cost savings by removing the hard geofences?

AW: I don’t think cost savings was truly always a focus erstwhile making the decision. surely the burden on our interior resources had been increasing exponentially. We did beef up our resources considerably to make certain that we could effort to do things 24/7, and we did our best to process within an hr of getting an application.

How do people benefit from the no-fly zones going away?

AW: I think somewhere around 50 percent of urban areas in the US are inside controlled airspace. So just say you’re doing a roofing survey. Half of your roofs require FAA approval to do a roofing survey. And that’s flying at very low altitude over a roof in a very short time period, so it’s intrinsically a secure operation.

But if you got your FAA approval to do that, you might have a time block. You’re allowed to do it, but then you would gotta wait for DJI hopefully to unlock within that time block. You might miss your timeframe. You might miss that occupation entirely. So the cost was rather considerable for our end users. But I think the 1 that truly was a bit of a gut punch for us is that we frequently would hear from firefighters, first responders, and others who were trying to launch and possibly weren’t flying in their average area.

They had gone into a disaster area to effort and fly to assist a neighboring agency, and they were having to spend precious minutes or hours to get their drone unlocked. In an instance where somebody’s trying to launch a drone to save a life, we don’t want to impede that in any way, shape, or form.

We have had many instances where operators including first responders have not been able to fly a mission immediately erstwhile they request to due to the fact that they have needed to get approval from us, even though they already have approval from LAANC or the FAA or whatever else to fly that operation.

Are there circumstantial instances where DJI unlocking delays resulted in circumstantial impacts to lifesaving work?

AW: We can’t actually give you the details of any individual unlock. There’s any privacy concerns around that.

Wayne Baker: While it’s not aviation safety that has been improved, our police and fire agencies would sometimes regular or weekly encounter areas that they needed to be able to fly in where we had restrictions. And they didn’t truly have the time. An autistic kid that’s missing in inclement weather — we didn’t have the time to go through “here’s our permissions” and all that. respective years ago, we tried to improve that process through the qualified entities program, and we inactive would have issues if pilots went to another area or changed logins. You just don’t have time.

I know it seems cliche erstwhile we say seconds and minutes count, but I can assure you they truly do. I’ve had quite a few public safety reaching out about how this is good. They’re going to be able to have that assurance to take off erstwhile they request to.

Are there times where people have lost their lives or been injured, or property has been severely damaged, due to the fact that DJI wasn’t able to unlock things in time?

WB: Unfortunately, we don’t have anything that says that, but you could reasonably infer that. 1 of the things I talk about is how large drones are at breaking a chain of events that could lead to an accident, an injury, or death, so you could reasonably infer that a hold could have reduced the chance that victim might have had [for survival] or that the building fire could have been mitigated sooner.

AW: We have so many documented instances of drones deescalating an active shooter situation or uncovering a kid that’s on the verge of hypothermia or so many another things, that, for us, making certain that we’re not delaying to the point where 1 of those instances escalates into failure of life — that’s the key thing. We don’t have circumstantial instances we can point to where there has been failure of life, but making certain that never happens is part of the reason behind this thinking.

Were any US regulators or representatives asking DJI to remove its no-fly zones?

AW: They didn’t straight ask us. We had any informal conversations with the FAA, and we’ve had informal conversations with aviation authorities in Europe and the UK, etc. due to the fact that this is always a voluntary measure, it’s something that DJI decided to do. The regulators have never truly espoused an opinion 1 way or another. You chose to do it. Therefore, you can choose to remove it.

I think, primarily, the requests have been from government end users who’ve been restricted by this. Even from the very early days, we received many calls for us to remove this. An analogy: if you had a brand of car that prevented you from driving certain places after you got approval or restricted your velocity in certain areas, I don’t think people would accept it. I think they would control to a different brand or complain vociferously.

But you can’t drive onto a military base. You can’t drive onto the White home lawn. You can’t drive up to a atomic power plant. There are fences. Why aren’t there geofences? Why not keep no-fly zones for the most delicate of areas in the United States?

AW: We did look at this. We did consider whether we should keep certain circumstantial areas. The decision was made internally that would inactive affect taking the onus distant from the operator, and we wanted to stick to the rule that the regulators have approved, i.e., that it’s the operator’s discretion at the end of the day. To your point, an airplane can fly wherever it wants, but there are rules about where it can and can’t fly, and it’s up to the pilot to admit that and live within it.

We’re doing a lot to make certain that our operators have information about where it is not appropriate to fly, giving them the warnings they request to make those decisions. But at the end of the day, the onus is with the operator.

WB: You can’t drive onto a military base due to the fact that there are physical barriers those sites have put up, not the maker of the vehicles. But that’s part of why we’ve looked at the maturity of the drone detection equipment out there. 1 example is with Axon’s Dedrone. There have been requests by the NYPD to legislature straight to let them to mitigate drones as well as the distant ID laws.

The DJI drone crashing into the Super Scooper plane fighting fires in Los Angeles — this was a drone that I do not believe would have been tracked by distant ID as it’s besides light. Is it a good time to let people fly their drones everywhere if distant ID is not a good adequate tool to halt drones?

AW: Just on the distant ID front, we comply with the FAA regulations, and it’s part of the FAA regulations that, below 250 grams, distant ID is not required. So that’s more a substance for the FAA to decide whether they want to change that. In terms of the flight restrictions around the fire area, there was a self-unlocking region that was put in place over the fires. That was kind of our intermediate step.

The reason self-unlocking zones are pertinent is, rather often, firefighters request to fly their drones in those areas, but you besides gotta admit that temporary flight restrictions are an even little reliable regulation than geofencing. There would never have been a permanent geofencing regulation in place over a fire, and to get that temporary flight regulation uploaded to a drone, that individual has to connect to the internet, which automatically limits the percent of people who would even get the TFR in the first place.

If you put a hard lock on that area, you could very well end up hampering the firefighters, but not hampering the guys that are rubbernecking. So I think the self-unlocking region is the most appropriate approach to that kind of situation. It’s evidently regrettable that they didn’t halt this individual from flying in that area at the time.

[Editor’s note: At interview time, DJI wasn’t able to answer our questions about what was then an ongoing FBI investigation, but now that the investigation is over, the company tells us it did assist; it provided the email address and shipping information of the purchaser to an FBI agent. DJI says it doesn’t know whether the drone was broadcasting a distant ID at the time.]

There is simply a countdown clock running. By December 2025, DJI needs the US government to designate an appropriate agency to find whether it poses a national safety risk, and to say out loud, no, we don’t believe it poses that risk, or else a complex process starts that keeps the FCC from authorizing your radios and cameras for import into the United States. How do you beat that clock?

AW: One thing to admit is that we have been through safety reviews in the past. The Department of Homeland safety reviewed our products back in 2019. They utilized Idaho National Laboratory, and we passed that review. The Department of Interior reviewed 2 of our products. Again, we passed that review. We’ve been reviewed even by the Pentagon, which has an office that looks at consumer off-the-shelf products. They looked at 2 of our products, and we passed that review as well. So we feel beautiful assured in our technology and what we’ve done on data security.

You are 100 percent right: there is simply a ticking time clock. And that ticking time clock is even worse due to the political transition. It says 12 months from the signing. That puts you somewhere in December of 2025, but you’ve truly lost the first 2 to 3 months while nominations take place and people are being put in place in the fresh administration. You’re then left with an eight- to nine-month time clock, and that’s where our concerns are. We’re absolutely going to embrace the scrutiny. We feel we have robust technology in place for data protection, and we actually are pleasantly amazed that we’re going to have an interlocutor.

There should be any kind of designated organization for us to have a conversation about where these risks are supposedly found and what kind of mitigations we could discuss if there are any things of concern. We want to embrace that. But to your point, what are we going to do now?

One part is we feel it’s actually unfair to have the ticking time clock. Through no responsibility of our own, we could be put on the FCC’s covered list, which would prevent us from launching fresh products just due to the fact that no agency took up the work. That’s our first concern that we would like to have conversations around.

There are about 5 agencies that are defined as appropriate [to find whether DJI poses a national safety risk]. It’s fundamentally the Department of Defense, the FBI, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the manager of National Intelligence. It could be any 1 of those. All we ask is that the appropriate agency take up the work, do it within the required time period if that time period can’t be shifted, and that there be any kind of right of reply.

Just as your iPhone is continually getting firmware updates due to safety patches, people will find flaws. There’s no specified thing as a flawless part of equipment. We just want to be able to have a conversation about what they deem a risk, if they find anything they deem a risk, and what mitigations we could put in place to deal with those possible concerns.

What is the actual work you do over the next three, six, nine, 12 months to get 1 of those agencies to take it up? Would DJI sue the government again?

AW: DJI doesn’t like to sue governments. That’s not how we like to spend our money. Our CEO likes to spend all his money on R&D making fresh product; he’s an electrical engineer and that’s where he likes to put his resources.

We have a government relations team, and we’ll be engaging both at the congressional level but besides at the departmental level to effort to make certain that this is taken up. We besides know quite a few our end users are already getting in contact with us saying that they besides want to make certain that this is done, and so I imagine they’ll besides be requesting that the work is taken up.

We’re going to put our efforts behind trying to make certain it’s taken up through average conversation, advocacy, and education. We’ll explain what we’ve done so far on data security, and we’ll explain the economical impact of DJI in the United States market. We’ve estimated that more than 400,000 jobs are being supported by the usage of DJI equipment in the United States, and so there is simply a sizable impact to doing something negative on DJI. That puts the onus on the government, I think, to actually do this thoroughly within the timeframe.

What happens in the event of a ban?

AW: If we were added to the covered list, it’s not retroactive. What it would do is actually prevent us from launching fresh products due to the fact that we wouldn’t be able to get the certifications we request for fresh products. So you’d be in kind of a perverse situation where the current Mavic model would proceed to be on sale in the US, but a newer model would be available in Canada and Mexico and everywhere else in the world. We’d inactive be able to sale those models. Obviously, it’s not optimal for our end users and it’s not optimal for DJI as a company to only be able to sale what’s available as of 2025 in the US market.

How crucial is the US marketplace to DJI, really? Is it so crucial that DJI would simply not be able to make or afford to make certain kinds of products?

AW: The US is clearly a crucial market. Nobody should kid themselves that it’s not a crucial market. Consumer spending and enterprise spending is hefty in the United States. But DJI has healthy markets across the globe, and that is more than adequate to support the company and its investigation and improvement efforts.

The real tragedy around this is the collateral harm it would origin to resellers, which are American companies, and to the American software businesses that have built their full businesses around DJI products. The biggest hazard raised by venture capitalists is, “What’s going to happen with DJI?” It’s already hampering their ability to rise money and conduct their businesses. But for DJI at large, it would not halt us from continuing to grow.