Drone Dominance and The Most American of Rights
Transforming NIMBY to YIMBY - Backyard Tyrants Become Air Rights Capitalists
The White House issued an ambitious executive order titled “Unleashing American Drone Dominance.” Aimed at accelerating U.S. leadership in drones and eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft. It promises to fast-track beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flight rules, establish pilot programs for air taxis, and bolster domestic manufacturing.
What’s conspicuously absent is whats most critical, Its soft underbelly. Low-altitude air rights, and this is no oversight. It’s a strategic omission that speaks volumes about the limits of federal authority, and the pivotal role of property owners in the future of the low-altitude economy.
What The Order Covers
It mandates the FAA to propose and finalize long-awaited BVLOS (beyond-visual-line-of-sight) rules within 240 days. This is an aggressive move to unlock routine long-range drone operations.
FAA test ranges are to be fully utilized for advanced trials, including autonomous and long-distance flights, reinforcing corridor models like New York’s 50-mile route.
It launches a national eVTOL pilot program, with at least five public-private projects selected by year’s end and real-world air taxi operations expected by mid-2026.
AI is to be deployed within 120 days to streamline waiver approvals, and agencies are instructed to prioritize U.S.-built drones while securing domestic supply chains. While framed as a strategy for national competitiveness, the real aim is to fast-track commercial drone and eVTOL integration into American airspace.
It paints an exciting picture for investors and innovators. Routine long-distance drone flights, air taxi trials in multiple states, quicker FAA approvals and all of it happening on a short fuse. It’s a national strategy to scale up a new aviation industry.
What’s Left Out Is More Important Than What’s Put In
Hovering above all these plans is a fundamental legal and economic reality. The federal government doesn’t own or control the air from the ground up. The EO pointedly does not mention is what is most important.
Air rights in the low-altitude band (0 - 500 feet) where most drones and eVTOLs will operate are key. That omission is not an accident; it’s an acknowledgment that those altitudes are private property, not public highways.
In U.S. law, a landowner’s property isn’t just a two-dimensional patch of earth, it includes the airspace above the ground. Air rights are 3D. Traditional common law holds that “landowners own the airspace above their land” and that an uninvited drone flying at 100 feet is as much a trespass as your neighbour’s dog running through your yard or a Door Dash driver parking on your lawn to deliver coffee to your neighbour.
As the Supreme Court’s says, flights that are low enough and frequent enough to interfere with a property’s use constitute a taking of property as surely as an invasive road or structure would. And under the Fifth Amendment, the government can’t simply take private property for public use without just compensation.
In simple terms, drones have no constitutional right-of-way over your backyard, but you have a constitutional right to enjoy your property (which includes the slice of sky over it). This is black-letter law. A drone is an object, not a person; it doesn’t get a special mention in the Constitution, and even if it did, it wouldn’t nullify property owners’ rights. They can trade these rights as they see fit.
The new order avoids this It champions a national drone policy but stops short of suggesting that Washington can unilaterally open low-altitude airspace. Why?
Because any rule that tried to give drones free rein from ground level up to 500 feet would run headlong into thousands of years of property law. It would amount to an uncompensated seizure of private airspace, triggering endless litigation and liability. And there is no line in any state or federal budget to pay all real estate owners for their air rights in order to subsidize the drone industry.
The first 500 feet of air above ground are not under the FAA’s sovereign control like high-altitude airways. They are a patchwork of decentralized “sky parcels” owned by homeowners, farmers, businesses, real estate firms, each with legal claims that the cannot be summarily erased. The silence on this is deafening. It demonstrates that drone dominance will not be achieved by preempting property rights. It must be achieved in partnership with them.
The Silence Is Strategic
Some might argue: “Can’t the federal government simply declare all airspace navigable and preempt local claims, as it did for high-altitude aviation?” After all, the sky was declared a “public highway” for aeroplanes decades ago, to prevent every flight from being an act of trespass. That principle was established with a crucial caveat that only the airspace above the minimum safe flying altitude was deemed public domain. Below that, 500 feet of airspace, was left to the landowners. This is because an aircraft cruising at 30,000 feet poses no meaningful interference to the landowner, but one buzzing at 100 feet does.
Drones and eVTOLs, live in that low-altitude zone well below 500 feet, often in the 100–300 foot range for deliveries. That’s undoubtedly within what courts have called the landowner’s “immediate reaches” of airspace. In practical terms, drone delivery is in the property owner’s backyard.
The drafters of Unleashing American Drone Dominance understood that any hint of federal preemption over 0–500 ft airspace would raise red flags. After all, the President, who is the signatory of the EO, has made millions of dollars from the trading of air rights. It would undoubtedly provoke backlash from property owners and likely stall the very momentum the industry needs and the order seeks to push.
The EO tacitly acknowledges that scale will come through consent, not force. The federal government can clear the way for technology, streamline regulations, and fund test corridors, but it can’t grant drones a blanket easement over everyone’s property. They are minding the turf.
Air Rights Are The Social License
The real key to unlocking drone and air taxi scale is social license. The buy-in of the communities over which these vehicles fly. The social license is an economic and legal layer. It’s air rights.
Property owners hold the keys to the sky in the low altitudes. Earning their permission is essential for drones and eVTOLs. The EO’s strategy will amount to nothing if drones can’t legally or peacefully traverse the sky to your doorstep. The answer to being granted a social licence at scale is through markets and voluntary coordination, not top-down mandates.
Markets are exceptionally good at solving this kind of coordination problem. Price signals can guide an efficient and fair allocation when a resource like low-altitude airspace is valuable but contested. Think of price as a “signal wrapped in an incentive” (HT Alex Tabarrok). It communicates information, like how much a property owner values privacy or tranquillity and provides motivation, such as compensation for the owner, a cost for the operator to consider. Drone operators acquire permissions from owners beneath their flight path, and a market price for air access emerges.
Busy neighbourhoods might demand higher “rent” for their airspace; sparse rural land could be cheaper. Over time, flight routes organically adjust to these signals, much like drivers choose toll roads versus free roads based on cost-benefit. The result is equilibrium. Drones fly where it is economically and socially acceptable, and property owners are incentivized to say yes because they benefit from the arrangement.
Compensating property owners for drone overflights turns NIMBY obstacles into market opportunities. Instead of seeing low-altitude airspace as a regulatory bottleneck, it can function as a marketplace where drone operators pay for passage and landowners grant consent, aligning interests for mutual gain.
Smart contracts, GPS corridors, and community drone trackers help facilitate these transactions seamlessly in the background. SkyTrade, for example, helps property owners monetize their overhead air, turning dormant space into economic opportunity. Crucially, this approach uses existing property law.
Unauthorised drone flight is trespass, and authorised flight is considered a negotiated easement. No massive new federal regime is required, and the government's role is simply to continue to recognize property rights as it has been doing for hundreds of years. This way, drone companies gain access through automated deal-making rather than default. It’s consent-driven, which makes it durable.
The alternative is to try to ram through preemption to allow free drone transit everywhere, with commercial drone entities somehow lobbying for favourable treatment over private property rights. Even if this were attempted, the backlash would be severe, from lawsuits citing takings and privacy to political blowback at the local level. The industry would become mired in conflict with the very public it aims to serve. We see this happening repeatedly in areas where commercial drones are operating. Sometimes they are kicked out of town. They try to placate people by offering to deliver medicine to old folks’ homes and send stationery to the local sports club by drone.
This does not reach equilibrium. Giving up private property rights for some vague public good in disguise does not hit the mark.
The market-based approach, where communities and landowners opt in (for a price), turns potential opponents into stakeholders. Homeowners under a drone delivery route welcome the activity if they receive a direct payment for using their air rights. The magic of markets is that they turn disputes over resources into deals. And deals are how big changes gain social acceptance in a democracy.
Consent Fuels Scale
The air rights layer is not a bottleneck; it’s the mechanism for sustainable growth. It means one extra dimension and one more line item in the cost structure for drone services. But far from slowing things down, this layer unlocks scale by making the growth politically and socially sustainable. When people have a say and a stake in what happens above their rooftops, innovation stops being something imposed on them and becomes something that rewards them. That is the essence of a democratic growth model.
The test of American Drone Dominance will happen at ground level, in towns and suburbs. Scale will come not by overriding the rights of the many, but by aligning the interests of all. Washington can open the door, but the property’s air rights owners holding the gateway to the low skies must be persuaded to open the floodgates.
Next Steps To Push Out Of The Nest
The omission of air rights in the EO is a positive sign. It means policymakers recognize the limits of fiat and the power of decentralized consent. The strategy can focus on enabling technology and letting markets and communities figure out the rest. The message to investors and officials is clear: don’t view property rights as an obstacle to be preempted, but as an asset to be utilised.
The first 500 feet of airspace will be the arena where drone commerce earns its legitimacy. This arena will become a thriving marketplace, with an approach grounded in property rights, voluntary agreements, and price signals.
The sky is opening up, but it won’t be by federal decree alone. It will open up the way any valuable frontier in America does. Claim by claim, deal by deal, with respect for the individual at its core.
The Executive Order charts a course for American drone dominance, and now, it’s up to industry and local stakeholders to secure the social license that will make it fly. The smart money is on permission, oiled by market logic and mutual gains, as the actual American engine of the drone era.
