218 Wildfire Drone Incursions Last Year, Most Ever Recorded

The U.S. Forest Service reported 218 drone sightings over active wildfires in 2025, more than the previous seven years combined. Most happened during the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles, where 184 drones entered restricted airspace, as the Rogue Valley Times reported.

The agency wants the public to understand the math. Every unauthorized drone forces firefighting aircraft to land, and every grounding lets the fire grow.

The Number That Should Worry You

The 218 figure isn’t just a record. It’s a 174 percent increase over the 125 reported incidents the Forest Service logged across the entire 2018-2024 period. Most of that 2025 spike came from two incidents.

The Eaton and Palisades fires generated 184 of the 218 sightings, which translates to a single Los Angeles County fire complex producing 47 percent more drone incursions than the prior seven years nationwide.

During one day of operations across both fires, counter-drone teams intercepted 49 drones. That’s not a busy week. That’s a single day of trying to fight two of the deadliest fires in California history while also playing aerial whack-a-mole with consumer drones.

The Forest Service is also flying its own authorized drones at unprecedented scale. From 2019 to 2025, agency drone flights on active incidents increased by 2,483 percent. That’s the legal, coordinated use of drones for fire mapping, hot-spot detection, and crew tracking.

The 218 unauthorized incursions are the exact opposite. They ground the official aircraft and shut down the operations the Forest Service is trying to run.

What Happens When a Drone Hits an Airtanker

The reference incident is the January 9, 2025 collision between a privately-flown drone and Quebec 1, a Canadair CL-415 Super Scooper on contract from the Quebec government during the Palisades fire. The drone punched a 3-by-6-inch hole in the leading edge of the aircraft’s left wing. The two crew members were unaware of the strike until maintenance staff at Van Nuys Airport found the damage.

The Super Scooper was out of service for approximately five days. The Palisades fire grew by 6,000 acres during that window. The aircraft eventually returned to service, but Quebec’s firefighting agency had to send two additional CL-415s to cover the gap.

Pilots described the strike as a near-miss for catastrophe. Pascal Duclos, a SOPFEU pilot flying behind the damaged plane, told reporters that a strike a few feet differently could have ingested the drone into an engine intake, started a wing fire near the fuel tanks, or punched through the cockpit windshield into the pilot.

The drone operator, Peter Akemann of Culver City, pleaded guilty to unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. He launched the drone from a Santa Monica parking structure to look at the fire damage, lost sight of his aircraft, and didn’t know it had struck the Super Scooper until investigators traced the recovered drone fragments back to him.

He paid $65,169 in restitution and accepted up to a year in federal prison plus 150 hours of community service.

Akemann’s defense team raised an important point. They cited the failure of his DJI drone’s geofencing system as a mitigating factor. Geofencing is the software that’s supposed to prevent consumer drones from entering restricted airspace, including temporary flight restrictions over wildfires.

In Akemann’s case, that safety layer didn’t stop the drone from crossing the TFR boundary, even though DJI markets geofencing as one of the core safety features that distinguishes its consumer products.

The Counter-Drone Response

After the Super Scooper strike, the LA County Fire Department, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, and the FBI formed a Counter UAS task force to detect and intercept unauthorized drones during fire operations. Lyndsay Johnson, an assistant director of aviation safety for the Forest Service, described how the system works.

“They use a system to detect drones the second someone turns them on,” Johnson said. “They then can track the controller, the location of the operator and their flight profile.”

That detection capability is significant. Once a drone is identified, an intercept team from the sheriff’s department and FBI goes to the operator’s physical location to identify the pilot.

The Forest Service hasn’t disclosed which detection platform the LA task force uses, but the description matches RF-detection systems like those from Aerospace, DroneShield, or Dedrone, which can pull serial numbers and operator GPS coordinates straight from drone control links.

The legal exposure for getting caught is real. Flying a drone in restricted airspace around a wildfire is a federal crime carrying up to 12 months in federal prison and civil penalties up to $20,000. Criminal prosecution under the relevant FAA statute can also reach fines of up to $75,000, depending on which legal framework prosecutors apply.

Akemann’s case used the misdemeanor track and still resulted in a guilty plea, restitution of more than $65,000, and a six-figure life disruption that included an indefinite ban on possessing or operating any drone.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ll be direct. The drone enthusiast community needs to own this problem. 218 incursions in a single year, with 184 of them clustered around two of the deadliest fires in California history, is an indictment of how poorly the consumer drone community has internalized basic airspace responsibility.

The Forest Service shouldn’t have to issue annual public service announcements asking adults not to fly $500 quadcopters into the path of $20 million firefighting aircraft, but here we are.

The Akemann case deserves particular attention because of the geofencing angle. DJI’s geofencing system has been one of the central pillars of the company’s safety messaging for a decade.

The argument has consistently been that DJI’s safety features make their drones the responsible choice, and that DJI does more than any competitor to keep amateur pilots out of restricted airspace. When that system fails during an active wildfire and contributes to a near-catastrophic aircraft strike, that’s not a footnote. It’s a structural question about whether geofencing actually works under the conditions where it matters most.

DJI removed mandatory geofencing enforcement from its consumer drones in early 2025, shifting from hard restrictions to advisory warnings that pilots can override. That change was framed as restoring user autonomy. The Palisades incident is a real-world test of what that policy choice looks like in practice. A more aggressive geofencing posture might have stopped Akemann’s drone at the TFR boundary regardless of his intent. The current posture didn’t.

Counter-drone detection during active wildfires is going to become standard, not optional. Departments and Forest Service regions will procure the gear, train the teams, and prosecute the cases. The drone community can either get ahead of this by enforcing its own norms harder or watch the regulatory response tighten until the consequences hit responsible pilots too. Wildfire season is starting now. Don’t be the case study.

Photo credit: Forest Service