The Olathe, Kansas City Council was scheduled to vote Tuesday night on an ordinance that would have banned drone takeoffs and landings within one mile of any temporary event in the city drawing 100 or more people. The rule would have created two-mile-diameter no-drone bubbles around wedding receptions, kids’ soccer games, school dances, church picnics, and business meetings, indoors and outdoors. Olathe resident James Van Booven, a Part 107 pilot, mapped the geographic effect, contacted council members in writing, secured a 44-minute phone call with Olathe Fire Chief Jeff DeGraffenreid, and walked the council through the federal preemption problem in a three-minute public comment slot. The City Clerk’s office told him the ordinance was being pulled from the agenda before the meeting started.

That is a real win for civilian drone operators at the local level. It is also the smallest fight on the board.

Three weeks before the Olathe vote, the FAA had already pulled NOTAM FDC 6/4375, the nationwide flight restriction that had created roving 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every Department of Homeland Security vehicle in the country. That restriction came directly out of the playbook DHS used in October 2025, when it closed 935 square miles of Chicago airspace during Operation Midway Blitz. The National Press Photographers Association called the Chicago closure the largest civilian drone ban ever imposed in the United States. Three months later, FDC 6/4375 took that model and tried to make it permanent, borderless, and nationwide.

Drone pilots’ rights are under attack in this country at every level of government. The pushback at every level is coming from the same kind of person: a pilot doing unpaid documentation work the rest of us are not doing.

Olathe’s Proposed Rule Would Have Grounded Most of the City Most of the Time

The proposed Olathe ordinance prohibited drone takeoffs and landings within one mile of any “special event” attended by more than 100 people, beginning one hour before the event and ending one hour after. The definition did not require the event to be outdoors. It also banned takeoffs and landings within 1,000 feet of fire stations, police stations, city hall, and wastewater treatment plants, according to coverage in the Olathe Reporter ahead of the vote.

The 100-person threshold is the part that breaks. Almost any school athletic event, conference, church service, or community gathering in Olathe qualifies. At any given hour during a typical day, much of the city sits within a mile of a qualifying gathering. The ordinance would have functioned as a city-wide flight ban dressed up as event security, while continuing to allow the city’s own Drones as First Responders program to fly over the same events. Police drones got the airspace. Residents did not.

Van Booven’s three-minute public comment did not relitigate the ordinance line by line. He distinguished the populations of civilian drone operators in clear terms. Part 107 pilots have passed an FAA exam covering airspace, charts, regulations, and flight operations, and recreational flyers operating under 49 U.S.C. Section 44809 are required to take the TRUST online safety test. The population that creates the problems Olathe was trying to address is the third one: people who do not know or do not care that any drone flown outdoors is subject to FAA regulation, including toys flown in a backyard. Banning drones across most of Olathe punishes the rule-followers and does nothing to reach the people who create the actual harms. His ask was that the ordinance add an exemption for operators flying lawfully under Part 107 or Section 44809, and that the city target the actual harms (voyeurism, harassment, reckless endangerment) rather than the technology.

Federal Preemption Doctrine Is Why Cities Keep Losing These Cases

The FAA holds exclusive authority over the National Airspace System from the ground up. Cities can regulate where drones take off and land from city-owned property, but they cannot regulate the airspace itself, and a takeoff-and-landing rule broad enough to function as a flight ban runs into federal preemption.

The FAA Office of the Chief Counsel issued an updated fact sheet in July 2023 stating that state and local laws regulating airspace use face field preemption. The 2017 federal court decision in Singer v. City of Newton struck down a Massachusetts city ordinance that tried to regulate drones in ways that overstepped that line. The Wiley law firm’s analysis of the 2023 fact sheet flagged this exact scenario in writing: a city-wide ban on drone takeoffs and landings is, in practice, no different from a ban on drone operations themselves, especially given the limited flight range of battery-powered drones. Olathe’s one-mile-from-an-event rule failed that test the moment it covered indoor gatherings of 100 people anywhere in the city limits.

Michigan Set the Model for State-Level Preemption

Michigan is what state preemption looks like when it works. The state’s preemption statute, MCL 259.305, prohibits political subdivisions from making or enforcing their own drone laws. The Michigan Court of Appeals enforced that statute against Ottawa County in 2022 when the county tried to ban drone operations in its parks. The Michigan Coalition of Drone Operators sued the University of Michigan over a comprehensive campus ban, with Court of Appeals Judge Brock Swartzle pressing the university on inconsistent application across its satellite properties. The legal framework has held in court even as the state legislature has tried to test it from a different direction with the recent SHIELD package.

The lesson is operational. State-level preemption is the wall that stops a thousand Olathes from becoming a patchwork that no commercial pilot can navigate. Without that wall, every city council in the country writes its own version of the same flawed ordinance.

The Federal Front Started in Chicago

In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security asked the FAA for a Temporary Flight Restriction over Chicago to support Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration enforcement operation running through the city. The TFR closed 935 square miles of Chicago airspace to all civilian drone operations through October 12. Real estate photographers, news drones, construction inspectors, and recreational pilots were grounded. ICE flew its own Skydio X10D drones overhead, and CBP flew MQ-9 Predators. The asymmetry was the point. Federal agencies got the surveillance airspace. The civilians who might document what those agencies did were not allowed to fly.

The National Press Photographers Association called it the largest drone ban ever imposed in the United States and an unconstitutional attack on aerial journalism. That language matters. NPPA general counsel Mickey Osterreicher has spent decades pushing back on local drone ordinances that quietly chill press coverage, and the Chicago TFR was the moment the same instinct went federal at scale.

The ICE NOTAM Made the Chicago Playbook Permanent and Nationwide

In January 2026, the FAA issued NOTAM FDC 6/4375. The notice prohibited all unmanned aircraft from flying within 3,000 feet laterally and 1,000 feet vertically of any active Department of Defense, Department of Energy, or Department of Homeland Security mobile asset, including ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts. That language covered unmarked ICE and CBP cars. The restriction had no fixed coordinates or end date, and it did not appear on B4UFLY, AirControl, LAANC, or the FAA TFR map. The system was specifically designed to withhold the information a pilot would need to comply.

The FAA paired this with Order 2150.3C Change 13 in late January, which removed investigator discretion for airspace violations and routed qualifying cases directly to the Chief Counsel for legal action. Vic Moss of the Drone Service Providers Alliance described the situation accurately: drone operators could be ensnared inside a restricted zone with no way of knowing it. The Remote ID system, designed to make drone operators visible to authorities, had no corresponding mechanism to make unmarked government vehicles visible to drone operators.

Minneapolis-based photojournalist Rob Levine filed a petition for judicial review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in March, represented by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Levine argued the NOTAM was unconstitutionally vague and chilled First Amendment newsgathering, and that the FAA had failed to follow the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act. On April 15, 2026, the FAA published NOTAM FDC 6/2824, replacing FDC 6/4375. The new notice dropped the flight prohibition and the criminal penalties. It now “advises” pilots to use caution near covered DHS, DOJ, DOE, and “Department of War” mobile assets. Reporters Committee staff attorney Grayson Clary told Ars Technica the FAA was not interested in defending the original NOTAM on the merits in front of the DC Circuit.

Different Pilots, Same Pattern of Showing Up

The federal NOTAM replacement got onto DroneXL’s radar the same way most pilot-watch stories do. Ryan Latourette spotted FDC 6/2824 on the FAA’s Federal NOTAM System on April 15, hours after the FAA issued it and before it propagated to public TFR maps or the active UAS NOTAMs page. He posted it in a couple of drone-pilot Facebook groups. James Van Booven saw Ryan’s post and relayed the news to DroneXL, which is how it became our April 15 reporting. The original spot belongs to Ryan. The fast relay belongs to Van Booven. The legal pressure that forced the FAA to publish the replacement at all belongs to Rob Levine and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Three weeks later, Van Booven was the pilot who showed up at the Olathe City Council with FAA Office of the Chief Counsel preemption material in hand and the Part 107 framework written out in plain language. None of these is hard work in isolation. A pilot reads a NOTAM and posts it in a Facebook group. A second pilot relays it to a publication. A third pilot maps a city ordinance against the FAA preemption framework and walks a city council through it. A photojournalist files a petition through a press freedom legal organization. Each of those is one person doing one thing. Done together, by enough pilots, in enough venues, it builds a record that policymakers cannot ignore. DroneXL has not independently verified the Olathe procedural details, which are sourced to Van Booven’s direct correspondence to this publication.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered enough of these now to see the pattern clearly. Drone pilots’ rights in this country are under sustained attack at every level of government at once. Cities like Olathe write ordinances that are unenforceable as drafted but stay on the books anyway, while state preemption laws like Michigan’s are facing legislative pressure to weaken them. The federal level escalated through 2025 and 2026 with the Chicago TFR and FDC 6/4375, both of which had the same structural feature: ground civilian operators while letting federal agencies fly their own drones over the same airspace.

The pushback works when it is documented. Wilkesboro, North Carolina faced an immediate preemption warning in 2020 from Vic Moss and the National Press Photographers Association, who told the town’s lawyers the ordinance would not survive a federal court case. Ottawa County, Michigan got enjoined in 2022. Olathe pulled its ordinance this week. The FAA replaced FDC 6/4375 in April after Rob Levine sued through the Reporters Committee. None of these outcomes happened automatically. Each one required pilots willing to spend their own time building a record that government attorneys could not ignore.

The forward-looking pieces matter. The Levine lawsuit is still active in the DC Circuit. Reporters Committee staff attorney Grayson Clary said explicitly that the FAA pulled FDC 6/4375 because it did not want to defend the merits of the original NOTAM in court. That suggests the agency expected to lose, which is the most useful signal pilots have about how the next federal restriction will be drafted. The FAA’s Section 2209 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking dropped May 5, the same day Olathe was supposed to vote, and creates the legitimate federal mechanism for fixed-site facilities to request permanent drone restrictions through 14 CFR Part 74. Public comment closes July 6. That is the real venue for any pilot, journalist, public safety agency, or operator who wants to shape the framework that will replace the ad-hoc TFR-and-NOTAM regime that produced the Chicago closure and FDC 6/4375 in the first place.

If you fly drones, the lesson from this week is concrete. Subscribe to your city council’s agenda alerts so you see ordinances like Olathe’s before they go to a vote, and file a comment on the Section 2209 NPRM through July 6. Support the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Press Photographers Association, the Drone Service Providers Alliance, and the Drone Advocacy Alliance with whatever combination of money and time you can offer. City councils and federal agencies do not write good drone law because pilots usually do not show up. When pilots show up with documentation in hand, the system bends. Olathe pulled its ordinance. The FAA pulled FDC 6/4375. The next one is on the calendar somewhere already.

The open question this story does not answer is whether the next federal restriction will be drafted more carefully now that one has been pulled, or whether the agencies that drove FDC 6/4375 will simply try a different vector. Levine’s case is still active for a reason. Watch the DC Circuit, and watch the comment dockets. The fight does not end because one ordinance got pulled and one NOTAM got replaced.

Sources: Olathe Reporter, Olathe City Council May 5 agenda packet, FAA Office of the Chief Counsel 2023 State and Local Regulation Fact Sheet, FAA Section 2209 NPRM (Docket FAA-2026-4558), prior DroneXL coverage of NOTAM FDC 6/4375 and FDC 6/2824, and direct correspondence from Olathe resident James Van Booven describing his outreach to the City Council, Fire Chief Jeff DeGraffenreid, and the City Clerk’s office, including the text of his three-minute public comment.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.