The National Press Photographers Association has filed formal comments on the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed Section 2209 rule, warning that the framework for permanent drone flight restrictions over critical infrastructure contains no consideration of newsgathering and no way for anyone to find out which airspace has been locked down, for how long, or why. The filing landed in Docket FAA-2026-4558 ahead of the August 5, 2026 comment deadline.

DroneXL has tracked Section 2209 since January 2023, when the rule was already six years past its statutory deadline, and the striking thing about the NPPA filing is how closely it mirrors what commercial drone operators put in the same docket two months ago. Press photographers and working pilots are converging on the same list of guardrails from opposite directions. Nobody planned that. It happened because the proposed rule has the same hole for both groups.

NPPA Concedes The FAA’s Authority And Attacks The Process

The NPPA filing does not argue that restricting drones over critical infrastructure is unconstitutional. It accepts the FAA’s authority to protect sensitive facilities and instead targets how the proposed rule builds restrictions: airspace could become effectively permanent “without sufficient transparency, public participation, documented findings, procedural safeguards” or any weighing of newsgathering impact.

The proposed rule, published May 6, would create a new 14 CFR Part 74 letting fixed-site facilities across 16 critical infrastructure sectors apply for Unmanned Aircraft Flight Restrictions, or UAFRs. The FAA identified roughly 125,000 candidate facilities and expects about 9,000 applications over five years. DroneXL’s breakdown of the Section 2209 NPRM covered the two-tier structure and the transit lane for Part 107 and other certificated operators broadcasting Remote ID.

What the NPPA wants added is specific and procedural: a meaningful administrative record for each designation, periodic review, expiration requirements, and a real avenue to challenge a restriction. The filing also flags that journalists, drone operators, researchers, public safety agencies, and property owners currently have no mechanism to determine which facilities have been designated or when restrictions expire.

Mickey H. Osterreicher, the NPPA’s general counsel, told PetaPixel that restrictions “adopted in the name of security can gradually expand beyond their original purpose.” NPPA President Alex Garcia added that security and transparency are not opposing goals, and that the rule should protect genuine security interests while preserving the public’s right to timely, independent information.

The Press And The Drone Industry Are Asking For The Same Guardrails

Compare the NPPA’s list to what the Drone Service Providers Alliance published in May. DSPA’s Section 2209 comment guide pressed for federal preemption of 25 state airspace laws, but it also demanded transparency when the FAA bypasses notice and comment for a UAFR, a clean separation between airspace restriction and counter-drone mitigation authority, and public visibility into what gets designated. AUVSI’s position, which the association previewed at XPONENTIAL Detroit, pushed to keep certificated operators inside restricted airspace with notification requirements that scale rather than obstruct.

Set those filings next to the NPPA’s and the overlap is hard to miss. A press association worried about documenting a refinery fire and a Part 107 mapping pilot worried about losing a transit corridor need the same three things: a public record of why the restriction exists, a date when it ends, and a way to contest it. A separate coalition of the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and EPIC filed its own comments in the same docket making related arguments about independent drone journalism.

That breadth matters for how the FAA reads the docket. When only one constituency objects, an agency can treat the objection as special pleading. When operators, journalists, and civil liberties groups independently identify the identical structural gap, the gap is the story.

The FAA Has Already Shown How These Restrictions Expand

The NPPA argues its concerns have already played out in practice, and it points to recent history our readers know well. The October 2025 Chicago TFR grounded drone journalism across 935 square miles, the largest drone flight restriction ever imposed in the United States, which DroneXL covered as news organizations challenged it. In January 2026, NOTAM FDC 6/4375 banned drone flights within 914 meters (3,000 feet) laterally and 305 meters (1,000 feet) vertically of Department of Homeland Security assets nationwide, including unmarked vehicles, creating moving no-fly zones no pilot could see coming. Minnesota photojournalist Rob Levine sued the FAA over that restriction in March.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes the FAA rescinded FDC 6/4375 on April 15, 2026 and replaced it with advisory FDC 6/2824. The restriction that press groups spent three months fighting was originally written to run 21 months, until October 2027. It took litigation and sustained pressure to unwind. That sequence, restriction first, accountability later, is exactly what the NPPA says Part 74 would codify at scale, because a UAFR has no expiration date and no review clock in the current draft.

The courts are unlikely to fix this afterward. In NPPA v. McCraw, the Fifth Circuit rejected the argument that journalists hold a sweeping First Amendment right to fly drones, and the Supreme Court declined to review it in 2024. If the safeguards do not go into the rule now, there may be no venue to add them later.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve reported on Section 2209 through three FAA administrators, two reauthorization acts, and a decade of missed deadlines, and here is what jumps out about this moment. Nearly every serious filing in this docket, from press photographers to service providers to civil liberties lawyers, accepts that a nuclear plant or a prison should be able to get drone airspace protected. The dispute is whether restrictions come with receipts.

The FAA’s own draft answers that question badly. A UAFR under the current proposal can exist indefinitely, invisible to the people it binds, with no review and no findings anyone can read. We watched this movie in Chicago and again with FDC 6/4375, and both times the restriction outran its justification until outside pressure forced a correction. Writing that pattern into a permanent regulatory framework, across 16 sectors and thousands of facilities, is regulatory overreach with a filing cabinet.

The good news is that the fix is cheap and the coalition asking for it is unusually broad. Expiration dates, published findings, and a challenge process cost the FAA almost nothing and cost legitimate security nothing at all. If you fly under Part 107, or you plan to fly under Part 108, file your comment in Docket FAA-2026-4558 before August 5 and ask for exactly those three things. Our guide to filing a comment that gets read walks through the process. Watch the final rule for whether they appear. If the FAA publishes Part 74 without an expiration or review mechanism after a docket this unified asked for one, that tells you the agency views this framework as a security tool first and an airspace rule second, and every operator should plan accordingly.

Sources: NPPA comments, FAA Docket FAA-2026-4558; Federal Register; PetaPixel; Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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