Oregon’s two airspace agencies have a blunt message for drone pilots in the middle of the state’s worst wildfire season on record: if you fly, firefighters can’t. The Oregon Department of Aviation and the Oregon Department of Emergency Management issued a joint warning on August 20 telling operators to keep drones out of active fire zones entirely, after unauthorized flights delayed aerial firefighting inside the state.
More than 20 large fires are burning in Oregon, with roughly 2.4 million acres (about 9,700 square kilometers) already scorched, more than the state lost in all of 2025. When a single unauthorized drone shows up over a fire, planes and helicopters leave the airspace until it is confirmed clear, and those lost minutes let the fire grow.
DroneXL has reported on drones grounding Oregon’s firefighting aircraft since 2020. What has changed is the volume.
Oregon’s Warning Follows Drone Delays at the Grasshopper Fire
The Oregon Department of Aviation and the Oregon Department of Emergency Management published their joint warning on August 20, after drones delayed aerial operations at the Grasshopper Fire near Mount Hood. The agencies’ message to pilots is blunt: if you fly, firefighting aircraft can’t.
“We want to make sure that people understand: if there’s a wildfire, don’t fly,” Oregon Department of Aviation Director Kenji Sugahara told KOIN 6 News. Sugahara said pilots flying waterdrops move at high speed and low altitude through smoke they cannot see through, and that crews had been hearing about drone problems around the Grasshopper Fire that were delaying operations.
Andrew Jahier, the emergency management department’s director of response and recovery, put a price on it in the release. “No photo is worth a federal prison sentence or a $75,000 fine,” Jahier said.
Firefighting aircraft work the same couple hundred feet of air that consumer drones occupy. The release describes low-altitude tankers and helicopters sharing airspace with recreational drones, a collision risk that ends the mission the moment a drone appears.
Drone Incursions Have Grounded Aircraft Across the West This Month
Oregon is not an outlier. The US Forest Service has reported 67 drone incursions near wildfires nationally so far in 2026, and August has been the worst stretch: grounded aircraft over the Spokane Complex in Washington and repeated shutdowns at New Mexico’s Frijoles Fire.
The Spokane numbers are the ugliest. Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels reported 26 drone incursions in a single day on August 2, four of them directly in the path of working aircraft. The next evening a drone grounded the fleet again for about 30 minutes. The sheriff’s office has since identified multiple operators and referred citations to the Federal Aviation Administration.
In New Mexico, drones grounded air tankers and helicopters twice in one week over the Frijoles Fire in the Santa Fe National Forest.
This follows a record 2025. The Forest Service counted 218 drone incursions over wildfires last year, 184 of them at the Eaton and Palisades Fires alone, more than the 125 incidents the agency logged across the previous seven years combined. That season produced the collision between a DJI Mini and a Super Scooper over the Palisades Fire, and the operator pleaded guilty to a federal charge.
Oregon has its own history here. A drone grounded firefighting aircraft over an Oregon wildfire in June 2024, and the state’s newest warning reads almost word for word like the ones that came before it.
Violators Face $75,000 Fines and Federal Prison Time
Flying a drone over an Oregon wildfire can cost up to $75,000 in civil fines and up to 12 months in federal prison. Violators also face confiscation of their equipment and permanent loss of their pilot certificates. Detection gear deployed near fire zones is helping the state find them.
Sugahara told KOIN 6 News that drone-detection equipment at some incidents can locate a drone in the air and, in some cases, the ground station it launched from. (Spokane County identified multiple operators within days.) Anonymous fire footage is getting harder to pull off, and I won’t pretend to be sorry about that.
The agencies want every operator checking Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) before takeoff. Active wildfire areas are no-drone zones around the clock, at night and on weekends, and anyone who spots an unauthorized drone in a fire zone should report it to local law enforcement or call 911.
DroneXL’s Take
Oregon’s warning deserves a wider audience than a state press release will get, because the operators flying over these fires are burning through goodwill the whole hobby depends on. DroneXL first covered illegal drones grounding aircraft over Oregon wildfires back in September 2020, and the story has barely changed.
Don’t be that guy. Nobody’s footage is worth a tanker crew pulling off a fire while houses burn below. Sixty-seven incursions this year. Every one of them is an argument handed to somebody drafting drone restrictions, and those drafts are already circulating: Grant County’s administrator is pushing a Washington state law creating criminal penalties for wildfire drone flights, drafted directly in response to Spokane.
Congress is further along. Oregon Congresswoman Janelle Bynum’s Wildfire Aerial Response Safety Act, H.R. 6618, passed the House on March 24 and now sits in the Senate. It only orders the FAA to study drone incursions, but lawmakers have already floated counter-drone powers at wildfires, and a fire season like this one is exactly what moves a study bill toward something with teeth. Watch whether the Senate takes it up before the season ends. My bet is that if the incursion count keeps climbing the way it has this August, the next bill written won’t stop at a study.
Sources: Oregon Department of Emergency Management, KOIN 6 News, FireRescue1, Albuquerque Journal
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
