A real estate photographer in Athens, Alabama, says someone shot his DJI Mavic 4 Pro camera drone out of the sky in the middle of a paid job. Michael Gardner was photographing a house off Lindsay Lane on Saturday, August 29, when he heard a gunshot, watched his video feed go haywire, and saw the $5,000 aircraft fall. He got it back two days later, after someone else found it.
Nobody has been identified as the shooter. Gardner is putting together a police report and says he is contacting the FAA office in Birmingham, which puts this case on a path DroneXL has documented for six years now: a camera drone gets shot, and the person holding the gun learns, usually too late, that federal law treats the act like firing at any other aircraft.
Gunshot Ends a Routine Real Estate Shoot in Athens
Michael Gardner was photographing a home for a client off Lindsay Lane in Athens, Alabama, on Saturday when a single gunshot ended the flight. His video feed scrambled, the DJI Mavic 4 Pro dropped, and the $5,000 camera drone stayed missing for two days until someone else found it.
Gardner told WAFF 48 the flight was routine work for a listing client until the shot rang out. He watched the crash happen through his controller.
The Mavic 4 Pro is DJI’s flagship camera drone, built around a 100-megapixel Hasselblad main camera, and it is exactly the kind of tool a working real estate photography business puts in the air every day. The hostility Gardner ran into is not new to him either. He says property owners have threatened to shoot down his drone before for flying over their land. Aerial photography is baked into residential listings at this point, and agents expect it on every property, which means working photographers spend their days over exactly the kind of neighborhoods where someone might reach for a gun instead of a phone.
Federal Law Puts a Drone in the Same Category as a Jetliner
Shooting at a drone is a federal crime. Title 18, Section 32 makes it a felony to willfully damage, destroy, or disable an aircraft, and the FAA counts a camera drone like the Mavic 4 Pro as an aircraft. The maximum penalty runs to 20 years in prison.
That is not a technicality dreamed up by drone lawyers. The statute is the same one that protects airliners, it carries fines on top of prison time, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said publicly for years that firing at any aircraft, crewed or not, is illegal and dangerous. State charges tend to stack on top. A Florida man got four years in prison for shooting down a sheriff’s drone, and another Florida shooter paid $5,000 in restitution after blasting a Walmart delivery drone out of the sky. Last September, a search-and-rescue drone took a bullet in Maine while looking for two missing beagles, and that case drew a federal investigation. Courts have not been sympathetic to the shooters who get caught.
Gardner also pointed at a danger most trigger-pullers never consider: the drone itself. A bullet through a lithium battery can ignite it, he warned, turning the falling aircraft into a fire hazard. If a burning drone lands on a roof and the house goes up, he noted, the person who fired the shot owns that outcome too.
The Airspace Myth That Keeps Getting Drones Shot
Gardner says property owners have threatened him before, convinced they own the sky over their land. They own less of it than they think. The Supreme Court settled in 1946 that navigable airspace is a public highway, though landowners keep rights in the immediate reaches.
Gardner put it his own way: “they don’t own the airspace above the tallest blade of grass in their yard,” he told the station. He is mostly right. United States v. Causby, the 1946 Supreme Court decision that still governs the question, gives a landowner the airspace immediately above the property that they can reasonably use, and it made everything above that a public route. What no court has ever granted a property owner is the right to fire a weapon at an aircraft passing overhead.
Pilots on the receiving end have options that do not involve becoming a headline themselves. DroneXL keeps a standing guide on what to do when someone shoots at your drone: document everything, land safely, and get law enforcement and the FAA involved. Gardner is following that script almost exactly.
DroneXL’s Take
I have covered drone shootings for six years, and the pattern never changes: an annoyed property owner, a gun, and a felony nobody seems to know exists. If Gardner’s account holds, whoever fired in Athens committed a federal crime over a real estate listing.
The property owners have a point, up to a point. Causby does protect the space right above your land, and a camera drone loitering low over a backyard is a legitimate grievance. The answer to that grievance is a police report or an FAA complaint. It is never a trigger.
What happens next in Athens is genuinely open. No shooter has been named, and small local cases like this often die quietly unless investigators find the person who fired. When they do find one, the record says prosecutors move: four years in a Florida prison for one shooter, court-ordered restitution for another. If a name surfaces in Limestone County, expect charges to follow that same track.
Gardner told WAFF the whole episode could have been avoided with a conversation. He is right, and it cuts both ways. A real estate photography pilot knocking on a door before a shoot costs nothing. A neighbor asking a question instead of shouldering a rifle costs even less, and it keeps everyone, and every DJI Mavic 4 Pro, out of the line of fire.
Source: WAFF 48
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
