Near-misses, crashes, airspace violations, and arrests — when drone flights go wrong.
Drone incidents are where the hobby meets consequences, and this desk keeps the record: incursions, crashes, forced-downs and the enforcement that follows.
The recurring worst case is fire season. Spokane’s drone incursions grounded firefighting aircraft 26 times — every grounding a fire burning unfought — and the response escalated to an FBI counter-drone task force forcing hobby drones down over those same fires. The wildfire desk covers the other side: drones as the firefighting tool.
Attribution is getting harder to escape. Cellebrite locked down SkySafe as its only drone-forensics partner, betting big on the counter-drone evidence chain, and the FAA’s DETER program shortened the road from a reported violation to a real penalty.
And half this desk’s job is saying what did not happen: the IISS work separating real Russian drone incidents from phantom ones is the model — incident inflation feeds bad policy as surely as real incidents do. The counter-drone desk tracks the defensive hardware. Every incident story lands in the feed below.
Last updated September 7, 2026 — the feed below updates with every new story.
Germany plans nine-city counter-drone units and a law letting power and water companies actively fend off drones, five weeks after the Leipzig bomb.
A Zipline delivery drone came down under its parachute onto Highway 6 in Cypress on Friday. No injuries, no damage, no calls to police, and no cause yet.
GAO finds the Secret Service logged drone incidents in 2015, 2016 and 2021, changed no civilian drone policy and never wrote down why. Then came Butler.
A gunshot brought down a real estate photographer's DJI Mavic 4 Pro camera drone over Athens, Alabama. Federal law calls that destroying an aircraft.
Germany formally blames Russia for the August 4 explosive drone at Leipzig/Halle Airport and will close the Russian consulate in Bonn on September 18.
A third drone and 50 grams of suspected hexogen turned up beside Leipzig/Halle Airport. Investigators say the plot was far larger than the public knew.
An FBI-led counter-drone unit built for the FIFA World Cup detected 41 unauthorized drones over the Spokane wildfires in four days and used electronic countermeasures to force them down. No pilots were arrested; the cases went to the FAA with fines of up to $100,000 each.
Civilian drones entered restricted airspace over the Spokane County wildfires at least 26 times in three days, repeatedly grounding helicopters and air tankers while three uncontained fires burned homes below. Two operators have been cited, and the cases have been referred to the FAA.
You ground the aircraft actually fighting the fire — Spokane logged 26 groundings in one season — and increasingly you meet federal enforcement: an FBI counter-drone task force forced down hobby drones over those same fires. 'If you fly, we can't' is policy, not a slogan.
No, and the record matters: panics have chased aircraft, planets and nothing at all. We report what is documented — forensics, radio evidence, recovered hardware — and label the rest as unverified, because incident inflation feeds bad policy.
More than they used to. The FAA's DETER program shortened the path from report to penalty, criminal charges now follow the serious cases, and counter-drone forensics — the Cellebrite-SkySafe partnership, for instance — makes attribution far harder to escape.
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