Airspace authorisation, Remote ID, night and over-people rules, and the Arizona statutes that sit on top of the federal ones.
Flying legally, which is most of the job
Every commercial flight we conduct is flown under 14 CFR Part 107 by a certificated remote pilot. That certificate is not a formality; it governs what may be flown, where, when and over whom, and the client inherits the consequences of getting it wrong.
The rules that shape a job most often: aircraft must be registered and broadcasting Remote ID, which means anyone with a phone can see the aircraft’s position and the position of its control station. Operations in controlled airspace require authorization, obtained through LAANC where the facility map allows it and by waiver where it does not — and the Phoenix metro is thick with controlled airspace. Sky Harbor’s Class B shelves sit over a great deal of the valley; Mesa Gateway, Deer Valley, Scottsdale, Chandler, Falcon Field and Luke each carry their own surface areas and grids. Some grids authorize to 400 feet in seconds. Some authorize to zero, which means the answer is no unless a waiver is granted, and waivers take weeks.
Night operations are permitted with anti-collision lighting visible for three statute miles and a pilot current on the night training. Flight over people is restricted by aircraft category and is the constraint that most often reshapes an event plan — we build the flight geometry so the aircraft is never over an uninvolved crowd rather than seeking permission to be. Beyond visual line of sight requires a waiver; we do not fly BVLOS on a client’s assurance that “nobody will notice.” Temporary flight restrictions appear with little notice around wildfires, VIP movements and stadium events, and a TFR bust is a certificate action.
Arizona adds its own layer. State law preempts local drone ordinances, so a city cannot invent its own flight rules — but state law separately makes it an offence to operate a drone dangerously near, or to use one to photograph, certain critical facilities, and it criminalises interference with first-responder operations. Arizona’s voyeurism and surveillance statutes apply to a camera in the air exactly as they apply to a camera on a pole. And no drone-specific statute suspends the ordinary law of trespass, harassment or stalking.
What Honeybadger Solutions provides
Honeybadger Solutions is an Arizona-licensed security guard and private investigations agency — Guard 1759798, PI 1759795 — with investigations, digital forensics and cyber work delivered nationwide. This article is background on the problem. For what we actually provide, see Drone Operations, or book a confidential consultation.