New Arizona Law · In effect September 12, 2026
It is now a crime in Arizona to fly a drone over your own backyard — if you are using it to say something.
Two bills passed this year rewrote A.R.S. § 13-3729, Arizona's drone statute. Both were signed on June 22 and both took effect on September 12.
One of them created a new one-mile exclusion zone around any ticketed event — a mile out and a mile straight up. Fly inside it and you have committed a class 1 misdemeanor: up to six months in jail.
There is an exception for your own property. Here it is, word for word. You are exempt if you are
“operating the person's own civil unmanned aircraft above the person's own private property and the operation is consistent with federal law and is not used for any of the following:
(a) Commercial purposes.
(b) To convey or communicate a message or to record for the purposes of commercial broadcasting or publication.
(c) To monitor or otherwise interfere in any way with a ticketed entertainment event.”
Read (b) again. You may hover a drone over your own yard. The moment you do it to convey or communicate a message — a livestream, footage you meant to post, anything you intended to say — the same flight becomes a crime.
Same drone. Same altitude. Same risk to the same people. The only thing that changed is that you were speaking.
A drone does not fall out of the sky any faster because the pilot had something to say.
The mile-wide zone only reaches a “civil unmanned aircraft.” The statute defines that as one flown for any purpose other than “strictly for hobby or recreational purposes,” and it spells out what it is reaching for: flights “in furtherance of or incidental to any business or media service or agency.”
So the law sorts people by why they are flying.
| Who is flying | Same drone, same spot, same altitude |
|---|---|
| A teenager flying for fun | No violation of this subsection. Free to fly. |
| A newspaper photographer | Class 1 misdemeanor. Up to six months. |
| A local business doing roof or real-estate work | Class 1 misdemeanor. Up to six months. |
| A homeowner over his own yard, filming to post it | Class 1 misdemeanor. Up to six months. |
If the point is keeping drones off crowds, the hobbyist is the one you would worry about first — that is who actually flies over stadiums. The law lets him go and charges the reporter and the small business.
That is not a safety rule. A safety rule does not care who you work for.
A separate subsection makes it a class 6 felony — class 5 on a second offense — to photograph or loiter “over or near” a critical facility in furtherance of any criminal offense.
The statute never says what “near” means. Fifty feet? A half mile? It does not say, and the list of protected facilities runs to seventeen categories, including every electrical transmission line of at least 69,000 volts, every “electronic communication station or tower,” all railroad infrastructure, every municipal court, and every hospital that takes air ambulances.
In the settled parts of Yavapai County, there is almost nowhere that is not “near” one of them.
What makes this hard to excuse is that nobody else writes it this way. Everyone who protects these same facilities manages to say where the line is:
Arizona wrote “near.” No distance, no altitude, nothing you could look up. A police officer decides afterward whether you were close enough to be a felon.
The oldest part of the statute makes it a class 1 misdemeanor to fly in a way “prohibited by a federal law or regulation that governs aeronautics.”
It requires no intent at all. Under A.R.S. § 13-202(B), a criminal statute that prescribes no mental state is a strict liability offense. You do not have to know. You do not have to be careless. You just have to be wrong.
Wrong about what? About Parts 91 and 107, the Remote ID rule, 49 U.S.C. § 44809, and the daily stream of temporary flight restrictions — none of it published in Arizona, none of it voted on by anyone you elected, all of it able to change tomorrow without asking this state's permission.
The Legislature did not decide what conduct is criminal here. It agreed in advance to whatever a federal agency decides later.
If you want to know how well that works, look at what this year's bills had to fix. Until June, the statute defined “model aircraft” by pointing at section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 — a federal provision Congress repealed in 2018. For eight years, an element of an Arizona criminal offense was defined by a federal law that no longer existed. One of this year's two bills quietly deleted the reference. The other one kept it.
That is what happens when you let someone else write your criminal code.
Both 2026 bills amended the whole of § 13-3729, and each inserted a different new subsection C. They had to be blended together into a single section afterward.
Something got lost in the blending. Both enacted chapters carry forward the subsection that bars cities, towns and counties from passing their own drone ordinances. The version of § 13-3729 published on the Legislature's own website today does not contain it — even though the section heading still says “state preemption.” The two local carve-outs that went with it are gone as well, and the school-notice subsection is missing words from the middle of a sentence.
The law itself is fine. The chaptered acts are what count, and they both kept it. But the published code is what a city attorney, a police officer, a drone operator or a trial judge actually reads, and right now it is wrong.
This one does not even need a bill to fix. A.R.S. § 41-1304.02(A)(8) lets the Director of Legislative Council correct manifest clerical and database errors in the statutes. It takes a letter.
Nobody caught it. Not in the three months between signing and the effective date. That is the part I keep coming back to.
None of this requires giving up the goal. Keeping drones off crowds and away from substations is worth doing. It is the drafting that is broken, and every piece of it is fixable.
Strike subsection C, paragraph 4, subdivision (b) — “to convey or communicate a message” — in its entirety. There is no saving a criminal exception that turns on whether you were speaking. The rest of the exception does the real work without it.
Strike “civil” so the prohibition reaches any drone, hobby or commercial. If the concern is a two-kilogram aircraft falling into a crowd, the pilot's line of work is irrelevant — and covering everyone closes the loophole the law currently leaves wide open.
One mile out and one mile up is airspace the State does not control; federal law reserves it, and no lawful drone flight goes above 400 feet anyway. Replace both halves with a single rule: at four hundred feet or less above ground level, over the property where the event is held, while the event is happening, and only if the operator knows or should know it is happening. That is where Texas draws it and where the FAA's own proposed rule draws it.
Insert “knowingly,” and name the specific federal rules the state means to enforce instead of adopting the entire body of federal aviation regulation sight unseen, forever, in advance.
Replace it with the boundary the federal government already uses: within the facility's lateral boundaries, four hundred feet or less. And make clear that the “criminal offense” triggering the felony cannot be a violation of this same statute — as written, drifting above 400 feet while filming near a courthouse can be bootstrapped from a regulatory slip into a felony.
Ask Legislative Council to restore the preemption subsection, the two local carve-outs, and the missing words, so the statutes say what the Legislature actually passed.
Read it yourself. The enacted text is Laws 2026, Chapter 215 and Chapter 236. The blended version is at A.R.S. § 13-3729 — compare them and you will see the missing subsection for yourself.
I build things. Circuit boards, firmware, software, search-and-rescue tools. I know what a drone is and what it costs, and I am not precious about the fact that people misuse them.
But this is the second time I have read an Arizona bill and found the same shape: a real problem, a law written fast, and ordinary people left holding criminal exposure nobody debated. A speech test buried in an exemption. A felony with no boundary. Strict liability for rules written in another jurisdiction. A published code that does not match the enacted law, three months after it passed.
These are not partisan failures. They are drafting failures, and they happen because not enough people read the bills all the way to the definitions section.
I read them. That is most of what the job is.