It was just last month that Chinese drone maker DJI got a one-year grace period from the U.S. government to prove it’s not a national security risk, lest it face a devastating ban on selling in the American market. Then this week, DJI published a blog post on its own website saying that they’ll no longer block users from flying in American restricted airspace. Uh, ok…
Why? And why now? Up until this announcement, DJI drones would use geofencing around restricted zones—near sensitive sites, such as airports, nuclear power plants, prisons, and such—to prevent operators from flying the drone overhead. The drone’s software would simply prevent the drone from following the commands to take it into that airspace.
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Now, DJI has renamed “restricted zones” to “enhanced warning zones,” and rather than block drones from entering them, the drones will instead display a warning to the user as their drone gets near them. But it’ll now allow the operator to fly into these sensitive sites.

still illegal
Don’t celebrate yet. The FAA still prohibits flights into sensitive areas, and any operator who ignores the warnings and flies into restricted airspace will see the holy hell of a pissed-off Uncle Sam come down on them with all sorts of severe punishments for breaking the law. The FAA only requires drones to warn operators when they’re about to enter restricted airspace, so the move by DJI still satisfies the law governing drone manufacturers, even though it’s a marked step backward from the voluntary geofencing that had been DJI’s policy since 2013.
In their blog post on January 13, 2025, DJI wrote that the move is intended to place “…control back in the hands of the drone operators, in line with regulatory principles of the operator bearing final responsibility.” Since when did anyone need the right to fly into restricted airspace and potentially clip a Boeing 737 full of passengers?

So it’s a baffling move for DJI to take the guardrails off a policy that keeps airports safer—you can’t have drones flying in the paths of passenger jets—and keeps its operators from tempting significant fines and jail time. Even weirder is the timing.
As I reported last month, the American government has already been floating a ban on DJI drones. The reasoning is that, as a Chinese manufacturer, the gov’t folks fear it may be so closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party and its military that it poses a national security threat.
Tweaking their product to enable it to enter restricted airspace sounds like exactly the kind of negative PR move that’ll only convince American lawmakers that it doesn’t have American national security top of its mind. Let’s see how this soap opera plays out, now that DJI has just handed ammunition to the very folks gunning to see it banned within the next year.
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