The FAA says it will shoot down your drone if you fly within 36 miles of the Super Bowl

By Ed Oswald February 3, 2016

The Federal Aviation Administration is taking a tough stance on drones at the Super Bowl this year: bring them, and we’ll shoot them down. The “no-drone-zone” spans much further than just the stadium itself too, extending out 36 miles from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

The no-fly zone encompasses nearly all of San Francisco to the north and west, Santa Cruz, Morgan Hill and Gilroy to the south, and San Jose and Pleasanton to the north and east.

Flight restrictions are in place from 2:00 PM through 11:59 PM local time on Sunday, and violators could face fines and prosecution for disobeying the order, officials say. The FAA also warns that drones could be subject to “deadly force” if it is considered a threat – although they did not specify how and by whom the restrictions would be enforced.

A YouTube video is now making the rounds of social media, telling attendees to “bring your lucky jersey, bring your face paint, bring your team spirit … but leave your drone at home.” The aim is to get the message out to as many people as possible, the FAA says.

A similar drone policy was in effect at last year’s Super Bowl in Phoenix, Arizona, although at that point the registration requirements for drone flying didn’t exist. Now the FAA expects to you to register your drone, so if you’re following the law it’s even less smart to do it – considering your drone now carries identifiable information on its owner.

While we’re making a big deal out of the no-drone zone here, the 36-mile restriction applies to manned aircraft as well, with even tighter restrictions in 10 mile radius according to the FAA website. Flights in these zones will need to have a flight plan on record, and the FAA recommends that pilots seek approval before entering the restricted airspace to avoid delays.

Super Bowl 50 takes place between the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos at 3:30pm on Sunday.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.