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Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how they got FAA permission to fly a private plane low over densly populated ara.

Do a search for either skywriting or air/sky tours, for a major city like NYC or SF, and you'll find companies offering planes and helicopters pretty low across the city for personal or promotional reasons. Not even that expensive, at least on the non-premium tours. Though a pretty nasty business in my opinion, both for wasting fuel on private flights and for making noise over lots of people in the city who get no benefit from having machines rumbling above their heads.

Unless you're talking about specifically thinking it looks too low in the photos, in which case I would assume it's just a case of their doing a good job planning the positions for two different flights to get great photos of one from the other that are framed well around the Apple locations.

There’s surprisingly little regulation for GA aircraft. Curious what rule you think they were breaking?

There's a minimum flight altitudes over populated areas of 1000ft in the US.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.119

If it counted as not a "congested area" than that drops to 500 feet.

It's a city. It's congested.

Here's a fun (?) fact: the FAA explicitly refuses to define the term "congested." In one case, they actually claimed that an area with one person was congested. Not sure if that held up on appeal. In any event, they've stated their desire to retain "enforcement flexibility" which, to me, is kinda BS. I've flown over a lot of areas where it wasn't obvious whether it counted as congested or not, and that 500' made a difference. (Next to a mountain, for example.)

This area, though, is definitely congested.

Do you have a link to that case? Sounds really interesting.

I thought this type of advertising was quite common in the US?

It was, a few generations ago. That and blimps. I've seen little of either, over the last 20 years.

It's still somewhat common in coastal areas. Though I realize "common" leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Authoritarians are often surprised to find out that people do actually have some limited freedoms left in the US.

When they see people exercising those freedoms they are often alarmed and quickly write their politicians to ensure those freedoms are curbed.

the parent is clearly one of those authoritarians.

Most people just have wildly incorrect ideas about flight because their only experience with it is the hellscape that is major airports. When that's all you've ever seen, it's natural not to understand that it's an extreme, not the mean.

It is funny how my original comment was downvoted to -1. The fact it has generated multiple thoughtful, polite, and informative responses shows that the question was not without the merit.

I think the fact it was downvoted was because some people precieved it as criticism of EFF. This is not true. I support EFF and personally do not use iPhone as a matter of principle. I was just curios about FAA regulations since I do not see many low-flying private airplaines over the Bay Area and asked an honest technical question.

Upvoted to help balance you out :)

I used to train pilots for a living. Just eyeballing it from the photos but that looks like 1000' AGL to me. Plus, that building is in San Jose's airspace, which means that aircraft was in contact with and radar-identified by San Jose ATC; the FAA therefore has a radar tape for that aircraft including altitude squawks. So unless that pilot is a complete idiot, there's no way in hell they busted 91.119.

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