Drone over your site: what may you do?

This is the question we get most often, usually by phone and usually while it is happening. There is a drone above the site, the crowd is looking up, and nobody knows who is flying it. Here is what you can and cannot do at that moment.

What you must not do

Start with the things to leave alone, because they create more trouble than the drone does.

• Do not bring it down. Shooting a drone, throwing something at it or catching it in a net is dangerous for the crowd underneath and puts you on the wrong side of the law. A falling two-kilo aircraft on somebody’s head is a serious injury.
• Do not jam it. Equipment that blocks the control link or GPS is not freely usable in the Netherlands. It also disrupts everything else on the same band, including your own security team’s radios.
• Do not take it over. Equipment that hijacks a drone’s control falls under the same restrictions and is reserved for a very small group of authorised parties.
• Do not approach the pilot in a way that escalates. It is usually a visitor with a new drone who does not know it is not allowed.

In short: intervening in the flight is not yours to do. That is reserved for the police and a handful of designated services, and even they rarely use it.

What you can do

1. Establish what is flying and where the pilot is standing. This is the step that makes the rest possible, and the hardest one without a tool.
2. Approach the pilot. In the large majority of cases it ends there. Someone did not know it was prohibited, lands the drone, and that is that.
3. Call the police if that does not work or the picture is different. Pass on the time, the position of the drone, the altitude and above all the position of the pilot.
4. Record what happened. Time, serial number, altitude and track. You need that for the debrief with the municipality and for next year’s permit.
5. Move your crowd or delay part of the programme if the situation calls for it. This is your own authority and sometimes the only one you need.

The bottleneck is step one

Every step above starts with knowing who is flying and where they are. By eye that rarely works. A drone at 100 metres is a dot, the pilot could be anywhere within a few hundred metres, and by the time somebody has found them the drone is gone.

Since 2024 almost every drone in Europe broadcasts its identity and position, and the pilot’s position with it. That is Remote ID. A receiver that picks up the signal puts both on the map within seconds. See what Remote ID actually is and how the AEROTECT DRID receives it.

What you can arrange in advance

• Put a drone clause in your event permit or site rules, so you have something to point at. We wrote up how to word it.
• Agree with the police in advance who you call and with which details. A report that includes a pilot position gets a very different response from "there is a drone".
• Record which drones are allowed to fly, your own photographer’s for instance, so an alert about those does not need handling every time.
• Make sure somebody in the control room has the picture open and that the security team leader gets the alerts on their phone.

And if the drone broadcasts no Remote ID?

It happens: home-built aircraft, older models and aircraft where someone has deliberately disabled the module. A Remote ID receiver does not see those. We are plain about that, because it decides what you may expect from detection. Read what does and does not work without Remote ID.

In practice, at events and business sites it is almost always an ordinary consumer drone, and those broadcast normally. During our 2026 deployments that was true of every aircraft. See the cases for the figures per event.