Comment by jrockway

3 years ago

> But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.

But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!

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jrockway

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emmelaich  3 years ago

> specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction,

To me, that doesn't change the answers much. You still have to have some definition of vehicle that inevitably assumes some context.

That to me means any human-propelled thing smaller than say a motorbike is not a vehicle.

So I only said 'is indisputably a vehicle' to cars and similar (even if was an ambulance or police car)

monocasa  3 years ago

But it's not really a local thing; I'd be shocked if there was a park which meaningfully controlled it's airspace. Practically the bounds of a park only go so high.

  • jrockway  3 years ago

    That's how you see it, but not how most people see it. The "corner crossing" lawsuit got a LOT of coverage on Hacker News. Landowners claimed that merely floating over their property was trespassing. The courts disagreed.

    Trust me, if there weren't any laws, people would be shooting down airplanes above their farms, or at the very least, writing a lot of angry letters to the FAA. The laws that we have right now allowing the freedom of air travel were hard-won and unpopular among those affected.

    Therefore, the park in this exercise would mostly like try and shoot down the International Space Station, or else risk the reputation of not being strict against surfers carrying surfboards. It's exactly the same thing.

    • flaminHotSpeedo  3 years ago

      Ignoring the fact that many of the corner crossing cases were bad faith arguments by landowners intentionally attempting to abuse the situation, I don't think anyone would argue that the park boundary is a prism that extends vertically to infinity.

      So where do you draw the line?

      3 replies →

  • gmane  3 years ago

    I mean, while it's not technically just the park, I'm sure there are several parks on US Military bases where the airspace is restricted. Also, we can be the change we wish to see in the world: any park can be a park with a controlled airspace if you bring enough surface-to-air missiles into the park.