Well, technically, there's nobody to police the high seas...that seems to be the deciding point. Try that overland and see what gets dispatched.

It would actually be very interesting to see what would get dispatched - at what point do they give up trying to contact the operator? Do they go for electronic warfare to wrest control of it, or do they capture the physical drone? What kind of response time would they have?

Probably slow response if any, judging by the interception of the stolen Q400 at Sea-Tac and having listening to the civilian ATC providing intercept vectors. Don't get me wrong, they coordinated well, but I guess I'd have expected a military jet to receive broad airspace clearance & use advanced radar to zoom straight to their POI.

> but I guess I'd have expected a military jet to receive broad airspace clearance & use advanced radar to zoom straight to their POI.

That would required clearing the airspace. As well as being incredibly disruptive, it would take a long time to get everyone down safely.

There are circumstances under which a military aircraft commanders would declare responsibility for air safety in a crowded airspace (MARSA, "due regard")[1][2] but that aircraft theft wasn't one of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARSA_(aviation)

[2] https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Due_Regard

If you want to crack down on people with drones, then capturing the physical drone with a net is very useful for identifying the purchaser. (Even in the case of DIY.)

It'd be really easy to connect a remote UHF radio to a stream, and ATC would never know. Get your clearance, taxi on to the runway, take off, say "have a nice day EIGHTTWOJULIET" as you clear their airspace.

maybe someone would look in the cabin and think it was weird they didn't see a head waving back, but in most cases i'd doubt it.

With some cheap animatronics, you could even fix that last bit...

Pretty sure the FAA doesn’t have any authority to grant or deny clearance over the middle of the Atlantic.

Pretty sure you need clearance from the tower to take off in the US, assuming a controlled airport; en-route controllers for the Atlantic also have a say in an international flight even if you're going to argue that they took off from an uncontrolled airspace.

The point was that this isn’t indicative of this being a first time this happened. Ops comment had nothing to do with jurisdiction.

But it was never implied that it's the first in the world.

There at least used to be YouTube videos of people outside the US flying large drones in autonomous mode over to the next town.

That didn’t require a commercial use waiver, as they weren’t selling a product or service. The article (if you care to read it) even calls out other non-commercial use examples.