On Wednesday, local media reported that Andreas Meißner of Königswinter, Germany pleaded guilty to violating the ban on drones, filming without a permit, and leaving property unattended. Federal prosecutors dropped one charge—making a false report to a government employee—in exchange for the plea deal.
For months now, drone use in national parks has been something of a menace according to NPS authorities. In June 2014, the NPS banned drones in all parks following an initial ban in California’s Yosemite National Park. Other incidents going back to September 2013 have involved buzzing wild sheep in Utah, flying over nesting gulls in Alaska, and flying over visitors at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
The case marks the first such drone-related prosecution in Yellowstone National Park since the ban, and it's possibly the first across the entire National Park Service (NPS). Two other prosecutions are currently ongoing for drone-related incidents in Yellowstone.
"It was not my intention to break any law or anything like that."
The court's judgment stipulates that the drone and its camera will be returned upon payment of the fine.John Powell, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Wyoming, said that Meißner will not get his memory card back as it is "fruits of an illegal act. The card contains evidence that the drone was used in the park."
"We have his SD card," he also told Ars. "Once he completes his probation, the drone will be returned to him. It’s unsupervised probation, he can’t come back to the park for a year. He’s been very cooperative. I think he’s mortified by the whole thing and wants to get on with his life."
Powell explained that no American authority was going to check up on him—the probation simply consists of a one-year ban from Yellowstone.
Meißner, reached by phone at home in Germany, told Ars that he was sorry that he crashed the drone—he didn’t even know that it was against park rules.
"They should have some signs, I was not thinking about that [I was doing something wrong]," he said. "It was not my intention to break any law or anything like that."
He explained that he was standing at the lakeshore and sent the drone up into the air "about 10 meters high."
"Then there was a technical malfunction, low battery or something like that," he said. "They go into safe mode, [attempt to land immediately], and it means water—that's not so good for me."
After Ars explained to Meißner that NPS has witnessed an increasing number of drone-related incidents and that he may have been made an example of, he understood his bad luck.
"I was at the wrong time at the wrong place," he said.
"Unfortunately we did not locate it."
According to an affidavit written by Steven Noh, a Yellowstone Park Ranger (and former 11-year veteran of the FBI based in Los Angeles), Meißner told park volunteers that his camera fell in Yellowstone Lake. He seemed "in distress" to recover his "camera" that he was using to film a permitted documentary from a "kayak."
When Meißner returned to a park office, he put the box of a Phantom 2 drone on the counter, re-iterating that he would be willing to pay for divers or whatever it took to recover the SD card.
"I think it was a misunderstanding. I was asking for help, and after that, they claimed I had said I was in a kayak, but that's not true," Meißner told Ars.
The affidavit also cites an e-mail from Meißner to Noh, in which he explains that his film project was for a charity, Run & Ride for Reading.
I was asked from the founder of a foundation to do some private documentation about his charity-project. As we’ve got no money for that, of course, it’s even more problematic that we’ve lost the Phantom and the camera but, especially the files on the card. As the Yellowstone Management knows, we’ve been on a cycling tour from Seattle to the Yellowstone Park—the joining fee from the cyclists is 100 percent used for the charity project, which brings children from socially disadvantaged families to free education.
Noh and Meißner exchanged a number of e-mails in which the German drone operator attempted to help the NPS in its search for his drone.
On July 22, Noh wrote to Meißner:
With what you provided, several hours were spent today searching for your Phantom 2. Unfortunately we did not locate it. We were on the water on a boat, using sonar and visual searching techniques, but were unsuccessful. We reviewed your photograph with the red circle and your narrative description to pinpoint our search area, but we had no luck. The conditions were OK but not ideal. We will try again when the weather, winds, and light are favorable.
Meißner then provided more precise GPS coordinates as best he could, and on July 28, Ranger Robert Elliott located a "light-colored, x-shaped object at the bottom of the Grant Marina." Two days later, Elliott went back, dove down, and retrieved the drone.
Eureka!
Noh pulled the 32GB SD card from the GoPro camera mounted on the drone and "allowed the card to dry further before sealing it as a separate item of evidence."
He wrote to Meißner:
The card appears unharmed…I took some photographs of our little adventure, and I attached them to this e-mail as a pdf file. Please let me know—and I certainly hope we do—that we have, in fact, retrieved the correct Phantom 2 and GoPro!
Meißner confirmed: "This device on your picture is definitely mine."
The former FBI agent-turned-ranger applied for and received a search warrant for Meißner’s SD card, resulting in "12 files that fell within the scope of the search warrant," which then prompted him to seek probable cause for the prosecution of a crime.
So what will happen to future drone operators busted by NPS rangers? Will they be given the same treatment as Meißner?
"It will be considered a standard for any future cases in the park," Powell, the spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Wyoming, told Ars. "It was a learning experience for us and everybody else as well. As anywhere else, drone issues are starting to pop up and if and how they should deal with them. [This case] sends a message that this is a policy that needs to be enforced. I think that [parks] are going to be posting signs and distributing circulars."
However, Powell noted that for future cases, "we’re certainly not going to ask for jail time or anything like this."
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