By We recently flew an impressive residential skyscraper in the Wall Street area, in fact one block from the Stock Exchange.
Needless to say, the permissions aren’t simple. After seeking and receiving a waiver from the FAA for this special no-fly area of downtown (my partner is a retired USAF Lt. Col. and Instructor and can write a flight plan acceptable to the FAA) we submitted it to the NYPD Drone Unit along with all the usual paperwork – 3D flight maps, GPS numbers, permissions from property owners, dates and times – and we were granted one flight day between 9AM and 12: Noon, with two fall backs for weather. This process took 60 days with a one week notice proceeding the fly.
The next thing to worry about is a TFR – A Temporary Flight Restriction issued by the FAA. These can happen at any time, the reasons are not explained (for instance, they are not about to say “world leaders are flying in Tuesday to the United Nations, so we are closing the sky for a few days”), and if it overlaps your permit, you are starting from scratch. This has happened to us. In fact, at the time of this writing, all of Midtown Manhattan is under a TFR.
Happily, this did not happen with our fly near Wall Street. We had blue sky but high winds the day of. Our commercial drone can withstand high winds without affecting image quality, but it draws power quickly, so the shots need to be planned carefully. We lifted off from the building garage driveway, which is easily controlled by two spotters and a producer, to prevent people on their phones obliviously walking under a drone in low flight. You can’t believe how often we have prevented this. The pilot and a camera director (on a remote screen) stand off to the side and focus purely on the flight. If the police or other officials come, the producer has all of our permits, insurance, licenses etc. at the ready to enlist them if we need them for crowd or vehicle control. (So far this has not happened in more than 40 flights. )
We got the drone up to 50 feet and put in hover so that the spotters could move to their assigned positions. They are on radio headphones to provide additional information about the drones positioning that is hard to see from a single location. The drone must ALWAYS remain in pilot’s light of sight, but the spotters can augment his/her understanding of the positioning; sometimes the pilot and director will move down a block or around a corner to remain in line of sight. All of this must be planned in advance – most flys require two or more scouting sessions prior to flying with notes about legal pathways for the drone.
This day we had a new experience: the buildings are so close that the drone was not able to acquire enough satellite feeds to fly with extremely accurate GPS positioning. That in turn limits the drone to 50 feet in height: no good for our shot list. We had to fly the drone and walk beneath it to a corner that showed more sky, where we did acquire enough satellite connections. Then we were able to fly a “helix” and a “glory shot” of the building and a quick 360 look around/look down, and then had to land because we were approaching battery limits. We limit ourselves to 15 minutes in high wind – the drone itself will force a RTH – a return to home – at 25 minutes in these conditions. (It won’t take off without knowing where its landing location is.)
Ultimately we spent about 2 hours to capture 10 minutes of usable footage – plenty for the purpose of a 1 minute final video. Unlike most current commercial-application drone companies, we believe “less is more” and rarely use 15 seconds of arial footage in a 60 second running time. We want to avoid shots repeats, both within videos and across videos, so that they remain memorable and don’t drift into generic.
To augment the flight footage, which gave the viewer a strong understanding of the buildings location, and a previous capture of apartment interiors and views, we filmed surrounding areas on the ground with the exact camera the drone can carry, so that the footage fits together. This took 6 hours for about 20 minutes of footage, but it was very effective, adding a “location story” to a beautiful, well landscaped building and a high floor apartment with landmark views.
All in all it produced a memorable video and we weren’t washed out by bad weather or a TFR – but 60 days of planning went into producing less that half an hour of footage with a team of six (not counting editors, assistants, and music supervisors.) There is no way to cut corners, no “hit and run” familiar from independent filmmaking methods. A Part 107 license in NYC that allows for drone flights is linked directly to the pilots commercial license, and ANY deviation from a flight plan could end a pilots career. So we do things by the book.
This is not our whole business, but we’ve learned a lot in 2025 on the ground doing these flys that is applicable to many other kinds of urban air mobility efforts in NYC. I guess a key idea is that there is no room for error, and NYCs infrastructure is going to have to be designed accordingly.