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Comment by themaninthedark | Hacker News Reader

You can fly a plane across the globe but the plane's flight path must be approved by each of the 15 countries before it is allowed in their airspace.

The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

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countries yes - because countries have airspaces. Parks typically do not - anymore than people flying over my house are not tresspassing.

If you live in the U.S., people flying very low over your house probably are trespassing, you have air rights. (True in other countries too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights Before commercial flight was common, air rights used to extend into space. Now they’re limited, but you have at least a few hundred feet.

Parks do have airspaces, obviously and literally, and more to the point, in the U.S. there’s existing legislation defining the altitudes that are considered “in” and out of the park.

US laws aren't relevant to the game, though.

Whether any airspace is included in the park is completely ambiguous in the game.

I agree the question is intentionally ambiguous. I disagree that laws aren’t relevant, precisely because they will disambiguate. This isn’t specific to US laws, most countries globally have flight regulations. The game is using words and concepts to ask questions that can only be defined and answered by laws. The altitude and location matter, if you want to answer the question correctly. You cannot moderate the situation, and the question cannot be answered correctly without knowing the altitude and location and laws that apply, and that doesn’t mean that moderation is hard, it means the author is fabricating unnecessary amounts of ambiguity.

Asking intentionally ambiguous questions that existing laws already answer in order to make a point about the difficulty of moderation kind-of undermines the author’s intent here. He was trying to prove that unanswerable corner cases always exist, but it’s not true for the specific case of airlines over parks once you know the laws.

How about quadcopter drones though? How about ones big enough to hold a human?

What about them? Both of those can violate air rights, and in the US both have FAA regulations that apply. I’m using the US as an example because I live in the US, but many many countries have similar regulations. Small drones need a remote pilot license, and drones large enough to carry a human require an actual aircraft pilot’s license just like any other airplane or helicopter. In a public park in the US, small drones are required to stay under 400 ft altitude above ground, inside the airspace of the park. (Small drones are also required to not fly directly above other people.) Aircraft with people in them are required to fly higher than that, which thus defines an altitude threshold above which is considered outside of land-based public and private property boundaries.

https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_...

The question in the quiz about flying airplanes over a park can be correctly answered with 3 pieces of information: the aircraft type, the park’s location, and the altitude. The question cannot be answered without that information. Contrary to the author’s attempted point, the correct answer to the question is not a matter of language ambiguity.

Interesting! But you didn't answer the question of if you consider a small quadcopter is a vehicle or not, just that there are rules about them. Small ones don't carry a person, or much of anything really.

Is a quadcopter at 399 ft in the park then? If it's at 401 ft, then it's not?

Yeah I saw all those rules. The FAA killed flying drones as a legal hobby for me.

Oh yeah I think a quadcopter can easily count as a (tiny) vehicle, if it’s, say, carrying a camera. I liked how someone pointed to the Merriam Webster page for “vehicle”, which includes things like “an agent of transmission” and “a medium through which something is expressed”. People fit the literal definition of vehicle!

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