A real legal high-flyer

North Carolina has been an innovator in aviation ever since the Wright Brothers took off from Kill Devil Hills (not Kitty Hawk, as is commonly misremembered). Now the state is in the vanguard of flying’s next frontier: unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

So this week Sidebar landed at a meet-up for “Droning on about the Drone Industry in RTP,” a talking shop for enthusiasts organized by Ashley Felton, an attorney at Felton Banks in Cary, which is perhaps the first firm in North Carolina to cater to this market.

Felton said that the drone law portion of her practice consists mostly of helping businesses in the heavily-regulated drone industry get off the ground, both legally and literally, and representing pilots who’ve been criminally charged after a drone drifted off into some place that it shouldn’t have. (Felton said that without fail, at least one pilot gets in trouble during the North Carolina State Fair each year.)

So far, the drone industry is pretty small, and Felton said she has only a handful of business clients currently. But the industry is still making a rapid ascent, and North Carolina has emerged as one of its leading hubs, particularly the Research Triangle and Charlotte areas. Drones have many promising business applications, but they’re especially practical for surveying land, so any place with a lot of construction and development also tends to have a correspondingly high number of drones buzzing above it, Felton said.

Last year the U.S. Department of Transportation picked Raleigh as one of ten sites to test advanced drone uses. And Flytrex, an Israeli company, announced that it plans to begin using drones to deliver food in nearby Holly Springs under tightly controlled conditions—a pilot program, as it were.

But the vigor of entrepreneurs and hobbyists has so far outpaced that of regulators, and not without good reasons. The very fact that drones are so useful for taking photos has prompted concerns about protecting the privacy of those of us on the ground. And larger drones are big enough to inflict serious damage on property or innocent bystanders if they crash. Indeed, another firm in Cary on its website specifically solicits potential clients who’ve been injured by a drone.

Felton helps companies navigate through the haze. She first discovered this untapped market in 2014 while practicing at a boutique construction law firm that had clients dabbling in the world of drones. Felton had no clue drones even existed, but her then-boss asked her to get educated on the topic to better advise clients, and she took her learning with her when she started her own firm the next year.

Sidebar learned quite a bit about drones himself at the meet-up. For instance, last fall Flytrex completed its first trial of a food delivery system, using drones to deliver burgers to golfers at a course in North Dakota.

Something to chew on, then.