Tea With a Rooftop Drone Pilot

He showed up with controller calluses and a grin that said he hadn't slept. Between sips of Kashmiri chai he rattled off clients: an NGO mapping floodlines in Sindh, a private guard outfit in Dubai, a municipality in Baku that wanted traffic heatmaps. He ran it all from a Karachi rooftop with two heavily modded DJI bodies and a patchwork of EV battery cells.

When regulators talk about airspace violations, they imagine hostile states. The reality is gig pilots balancing conscience and invoices. He knows every gap in civil aviation radar and every Telegram channel asking for 'urgent aerial overwatch'. He also knows he can make more money in a weekend than a software engineer does in a month—tax-free and morally ambiguous.

My takeaway? Sovereignty is being auctioned in WhatsApp chats. The people who control local skies aren't air force generals; they're caffeine-fueled pilots with soldering irons. Until states figure out how to hire or regulate them, airspace will belong to whoever has the best battery chemistry and the fewest scruples.