They do go up into the air, but it's basically "dozens" of feet, as opposed to hundreds. Drones can't fly at 10 ft above your property, that's clearly considered trespass/nuisance. But at 300 ft it's totally fine.
There's no exact precise "hard" limit like 100 ft because there doesn't need to be, and it depends on the height of your home, etc. But drones already aren't allowed to just hover above your pool at eye level. But if it's just passing overhead with plenty of room to spare and not specifically bothering you, then that doesn't belong to your property. Nor should it.
If you're concerned about safety, you'd prefer an out-of-control drone hits a car instead of a backyard or farmer's field?
And if you're concerned about noise, homes tend to be along roads anyways. So it's not going to change that.
And FYI, they're basically always below 500 feet, so they don't hit planes.
> But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable
Flying over public roads would be a way to avoid flying over properties that do not allow drones and would not be unpractical.
In general our society desperately needs to stop denying this basic division, and burden individuals less while applying heavier regulations to corporations/LLCs - ie artificial legal entities created by government whose sine-qua-non is already large amounts of paperwork. For another example, most of the opposition to digital privacy regulation would become moot.