Student fined $3,500 for taking drone photos of girlfriend on campus

A court has fined a Chinese student $3,500 for taking drone photos and videos of his girlfriend at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

Xu Zi Zhou, 25, was using the DJI Mavic Air 2 to photograph his girlfriend at NTU’s Yunnan Garden on June 1, 2021, when his flight was intercepted by the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS).

The drone came onto CAAS’s radar since the sprawling heritage park where Xu was flying at an altitude of 518.37 feet is located within a 5 km range of the Tengah military airbase. It was identified using the DJI AeroScope drone detection platform.

Read: Over 80,000 DJI drone IDs exposed in AeroScope data leak

A team was immediately dispatched to the Yunnan Garden to catch the operator and get the drone to land. When the officials checked the drone logs, they found that Xu had flown the aircraft five times that day with a total flight time of 18 minutes.

In Singapore, a Class 2 Activity Permit is…