Drone incursion data from the FAA, NORTHCOM, the NFL, and the South Carolina Department of Corrections is no longer telling four separate stories. It is telling one: the unauthorized drone problem has crossed from anomaly to baseline, across every category of protected airspace in the United States.
If you are responsible for an airport perimeter, a stadium event, a military installation, or a correctional facility, you have probably noticed the trend without needing the statistics. But the numbers are now sharp enough — and from credible enough sources — to retire any remaining argument about whether this is a fringe issue. Here are the four data points your leadership, your board, or your local authority is going to ask you about in 2026, with the context behind them.
In the first three months of 2025, the FAA recorded 411 reports of illegal drone incursions near U.S. airports — a 25.6% increase over the 327 reported in Q1 2024. By comparison, the Q1 2023 to Q1 2024 increase was just 4.8%. The acceleration is the story.
The number was significant enough to anchor written testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security at the July 2025 "Surveillance, Sabotage, and Strikes" hearing, and was cited in the committee's own July 2025 release on outdated U.S. counter-drone policy. Subcommittee Chairman Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) used the data to frame the U.S. as falling behind on a threat that adversaries are already exploiting overseas.
Real-world consequences are not hypothetical. In January 2025, a drone struck a Los Angeles County firefighting aircraft during the Palisades wildfires, punching a six-foot hole in the wing and grounding the aircraft while 192,000 residents were under evacuation orders.
The NFL told ESPN in December 2025 that the league has logged more than 2,000 drone incursions into the temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) around its stadiums in each of the last three seasons. The 2023 season alone saw 2,845 incursions — up from just 12 incidents in 2017, according to congressional testimony from NFL Chief Security Officer Cathy Lanier.
Stadium TFRs are not vague guidance. They bar drone operations below 3,000 feet within three nautical miles of a stadium, from one hour before the scheduled start until one hour after the end of any game with an attendance of 30,000 or more. They are federal restrictions, and they are being violated thousands of times per season.
Several of these have crossed from statistic into operational disruption. The January 2024 AFC Championship Game between the Ravens and Chiefs was paused after a drone entered M&T Bank Stadium's restricted airspace. The same stadium saw a January 11, 2025 wild-card game between the Ravens and Steelers temporarily suspended when a drone flew over the bowl. Both incidents resulted in successful prosecutions.
NORTHCOM Commander Gen. Gregory Guillot disclosed at the September 2025 Falcon Peak counter-drone exercise that drone incursions over U.S. military installations rose 82% year-over-year — from approximately 230 reports between September 2023 and September 2024, to roughly 420 between September 2024 and September 2025.
Translated to operational terms: one to two drone incursions per day at U.S. Department of Defense installations. Gen. Guillot was candid that some of the increase may reflect improved detection rather than a pure increase in flights, but the trajectory is clear either way. And the defeat rate remains low: in March 2026 Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, Guillot said NORTHCOM is currently able to defeat only about a quarter of detected drones, up from near-zero a year prior.
Specific incidents have made headlines. Multiple waves at Wright-Patterson AFB forced airspace closures. Marine Corps installations in California recorded six consecutive days of incursions in December 2024. And in March 2026, Operation Epic Fury saw the first successful real-world deployment of NORTHCOM's new counter-drone fly-away kit at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to B-52 strategic bombers.
The South Carolina Department of Corrections told CNN in May 2026 that its 21 state prisons logged 273 drone smuggling incidents in 2025, and recorded another 75 in just the first four months of 2026 — a pace that points to a worse year than 2025.
The corrections context is brutal. Drones now deliver phones, drugs (including fentanyl), tobacco, and weapons "kind of like a DoorDash," in the words of the captain leading the state's drone-hunting team. SCDC Director Joel Anderson told Fox News his teams "get assaulted nightly" — and that the heavy-lift drones now in use can carry 25-pound duffle bags at over 75 mph, a step-change from the four-pound, 45-mph payloads of just a few years ago.
South Carolina is not an outlier. The Federal Bureau of Prisons logged 479 drone incidents at federal prisons in 2024 — up from just 23 in 2018. Georgia has reported nearly 400 incidents in a single year. The threat is national; South Carolina just happens to be measuring it with more rigor than most.
Each statistic comes from a different domain — civil aviation, professional sports, military defense, corrections. Each comes from a different reporting authority. But they share three operational realities that any airspace security professional needs to internalize:
The threat is no longer episodic. "One to two per day" at military bases. "Nightly" at South Carolina prisons. Thousands per season at NFL stadiums. None of these read as outlier events — they read as steady-state baseline. Counter-UAS strategy built around assumption-of-rarity has been overtaken by the data.
Detection is the choke point. Gen. Guillot's own assessment is that some of the 82% jump reflects better sensors, not more drones. Either way, his point cuts both ways: facilities that aren't measuring rigorously are not measuring zero — they are just not seeing what is already happening. The first operational question for every protected site in 2026 is not "are we under threat?" but "would we know?"
Authority and capability are finally beginning to catch up. In December 2025, Congress passed the SAFER SKIES Act as part of the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act, granting — for the first time — state, local, tribal, and correctional law enforcement agencies the authority to detect, track, and in some cases neutralize drones posing a credible threat to covered facilities and events. FEMA is deploying $500 million in counter-UAS funding across 2026 and 2027 ahead of the FIFA World Cup. Boston Police alone received $10.6 million in federal grants for counter-drone gear. The authority has shifted. The funding is moving. The question is whether facility operators and their public-safety partners have the detection infrastructure in place to make use of either.
For airport security directors, stadium operations leads, base commanders, and correctional facility administrators, the 2025 data forces a single planning assumption forward into 2026: drones over your airspace are happening, often, whether or not you are currently counting them. The legal and funding environment now exists to act on what you detect. The detection layer is the prerequisite for everything that follows.
That is exactly the gap our AirGuard platform was built to close. Three operational priorities matter most given the 2025 data:
The four numbers in this post are not the ceiling — they are the measured floor of a problem that is almost certainly larger in reality than in any official tally. The Federal Bureau of Prisons climbed from 23 incidents in 2018 to 479 in 2024 not because the underlying threat exploded twentyfold in six years, but because detection finally caught up to behavior that was already happening.
The next twelve months will define which facilities have the baseline measurement, the visual confirmation, and the authority-ready records to act on what their skies are actually showing them. The data is no longer ambiguous. The window for treating drone incursions as edge cases has closed.
Schedule a demo with Airsight to see how AirGuard turns daily drone incursions from invisible noise into actionable intelligence.
Sources: FAA via The Debrief; House Committee on Homeland Security; DroneUp written testimony to Congress; ESPN; Breaking Defense; Air & Space Forces Magazine; The War Zone; CNN; Fox News; Security Info Watch; Boston Globe.