Title: How Can Drone Pilots Fly within Five Miles of an Airport? - UAV Coach
Headings: How Can Drone Pilots Fly within Five Miles of an Airport?
How Can Drone Pilots Fly within Five Miles of an Airport?
So How Can Drone Pilots Fly Legally within Five Miles of an airport?
How Hobbyist Drone Pilots Can Fly within Five Miles of an Airport
How Commercial Drone Pilots Can Fly within Five Miles of an Airport
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Content: In the U.S., drone operations are often not generally allowed within five miles of an airport, and this can be the source of a lot frustration for some drone pilots. Image Source
For instance, if you’re flying in your own backyard as a hobbyist and you only plan to go ten feet in the air, why do you need to notify Air Traffic Control? Or if you’re flying a real estate mission four miles away from an airport, and don’t plan to fly much higher than the house you’re photographing, why do you need to go through the potentially lengthy process of securing airspace authorization? If you’re a hobbyist, this scenario certainly does seem frustrating, but we’d recommend doing everything you can to be compliant. Right now there is an ongoing debate on whether hobbyists should be more strongly regulated, and given the relative lenience of existing regulations it seems like a good idea to comply, even if you’re just flying at your house. And for commercial drone pilots, the FAA is working to speed up the process for airspace authorizations by rolling out instant airspace authorizations via LAANC throughout the U.S., so hopefully things should be much quicker within the next year. So How Can Drone Pilots Fly Legally within Five Miles of an airport? The first thing to clarify is that there are two different classes of rules in place for flying drones. One set of rules applies to hobbyist drone pilots, and another set of rules—the FAA’s Part 107 rules —applies to commercial drone pilots. Image Source
A hobbyist is someone who’s flying a drone just for fun, and a commercial drone pilot is someone flying for work or business purposes.