I am new to drone flying and have a Mavic 2 Pro. There are houses being built on a 10 acre field bordering our village and the site is locked up over weekends and overnight. There is a road on one boundary of the site with houses on the other side of the road, and the other 3 sides of the site go onto countryside and small roads. There are only a couple of finished houses, half a dozen in progress and about 15 foundations set so far and I wonder if I am permitted to overfly the site out of working hours to take some photos to record this addition to our village? I can keep the 50m distance from existing properties whilst overflying the site.
Check this out:
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Almost inviting you to document the changing history of your village 
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I am unsure if this is classified as a built up area. Until they started building houses it was just a farmerâs field on the outskirts of the village but now part of the fenced off site has building work ongoing but the site is locked up and unoccupied after about 5 pm and over weekends. Might contact the builder and ask for permission.
Go ask and offer to give copies of the photos as it progresses, I would have thought they would say yes.
Or just do it anyway. But you donât want them thinking its scum casing the area for machinery to pinch.
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Have you thought how you would retrieve the drone if you were forced to land in the barriered off area?
I have an old derelict mansion house close by that i would love to send the drone in for a look about, but the thought crossed my mind on how to get it back in a worse case scenario.
Isnât that the fear though of flying over anything ?
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Very good point, I hadnât considered that but I guess itâs the same risk as flying over water.
As a minimum I would say you would need to be somewhere around the end of the 150m line on the map. That would at least satisfy the legal prescribed distances to the built up residential area.
Itâs very subjective.
Your screen shot there @helidan looks like a small village to me.
Perhaps worth a read:
Yep, totally get what youâre saying. Itâs all in the eyes of the beholder. Really all boils down to one very simple question - can the pilot satisfy themselves that the flight can be conducted safely and legally?
Isnât this relatively simple? Weekends only and 150m or more from the existing houses unless you hold an A2 CofC.
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My humble opinion would be that you canât.
Firstly, the 50m distance for your M2P is for uninvolved people. Unless youâve got an A2 CofC, your minimum permitted distance from residential areas is 150m. Thatâs also your distance from industrial areas and, personally, Iâd classify a building site as industrial until itâs finished and becomes residential.
Now, if you get yourself an A2 CofC then all you need to concern yourself with is the 50m distance from uninvolved people. But⌠I think you have a second problem there.
They might close the site overnight and at weekends, but can you be certain there arenât security guards on site at times? Or fitters in the finished structures doing overtime? If you canât then you should assume there are, which means 50m distance and no overflying.
Looks like a pretty big site though so youâll likely find that sitting above the fields to the south and looking back towards the village gives a better idea of the scale of the development than overflying it anyway.
I was wondering if it is easier to fly under Article 16 here if the field where they have started building houses is not classed as a âbuilt up areaâ. Obviously I am not going to overfly it unless I am certain it is legal but unsure what the classification of a building site which has only got a small portion of the housing started. It may be easiest to ask the company for permission to fly there out of hours.
I think youâd struggle to say that the housing development is used only for recreational purposes.
I would just stick to the 150m or do your A2 and drop that to 50m. With the M2P I can still get good images even at those distances. And if youâre planning on video use the 4K HQ mode as that gives a slight zoom over the full FOV mode.
If in doubt why not just put it up to the side of it and take photos and avoid overflying anything ? Probably more interesting anyway than a satellite shot in my viewâŚ
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Think I will do that
I think this one is fairly simple.
Most of the site is within 150m of a residential area, so you canât overfly the building site in Open A3, even when itâs closed.
If you can be confident thereâs nobody present and stay 50m from the housing, then you can overfly in Open A2 (50m horizontally from uninvolved people) if you have an A2 CofC.
Your best option is if you can use an Article 16 Operational Authorisation. That applies outside âbuilt-up areasâ and defines those as âareas substantially used for industrial, recreational, commercial or residential purposes.â Iâd personally say itâs clearly none of those, certainly at a weekend when nobody is working there. Yes, there may be a security guard, but so long as you are at least 30m up in the air, flying manually and not for commercial work, Article 16 covers you.
Iâve shared some comments in another thread which may help with your thought process: