I’ve been trying to get a clear position on where I can fly and there were two thing that I have found in the past week that’s made me rethink where I can fly from the CAA. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole reading a lot of CAA documents. Hidden away is this page which is the clearest I’ve seen, but it’s bloody difficult to find.
https://register-drones.caa.co.uk/drone-code/where-you-can-fly
The block in the middle of this says;
Built-up and busy areas
Never fly closer to built-up and busy areas than 150m.
Never fly above these areas at any height.
Examples of built-up and busy areas:
- cities and towns
- villages
- beaches and recreational parks that are part of a city, town or village
- housing estates
- schools and offices
- retail, warehouse, industrial and business parks
- theme parks
So where is the clearest definition of built-up area? (you’ll also see those words “built-up” in the latest drone code poster / pdf document - but not anywhere else!)
Turns out there is an accepted government definition of “built-up” in the UK, that can be found here →
So what does all of that mean?
The standard permission seems to be the way to go to be able to fly in “congested” areas - note it doesn’t say “built up”!?
Not very clear! Using the words “built-up” and “congested” and seeming to swap between them, does leave it all open to interpretation. Having read through all of this in the last week, I’m still not 100% sure where I can fly, so flying on the side of caution at the moment until I can get some more information from the CAA as the examples in the “where you can fly” seem to be the clearest thing I’ve read so far…