FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Initial Knowledge Test (UAG)

Here's a spraying drone on the scale, and the bare airframe weighs 38 pounds. Add its 9-pound battery and a 5-pound camera, and you're at 52, under the 55-pound line, so Part 107 covers it. Now strap on a 4-pound tank of spray. It's tempting to call that cargo rather than aircraft, but anything aboard or attached counts, so you're at 56, over the line. And the limit is measured at takeoff, so spraying it down to 53 in the air doesn't bring it back under.

Picture a trainee, Maya, flying a survey drone over a field, with her thumbs on the sticks. Standing right beside her is Dan, who holds the remote pilot certificate. You might think whoever's flying is the pilot, but Part 107 puts the final authority and responsibility on Dan, the remote PIC. Maya is only the person manipulating the flight controls. So if the drone drifts toward the road, Dan has to be able to take over immediately, and he answers for that flight either way. Her hands are on the sticks, but the responsibility stays with his certificate.

Here's a remote pilot's flight log, and a slip, like writing the wrong date, isn't the problem. You fix it and move on. But this entry is a flight that never happened, written in on purpose, and that knowing falsity is what the rule goes after. First, it can be grounds to deny a certificate or rating you've applied for, suspend one you hold, or revoke it outright. Second, it can be the basis for other penalties on top of that, like a civil fine. So one deliberate lie in a record puts both at risk.

Say the accident happens on Thursday, May twenty-second. That day is day zero, and your count starts the next morning. Calendar days don't stop for the weekend, and they don't stop for Memorial Day either, so day ten lands on Sunday, June first, and that's your deadline. A lot of people count business days instead, skipping the Saturdays, the Sundays and the holiday, which pushes them all the way to June sixth, five days late. So count every square on the calendar, starting with the day after.

Here's a little drone that weighs half a pound. If you fly it just for fun, the registration line sits at 0.55 pounds, so this one slips under it and you don't have to register. Now a real estate agent pays you to film a listing with it. That makes it a Part 107 flight, and under Part 107 the weight line simply disappears. So the half-pound drone needs its own registration number, exactly like a two-pound drone does, with that number marked on the outside of each one. Commercial work means you register, at any weight.

Say you're about to fly a roof inspection at this house. Before the drone leaves the ground, you check four things about the place. First the weather: the wind sock's barely moving, and the clouds are high, so that's clear. Next, airspace: an airport sits five miles off, and you're outside its controlled area. Then the ground: a neighbour's in the garden, so you route the flight away from her. Last, hazards: power lines along the street and a tall oak by the drive. Only when all four are ticked do you take off.

Picture a roof survey on a gusty afternoon. The client wants the footage today, your employer wants the client kept happy, and your visual observer is calling out the trees and the crane. Then the wind climbs past twenty-five knots, and the client says, just get it up. Here's the thing: every one of those voices is input, but the responsibility lands on one person, you, the remote pilot in command. So the drone stays on the ground, because the final say on whether it flies is yours, and so is the accountability.

Your drone loses GPS right above a crowd, and it starts drifting. It's tempting to think an emergency flips every rule off, but 107.21 doesn't work like a switch. It's a dial: you may deviate from a rule only as far as the emergency needs. So you don't loop out over the whole crowd. You take the shortest line to the empty field, crossing over people for just a few seconds, and you put it down. Altitude, line of sight and speed never moved, and if the FAA asks, you send them a report.

On the left, this pilot's head is down in the chart, so the plane slowly sinks off its course toward a tower without anyone meaning it to. That's careless: plain inattention, not taking the care you owe. On the right, this pilot spots a crowd and dives straight at it on purpose, for the thrill. That's reckless: knowing the risk and doing it anyway. Now notice that both planes pass and nobody gets hurt. It doesn't matter, because the rule is about endangering life or property, so each pilot broke it the moment that danger existed.

Picture a helicopter cruising at sixty knots, and you want to send your drone out the door. Under Part 107, that's never allowed, because a moving aircraft is off-limits no matter how empty the sky is. Now put that same drone in a pickup on a rural highway. Launching from a moving car, or from a boat, can be legal, but only over a sparsely populated area. Drive into town and that permission disappears. So the dividing line is simple: from an aircraft, never; from a land or water vehicle, only where it's sparse.

Say your last sip of wine is at ten p.m. You're in bed by eleven, up at four, and the flight leaves at five. It feels like a decent night's rest, but the eight-hour clock doesn't start when you fall asleep or when you wake up. It starts at that last sip. Count from ten: eleven, midnight, one, two, three, four, five. That's only seven hours, one short, so you can't fly. The earliest legal takeoff is six a.m., eight full hours after the glass goes down.

Here's a pilot in her everyday glasses, watching her drone over the field. Those lenses only correct her eyesight, so the rule treats that as her own vision, and that's visual line of sight. Now her friend raises a pair of binoculars and sends his drone twice as far, because he can still pick it out. But the magnification is doing the seeing, not his eyes, so it doesn't count. VLOS means unaided eyes, and glasses or contacts are the only exception, so your drone stays as close as your corrected eyes can follow.

Picture your drone at two hundred feet, with a small plane coming in from the right on the same line. So who moves? You do, every single time. Right-of-way works like a ladder: balloons sit at the top because they can barely steer, then gliders, then airplanes and helicopters. Your drone is on the bottom rung, below every manned aircraft. That pilot probably can't even see something this small, so you turn away early and give them plenty of room.

Here's your drone, cruising at seventy-five knots through the air. The rule caps you at eighty-seven knots, but that's measured over the ground, not through the air. Turn into a twenty-knot headwind and the air pushes back, so you only cover fifty-five knots of ground. Now fly the same drone with that wind behind you. It's still doing seventy-five through the air, plus twenty from the wind, which puts you at ninety-five over the ground. That's over the limit, even though nothing on the drone changed. So check the wind, and slow down when it's at your back.

Picture one day at your airport, where official sunrise is six-forty in the morning. The sky's already usable before that, though, because civil twilight begins thirty minutes earlier, at six-ten. That evening the sun sets at seven-fifty, and the same thirty-minute band trails right behind it, so twilight lasts until eight-twenty. That means night doesn't start at sunset; it's everything outside those two bands. So take sunrise and subtract thirty, take sunset and add thirty, and you've found where night ends and begins.

Here's a slice of a sectional chart, and the line styles tell you which airspace you're looking at. That heavy solid blue ring around the big airport is Class B, built in shelves like an upside-down wedding cake. Solid magenta, around the mid-size field, is Class C. And the dashed blue ring around the small towered airport is Class D, but dashed doesn't mean optional. So say you're planning a flight out here. The moment your path crosses any of those three lines, you need ATC authorization before you go. Solid blue, solid magenta, dashed blue: all three mean ask first.

On your sectional, these two look almost the same: a blue hatched border with a letter and a number. P stands for prohibited, like P-56 over the White House, and it's a hard no, because there's nobody you can call to get let in. R stands for restricted, like R-4001 at Aberdeen, where live firing can happen. When it's active you stay out, unless the controlling agency gives you permission, and then you're cleared straight through. So P means never, and R means ask first.

Say you've programmed a survey over a field: four waypoints, and the drone flies them on its own. That's allowed, but only because you're still holding the controller, with a live link to the aircraft. Then a low helicopter comes over the treeline, toward your route. You flip to manual, take the sticks, and steer the drone off its path and down. So automation is fine as long as you can step in at any moment. If you couldn't, the autopilot shouldn't be flying.

Meet Maya. She's seventeen, and she wants to fly drones for a real-estate photographer. The first gate is age: you need to be at least sixteen, so she's through. Next, you must read, speak, write and understand English, and she does. Third, you can't have a known physical or mental condition that would make flying unsafe. Notice that's not an FAA medical exam, just an honest self-check. Last, you pass the aeronautical knowledge test, which she does. The certificate only opens up once all four gates are cleared, because missing any one of them stops you.

Say you're convicted of a drug offense on March first. That date starts the clock, not the arrest and not the offense itself. For the next twelve months, the FAA can deny any application you file for a certificate or rating. So if you apply in September, six months in, you can be turned down on that conviction alone. But if you wait it out and apply the following April, the window has closed, so you're eligible to apply again. Remember it as up to one year after the date of conviction.

Say you pass your initial knowledge test in March 2023. That starts a clock of twenty-four calendar months, so you're current until the last day of March 2025, not just the date you tested. A lot of pilots think staying current means sitting that test again. It doesn't, because completing recurrent training counts just the same, so finishing it in February 2025 resets the clock, and you're good through February 2027. Either one, test or training, within the previous twenty-four months, keeps you current.

Let's sort a stack of Part 107 rules. Flying beyond visual line of sight? That one's waivable, so you can apply for a certificate of waiver if you show how you'll keep it safe. Flying over people, from a moving vehicle, several drones at once, past the speed and altitude limits: all waivable, too. But carrying hazardous materials goes in the other column, and so does flying under alcohol or drugs. Those two are locked, because no safety plan makes them okay. So waivers bend how you fly, never what you carry or your fitness to fly.

Picture a four-kilo drone drifting in at five metres a second, straight into this dummy's chest. Everything it's carrying at that moment, half its mass times its speed squared, gets dumped into the body, about fifty joules. Now swap in a drone under a kilo, but moving at fifteen metres a second. It's less than a quarter of the weight, yet it lands with about a hundred joules, twice the hit. That's because speed is squared, so tripling it multiplies the energy by nine, while mass only counts once.

Here's a little drone straight out of the box, and the scale reads half a pound. Category 1 means under 0.55 pounds, so right now you're in. Clip on a small camera and it reads 0.53, still under, just. Swap in the bigger battery and the reading jumps to 0.57, which puts you past the line. Add propeller guards and you're at 0.59. The box still says half a pound, but that doesn't matter, because the limit counts everything attached when it leaves the ground, so this drone isn't Category 1 anymore.

Here's the view straight down: a drone hovering, and a person standing on the grass. Right now the spot directly under the drone sits on their shoulder, so this counts as flying over them. Slide the drone sideways, and the moment that spot leaves their body, it's no longer over them, even though they're only a few feet away. You might expect a safety buffer, like twenty-five feet, but the rule doesn't set any sideways distance at all. So the only question is whether the drone is directly above any part of a person.

Say you're holding two drones, and the first box says "FAA compliant" in big letters. That sticker is only marketing, so it doesn't clear you for anything. What counts is the FAA's list of accepted Declarations of Compliance, so you type in the exact model name, and this one comes back with no match, which means it isn't eligible to fly over people. Now take the plain box. You run the same search, and there it is on the list, accepted for Category 2 or 3 operations. So the list decides, not the label.

A Standard Remote ID drone starts broadcasting the moment you power it on, before it ever leaves the ground. As it lifts off, every message carries its serial number or a session ID, its position, altitude and velocity, plus where you're standing at the control station. It keeps sending all the way down to landing, and it stops only when you shut the drone off. Because the broadcast is built into the aircraft, there's no switch you can flip mid-flight, so the bar never breaks.

You're at the tailgate, the drone's on its pad, and before anything spins up, you power on the aircraft and the controller. Then you watch the Remote ID status, because the drone or its add-on module has to be actually broadcasting: its ID, its location, and yours. A green, working status means you're clear to take off. But if it shows red, or the module's light stays dark, the drone stays on the ground. You fix it first, by reseating the module or updating the firmware, because no working Remote ID means no flight.

Here's a drone flying under standard Remote ID, and it broadcasts a packet about once a second. First comes its ID, the serial number that says which drone this is. Then where it is: latitude, longitude, and its altitude. Its velocity: how fast it's going and which way it's heading. Next, where you are, the control station's position and altitude. A time mark stamps the moment, and emergency status says whether anything's wrong. That's six elements in every packet, so anyone listening knows the drone and where its pilot stands.