1.6 Right of Way, Hazardous Operations & Moving Vehicles

15 min · UA.I.B.K6 UA.I.B.K6a UA.I.B.K6b UA.I.B.K7 UA.I.B.K14 UA.I.B.K14a

Three short sections in this lesson carry more enforcement weight than anything else in Part 107. They are the sections the FAA reaches for when a flight was legal on paper and reckless in fact.

You always yield — § 107.37

There is no exception. Not for a slower aircraft, not for one converging from your right, not for a balloon, not for another drone that saw you first. The manned-aircraft right-of-way rules in § 91.113 set up a pecking order — balloons over gliders over airplanes and so on. Part 107 puts you at the bottom of every one of those lists, permanently.

Read the definition of yielding closely. It is not enough to avoid a collision. You may not pass over, under, or ahead of the other aircraft unless you are well clear. In practice the response is almost always the same and almost always correct: descend and hold. A manned aircraft's crew has no reasonable chance of seeing you; putting yourself low and stationary removes the problem.

Paragraph (b) adds a separate prohibition: no person may operate a small unmanned aircraft so close to another aircraft as to create a collision hazard. That one stands on its own. You can violate (b) even where nobody had to yield.

See and avoid, when you are the one who has to see

Manned pilots share the see-and-avoid burden with you. Realistically, they will not see a two-foot quadcopter. The whole job of detection is yours, and it is a learned skill rather than a matter of staring harder.

• Scan in segments. Divide the sky into blocks roughly 10 degrees wide and pause on each for a second or two. A continuous sweep produces a blur; the eye resolves detail only when it stops.
• An aircraft on a collision course does not appear to move. It sits at a constant relative bearing and grows. Because your eye is tuned to detect motion, the single most dangerous target is the one that looks static against the background.
• Look and listen. Engine noise often arrives before a visual, especially for aircraft low on approach. A crew that hears an aircraft it cannot see should get the drone down first and find the traffic second.
• Use the visual observer deliberately. Assign sectors. One person watching the aircraft and one watching the approach path beats two people watching the same drone.

Careless or reckless, and dropping objects — § 107.23

Section 107.23 has two paragraphs and each is a separate offense.

• (a) No person may operate a small UAS in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.
• (b) No person may allow an object to be dropped from a small unmanned aircraft in a manner that creates an undue hazard to persons or property.

Paragraph (a) is the FAA's catch-all. It does not require a specific numeric violation. Flying in wind beyond the aircraft's demonstrated capability, launching with a known-damaged propeller, flying while your attention is on a client conversation, chasing wildlife, buzzing a beach to get a reaction — all of these can be careless or reckless even if the aircraft never left 200 feet or exceeded any published limit. It is the section that fills the gap between the letter of the rules and safe operation.

Paragraph (b) is more often misread than any other line in Part 107. Dropping objects is not prohibited. Dropping them in a manner that creates an undue hazard is. Delivering a life ring to a swimmer, releasing sterile insects over an orchard, dropping a marker on a survey point, and lowering a tool to a roofer with a winch are all legal Part 107 operations, provided you have thought about what happens if the object falls where you did not intend.

Two neighboring rules constrain the same activity from different directions. Section 107.36 forbids carrying hazardous material at all, so nothing on the 49 CFR 171.8 list may be dropped or carried. And dispensing an economic poison — a pesticide, herbicide, or fungicide — for agriculture is agricultural aircraft operation under Part 137, which requires its own operating certificate on top of Part 107.

Operating from a moving vehicle — § 107.25

This section governs where you and your control station are, not where the aircraft flies.

From a moving aircraft: never, full stop, without a waiver. From a moving car, truck, or boat: allowed, but only over a sparsely populated area, and never while carrying somebody else's property for hire. The FAA does not define sparsely populated with a number; it is a judgment about how many people and structures are beneath the aircraft, and the burden of that judgment is yours.

Section 107.25 is waivable — it is item (a) on the § 107.205 list. The waiver entry carries its own caveat: no waiver of this provision will be issued to allow the carriage of another person's property by aircraft for compensation or hire. Pipeline patrol from a moving truck is a plausible waiver. Delivering packages from a moving van is not.