Flying at night
Flying a drone at night in the United Kingdom is not prohibited by the hobby flying requirements, and darkness changes far less in the rules than it changes in the cockpit. The published height ceiling of 400 feet, which is 120 metres, is the same after sunset as at noon. The separation distances from people and buildings are the same. The airspace above the take-off point is the same, unless a temporary restriction has been raised. What changes is the one requirement that depends on a human being rather than on a figure: keeping the aircraft in unaided sight, which after dark stops being a formality and becomes the constraint that decides the flight.
What night flying is, as the requirements see it
Night flying, in this context, is flying in the period when the light has gone and an aircraft at any distance is visible only by what it is carrying. The requirements do not draw a line at a clock time; they attach to conditions and to the pilot's ability to comply with them. A flight at dusk in June and a flight at four in the afternoon in December can present the same problem, which is why treating this as a question about darkness rather than about the hour is the useful way round.
The distinction that matters is between seeing the aircraft and seeing what it is doing. A machine with lights on it is visible as a moving point a long way out. Its heading, its attitude and its distance are a separate question, and they are the ones that get you home. Most manufacturers fit a small number of coloured lights precisely so that the front of the aircraft can be told from the back, and the range at which that distinction survives is short.
Who the night requirements fall on
Night flying falls on the person at the controls, because every part of it that changes is a matter of what that person can see and judge. The requirement to keep the aircraft where you can see it with your own eyes is a requirement on the pilot, not a property of the machine, and it is not satisfied by a camera feed on a screen. A flyer looking at goggles or at a phone is looking at the aircraft's view rather than at the aircraft, and after dark that difference is stark.
The person responsible for the aircraft, whose identifier is marked on the airframe, is in the same position at night as during the day. Nothing about darkness alters which identifiers a machine calls for, and The drone licence question sets out how the two are decided by weight against the 250 gram boundary and by whether a camera is fitted. A second person acting as an observer is a common and useful arrangement, and does not transfer the requirement away from whoever is flying.
What flying after dark asks of you, in order
- Choose the site in daylight, walk it, and note every mast, cable, tree and building that will be invisible later.
- Fit the aircraft's navigation lights, check they are working, and confirm you can tell the front of the machine from the back at the distance you intend to fly.
- Set a working range for yourself that is well inside what you can see, rather than what the aircraft can transmit.
- Mark the landing point with something visible from the air, since a dark lawn offers no reference at all on the way down.
- Take off and land in the same spot, and fly a pattern you have already flown in daylight.
- Watch the battery more closely than in daylight, because a night flight tends to be slower and a low pack over an unlit field is a poor position to be in.
Two practical points sit behind that list. The first is that flight time falls in cold air, and most night flying in Britain is cold flying: a pack that gives a comfortable margin in July gives noticeably less in January, and the aircraft's own estimate of remaining time is calculated for the conditions it thinks it is in. The second is that a return-to-home function is an automatic behaviour rather than a plan. It flies a route it was not shown, at a height it was given, and an obstacle it does not know about is still there in the dark.
Caution
A drone that loses orientation at night is usually lost. Disorientation over an unlit field ends in a crash into something the pilot never saw, and the search that follows takes place in the dark on ground that may not be yours to walk on. Land early. Lithium polymer packs also lose usable capacity in cold air, so treat a winter flight as a shorter flight and never fly a pack down to warning level over water or over a road.
Where the exemption people expect does not apply
The exemption people expect does not apply, because darkness creates none, and this is worth saying because the assumption most often runs the other way. The ceiling is 400 feet, which is 120 metres, at midnight exactly as it is at noon. Darkness makes no difference to the separation distances from people and from buildings, no difference to a flight restriction zone around an aerodrome, and no difference to a restricted area over a site. It makes no difference to registration, to the identifiers, or to what a camera on board is permitted to record: the Information Commissioner's Office guidance on recording identifiable people is not suspended after dark, and a camera that gathers little usable image at night can still gather enough to matter.
Nor does it make a difference to insurance in the sense readers hope. A policy is written around the requirements and around the exclusions, not around the hour, so Insurance is worth reading for its exclusions rather than for anything specific to night. The one thing darkness does reliably change is the likelihood of a claim.
What people believe about flying at night
The first belief is that night flying is banned outright for hobby flyers in the United Kingdom. It is not, and the belief appears to come partly from older arrangements and partly from other countries, several of which do restrict it and some of which require a specific authorisation. The rules on this subject differ markedly between states, so an answer read for the United States or for a European neighbour is not an answer for here.
The second belief is the opposite one: that fitting a bright light makes a night flight the same as a day flight. It does not. A light tells you where the aircraft is. It does not tell you which way it is pointing, how far away it is, or whether it is drifting, and those three are what a pilot uses to fly. The third belief is that goggles or a camera feed satisfy the requirement to keep the aircraft in sight. They do not, at any hour, and at night the temptation to rely on them is strongest exactly when the consequences are worst. The UK rules, in order places the sight requirement among the rest of what applies.
Is a night flight within your own limits?
To test a night flight before making it, ask three questions on the ground. Can you see the aircraft, unaided, at the range you intend to fly it. Can you tell its heading at that range from the lights it carries. And do you know the site well enough in daylight to know what is standing up out of it. Three clear answers describe a flight that is within your ability to fly; a hesitation on any of them describes a flight better made an hour earlier.
Those questions describe the shape of the requirement and the practical limits around it. This page does not interpret the requirements for a particular flight, a particular aircraft or a particular place, and it is not legal advice. The Civil Aviation Authority publishes the requirements that govern this kind of flying, including the height ceiling, the separation distances and the obligation to keep the aircraft in unaided sight, and the CAA amends them over time, so the current version on the CAA's own pages is the one that describes what applies to a flight made tonight.