Flying over private property
It depends, and it does not depend on whose land it is: flying over private property is not, in itself, the thing United Kingdom law restricts, and the question people arrive with is the wrong question. Land ownership does not extend indefinitely upwards, and the Civil Aviation Act 1982 contains the long standing provision that no action lies in trespass or nuisance merely because an aircraft has flown over land at a height that is reasonable in the circumstances. What the requirements restrict is how high the aircraft is, how close it is to people and buildings, and what is done with anything it records. Those are three answerable questions. "Over or not over" is not one of them.
What the law restricts, and what it leaves alone
The law restricts height, proximity and conduct, and it leaves the bare fact of overflight alone. That is the shape of it in three parts. The height ceiling for this kind of flying is 400 feet, which is 120 metres, measured above the surface, and it applies over a garden as much as over a moor. The proximity requirements set a distance from people who are not part of the flight and a larger distance from crowds and from residential, commercial, industrial and recreational areas, with the exact figures turning on the weight and class marking of the aircraft. Conduct is where the rest of the law lives: harassment, voyeurism, criminal damage and the misuse of personal data are offences whether or not an aircraft is involved.
What the aviation legislation gives with one hand it qualifies with the other. The protection attaches to flight at a height that is reasonable, and a machine hovering at window level outside a bedroom is not flying at a reasonable height over land in any ordinary sense of the phrase. The lower and the more persistent a flight is, the less it looks like overflight and the more it looks like something else, which is exactly how a dispute about a drone tends to be argued.
Who a flight over somebody else's land falls on
A flight over somebody else's land falls on the person at the controls. Responsibility follows the flying rather than the ownership: it is not the registered operator who accounts for where the aircraft went, and it is not the person whose garden it went over. Where a young flyer is involved, the adult who is answerable for the machine and the child at the controls are in different positions on different questions, which is one reason the identifiers are split the way they are under The drone licence question.
The landowner underneath is in a different position again, and it is a weaker one than most people assume. A householder who finds a drone above the garden has no power to bring it down, no power to seize it, and no entitlement to damage it. Shooting at, throwing at or otherwise striking an aircraft creates a fresh problem for the person doing it. What a landowner can do is refuse permission for anybody to take off or land on the land, which is a right over the ground and a real one, and complain about conduct to the police or, where recording is involved, to the Information Commissioner's Office.
| The complaint | What it is really about | Where it is dealt with |
|---|---|---|
| It flew over my garden | Height and reasonableness, not trespass | The aviation requirements published by the CAA |
| It was hovering by my window | Proximity and conduct | The police, and the CAA requirements |
| It was filming my children | Personal data and harassment | The Information Commissioner's Office, and the police |
| It took off from my field | Use of the ground | The landowner, through the law of trespass |
| It broke my greenhouse | Damage and liability | A civil claim, and Insurance |
What a considerate flight over inhabited land asks of you, in order
A flight over inhabited land asks for a sequence that answers the three real questions before the aircraft leaves the ground.
- Establish where you are launching from and whether the person who manages that ground permits it, since take-off and landing are the parts that genuinely involve the land.
- Set a height that keeps the aircraft well inside the published ceiling and well above the level at which it becomes a presence at somebody's window.
- Plan a track that keeps the separation distance from people who are not involved in the flight, and further still from gardens in use.
- Decide before take-off whether the camera is recording and what it will be pointed at, because that decision is the one that turns a flight into a data question.
- Speak to anybody who comes out to ask, since almost every complaint that escalates began with a flyer who would not explain what they were doing.
- Delete footage that captured somebody's home or family incidentally, rather than keeping it because it was accidental.
The recording step deserves its own note. Using a camera drone for a purely personal purpose sits differently in data protection law from using one in a way that goes beyond the household, and the Information Commissioner's Office publishes guidance for drone users on the point. That is a separate body from the CAA answering a separate question, and a flight can be entirely correct on airspace and still be a problem on data.
Where the overflight question does not apply
The overflight question does not apply to land you manage yourself, where take-off, landing and the ground are all yours, though the height ceiling, the separation distances and the airspace above are unchanged by ownership. Nor does it arise where there is no property below: over open water, over an unenclosed moor or over the sea, the trespass and nuisance argument has nobody to make it, and the constraints that remain are the aviation ones and your own eyesight.
It does not arise abroad either, and this is worth stating plainly because the search results for this question mix jurisdictions freely. Whether a flight over private property is permitted in Canada, in Japan or in any other country is governed by that country's own law, its own regulator and its own weight boundaries, and none of the position described here carries across. This page describes the United Kingdom only. The UK rules, in order places the question among the rest of the UK requirements.
The two things people most often get wrong
The first thing people get wrong is the belief that a person owns the sky above their land, so that any aircraft crossing the boundary is a trespasser. That is not how the law has treated airspace, and the Civil Aviation Act provision exists precisely because a rule of that kind would make ordinary aviation impossible. The mirror belief is just as wrong and rather more dangerous: that because overflight is not trespass, a camera drone may be flown anywhere over anybody at any height. Height, proximity, conduct and personal data are all still live, and a flight that would fail on any of them fails.
The second thing people get wrong is the belief that a householder may act against an aircraft over their garden. They may not, and doing so converts a complaint into an offence. The correct response to a drone that is genuinely a problem is to record what happened, note the time and place, and take it to the police or to the Information Commissioner's Office depending on which of the two questions it raises. Where an aircraft has actually broken something, the question becomes one of liability and cover, and Insurance describes how that is usually arranged.
Does this question arise for the flight you are planning?
To test a flight you are planning, ask the three questions the law actually asks. How high will the aircraft be over ground that belongs to somebody else. How close will it come to people who are not part of the flight, and to the windows of a home. And what will the camera be recording while it is there. A flight that answers those three cleanly is not made a problem by a property boundary somewhere underneath it, and a flight that answers them badly is not rescued by being over your own land.
Those questions describe the shape of the requirement rather than deciding a particular case, and nothing here interprets the law for an individual flight or amounts to legal advice. The Civil Aviation Authority publishes the height and separation requirements for this kind of flying and revises them as the class markings change, so the current version is the one on the CAA's own pages, while the Information Commissioner's Office publishes the guidance that governs what a camera on board records.