Where You Can Fly a Drone in the UK: Distances, Airports and Privacy

Knowing whether you can legally fly your drone somewhere is only half the picture in the UK. The other half is what the camera on board is allowed to record, because a drone that is perfectly legal to fly can still put you on the wrong side of privacy and harassment law if you point it at the wrong place.

The Core Distance and Height Rules

Wherever you are flying in open airspace, a small set of baseline rules applies across the UK.

Maximum height is 120 metres (400ft) above the surface directly beneath the aircraft, not above sea level or above your own launch point if the ground rises or falls.

Distance from uninvolved people is 50 metres horizontally as the general rule. The main exception is the lightest aircraft: a sub-250g drone, or one marked UK0, UK1 or C0, does not have to keep that 50 metres away from people it is not being flown for, which is what lets it be used for things like filming a family gathering it is already part of.

Distance from areas, rather than individual people, comes into play under the A3 subcategory: 150 metres horizontally from residential, recreational, commercial and industrial areas as a whole. As with the 50-metre rule, sub-250g and UK0/UK1/C0-marked aircraft are exempt from the 150-metre distance.

Never over a crowd. Whatever subcategory or exemption an aircraft qualifies for elsewhere, no drone may be flown over a crowd or an organised assembly of people. This rule has no lightweight exception.

Visual line of sight (VLOS) must be maintained at all times, meaning the pilot can see the aircraft directly with their own eyes. Watching through binoculars, through the drone's camera feed, through a zoom lens, or through FPV goggles does not satisfy this requirement on its own; those tools can supplement what you see, but they cannot replace direct eyesight of the aircraft itself.

Flight Restriction Zones Around Airports

Airports and aerodromes are protected by a Flight Restriction Zone (FRZ), and flying inside one without permission is one of the most common ways new pilots run into trouble.

An FRZ is built from three layered pieces. The core is the aerodrome's Air Traffic Zone (ATZ), a cylinder with a radius of either 2 or 2.5 nautical miles depending on the aerodrome, extending up to 2,000ft. Around each runway, the FRZ also adds Runway Protection Zones (RPZs): rectangles roughly 1km wide that extend 5km out from each runway end, also up to 2,000ft. Finally, where the aerodrome's own boundary sits outside the ATZ, a further 1km buffer is added around it.

Not every aerodrome follows this exact shape. Heliports do not have the rectangular RPZs that fixed-wing runways generate, since there is no runway to protect in the same way. Spaceports instead use a simpler, flat cylinder with a 5km radius.

If you want to fly inside an FRZ, the rule is straightforward: you need permission from the airport or from air traffic control before you launch. There is no workaround that lets you fly inside an FRZ without that permission, no matter how small or camera-free the aircraft is.

No-Fly Restrictions Around Prisons

Separately from airport protections, flying over closed prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales is restricted under regulations made using the power in Article 239 of the Air Navigation Order 2016, which came into force on 25 January 2024. The detail of exactly how far these restrictions extend, and what the penalties are for breaching them, varies by site and by the specific regulations in force, so this guide does not attempt to state a single figure. Anyone planning to fly anywhere near a prison or young offender institution should check the current restriction directly with the CAA or NATS rather than guessing at a distance.

Drones, Cameras and Your Neighbours' Privacy

This is where drone law overlaps with the subject RecordingLaw.com covers most closely: what you are and are not allowed to record.

If you fly a camera drone purely for your own personal or household purposes, such as filming your own garden or a family occasion on your own property, that use generally falls outside the UK GDPR under what is often called the domestic purposes exemption. Purely personal, non-commercial use of this kind is not normally treated as the kind of data processing the UK GDPR was built to regulate.

That exemption is narrower than it might sound, though. Once footage extends beyond your own property boundary and starts capturing identifiable people, whether that is a neighbour's garden, a shared driveway, or people on a nearby street, you can move outside the domestic purposes exemption altogether. At that point the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 can apply to you directly, and you can find yourself treated as a data controller with the responsibilities that status carries, including having a lawful basis for recording and, in some circumstances, being able to respond to requests about the footage from people who appear in it.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data protection regulator, groups drones together with CCTV, automatic number plate recognition and smart doorbell cameras as forms of surveillance-camera technology that raise similar privacy questions, even though the equipment looks very different. The same underlying principles the ICO applies to a doorbell camera pointed at a neighbour's front door, proportionality, minimising what is captured, and being clear about why you are recording, apply just as much to a camera mounted on a drone.

Data protection law is not the only exposure here, either. Flying a drone to repeatedly watch, follow or film a specific neighbour can raise a harassment claim under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, separate from any data protection issue. Using a drone camera to observe someone in circumstances where they would reasonably expect privacy can also raise voyeurism concerns, and persistent, unwanted overflight of someone's property can amount to private nuisance even without any recording taking place at all. None of these routes turns on a fixed distance or a fixed number of incidents; they depend on the facts of what was done and how it affected the person on the receiving end.

For the general rules on cameras aimed at neighbours from a fixed position, such as a doorbell or CCTV camera, see our guide to CCTV and doorbell cameras in the UK. For the broader UK data protection framework a drone operator can become subject to, see our UK data privacy hub.

This guide sets out the general distance, height and privacy rules that apply to drone flying near people and property in the UK. It is not a substitute for checking live airspace restrictions before any specific flight, and it is not legal advice on a specific privacy or harassment complaint. For the registration and licensing rules that apply before you fly at all, see our guide to UK drone laws.