Operations over people under Part 107: eligibility and rules

“Can I fly over the crowd at this event” is one of the most common eligibility questions in this niche, and the honest answer is “it depends on your aircraft, not just your intent.” This page walks through exactly what the rule allows.

The default rule, and its three built-in exceptions

Under 14 CFR 107.39, the baseline rule is that a Part 107 remote pilot may not operate a small unmanned aircraft over a human being unless one of three conditions is met:

1. The person is directly participating in the operation, meaning they are working with you as crew, a visual observer, or someone otherwise necessary to the flight.
2. The person is under a covered structure, or inside a stationary vehicle that could provide reasonable protection from a falling aircraft.
3. The aircraft qualifies under Category 1, 2, 3, or 4 of the FAA’s operations-over-people eligibility framework (below), which sets aircraft-design and operational conditions the FAA has determined make routine flight over non-participants acceptably safe without a case-by-case waiver.

14 CFR 107.145 sets a parallel rule for moving vehicles: flying over a moving vehicle is restricted the same way, unless the people inside are participants, or the operation qualifies under the applicable category conditions.

The four eligibility categories

The 2021 Operations Over People and at Night final rule created four categories, each defined by the aircraft’s characteristics and what happens if it were to strike a person, not by the operator’s intent or the event being flown over:

• Category 1: the aircraft weighs 0.55 pounds (250 grams) or less, including everything attached to it, with no exposed rotating parts that could lacerate skin. The lightest, least restrictive category.
• Category 2: the aircraft is heavier than Category 1 but is shown, through FAA means-of-compliance testing, not to exceed a specific injury-severity threshold if it strikes a person, and to have no exposed parts that could lacerate skin.
• Category 3: similar to Category 2 but permits a higher injury-severity threshold; in exchange, Category 3 operation over open-air assemblies of people (crowds) is not allowed, and sustained flight directly over non-participants is more restricted than Category 1 or 2.
• Category 4: the aircraft holds an FAA-issued airworthiness certificate and operates according to specific operating limitations from that certificate. This is the category most consumer and prosumer drones do not hold.

Manufacturers, not individual pilots, are generally the ones who obtain the FAA declaration of compliance or means-of-compliance approval that qualifies a specific drone model for Category 1, 2, or 3. As a pilot, your practical task is confirming whether your specific aircraft model carries a manufacturer declaration of compliance for one of these categories, not running the engineering analysis yourself.

If your aircraft does not qualify for a category

If your drone has no Category 1-4 declaration of compliance, and your planned operation involves flying over non-participants who are not under cover or in a stationary vehicle, or over a moving vehicle carrying non-participants, you need a case-by-case FAA Certificate of Waiver under 107.205(g) or (j), applied for through the FAA’s FAADroneZone waiver-application portal. This is the same style of individualized safety-case waiver process described on the BVLOS page, evaluated against your specific aircraft, route, and mitigations, not a fast automated approval like the LAANC controlled-airspace path.

What this rule does not touch

Operations-over-people eligibility is entirely separate from controlled-airspace authorization (still needs LAANC or a manual authorization if your flight crosses Class B, C, D, or surface Class E airspace) and from night-operation conditions (a separate lighting-and-training requirement, not a waiver, since 2021). A single event, say a nighttime drone show over a crowd inside controlled airspace, can require satisfying all three surfaces at once: an eligible aircraft or waiver for the crowd, a current LAANC authorization for the airspace, and lighting plus knowledge recency for the night operation.

See the waivers & authorizations hub for the rest of the post-certification surface, or the free recurrent-training path if you are here to stay current rather than to expand what your certificate covers.