FAA Regulations for sUAS Surveying

The FAA rules the skies when it comes to data collection from a sUAS for surveying. The key points are:

1. Remote pilot certificate from the FAA is required to operate a sUAS
2. sUAS aircraft must be registered with the FAA and the markings must be on the aircraft
3. sUAS must operate under FAA rules

The FAA has literally thousands of pages of information and tens of thousands of rules that must be followed when operating a sUAS in the National Airspace (NAS) of the USA.

All of the information is available (usually at no charge) on the FAA website. Below is a summary of information which is basic to sUAS operations. To fully understand all that is required to operate from an FAA standpoint is beyond the scope of this course. sUAS are allowed to operate under FAA 14 CFR Part 107. While this pertains to sUAS, many other parts of the FAA are required knowledge. For someone new to FAA regulations it can take dozens of hours of studying to become familiar with all the information pertaining to the FAA.