How to (Legally) Fly Your Drone in France and the Rest of the EU

so you're a gringo you're heading to France and you want to be able to fly your drone well thankfully for you I recently went through that process of getting myself all set up for flying in France and Spain and I'm here to walk you through what I did and hopefully give you some tips that get you at least organized and figure out what that process looks like because it is a little bit confusing and before we get too deep into things want to throw out a few disclaimers first off I'm not a lawyer I'm not French although I do enjoy some french toast and french fries and I'm also not a drone although I have been accused of droning on in my videos occasionally but I will try and get straight to the point so you can figure out how to get your drone registered so the first question you might have is what country do I register in again this is targeted at people who live in the United States and are traveling to Europe the rule that I found is you need to register yourself as a drone operator and you need to register your drone in the first country that you're visiting so in my case I'm going over to France May Bop into Spain a little bit and I don't need to actually register in both those countries I can register in France since that's the first country I'm visiting and that same registration will work in Spain would work in Italy will basically work in any EU country and the only little caveat there aside from the fact that this only applies to the EU is obviously the United Kingdom is no longer part of the EU so if you're going to do something like go to France and then spend some time in the English Countryside you'll need to do all the EU stuff and then also do all the UK stuff in my case I'm staying in the EU France is my first arrival country so I basically need to do everything in France and that set me up for the rest of the EU now in terms of what you actually need to do to set yourself up and register your yourself to operate a drone legally in France and I'll offer another little disclaimer here you know some people will debate the need for drone registration and we'll say you know you're just sort of feeding into the man and you know we need to to do less things with the man and I'm not going to comment on that the only thing I will say is there's more of the man than there is of me the man has far more weapons of mass destruction than I have access to so you know for my personal decision it was let's comply with a man especially when I'm in another country and you know maybe don't know what's going on there so way those factors however you want you know you're an adult make your own decision on whether you're going to go through some of the Hoops to register yourself and register your drone but the thing I will say is it's fairly efficient it was you know fairly easy it basically it took me all of an afternoon and so far there haven't been any costs or fees associated with it despite a lot of the information I saw saying there were some fees for drone registration but I don't know if if that's changed or just you know I've done something wrong but I haven't been charged any fees throughout this process and there's basically kind of three activities that you have to do to be able to operate your drone legally so the first is registering yourself off as a drone operator and this is pretty straightforward for France you go to a website called Alpha Tango and I'll link everything down below it was pretty straightforward to use that website it is available in both French and English I'm not sure if there were other languages but you know being somebody that primarily speaks English I clicked on the little I can't remember if it was an American or British flag but somewhere on there there's a switch to switch it over to English and I was able to sign up again that was pretty straightforward I think I entered email login information received an email from the site and had to click a few validation things and then it's basically a matter of filling out your name address date of birth pretty straightforward information you know nothing all that challenging or goofy in there once all that was done I was a registered drone operator and got this you know certificate suitable for framing that I was able to print out and the one bit of advice I will give you there having lived in France briefly and maybe this is is a bit of a stereotype but you know the French seemed to me and most of the other European countries seem to be more paper oriented than maybe we are in the United States so I would strongly recommend printing out all these forms carrying them with you I have a little generic bag that my drone came in so I just stick all this stuff in that bag and I do think the requirements stay that you need to have all these these forms on you and on your person when you're offering your drone so make sure you do print them out so you've got them with you in case anyone stops and asks you any questions so there were no fees for the registration of myself as a drone operator it's valid for five years again no strange information or anything particularly challenging that was required to get this you know drone operator certificate and that's kind of step one so this is registering me as a drone pilot step two is registering your drone and if you've done the FAA stuff where you go in and register your drone it's quite similar this is also administered through that Alpha Tango website there's a pretty straightforward way to add a drone registration to your profile you can put in your manufacturer you have the ability to go and search through common drone makes and models I was able to find my DJI mavic Mini 3 Pro pretty easily so they seem to be fairly current on the model numbers and the only slightly confusing point at least for me is the Drone serial number and the Drone remote ID registration so the way you find that is if you go and this is specific to DJI drones but if you go into the controller app and go into the menu and then hit about you'll see in their aircraft serial number and then flight controller serial number in my case those are both the same I don't know if that's typical but basically that serial number was what I entered for the Drone serial number field and then I put that same number in the remote ID field and there's a little toggle there to set a ANSI remote ID number and I was able to put that in and that was accepted so in both these cases you get a magical ID number so I've got a rather long French drone operator ID number that starts with fra and is you know a dozen or so digits same thing with the Drone registration process I get a handy dandy PDF there's a giant number on here as well for my drone registration and I printed both of those out using a little brother label maker and affix those to my drone it does seem like you need to affix your drone operator ID to all your drones I got kind of conflicting information on whether you need to fix your drone registration number to your drone or not but I just put both on one label the other trick I do is on the other side of my drone I have my FAA registration numbers and some typically operating in the United States and I put my phone number on there a tip for the Americans if you're not used to making telephone calls in another country there are country codes so you know you'll see numbers sometimes for France with a plus three three at the beginning the country code for the United States is plus one so if your phone number is 212-55-1212 just put a plus one in front of it generally most people from outside the U.S kind of understand that that's a country code and that way if somebody finds your drone that plus one will indicate that your phone number's from the United States and as long as they dial that plus one they'll be able to call you and or send you a text message and let you know that they found your drone so probably a good idea to have your phone number or something on your drone in case you do manage to lose it so the final piece of the puzzle and this is where things got a little bit confusing there's a lot of documentation and information about you know what happens if your drone is below 250 grams in the case of the DJI Mini 3 that I have it is indeed below 250 grams and a lot of that info kind of implies that you don't have to register if you're below 250 grams the little caveat to that and it took me a while to figure this out is that if you have a I think they call it like a video recording device or a photographic device on your drone then you do indeed have to register you do indeed have to take some operator training so you know even if you have one of these drones that's below 250 grams and I think the manufacturers sometimes hype it up like you don't have to register you do as long as there's a video camera on there and you know that's kind of the purpose at least for me of having a drone is to do some video and photography so just because you're below 250 grams doesn't mean you avoid that registration requirement furthermore if you do want to take video and you do want to fly near people and kind of do the things that I frankly want to do with my drone again with that focus on photography and video you do need to take some operator training now this is also administered through Alpha Tango so the nice thing about that website is kind of all the three things you need to do are pretty obviously on the home page there's a box for your operator registration box for your drone registration and a box for training if you click on that there's two types of training I think one is for remote controlled aircraft but the other is called open category registration that's what you ultimately want to do and that's what gives you operator privileges and you know is the training that you need there was some debate that I saw online about whether you needed this or not what I interpreted from a lot of the stuff I read was that if you're not an EU citizen you most definitely have to take that training regardless of the type of drone you're flying regardless of the type of drone operations you're doing I just took the training just to be on the safe side and again like everything else in France you get a handy-dandy certificate I printed this out and I'm basically going to put these three pieces of paper in my drone bag and have them with me at all times when I'm operating in terms of the training and tests I blew that off probably for a little longer than I should have because when you first click on it says it takes an average of 120 Minutes to complete I didn't really have a two hour block where I was ready to sit down but I think I ultimately completed it in like 25 minutes including taking the test the actual training portion I think took like nine minutes and it's basically watching a video that I think is an EU video that's in English it's kind of goofy you know tells you don't you know fly in over people keep an eye on your drone all the things that you hopefully know and expect at this point and then you have to watch a video that's in French that gives you the Ten Commandments of drone operations again my French is not great but they were all pretty obvious things like you know don't fly in active airspace don't fly into people you know keep your drone under control at all times and I think if you've taken the FAA part 107 test and I've got a few comments on that I'll link to the video where I talk about that above you can probably pass the EU test cold that's what I did yeah I frankly took it in the morning while trying to get my kids ready for school so I was a little bit distracted it's a 40 question test it is in English I got a 93 on it so I was pretty happy with that and the only thing that is a little funky is the EU kind of breaks down your drone operations in terms of the Drone class taking this test lets you operate I think in A1 and A2 and I'll put a link down below there was a website with a nice Matrix that kind of showed all the a operation categories all the different types of drones and where they fit in there and then all the C's and kind of the restrictions related to each of those and there are questions on the test about things like you know if you're doing uh if you have a c whatever drone can you fly over people if you have this weight of drone what type of operation are you doing and as long as you can kind of figure out that chart it's pretty reasonable most of the other questions were all common sense the one negative to that whole process was after the two goofy videos that they make you watch they give you kind of the French drone operations handbook it is of course all in French there's a little note there saying it'll be in English someday but it's 66 Pages you know I didn't even read it just because my French is not good enough to Wade through that and figured I'd take the test cold and see what happens and passed on my first try from what I've read and I don't have experimental data to back this up you're allowed to take the test three times so it's probably not a terrible idea to take it once cold you know use that chart use some of those other resources that I'll link to and see if you can pass it if not maybe you got to study up a little bit in terms of difficulty the tests you know the FAA part 107 test was significantly more difficult because it had a lot of airspace questions had a lot of you know what I would call Aviation trivia around things like weather and all that stuff a lot of the French test was Common Sense stuff you know what happens if you're drinking you know what kind of things should you look out for basically the key themes that they focused on were being a smart operator so you know not drinking being able to see your aircraft you know all that sort of stuff and then some of the rules around flying over people so there was a lot about you know can you fly over crowds there's a question about you know what happens if somebody rides a bicycle and stops under your drone what should you do and most of that stuff I found the the common sense answer kind of got you to the right place now in terms of fees I did see a lot of information on mine that said there was a fee to register your drone it was something like 30 Euro I saw Band-Aid about quite a bit I saw other stuff about how it was five euro to you know register yourself as an operator there was no asking for fees on Alpha Tango there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to enter payment information so my hope slash assumption is that they've done away with all those fees on all my lovely certificates here you know everything says it's valid everything has a five-year expiration date so I'm basically set and you know other than the 45 minutes to an hour I think it took me to figure all this stuff out and the cost of printing out three pieces of paper I'm now legally able to operate my drone in France overall a pretty straightforward process so finally I'll give a plug for my video series on taking an international workcation that's why I'm actually heading over to France hopefully we'll have some videos with some nice Drone footage from France once we're over there so stay tuned you know mash the Subscribe if you want to see some of that stuff hopefully it'll be interesting to you and you know hit the Bell button I still have no idea what it does but all the other cool kids say to hit the Bell so we'll see what happens there with that said big heavy wishing you bon voyage safe flying safe travels and may all your casulay be delicious peace ever wonder why every talking head on YouTube asks you to hit the like And subscribe button at the end of the video you were right because we're living in a computer simulation and Our Benevolent robotic overlords get just a little bit of energy every time you hit that like so do me the rest of civilization and Our Benevolent robotic overlords a favor match that subscribe be kind to each other keep living your simulated dreams

Channel: The Big Heavy

Views: 8,582

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Id: MDk7gypseG8

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023