Legal and regulatory (single source of truth)

Summary¶

Not legal advice. To the best of our understanding as of June 2026, the laws, limitations, and practices below constrain how libdrone may be flown. We are not lawyers; rules change, vary by country, and are interpreted by national authorities. Verify against your national aviation authority — in the Czech Republic, ÚCL (caa.cz) and the official DroneMap portal — before flying. You are responsible for your own compliance. Specific figures marked (verify) are from secondary sources and await confirmation against ÚCL primary sources.

This is the single source of truth for all regulatory, legal, and operational-risk information in the libdrone corpus. Every other atom that touches legality links here rather than restating rules. The headline: libdrone is a privately-built UAS under EASA, which is a permanent, named category — not a grey area — but that status carries real operational limits, and the most important one is that a self-built Pro flies in subcategory A3, not A2.

Concept¶

libdrone is a privately-built UAS — what that means¶

EASA's framework offers three routes into the Open Category: a drone bears a C0–C4 class mark; or it is privately built and under 25 kg; or it is a legacy drone placed on the market before 31 December 2023. libdrone, assembled by its builder from open hardware for personal use, takes the privately-built route.

This matters because the 2026 class-marking regime (C0–C4 mandatory, only CE-marked drones may be sold) reshaped the commercial market but does not apply to a self-build — nothing is placed on the market, so no class mark is required or possible. A privately-built UAS is defined by EASA as one assembled for the builder's own use, explicitly not including a drone assembled from a ready-to-assemble kit sold as a single product. A libdrone built from the open documentation and separately-sourced parts is privately built; a hypothetical single boxed libdrone kit sold ready-to-assemble would not be.

The consequence: self-builds fly by weight, in A1 or A3 only¶

Because a privately-built drone has no class mark, it cannot access the class-marked subcategories — and A2 is a class-marked subcategory (it requires a C2 mark). A self-build therefore flies by weight:

• Under 250 g → A1. May operate in populated areas (not over assemblies of people).
• 250 g to 25 kg → A3. Must operate far from people and built-up areas — (verify: ~150 m from residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational areas in CZ). No flight near uninvolved persons.

There is no privately-built route into A2. The A2 "fly 5 m from people in low-speed mode" provision applies only to C2-class-marked drones, which a self-build cannot obtain without becoming a manufacturer placing a product on the market.

What this means per libdrone variant¶

• SCRAP (sub-250 g): A1. The sub-250 g design target is a genuine regulatory advantage — A1 is the least-restricted route. Note: carrying a camera triggers operator registration regardless of weight (verify).
• Core (typically sub-250 g): A1 if the actual built weight is confirmed under 250 g; A3 if any configuration exceeds it.
• Pro / Ghost / Bandit / Wing (over 250 g, privately built): A3 only in the Open Category — far from people and built-up areas. These cannot legally operate near uninvolved persons or in urban settings as Open-category self-builds.

The route to urban, near-people, and municipal operations¶

libdrone's institutional positioning — municipal emergency response, urban survey, civil preparedness — describes operations that are not reachable in the Open Category for a self-built Pro. The legal path for those is the Specific Category: an operational authorisation from the national authority (ÚCL in CZ) based on a risk assessment (SORA), or operation under an EU standard scenario (STS-01 / STS-02) if the Member State has adopted them (verify whether CZ has). Any libdrone deployment that is urban, near people, at night, or municipal is a Specific-category matter — this is the honest answer to "how does libdrone reach its institutional users legally," and institutional skeletons should frame it that way rather than implying Open-category access.

Reference¶

Operating limits (Czech Republic, Open Category, as of June 2026)¶

All figures (verify) against ÚCL (caa.cz) and DroneMap before relying on them.

Remote ID¶

EU Remote ID (EASA) requires drones above 250 g to broadcast operator and position data. For libdrone this is a legal obligation on Pro / Ghost / Bandit / Wing, met by a dedicated lightweight broadcast module. Remote ID does not replace operator registration — both are required. (Verify current CZ applicability and thresholds.) Technical implementation lives in remote-id-compliance; the legal requirement lives here.

Data protection (GDPR)¶

A camera-carrying drone processes personal data and falls under EU GDPR + CZ Act 110/2019 Coll. (supervisor: ÚOOÚ). Filming or photographing identifiable people in private settings without consent is prohibited. libdrone's local-processing, no-vendor-cloud architecture is a genuine data-sovereignty advantage here — data need not leave the operator's control — but it does not remove the operator's GDPR obligations. (Verify.)

Procedure¶

Pre-season regulatory check¶

1. Confirm operator registration is current (renew if due).
2. Confirm A1/A3 pilot certificate is valid.
3. Confirm any required insurance is active.
4. Check caa.cz and easa.europa.eu for changes since last season.
5. Per site: check DroneMap for airspace restrictions and zone permits.
6. For any urban / near-people / night / municipal operation: confirm whether a Specific-category authorisation is required and obtain it before flying.

Rationale¶

Why a single source of truth¶

Regulatory awareness belongs everywhere in the corpus — weight targets, throttle limits, and pre-flight gates all exist partly for legal reasons, and pretending otherwise would make the engineering incoherent. But a regulatory claim a reader might act on must live in exactly one place, so it can be reviewed once (ideally by pro-bono legal counsel), corrected once, and dated once. Other atoms may say "this has regulatory implications — see legal-and-regulatory"; they may not state what the law is. This contains the legal risk to one reviewable document and keeps the technical atoms technically focused.

Why we corrected the A2 framing¶

Earlier corpus versions placed libdrone Pro in subcategory A2 and described low-speed mode as the mechanism that makes urban operation legal. That was incorrect: A2 requires a C2 class mark, which a privately-built drone cannot hold. A self-built Pro is A3. The low-speed / throttle-limiting capability remains valuable — as a beginner-training aid and good airmanship (see throttle-limiting) — but it does not unlock A2 separation distances for a self-build. Where we may have been at fault, we removed the claim. The honest urban path is the Specific Category.

Connections¶

requires: [] related: - throttle-limiting - remote-id-compliance - risk-assessment - dji-problem leads_to: []