14 CFR Part 107 Cheat Sheet for Drone Piloting Test

Some people love to fly drones (unmanned aircraft operated without the possibility of direct human intervention from within or on the aircraft) for fun or as a hobby, but if you know enough information about flying drones properly and meet some other qualifications, you can become a professional drone pilot and even get jobs making money through your skills with a drone. However for this certification, you need to know a lot - and I mean a lot - of information to pass the exam; that is where this article comes in. Consider this a basic cheat sheet for the part 107 exam with enough information to make it somewhat easier to try and pass the actual exam!

Now, to get a remote pilot certificate, you need to be at least sixteen years old, know the English language, and be mentally and physically well. Even after you get certified, you need to get recurrent training every twenty-four months which is free and something you can take online at faasafety.org. The exam has sixty questions and is multiple-choice. Some of the questions require you to reference charts or maps that will be provided during the test. You need to earn at least seventy percent or more to pass or forty-two out of the sixty questions need to be correct.

The FAA recommends 15 to 20 hours of studying, but everyone studies at their own speed, so you do not need to stick to this strict metric. You will take the exam in person at one of the over seven hundred facilities in the United States of America.

If you have an accident that hurts someone significantly/ makes someone fall unconscious or damages greater than $500 to repair or replace the property should be reported to the FAA in 10 days.

If you are the RPIC -the remote pilot in command - you must do a pre-flight check before each flight and have a remote pilot certificate, waiver, or any other documentation in case of an accident. Someone can be a pilot in command without a remote pilot certificate as long as they are being watched over by a proper RPIC with a certificate. You should not operate a drone from a moving vehicle or while impaired (such as drunk alcohol in the last 8 hours, have 0.04 or higher blood alcohol content, or have taken medication that leaves you impaired).

Now, we need to go over what to do for daytime or nighttime. You generally should not fly at night without a waiver after civil twilight. So what is civil twilight? Evening civil twilight is the period between sunset and thirty minutes after sunset. Morning civil twilight is the period of thirty minutes prior to sunrise until sunrise.

Visual Line of Sight Operations (or VLOS) is about being able to see the drone you are flying when you are operating. Minimum visibility should be 3 statute miles and you should try to be five hundred feet below the clouds and no less than 2000 feet horizontally of clouds. You should generally only fly up to four hundred feet AGL (above ground level), so no more than four hundred feet over the ground or a structure beneath the drone. You should fly no faster than 100 mph or 87 knots.

Submit a waiver ninety days before your planned operations if you need a waiver for an exceptional position.

If there is about to be a collision, the remote pilot should yield to the right of the other aircraft.

METAR is an interesting acronym. It is short for Meteorological Terminal Aviation Weather Report and they are interesting weather reports that talk about weather conditions that might affect your flying. These are statements of expected weather conditions at an airport. There are standard briefings you should get before a flight, abbreviated briefings, and outlook briefings if a departure is six hours away. First, it will tell you the type of report (METAR is hourly, SPECI is special weather conditions). Next, you get the airport identifier four-letter code. The first letter is the country designation and the next three identify the airport. After that you have the date and time in UTC (universal standard time or 'zulu' time); then a modifier to see if it is an automatic report or a corrected report; then wind data for direction and wind speed in knots; after that, you have visibility in statute miles. After that, the METAR will show the weather, the condition of the sky, the temperature/dew point, the altimeter setting, and finally remarks.

TAF reports, unlike METAR reports, are updated daily instead of hourly.

An increase in altitude increases the amount of power required for an aircraft and these things depend on whether you have stable or unstable air masses. Stable air masses contain consistent conditions and stratiform clouds. It also has poor visibility and continuous precipitation. Unstable air has cumulus clouds, build vertically in size, showery precipitation, and good visibility.

Airspace is broken into Class A, B, C, D, E, and G (uncontrolled airspace with no clearance needed) airspace. The other forms of airspace are controlled.

This is not all of the information needed for the Part 107 test, but it is a decent amount of the information and with it, it will be ten times easier for you to get certified!