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by poulpy123 755 days ago
In france, Drone less than 250gr are legal without any documentation in autorized places (or more exctely where it's not forbidden) but you need to be able to see the drone. So FPV is legal as long as the drone isn't too far.
3 comments

The line of sight requirement prohibits FPV altogether, unless you have someone else maintaining the line of sight requirement for you

You're not looking at the drone when you're looking at your goggles, or at least that's how Dutch laws were explained when I last looked into them, and nowadays they're aligned in the EU or maybe EEA (edit: looked it up, it's still like this but I think what changed is that your spotter can be the line of sight fulfiller and they needn't be able to pilot the device, they just need to be able to tell you of danger nearby)

The list of authorized places is a very arbitrary. With my DJI I can take off in half of my garden, but the other half is not authorized. Apparently it falls in a nature reserve, but actually the entire reserve is in a residential area with no other restrictions.
>but you need to be able to see the drone

To have line-of-sight. Actually being able to see the drove is usually not possible - seeing a small drone at 40m high is near impossible after a couple hundrend meters away, especially as it moves.

Of course nobody actually tries to be able to really see the drone.

the law translated by deepl is more strict than in my memory:

> The drone must be visible to the naked eye and remain within the pilot's field of vision. Immersion flights (FPV) and the use of follower drones are possible, provided a second person is present.

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F35675/...