How to get PDRA01: steps, £524 fee and the CAA audit

PDRA01 is the UK CAA's standard operational authorisation for drone work in the Specific category. It lets you fly aircraft from 250 g to under 25 kg, within visual line of sight, in and around towns, where the Open category would keep a heavier aircraft 150 m away from built-up areas. It costs £524 and lasts 12 months.

Getting it is now the easy part. You apply online in about 15 minutes, the CAA no longer asks you to upload your operations manual, and it aims to issue the authorisation within 24 hours. The real test comes later: a compliance check that can arrive on any day of those 12 months and asks for evidence from your last three flights. If you can't send it within 28 days, the authorisation is suspended.

So work in this order: check whether you need PDRA01 at all, set up the records that would answer that check, then apply.

Do you need PDRA01?

Plenty of paid work doesn't. The CAA's Open category covers low-risk commercial flying as well as leisure, and it needs no authorisation: every pilot needs a Flyer ID, plus an A2 Certificate of Competency (A2 CofC) to fly in the A2 subcategory. PDRA01 pilots need a remote pilot certificate instead: the RPC-L1, or the older GVC.

Here's the same job, a commercial flight near people in a built-up area, under each route:

Look at the distances first. A small class-marked aircraft in A2 can get closer to people than PDRA01 allows: 30 m, or 5 m in low speed mode, against PDRA01's 50 m. So if the work fits a UK2 or C2 aircraft under 4 kg, the Open category may do it with far less paperwork.

PDRA01 earns its fee when the aircraft is too heavy for A2 and the site is in a town: a larger inspection or survey aircraft working next to offices, houses or a retail park. It also differs on overflight. A2 rules say you must not intentionally fly over uninvolved people. PDRA01's conditions keep the 50 m separation but allow flight over uninvolved people as long as you keep it to a minimum, so plan for the 50 m and treat any overflight as the exception. The CAA still recommends avoiding deliberate overflight where you can.

PDRA01 stops where the pilot can no longer see the aircraft. For BVLOS work, start with how a SORA risk assessment works.

What the CAA checks once you hold it

The CAA's checks are targeted. Not every holder gets one, but any holder can be selected at any time during the 12 months. The request arrives by email at the address registered to your Operator ID, and you have 28 calendar days from then to send the evidence. The CAA's oversight page sets out the list.

Here's what it asks for, and what you should be recording from your first flight:

Currency is the item that slips without anyone noticing. Each pilot needs at least two hours of flying in the previous three months, on similar or equivalent aircraft, and hours flown in the Open category count. The check asks about the three months before each of your last three flights, not about today. A pilot who spent the winter on desk work can be out of currency on their first spring job, and you'll find out when the CAA does.

The logs have set contents, and the CAA publishes a free template for the technical logbook (CAP 2606A).

• Each pilot's flight log: their name and Flyer ID, the date, the take-off and landing location, the flight time by day or night, a description that includes anything unusual, and the aircraft's make, model and serial number.
• The operator's technical logbook, one per aircraft: every flight's date, time, duration and location, who flew it, total hours or cycles, pre-flight inspections, site risk assessments, incidents, and maintenance and defects.

Flight-safety documents, and the training records of your pilots and anyone with operations or maintenance duties, must be kept for at least three years.

Two findings end things quickly. A Level 1 finding, which the CAA defines as an immediate safety concern, suspends the authorisation at once. And if the operator name on your documents doesn't match the one on the authorisation, it's suspended until that's fixed, so check the name on the manual after any change of company or trading name.

A useful test before you apply: if the CAA's email arrived this morning, could you send all of this by Friday?

What to have in place before you apply

• The right Operator ID. To hold the authorisation in a company's name, apply with the organisation's Operator ID. A PDRA01 can't be moved to another Operator ID later, so apply under the one that will own the work. Register it to a team inbox someone reads every day, not one person's address, because that's where the CAA's check will land. The ID must be displayed on every aircraft you fly under the authorisation, and it needs renewing every year on its own schedule.
• Pilots who qualify. Every remote pilot needs a Flyer ID and either an RPC-L1 (Level 1 Remote Pilot Certificate) or a GVC (General Visual Line of Sight Certificate), trained with a CAA-approved Recognised Assessment Entity, and must be employed or contracted by the operator. The CAA stops issuing the GVC on 31 December 2027. An existing GVC is still accepted until it expires, as long as the authorisation says a GVC is acceptable, and PDRA01's does today. The CAA describes the two as broadly similar in competency, so train new pilots on the RPC-L1.
• Insurance that meets UK Regulation (EU) 785/2004.
• An operations manual. The CAA strongly recommends its own PDRA01 template. If you write your own, follow CAP 722A, Volumes 1 and 2. It has to cover, among other things, your nominated personnel and their responsibilities, how pilots are trained and kept current, and your flight procedures, with forms for site surveys, briefings and occurrence reports. Write it for the team you actually have, because a check compares the manual with what your records show.

How to apply

1. Sign in to My registration with the Operator ID that will hold the authorisation (the organisation's, for a company) and open the PDRA01 application.
2. Confirm you'll meet the operator responsibilities, the remote pilot competency requirements and the PDRA01 insurance requirements. This is a declaration, and a compliance check is how the CAA tests it.
3. List your aircraft makes and models, with the hours flown in the past 12 months. This is optional on a first application.
4. Confirm that you have, and will maintain, an operations manual that meets the requirements. There's no upload.
5. Pay the £524 fee.

It usually takes about 15 minutes, depending on how many aircraft you list, and the CAA saves your progress for 14 days. It aims to issue the authorisation within 24 hours and emails you when it does.

The operating limits

The PDRA01 overview has the full conditions. The ones a crew briefs from:

• Aircraft from 250 g to under 25 kg, fixed wing or rotary.
• No higher than 120 m (400 ft) above the closest point of the ground.
• Within visual line of sight, and never more than 500 m from the remote pilot.
• At least 50 m from uninvolved people, or 30 m during take-off and landing, with any flight over them kept to a minimum.
• At least 50 m from assemblies of people, and never over them.
• Night flying is allowed if you follow the procedures in your operations manual.
• Nothing dropped from the aircraft, and no dangerous goods carried.

If something goes wrong, accidents and serious incidents are reported to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), and other occurrences to the CAA through its ECCAIRS2 reporting portal.

Renewing, and changes during the year

You can reapply from 28 days before your authorisation expires. Do it before the expiry date and you keep the same anniversary, with no gap. The form shows last year's answers and you update whatever changed. This is where a year of flight logs pays off, because the form now requires your hours for the past 12 months. Don't fly under an expired authorisation; if it lapses, reapply through the same service.

Between renewals, tell the CAA when your contact details or operations manual details change. A new accountable manager goes through the CAA's Change of Accountable Manager form, and an administrative variation to a PDRA01, such as a change of company name, costs £113.

Is PDRA01 going away? Not on any published date. The CAA said in August 2023 that it would review PDRA01 using the SORA method and told holders to keep renewing as usual in the meantime. Its 2026 decision to pause changes to the UK SORA guidance lists PDRA-01 holders among the people it won't affect.

Logged at the time, or not at all

A site survey written after the flight isn't a site survey, and currency nobody logged is currency you can't show. If it wasn't recorded at the time, 28 days won't produce it. If it was, answering the CAA means opening three jobs.

That's how FlybyOps is set up. Each job is planned with its pilots and aircraft, and the site survey and risk assessment can be attached to it. Each flight log is tied to the same job, pilot and aircraft, captured automatically from DJI controllers with Flight Sync and entered by hand for other aircraft. Every aircraft's maintenance history sits in the equipment registry, and the operations manual lives as a controlled document with version history and role-based access. Pilot currency tracking comes with the Business plan, and the append-only audit log shows who changed what and when.