Night Operations Under Part 107: What Changed

For years, flying a small UAS after dark meant applying for a waiver and waiting on the FAA. That's no longer true, and the exam knows it changed recently enough that candidates studying from an old source, or a friend's outdated advice, still get this wrong with real confidence.

The two conditions that replaced the waiver

14 CFR §107.29 permits night operations directly, no waiver required, once two things are true: the remote pilot has completed the recurrent training that covers night operations, and the aircraft is equipped with anti-collision lighting visible for at least three statute miles that has a flash rate sufficient to avoid a collision hazard. Both conditions have to be met at the same time. A pilot current on training but flying an aircraft with a dim or non-functional anti-collision light isn't legal at night, and the reverse is equally true.

Civil twilight is its own separate band

Civil twilight sits between daylight and full night, and it gets its own set of rules rather than being folded into either the daytime or night category outright. During civil twilight, the same anti-collision lighting requirement applies, and pilots need the same night-operations knowledge covered in their recurrent training. Confusing "it's not fully dark yet" with "the night rules don't apply yet" is one of the more common ways this topic trips people up.

What this doesn't remove

Nothing about the night-operations update touches VLOS, registration, or any of the other baseline Part 107 requirements. A pilot flying at night still has to maintain visual line of sight with the naked eye, correctable lenses, or vision-correcting devices, not through a device like binoculars, and still needs the aircraft registered and marked exactly as it would during the day. Night operations changed one specific gate, not the whole rulebook around it.

The version the exam tests

Exam questions on this topic tend to present a scenario, an aircraft with a specific anti-collision light spec, a pilot with or without recent training, sometimes a civil-twilight timestamp, and ask whether the flight is legal. The fastest way through those questions is checking both conditions independently rather than assuming one implies the other: does the pilot have the required recent training, and does the aircraft's lighting meet the visibility and flash-rate requirement. If either answer is no, the flight isn't legal regardless of how obvious the rest of the scenario seems.

Study the full citation and the surrounding operating-rules context in the handbook's night operations section.