Operations Over People: The Four Categories Part 107 Actually Tests

Section 107.39 doesn't ban flying over people. It bans flying over people unless the operation fits one of four specific categories, and that distinction is exactly where most wrong answers on this topic come from. Candidates tend to reach for a single memorized rule, usually the weight limit, when the actual question is testing which category applies and what that category does and doesn't allow.

Four categories, four different bars to clear

Category 1 is the one most people can picture without looking anything up: the aircraft weighs 0.55 pounds (250 grams) or less, counting everything on board or attached, and has no exposed rotating parts that could lacerate skin. That's it. No paperwork, no performance testing, just a hard weight ceiling and a physical design requirement.

Categories 2 and 3 are where most of the confusion lives, because they aren't defined by weight at all. They're defined by performance-based injury limitations, meaning the aircraft has to demonstrate it won't cause injury above a certain severity threshold if it hits someone, regardless of how much it weighs. To fly under Category 2 or 3, the aircraft has to be listed on an FAA-accepted Declaration of Compliance, a manufacturer's formal statement that the specific aircraft meets those requirements. A Declaration of Compliance is not a blanket permission slip to fly over any moving vehicle or any crowd; it only establishes that the aircraft itself qualifies for its category, nothing more.

Category 4 is the outlier: it requires an actual airworthiness certificate under 14 CFR part 21, the same regulatory family manned aircraft certification lives in. Most Part 107 operations never touch Category 4, but the exam still expects you to recognize it as the category tied to a type-certificated aircraft with FAA-approved operating limitations, not something a hobbyist-grade platform backs into.

None of the four categories change based on time of day. Night operations over people follow the same category rules as daytime ones, layered on top of the separate night-operation requirements in § 107.29.

Category eligibility isn't permanent

A Declaration of Compliance is tied to a specific aircraft configuration, not to the aircraft as a general product. If you or anyone else modifies the aircraft in a way the manufacturer's operating instructions don't explicitly permit, Category 2 or 3 eligibility disappears immediately, and getting it back requires an FAA-accepted means of compliance and a new Declaration. This is a genuinely common trap: a candidate assumes the category is a property of the aircraft model, when it's actually a property of that aircraft in its currently-documented configuration. Swap an unapproved battery, attach an unlisted payload, or run a modification the manufacturer didn't account for, and you're not flying a Category 2 aircraft over people anymore, you're flying an aircraft with no category at all.

Open-air assemblies and moving vehicles: the sustained-flight distinction

Two situations get their own separate rules layered on top of the category system, and both hinge on the word "sustained."

Flying briefly across a crowd or a road is treated differently than lingering over one. Category 1, 2, and 4 aircraft are prohibited from sustained flight over open-air assemblies of people unless the operation also satisfies Remote ID under § 89.110 or § 89.115(a), and even then it's subject to waiver, not a default yes. Category 3 goes further: it can't operate over open-air assemblies at all, sustained or not. The same sustained-versus-transit distinction shows up for moving vehicles outside a closed or restricted-access site: brief crossing is generally permitted for Categories 1 through 3, but maintaining flight over a vehicle in traffic is not, regardless of which category the aircraft holds.

Inside a closed or restricted-access site, the rules relax somewhat, but "closed or restricted-access" is doing real work in that sentence. A parking lot that happens to be quiet is not automatically a restricted-access site just because nobody's around at the moment.

The trap the exam keeps setting

Almost every wrong answer on this topic comes from treating one exception as if it covers everything. A Declaration of Compliance proves the aircraft qualifies for Category 2 or 3, it doesn't authorize flight over a crowd. A person standing under a covered structure or inside a stationary vehicle can lawfully be overflown under § 107.39's separate protected-location exception, but that exception applies only to people actually under cover, not to everyone nearby. Category eligibility, the open-air assembly rule, and the covered-structure exception are three different provisions that happen to interact, and exam questions are built specifically to test whether you're tracking which one actually applies to the scenario in front of you.

The fastest way to get an operations-over-people question right is to ask, in order: what category is this aircraft actually eligible for right now, does the situation involve an open-air assembly or a moving vehicle, and is anyone in the scenario protected by the separate covered-structure exception. Answer those three, and the "single rule" most candidates go looking for turns out not to exist.

The full citation trail and all seventeen ACS elements for this task live in the handbook's Operations Over People section, including how this interacts with Remote ID compliance for the open-air assembly exception.