Drone Flight Log: When It Is Required, What Goes In It, Free Template

The short answer first, because the wrong version of it keeps going round: in the open category — which covers nearly everything flown privately — nobody requires you to keep a flight log. EU drone regulation asks for registration, a competency certificate and insurance there, but not for a record of your flights.

In the specific category it is different: records are mandatory, and they have to be kept for three years.

And then there is the space in between, where most pilots end up — no obligation, but plenty of situations in which a flight log is suddenly the only thing you can produce. That is what this page is about.

Is a drone flight log mandatory?

It depends on the operating category alone — not on the weight of the drone, and not on whether you fly privately or for money.

Open category (A1, A2, A3): no

The annex to EU regulation 2019/947 sets out operating procedures, distances, altitudes and the remote pilot’s duties before take-off for the open category. There is no record-keeping duty in it. Fly a 250 g drone in the park, or closer to people with an A2 certificate, and you need no log.

One caveat: if you fly under an individual authorisation — permission to take off inside a geozone, for instance — the conditions attached to that permission may well include documentation requirements. That is in your permit document, not in the regulation. Read it.

Specific category: yes, for three years

As soon as you operate in the specific category — a declaration under a standard scenario, an operational authorisation following SORA, or a LUC — UAS.SPEC.050 applies. It obliges the operator to keep records and retain them for at least three years, covering three things:

• Qualifications of the remote pilot and the other personnel involved — training, certificates, refreshers.
• Maintenance of the unmanned aircraft system — what was serviced, replaced or repaired, and when.
• The operation itself — the flights carried out, expressly including unusual technical or operational occurrences, plus whatever else your operational authorisation demands.

The third point is what people commonly call the flight log. And since the authority may ask to see these records without announcing itself first, a log sitting in a drawer in another part of the country is not much use.

Flying commercially is not a category

A common misconception: that “commercial” automatically means the specific category. It does not. EU regulation does not care whether you are paid; it asks only about the risk of the particular flight. A paid property shoot over an empty plot can be A3 and needs no log. A private shot over a crowd is specific and needs one.

People who fly commercially usually keep a log anyway, for a different reason: without a date, a place and a duration, neither an invoice nor a job is easy to substantiate.

Why a flight log is worth keeping even when it is not required

Four situations in which pilots are glad afterwards that they wrote something down.

A claim. Third-party liability cover is mandatory for drones in several countries, Germany among them, at any weight. Report a claim and the insurer wants to know when, where and how long you flew and who was at the controls. An entry written the same day carries a different weight from a memory eight months old.

Someone asking. A complaint from a neighbour, a query from the police, a landowner who wants to know who flew over their roof. With the date, time, launch point and flight duration, that is settled in two minutes.

Maintenance. Batteries age by charge cycle, motors and propellers by operating hours. Without a total across all your flights you do not know whether a battery is at 40 cycles or 180 — so you either replace it too early or once too late.

Your own progress. For the A2 certificate you declare that you have practised. Renewing A1/A3 and A2 happens every five years and needs no flight hours. But a pilot who can see that a year produced twelve flights totalling 90 minutes judges themselves more accurately than someone who believes they fly “all the time”.

What goes into a drone flight log?

There is no prescribed format. In the specific category, your authorisation names what it additionally requires; for everyone else, this set of fields has proven itself.

The basic entry — the minimum that always makes sense:

Field	Why
Date and take-off time	Identifies the flight unambiguously, even with several in one day
Drone	With more than one aircraft, the precondition for every maintenance calculation
Location	Place name plus coordinates — the name alone is worthless out on a farm track
Flight duration in minutes	The basis for operating hours and battery cycles
Note	Weather, purpose, anything unusual

Additionally, once things get more formal:

Field	Why
Operating category	A1, A2, A3 or specific — the first question anyone asks
Pilot in command	Relevant as soon as more than one person flies
Incidents	Explicitly required in the specific category
Permit / reference number	Ties the flight to the authorisation it took place under

What does not belong in it: the names and photographs of uninvolved people. A flight log is a record of operations, not a surveillance file.

Free template to download

Two formats, neither needs an account:

• Drone flight log as a PDF — A4 landscape, one line per flight, print it and put it in the bag. For anyone who would rather write with a pen on site.
• Drone flight log as a CSV — header row plus one example line, opens straight in Excel, Numbers or LibreOffice. Semicolon separated, UTF-8.

The CSV deliberately uses the same columns as the Hoverpoint export. Move from the spreadsheet to the app later and you import your existing flights instead of retyping them.

Paper, spreadsheet or app?

	Paper	Spreadsheet	App
Filling it in on site	good	awkward	good
Capturing coordinates	by hand	by hand	automatic
Totals and statistics	no	with formulas	automatic
Lost if you lose it	yes	depends on your backup	cloud backup
Printout you can show	already is one	mediocre	PDF at the touch of a button
Cost	printing	none	none

Honestly: for ten flights a year, paper is fine. From the second drone onwards, for flights under an authorisation, or as soon as somebody asks about operating hours, adding it up by hand gets tedious.

The flight log in Hoverpoint

The flight log in Hoverpoint is free — entries, list, statistics, PDF and CSV export, all without Pro. Only the four extended fields are Pro (operating category, pilot in command, incidents, permit reference), which is precisely what you need when you put the log in front of an authority or an insurer.

A flight gets in three ways:

1. By hand — date, drone, location, duration. Four fields, done.
2. Offered automatically after the flight. End “I’m flying here” on the map and the app asks whether the flight should go in the log — start time, duration, position and the active drone are already filled in. You check and save. Flights under a minute are never offered, so a stray tap on the switch does not pollute the log.
3. From a flown waypoint route — launch point, name and linked drone come across, you enter the duration.

What happens after that:

• Place name from coordinates. One tap turns 50.0821 / 8.4903 into a place name. Leave the location field empty and the app looks it up quietly on save.
• Every flight on the map. Grouped by launch site with a counter — you see at a glance where you actually fly, and where you have not been for two years.
• Year in review. Flights, flight time, aircraft, longest flight — per year or across everything.
• Export as PDF and CSV. The PDF is A4 landscape with the pilot’s name, period, flight count and total flight time in the header; the Pro columns appear only when they are actually filled. The CSV is the format for your own analysis.
• Share as an image. A single flight or a year’s summary as a tile for social media, with the flight path drawn in.
• Cloud backup. Encrypted on request and restored on a new device. A flight log that disappears with the phone is not a flight log.

Importing flights you already have

In the browser at web.hoverpoint.info, Hoverpoint reads existing records — several files at once:

• Airdata CSV
• DJI and PhantomHelp CSV
• OpenDroneLog (German and English headers)
• Hoverpoint’s own export

Duplicates are detected along the way (same start to the minute, same drone — both against what is already there and within the files), the aircraft is matched against your hangar, and figures such as altitude, distance and top speed are carried into the notes as a line. Place names can be looked up for the whole import in one go.

Raw DJI log files (.txt, .dat) are not readable by Hoverpoint, and it says so — for those you need a detour through Airdata or PhantomHelp, which turn them into a CSV.

Imported flights reach the app through the cloud backup.

Frequently asked questions

More guides for drone pilots

• Drone rules in Germany
• Drone weather: when is it safe to fly?
• NOTAMs for drone pilots
• Flying a drone abroad: rules for 140 countries
• EU drone licence: A1/A3 or A2
• Drone flight log: rules, content, template
• Drone wind limits by model

Try everything for free: Hoverpoint for Android and iOS, or straight in your browser at web.hoverpoint.info.

Note: this page reflects the situation as of September 2026 and is neither legal advice nor an official clearance. The regulations in force at the time of your flight are what count.