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C-DRONE GUIDE · 19 AUGUST 2026

Professional night drone flights: regulations and prefectoral authorisation

EU regulation has allowed drone night flights since late 2021, anti-collision light included. France, however, still restricts the practice through an additional national rule: barring a specific case, a night flight in the open category remains prohibited without prefectoral authorisation. For providers who need to operate after dark — public lighting thermal audits, site surveillance, wildlife counts, search operations — understanding this gap between the European framework and French practice changes the mission's whole timeline. Here is what is actually allowed, what needs a prior application, and how to plan around it.

Published on 19 August 2026, reviewed on 19 August 2026 — regulations in force as of August 2026.

What EU law has allowed since 2021

Since 2 December 2021, Regulation (EU) 2019/947 has permitted night flights in the open category across the European Union, France included as far as the EU text itself goes. Article UAS.OPEN.020 sets a single technical requirement: fit the aircraft with a green flashing light, or an equivalent device, visible through 360° and bright enough for both the remote pilot and third parties on the ground to spot the aircraft and judge its trajectory in the dark. The same obligation has applied to the specific category since 1 July 2022. A registered, trained and properly equipped operator therefore meets, on paper at EU level, most of the conditions for flying at night with a class C0 to C4 drone.

In practice, darkness changes the operational picture well beyond the regulatory text: the remote pilot loses part of the ability to make out thin obstacles — cables, guy wires, high branches — and to judge distances, while third parties have less time to spot the aircraft than in daylight. This degradation of night-time perception, documented far beyond aviation alone, is why several national frameworks, France's included, layer additional safeguards on top of the EU authorisation rather than relying on it alone.

The French restriction: banned by default, prefectoral authorisation

France adds to the EU regulation a national rule carried by the "Espace" order governing the use of airspace by unmanned aircraft: night flying in the open category remains prohibited there by default. An exemption can be granted by the territorially competent préfet, case by case, after review by the DSAC (the French civil aviation safety authority) and, depending on the zone, an opinion from territorial defence services. The application must be filed well ahead of time — common practice is a minimum lead time of around thirty days before the intended flight date — which rules out any night mission decided at short notice without a pre-built file.

The order of 23 December 2025, in force since 1 January 2026, introduced a nuance: certain unmanned aircraft may operate at night without an individual exemption inside airspace portions listed in its annex III, provided arrangements ensure effective segregation between the drone and other airspace users — typically U-space zones or dedicated volumes. This case remains the exception: for the large majority of client sites — a company roof, a business park, a farm, a municipal monument — the prefectoral exemption is still the mandatory route. That night flying in the open category stays confined to the exemption case, even after the 2026 reform, is in fact confirmed in our own service pages: professional flight over built-up areas, now allowed by day without overflying people since 1 January 2026, remains explicitly bounded to daytime.

Professional missions that justify a night flight

Night flying is never an end in itself: it is justified when darkness is the very condition of the measurement or observation. Drone thermal imaging is the first case: at night, the thermal inertia built up during the day dissipates and temperature differences become readable without the noise of direct solar radiation — this is the principle behind local authorities' night-time public lighting drone audits, where only darkness lets you measure the light actually cast on the ground. Drone security and site surveillance follows the same logic on the industrial and logistics side: night patrols, alarm-verification flights after closing time — exactly when a site is most exposed.

Ecology and search operations form the second register. Nocturnal wildlife counts by thermal drone exploit the thermal contrast between animals and a cooled ground, invisible in daylight: a study by Louis-Pierre Chrétien, Jérôme Théau and Patrick Ménard published in 2016 in Wildlife Society Bulletin validated this approach, showing reliable detection of white-tailed deer by airborne thermal imaging, with better detection rates at night than in daylight (see the study on Google Scholar). The same thermal camera serves missing-person searches by thermal drone, where night removes confusion with residual solar radiation from surfaces. At the other end of the spectrum, drone light shows are night-time by nature, but fall under a distinct regime: a supervised swarm, a dedicated zone, an authorisation specific to the event.

Reaching for darkness is never neutral for the environment it is meant to document: a landmark review by Kevin Gaston and co-authors, published in 2013 in Biological Reviews, showed that artificial light at night — even brief — disrupts the physiology and behaviour of many species (see the study on Google Scholar). One more reason to frame any night mission near a sensitive natural site strictly, a subject covered in our guide to drones in Natura 2000 zones.

Building the file: lead times, lighting, and the impact of the 2026 reform

A prefectoral exemption file for a night flight should be planned like a project in its own right, not a last-minute formality. At minimum it gathers: the registered operator's identity and insurance certificates, a precise description of the drone and its anti-collision light, the exact mission location with any sensitive zones nearby (aerodromes, military areas, Seveso sites), the targeted time slot and its operational justification, and the safety measures planned for third parties on the ground. Allow a minimum lead time of one month between filing and the flight, to be built into the client schedule from the quote stage onward — a factor that directly affects the delivery date of a scheduled audit or count.

The reform in force since 1 January 2026 also complicates certain cases: the national scenarios S1, S2 and S3 have been replaced by the standardised European scenarios STS-01 (populated area, visual line of sight) and STS-02 (sparsely populated area, beyond visual line of sight), covered in our guide to BVLOS flights and STS/SORA scenarios. Flying in the specific category — often required at night in a populated area or beyond visual line of sight — now requires the remote pilot to hold the EU-recognised CATS certificate, whose content and registration process are detailed in our guide to the CATS remote pilot theory exam. For a company or local authority planning a mission after dark, the safest course remains to plan ahead: request a quote several weeks in advance, stating the site, the mission's objective and the desired time slot, so the provider can qualify the applicable regime and, if needed, start the exemption process in good time.

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