How this catalog is built

Organised by regulatory jurisdiction

A jurisdiction gets an entry when three things are true: a named authority issues drone rules that apply there, those rules can be cited from a reachable primary source, and a flyer standing there would obey a different rule set than the nearest parent entry.

That is the whole test. It is about which rules you must obey, not about political recognition — the same basis ICAO and IATA use. Hong Kong is listed because the Small Unmanned Aircraft Order is a different legal regime from mainland China's; Puerto Rico is not, because FAA rules apply there unchanged. Names are the plain ones the aviation authorities use for themselves.

Every fact carries a source and a date

Drone rules change roughly twice a year, so an undated fact is close to worthless. Every row on every page links to the official document it came from, with that document's own date, and every page states when we last checked it. Where a regulator's page is undated, we say so rather than inventing a date.

We distinguish clearly between what is in force and what has only been proposed. A great deal of drone coverage does not, and readers end up complying with rules that do not exist — or missing ones that do.

We publish the gaps

When we cannot confirm something from an official source, the page says so. When a whole jurisdiction cannot be verified, it is left out and listed with the reason — 5 of them today, against 3 published.

This is not modesty. In building this catalog we found Brazil's ANAC behind a CAPTCHA with an English page still describing a regulation replaced three months earlier, Colombia's Aerocivil returning 404s, Chile's DGAC blocking crawlers, Mexico's AFAC returning 403, and Tanzania's TCAA serving an invalid TLS certificate. Every third-party drone-law database is stale partly because the primary sources they depend on are unreliable. Saying which parts we could not verify is the only honest way to publish this material.

How it is kept current

Each jurisdiction is re-checked against its own regulator roughly once a month, on a rolling schedule. Known upcoming changes carry a watch date and are checked on that date rather than waiting for their turn. When something has changed, it is added to that country's timeline with the source, and the summary fields it affects are updated in the same pass — which is why the timeline works as an audit trail of the comparison table.

If a regulator's site is unreachable, we do not substitute a secondary source for a headline fact. The old value stands with its old date, and the page shows that date.

What this is not

This is not legal advice, and ListDrone is neither a law firm nor an aviation authority. Use it to find the rule and the regulator quickly — then verify with that regulator before you fly. If you find something wrong or out of date, tell us; it is the fastest way to improve a page.