An aircraft crashes into an empty field, destroying the drone and its $900 camera payload. No one is injured and nothing else is damaged. What is required?

Part 107 sets two accident reporting triggers and this event meets neither. A report to the FAA within 10 days is required when the operation results in serious injury to any person or any loss of consciousness, or when it causes damage to any property other than the aircraft exceeding $500 to repair or replace at fair market value. Damage to the unmanned aircraft itself is expressly excluded from the property damage calculation, which is what disposes of this case: nobody was hurt, nothing but the drone and its payload was damaged, so despite $900 of loss there is nothing to report. The distractors reconstruct the rule wrongly in three plausible ways — counting the drone's own value toward the threshold, invoking the NTSB for a destroyed aircraft, and tying the requirement to whether the flight was commercial. None of those is how the rule is written, and the exclusion of the aircraft's own damage is the specific point being tested.

Reporting is triggered by serious injury or loss of consciousness, or by more than $500 of damage to property other than the aircraft. Neither occurred here, so no report is required.

Part 107 requires reporting to the FAA within 10 days when an operation results in serious injury or loss of consciousness, or damage exceeding $500 to property other than the unmanned aircraft, valued at repair cost or fair market value.

Your Own Drone Does Not Count. Serious injury, or $500 of somebody else's property — those are the only two triggers.

Ten days to the FAA is the deadline. The NTSB appears in distractors but is not the reporting authority for these accidents.

• •Counting the aircraft's own value toward the $500 threshold
• •Reporting to the NTSB rather than the FAA
• •Tying the requirement to commercial versus recreational purpose