What are the Part 107 minimum flight visibility and cloud clearance requirements?

Part 107 sets three numbers that must be held together: a minimum flight visibility of three statute miles as observed from the control station, and cloud clearances of 500 feet below and 2,000 feet horizontally from any cloud. Each detail is deliberately chosen and each is a common error point. The visibility is in statute miles, not nautical, and it is assessed from the control station — the pilot's own position — rather than from a reporting station, so a distant METAR informs the judgment but does not make it. The cloud clearances are asymmetric because the risk is asymmetric: an aircraft emerging from a cloud base appears with very little warning, so the vertical margin is generous relative to the altitudes involved, while the horizontal margin gives time to see and avoid an aircraft transiting near the side of a cloud. The requirements apply in every airspace class, day and night, and can be waived only through an FAA waiver.

Part 107 requires a minimum flight visibility of three statute miles from the control station and cloud clearances of 500 feet below and 2,000 feet horizontally from any cloud.

Part 107 requires minimum flight visibility of three statute miles observed from the control station and cloud clearances of 500 feet below and 2,000 feet horizontally from clouds, in all airspace classes, waivable only by FAA waiver.

Three, Five Hundred, Two Thousand. Statute miles of visibility, feet below cloud, feet horizontally.

Visibility is determined from the control station, which is why a distant weather report can never satisfy it by itself.

• •Substituting nautical for statute miles
• •Treating the cloud clearance as a single uniform distance
• •Applying manned VFR minimums to a Part 107 operation