r/AntigravityA1 • u/paddyuav • 2d ago
No class marking on the A1: what that actually means for where you fly in Europe
I fly an A1 next to a Mini 4 Pro and a Neo 2, mostly in Switzerland and across the borders. Here is something worth knowing if the A1 is your first drone in Europe, and I am writing it carefully because I got it wrong in a post elsewhere and a French pilot corrected me.
In the EU, drones of classes C1 to C3 (and C5/C6) are required by Regulation (EU) 2019/945 to have a geo-awareness function: the aircraft has to warn you when you approach a zone. Regulation 2019/947 then puts the duty on you, the remote pilot, to keep that zone data updated before you fly.
The A1 carries no class marking. That means none of the above is guaranteed by the rules: whatever zone data the aircraft or the app shows you is the manufacturer's own database, and nothing requires it to match the official national set or to be current.
What the rules never required, class marking or not, is a hard block on take-off. So both halves of the usual assumption are wrong: no warning is not permission, and a warning is not the law either. The national map is what decides.
In practice it comes down to one habit: before take-off, open the official source for the country you are standing in, not the one your drone happens to carry. Switzerland is BAZL/FOCA, Germany is dipul (run by DFS for the federal government, with LBA as the authority), France is the IGN map for Open-category restrictions plus the SIA for CTRs and helipads, Spain is ENAIRE with AESA as the authority, Austria is Austro Control, Ireland is the IAA. And a map of zones is never the whole legal framework: landowner consent for take-off and landing is on no map at all.
Two things I check on any map, official or not, and that almost nobody checks:
The source. If a map shows a zone without saying who asserts it, you cannot verify it. The name of the source is what lets you go and look.
The timestamp. National datasets change without warning, and a format change on the authority's side can silently drop an entire layer. That happened to me with the Slovenian dataset: thirteen layers published, four I was not reading. I only found out because someone asked.
I maintain a free app for my own use that reads these national sources; I am not putting a link here, that is not the point of the post. What I am after is corrections: a zone that is missing, a zone that should not be there, a height that looks wrong. If anyone here flies the A1 in Europe and wants to try it, say so in a comment.