The records your insurer asks for at renewal
Once a year the renewal comes round, and with it a form. Most of what it asks for is about how you ran the last twelve months: which aircraft, which pilots, what kind of work, and what went wrong. If those answers are in a flight log, the form is copying. If they are in people’s heads, it is guesswork.
This article covers what Part 107 asks you to keep, what insurers’ own application forms ask for, what one insurer says a claim needs, and how to keep the answers ready.
What Part 107 asks you to keep
Not much. Part 107 has no flight-log requirement and, for ordinary operations, no maintenance-log requirement. The exception is a Category 4 operation over people, flown with an aircraft that holds an airworthiness certificate: that owner must keep maintenance records (14 CFR § 107.140).
Two rules do produce dates worth keeping:
- Recurrent training. Under § 107.65, a remote pilot may not use the certificate unless they passed the knowledge test or completed recurrent training “within the previous 24 calendar months” (14 CFR § 107.65).
- Accident reports. Under § 107.9, the remote pilot in command must report to the FAA within 10 calendar days any operation involving serious injury, loss of consciousness, or damage to property other than the aircraft, unless the repair costs $500 or less or the property is worth $500 or less (14 CFR § 107.9).
There is no routine FAA records audit of a small operator. The people who ask for your records are your insurer, at renewal and after a claim, and your clients.
What the application asks for
Several insurers publish their drone application forms. Three are worth reading side by side: Old Republic’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Insurance Application (edition 01-24), Great American’s Unmanned Aircraft Insurance Application (edition 10/17), and Kinsale’s Drone/UAS Operators Supplemental Application. Kinsale’s form has a box marked “Renewal?”, so the same questions come back each term. The questions fall into five groups.
The aircraft
All three forms want a schedule of aircraft. Old Republic’s has a row per aircraft for registration number, serial number, make and model, year, insured value and weight, plus a second table for additional equipment. Great American asks for an insured value for each aircraft and for its payload, and for “Estimated Annual Hours” per aircraft. Kinsale asks for a page per aircraft, including its registration and serial numbers and its total value.
The pilots
Old Republic asks, for each operator, for “UAS Total Time”, “Make/Model Time”, “Certifications and Ratings”, any training, and “Losses / Waivers / Violations”. Kinsale asks for each pilot’s certificate number and says “Please attach copies of all pilot records.” Great American wants a separate pilot record form for each pilot.
BWI, a broker, lists the same items as what “underwriters need to evaluate”: pilot “license level, training history, hours”, the drone’s “make, model, serial number, value”, the operational use and the FAA waivers held (BWI).
Total time and time on type are numbers you can only give from a log. Kinsale also asks for “projected flight hours for the coming term”, which is easiest to estimate from last term’s.
The work
Every form asks what you fly and where. Old Republic has check boxes for purpose of use and operating environment, including night operations. Great American asks for a mission description per aircraft. Kinsale asks which operations you engage in, where you fly, and “Who makes the final go/no go decision before flights?”
The history
Great American asks: “Has Applicant had any UAV claims or losses? (Hull or Liability)” and “Has any insurer cancelled, declined or refused to renew any UAV Insurance?” Kinsale asks you to attach “Currently valued five year loss runs, including claim detail for all losses open or exceeding $15,000”. Its UAS product page also lists copies of “Any FAA or NTSB reports involving insured’s operations” among its submission requirements (Kinsale). A § 107.9 report you filed is one of those.
How you run it
Kinsale asks the most here. It asks for “A copy of your operational manual or standard operating procedures”, for “a copy of your pre-flight UAS inspection procedures and checklist”, whether you do your own maintenance, and “How long are maintenance records maintained?” Great American asks “Do you have a formal written Standard Operating Procedure?”
None of these forms says what a given answer does to the price. They ask.
What a claim needs
The renewal is the planned request. A claim is the unplanned one. SkyWatch.AI, a drone insurer, writes: “Any claim requires detailed documentation. Date and time of incident, weather conditions, aircraft condition before flight, maintenance history, flight purpose, and pilot qualifications all factor into claim processing. Missing records delay claims or result in denials.” (SkyWatch.AI on record-keeping.)
The same page ties this to the recurrent-training clock. SkyWatch.AI writes that letting it lapse “makes every commercial flight illegal”, and that “insurance coverage typically excludes illegal operations.”
Most of that list exists only if somebody wrote it down on the day: the weather, the preflight condition, the purpose of the flight. You cannot rebuild it after the crash.
Does a log lower the premium?
Not that we could confirm. None of the forms and pages cited here says that keeping records lowers a premium, and we found no insurer program offered today that we could confirm does. If an insurer offers you a discount for sharing logs, ask what it reads: a written logbook, or the telemetry your aircraft records.
What the forms do establish is narrower and more useful: they ask, every term, and the answers come from records.
Clients ask too
The insurer is not the only one. SkyWatch.AI notes that “Clients sometimes ask for them to verify service delivery”, meaning flight logs (SkyWatch.AI on record-keeping). The record you keep for the insurer answers the client as well.
A renewal file, kept as you fly
Keep the file current through the year, and renewal becomes copying, not reconstructing:
- An aircraft list. Registration, serial number, make and model, year, value, and the payloads and equipment you would insure with it.
- Hours per aircraft and per pilot. Total time, time on each make and model, and last term’s hours, so you can project the next one.
- One record per pilot. Certificate number, ratings, training, and the month-end date their § 107.65 window runs to.
- A loss and incident list. Every claim, every § 107.9 report, and any incident that might become a claim, with the date and what happened.
- Your procedures. The SOP, the preflight checklist, and who makes the go/no-go call.
- Maintenance history. What was done to which aircraft, and when.
None of this is hard. It needs to be written down as you fly, in one place, by whoever flew.
Tobren Operations is built around this record: the flight log, the aircraft and battery history and the crew behind them, in one place. Start free; the Free plan never expires, and the pricing is on the Operations page.
See it with your own fleet.