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Airport apron with terminal, jet bridge, control tower and a parked aircraft behind the perimeter fence, no airline markings visible.
drone no-fly zone airport section 21h LuftVO

Drone No-Fly Zones at German Airports: What Section 21h LuftVO Means

An airport is not an ordinary fenced site. Section 21h LuftVO sets its own, considerably larger exclusion zones — regardless of who owns the ground underneath.

werob· Systems integrator for robotics· 18 September 2026

Anyone wanting to fly a drone near a German airport runs into a considerably stricter rule than on an ordinary works site. Section 21h LuftVO sets a 1 km lateral buffer from an airport's boundary, plus a no-fly exclusion off each runway's extended centreline running 5 km long and 2 km wide in both directions. At airfields that are not airports, a flat 1.5 km buffer from the perimeter still applies. werob and wedrone have no deployments in this space; this article only maps the legal position.

Key Takeaways

The rule in detail

Under the current version of the LuftVO, a flat 1.5 km buffer no longer applies to airports. Instead: a 1 km lateral buffer from the boundary, plus its own no-fly exclusion off each runway's extended centreline, 5 km long and 2 km wide in both directions. Airfields that are not airports keep the flat 1.5 km buffer around the perimeter.

Who grants the exemption

For airports, the exemption sits with the competent state aviation authority (Landesluftfahrtbehörde). For simple airfields and heliports, clearance from the flight operations office or the operator is enough. That is a materially different path than the standard scenarios under EU 2019/947 that apply on a private site.

The context: who runs these sites

The ADV airport association's currently published membership map (as of January 2026) lists 30 members: 23 international commercial airports and 7 regional airports. Bundespolizei states it is responsible for aviation security (§4 Bundespolizeigesetz, Luftsicherheit) at 13 major German airports.

What this is not

This article maps the legal position; it is not an announcement. werob and wedrone have no airport-security deployments and no counter-drone product in the partner catalogue. The general compliance path for drone operations over a controlled site you own sits on the wedrone Site security page.

FAQ

Does werob offer a drone solution for airports?
No. This article maps the legal position under Section 21h LuftVO; werob and wedrone have no deployments in this space.
Does the 1.5 km buffer still apply?
Only at airfields that are not airports. At airports, a 1 km lateral buffer applies plus the 5 km x 2 km exclusion off each runway direction.
Is a SORA 2.5 authorisation enough for the airport zone?
No. The exemption for the Section 21h LuftVO zone is additionally granted by the competent state aviation authority, independent of the SORA compliance path under EU 2019/947.

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2 September 2026
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