Drone insurance
Also known as: liability cover, UAV insurance
Liability and hull cover for flying a camera aircraft, required for commercial work in many countries and sensible anywhere a crash could injure somebody.
Updated
What it means
Two separate things get called insurance. Liability covers damage an aircraft does to people and property; hull cover replaces the aircraft itself after a crash. The two are sold separately and confused constantly.
Liability is the one that is often mandatory. Commercial flying in much of Europe requires it by law, and event organisers frequently ask for proof before a pilot is allowed near a course.
Hull cover is a judgement call. A Sub-250 g drone is rarely worth insuring against loss, while a heavy Cinelifter carrying a camera is a different conversation entirely, and most pilots reach that point only after a replacement they paid for themselves.
How it works in practice
Proof travels with the pilot. A certificate on a phone and a registration number on the airframe answer most questions on site, which matters more than the policy wording.
Policies care about how the aircraft was flown. Flying outside Visual line of sight (VLOS) or above a permitted height can void a claim, so the rules and the cover are the same subject.
Logs become evidence when something happens. A Drone flight log showing height and distance is what an insurer reads after an incident, and it is written whether the pilot likes it or not. Deleting an inconvenient log afterwards is worse than the flight that produced it.
What to watch out for
Recreational policies do not quietly extend to paid work. A pilot who sells a highlight from a flight has done commercial work, and a hobby policy will say so after the fact.
Event coverage is a common gap. Flying over a crowd at a Bike park is usually excluded outright, regardless of what the general liability figure says. Reading the exclusions before a shoot is the whole job.
Finally, insurance does not make a flight legal. Remote ID, registration and local airspace rules are separate requirements, and holding a policy satisfies none of them.
How RawClip handles it
Insurance sits outside the editing side entirely, but it shapes what material exists. Pilots flying inside their cover produce footage from legal positions, which is the same footage that holds up if a highlight is later published somewhere public.