so i just bought my first drone, its a dji mini 4 pro and my neighbor told me i need to register it with like the government or something before i can even fly it in my own yard. is that actually true? it seems kind of crazy to me that you cant just fly a thing you bought on your own property without asking permission from the faa or whoever. i live in ohio if that matters. just want to fly around and take some photos of my house and yard, maybe the surrounding fields, nothing crazy.

yeah your neighbor is kind of right but also kind of wrong lol. the mini 4 pro is under 250g which is the magic number the faa uses. if you stay under 250g you dont technically need to register with the faa for recreational flying. but ? and this is important ? you still have to follow the basic rules even without registration. staying under 400 feet agl, not flying over people, keeping it in visual line of sight, not flying near airports without authorization through the faa drone zone or laanc system. your backyard flying sounds totally fine honestly as long as there isnt a controlled airspace situation near you. ohio has a bunch of class d and class c airspace around the bigger cities so worth checking b4 you just launch.

I just went through all this last month. I was so confused too. The FAA website is honestly kind of a mess to navigate but there's a thing called B4UFLY which is an app that shows you if you're in restricted airspace. I'd download that before flying anywhere honestly. Also check if your specific city or county has local ordinances because some places have piled their own rules on top of the federal ones and you wont find those on the faa site.