How Low Can You Fly? Minimum Altitudes and Distances

Why it matters

Picture yourself on a sunny Saturday, tracking home along the shoreline with a friend in the right seat. A small town slides under the nose, then a beach with a few hundred people at a festival, then open farmland. At each of those moments the law expects a different minimum height from you — and the reasons are practical, not bureaucratic. If the engine quits over houses, the people below never agreed to share your risk. Minimum altitudes exist to buy you gliding room and to keep noise and danger away from people on the surface.

The exam tests these numbers constantly, and it likes to mix them up. This unit gives you the exact rules from CAR 602.12 to CAR 602.15, in the order you meet them in flight.

The built-up area rule: two tests, both required

Over a built-up area or an open-air assembly of persons, CAR 602.14 imposes two conditions at the same time. Your altitude must be:

1. High enough to land safely after an emergency. If the engine failed right now, you must be able to reach a spot where landing would not create a hazard to people or property on the surface. This is a judgment call that depends on your aircraft's glide performance, the wind and what is below you; and
2. In any case, not lower than a fixed floor. For an aeroplane, that floor is 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal distance of 2,000 feet of the aeroplane.

The second test is the number the exam wants. Notice the wording carefully: it is 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle, not 1,000 feet above the ground. Over a town with a 300-foot radio mast, the mast sets your floor. And the mast counts if it is anywhere within 2,000 feet of you horizontally — roughly a third of a nautical mile — so you cannot skim past it at 1,000 feet AGL with the mast just off your wing.

Other categories have their own floors: balloons must stay 500 feet above the highest obstacle within 500 feet, and helicopters and other non-aeroplanes 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within 500 feet. You only need the aeroplane figure for your exam, but knowing the others helps you spot distractors built from them.

When are you "over" a built-up area?

CAR 602.12 answers this with the same 2,000-foot figure. An aeroplane is deemed to be operating over a built-up area or an open-air assembly of persons whenever that area is within 2,000 feet horizontally of the aeroplane (500 feet for helicopters and balloons). So flying alongside a town, just off its edge, still puts you "over" it for the purposes of the minimum altitude rules until you are more than 2,000 feet away.

What counts as built-up is not defined by a number of houses in the CARs. Read it the way a reasonable person would: towns, cities, villages, dense cottage strips, industrial parks. When in doubt, treat it as built-up and give yourself the 1,000 feet.

Everywhere else: the 500-foot rule

Away from built-up areas and crowds, CAR 602.14 does not set a height above the ground. Instead it says you may not operate closer than 500 feet from any person, vessel, vehicle or structure. This is a distance, measured in any direction — vertically, horizontally or diagonally.

Two consequences follow. First, over an empty field or a lake with nobody around, there is no regulatory minimum altitude at all (although your instructor, your insurer and common sense have plenty to say). Second, a lone farmhouse, a fishing boat or a car on a country road each carries a 500-foot bubble you must stay out of. Descend to 400 feet over an empty lake and a canoe appears: you are now too close, whatever your altimeter says.

Take-offs, approaches and landings

The minimum altitudes in CAR 602.14 do not apply while you are conducting a take-off, an approach or a landing — you obviously have to pass through low altitudes to use a runway. But two other sections govern where that is allowed.

Within the built-up area of a city or town (CAR 602.13), you may only take off, approach or land at an airport, heliport or military aerodrome. The exceptions are narrow: police operations, saving human life, and specific provisions for balloons. Note the vocabulary — an airport is a certified aerodrome; a plain registered aerodrome inside a town does not qualify.

Over a built-up area or an open-air assembly of persons during a take-off, approach or landing anywhere except an airport, heliport or military aerodrome (CAR 602.12), you must fly so that you do not create a hazard to people or property, and at an altitude from which you could land safely if the engine failed or another emergency forced you down at once.

Who may legally fly lower

CAR 602.15 lists the operations that may descend below the minimum altitudes and distances, provided they fly no lower than necessary for the job and create no hazard on the surface:

• police operations and flights to save human life;
• fire-fighting and air ambulance operations;
• fisheries protection, national and provincial park administration, and flight inspection;
• with the appropriate authorisation, aerial work such as aerial application (crop spraying), aerial inspection, aerial photography by an air operator, and helicopter external-load operations;
• flight training conducted by or under the supervision of a qualified flight instructor — which is what makes your low-level and forced-approach practice legal — but only with respect to the 500-foot distance rule, never the built-up-area rule.