What goes into a drone operations manual (MANEX)? Guide and structure (2026)

Officially: to describe your organisation and your operating procedures, consistently with the requirements of your scenarios. The DGAC puts it this way: the MANEX describes how you carry out your regulatory obligations. In practice, a good MANEX meets three very concrete needs:

• Standardise — any two pilots on your team prepare and fly a mission the same way;
• Prove — during an inspection, it shows that your operation is thought through, not improvised;
• React — loss of link, intrusion by a third party, emergency landing: emergency procedures should be decided in advance, not at 80 metres up.

Any operator flying in the Specific category — both standard scenarios STS-01/STS-02 (the operational declaration rests on them) and specific authorisations (SORA/PDRA). In the pure Open category it is not required — but as soon as your activity becomes professional (a team, industrial clients, tenders), a procedures manual becomes a de facto industry standard: many clients require it in the bid file.

For an STS declaration, the MANEX is not attached to the declaration: it may be requested during an inspection. For an operational authorisation, EASA expects it to be submitted to the competent authority from SAIL III upwards.

The content of a MANEX is set by Appendix 5 of the Annex to Regulation (EU) 2019/947, and the DGAC points to the structure EASA publishes in AMC1 UAS.SPEC.030(3)(e): the recommended structure of Chapter A.3 of Annex A to AMC1 Article 11. The DGAC recommends using it, provided it is adapted, that is completed or amended to reflect your own operation.

The preliminary pages come first: cover page, document control (the revision log), other applicable documents, purpose and scope, list of contents, definitions and abbreviations. Then come eight parts:

For an operator under a standard scenario, the DGAC spells out what these procedures must cover at least:

• operational procedures that keep flights safe;
• compliance with the safety requirements of the operational area;
• protection against unlawful interference and unauthorised access;
• compliance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on personal data, with an impact assessment when the data protection authority requires one;
• guidelines for remote pilots to minimise nuisance, including noise, for people and animals;
• identifying, reporting and analysing safety occurrences, incidents and accidents.

The MANEX also holds the up-to-date list of authorised remote pilots, with the aircraft they may fly and the activities they may carry out, and the list of the other trained people safety depends on.

In Dronops, the MANEX is drafted from what the application already knows about your operation: your identity, your declared scenarios, your fleet, your remote pilots and your insurance. You rewrite the passages that must state your own procedures, the application points out inconsistencies between that data, such as an aircraft the insurance does not properly cover or an expired remote-pilot certificate, then you sign the version.

Every signed version is frozen and stays downloadable, in Word and PDF, from the revision log. When your activity changes after the signature, an aircraft or a remote pilot joining or leaving, a scenario declared or dropped, an insurance policy replaced, Dronops tells you what the version in force no longer describes, so that you revise it.

• The copy-paste template — a generic MANEX describing drones you do not own and procedures you do not apply. Worse than no MANEX: it is a documented non-compliance.
• The dead document — written once in 2023, never revised: the fleet has changed, the team has turned over, the rules have moved to EASA… the gap keeps growing.
• No version control — who changed what, when, and which version is authoritative? Without a revision log or signature, it is impossible to establish.
• The team has never read it — a MANEX that pilots discover during an inspection protects no one. The DGAC requires the MANEX to be known and strictly applied by the staff concerned.

The DGAC guide for the Specific category sets two obligations:

• Amendment — the MANEX is amended to reflect changes in the regulation and any change in the activity that affects it: a new aircraft, a new scenario, a new area, a change of organisation.
• Archiving — the operator archives the MANEX and all its amendments, and keeps them available to the authorities for an inspection.

So keep every superseded version, not only the latest: after an occurrence, what counts is the version in force on the day of the flight. The DGAC also asks you to keep records of training, maintenance, flights, incidents and occurrence reports for three years.

The method that works comes down to four habits:

• A review on a fixed date (twice a year is enough for most operators) put on the calendar;
• An update on each event: a new drone, a new scenario, a regulatory change, an incident → the relevant section is revised within the week;
• Systematic versioning: version number, date, author, change log, signature of the person in charge;
• A tracked distribution: each pilot acknowledges receipt of the current version.