Can I fly here? — the airspace checker
🇦🇪 UAE (reviewed edition)
Pin your location and within a second you get: the classification of the site (prohibited / restricted / no known restriction), the specific reason behind it, and the distance and bearing to the nearest airport. The whole calculation runs inside your browser; your location is never sent to any server.
How to read the result
■ Prohibited
The site falls inside the envelope of an airport, an air base, a sovereign or critical facility, or a border strip. Taking off here is not an administrative offence — Article 18 of Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2022 carries imprisonment and a fine.
▲ Restricted
Outside the immediate prohibition circle, but within an approach path, a sensitive envelope, or close to a border. It needs coordination and a prior permit — being outside the red line is not an assumption of permission.
◇ No known restriction
The location did not match any zone in our database. That is not authorisation to fly — the baseline in the UAE is flying inside officially designated areas with a valid registration.
The distances the checker bases its verdict on
Why are these figures larger than the familiar five kilometres? Because the law measures from the airport's outer perimeter fence, whereas any digital tool measures from the reference point at the middle of the runway. At a large airport such as Zayed or Dubai the perimeter extends around three kilometres from the reference point, so the legal five kilometres is, in practice, eight from the centre. A tool that stops at five from the centre will tell you "no restriction" while you are genuinely inside the prohibited area.
That is why each airport's radius has been raised by the extent of its perimeter. The figures are conservative operational estimates rather than a transcription of an official map, and the error in them is deliberately biased towards over-warning: warning you unnecessarily is far cheaper than staying silent about an offence that carries a custodial sentence.
