Three Legislative Yuan budget evaluations log 23 drone-caused airport closures in Taiwan between FY2019 and August 2023, and every row's response column repeats one sentence: on notification, go to the scene with the Aviation Police and investigate. Article 99-13(6) of the Civil Aviation Act gives an airport the verb 'enforce against', not 'stop or remove' — yet the FY2024 report says every airport has already procured handheld jammers.
Paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article 99-13 of the Civil Aviation Act say 'government agencies, schools or legal persons', but paragraph 7's proviso — the only sentence letting a site operator 'take appropriate measures to stop or remove' a drone — says only 'government agencies', and Taipower, CPC and the fabs are legal persons. Their remaining path is to have a municipality announce a restricted zone and 'enforce against' violators, which drops the penalty from an NT$300,000 minimum to an NT$300,000 maximum, while importing a jammer requires 'critical infrastructure provider' status that you learn you hold by receiving a letter.
Eight municipal police departments now run drone units, and the authority to fly is clear — Article 99-16(2) of the Civil Aviation Act exempts agencies performing statutory duties. But that is a flight-safety exemption: a Taipei City legal opinion says it 'may be unable to serve as the legal basis for conducting administrative investigation by drone', and the special-compulsory-measures chapter passed in July 2024 authorises GPS, IMSI-catchers and private-space imaging with no aerial-investigation provision at all.
'Drone' appears in 19 of Taiwan's central statutes and regulations; 'counter-drone' appears in exactly one, and that one is a procurement act. Six settings are authorised to 'stop or remove' an intruding drone and none of them says by what means — Article 99-13 of the Civil Aviation Act says only 'take appropriate measures', while the 31-item police instrument list includes mortars but no jammer, and Article 67(1) of the Telecommunications Management Act has no public-duty exception.
Reading the whole specification turns up three counter-intuitive things: of the seven mandatory items only three sit on the aircraft and the rest on the ground control station; an unencrypted link still passes, as long as the manual or the box states the reason or the risk — the rule asks for disclosure, not encryption; and the five items that actually test resilience (spoofing, jamming, link loss, known firmware vulnerabilities, app certification) are all in Chapter 8, which is optional.
In 2022 Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation issued a press release titled 'Drone Licensing Overhaul! Obscure Questions Removed, Question Banks Fully Published,' putting all 1,420 questions online — 388 general, 588 professional, 324 renewal, 120 simplified renewal. The stated reason was candid: candidates said it was too hard. And the published bank became a policy document in its own right — the meteorology subject imports the manned-aviation syllabus wholesale, and flight principles lean heavily on fixed-wing aerodynamics, while most candidates fly multirotors.
Taiwan's Civil Aviation Act drone chapter regulates flight safety, not the people being flown over — and that isn't my commentary, it's the Legislative Yuan's own 2020 research report: the chapter 'contains no specific provision on the privacy management that matters most to the public.' So privacy falls back on Article 315-1 of the Criminal Code and the Personal Data Protection Act, and case law shows that catches part of it: pointing a drone at a hot spring room drew an indictment, raising a phone to a window drew four months. What it doesn't catch is evidence — the report's own words: 'by the time the victim notices it, it may already have vanished.'
The general licence is written-test only and costs NT$450 total (NT$200 test + NT$250 certificate). The professional basic tier adds a practical test and medical exam for NT$1,900. Professional tiers must be climbed in order — reaching the top bracket realistically takes 18 months to two years. Each advanced group (G1/G2/G3) costs another NT$1,200. Fee figures come from Annex 17 of the regulations; the widely circulated 'NT$500 practical test' is wrong.
Register anything 250g or heavier; the registration number expires after 2 years. Individuals only need a licence at 2kg–15kg with navigation equipment. The licence term is now 3 years, not 2, and the student licence age dropped to 14, not 16. This piece covers only the currently effective text of the Remotely Piloted Drone Management Regulations, and flags the three most common outdated claims circulating online.