CERFA 15476: France's prior declaration for flying over populated areas
What the CERFA 15476 is for, when it is required, and why filling it by hand is so painful.
The CERFA 15476 is the French form for the prior declaration of a flight over a populated area by an unmanned aircraft. The version in force is 15476*04.
It is what the operator sends to the authority before the operation, to announce a flight where overflight is not a trivial matter.
When it is required
It accompanies operations over populated areas in the Specific category, where the regulation requires warning beforehand rather than reporting afterwards.
⚠️ An acknowledgement of receipt is not an authorisation. This is the most frequent and most expensive confusion: an acknowledgement means the declaration arrived, not that the flight is permitted.
Why filling it by hand is so painful
The official PDF is a form with 191 fields.
The number is not the problem. The problem is that 88 of them carry auto-generated
names — Texte36, Groupe45, sometimes undefined. Those labels say nothing about what
they designate: they can only be identified by their position on the page and the text
printed beside them.
For anyone filing regularly, the consequence is that every declaration re-types the same information — company, operator number, aircraft, remote pilot, area — into a form that remembers nothing.
What Waypoint360 does
We do not redraw the form: we fill the official PDF, the one the authority expects.
- All 191 fields are mapped once and for all, including the 88 unreadable ones, identified one by one by position.
- The data comes from your mission: company, operator, aircraft, remote pilot, area, dates. You do not retype what the platform already knows.
- An automated test checks that every field still exists in the reference PDF. The day the administration reissues the form and renames fields, we will know — instead of silently producing incomplete declarations.
That last point is the real subject: an administrative form changes without warning, and a half-filled declaration does not show.
Going further
- MANEX — the operations manual, often requested at the same time.
- SORA for drones — for operations outside standard scenarios.
- Drone regulations in France.