A drone pays for itself on the first steep-slope estimate you do not have to climb. It also quietly changes what your insurance covers. The standard commercial general liability form has excluded aircraft for decades, and the insurance industry decided some years ago that a quadcopter is an aircraft. If nobody told your carrier you are flying, the odds are good that the exact activity you now do on every inspection sits outside the policy you are paying for. Here is what the forms say, what the FAA expects, and the short list of things to fix before the next flight.
1. The CGL Aircraft Exclusion Was Never Written With You in Mind
Every unendorsed commercial general liability policy contains an aircraft, auto and watercraft exclusion. It removes coverage for bodily injury and property damage arising out of the ownership, maintenance, use or entrustment to others of any aircraft the insured owns or operates. The clause predates consumer drones by half a century — it exists because aviation risk is priced by aviation underwriters, not by the people who rate roofing contractors.
The question that mattered once drones got cheap was whether an unmanned aircraft is an aircraft for the purposes of that sentence. The insurance industry answered it by writing dedicated forms rather than leaving it to argument. ISO published a matched set of unmanned aircraft endorsements: exclusions on one side, limited grant-backs on the other. Their existence is the answer. If drones were obviously outside the aircraft exclusion, nobody would have needed to draft an exclusion specifically for them.
What this means in practice is that your coverage position depends on which endorsements are attached to your policy, not on what feels reasonable. Two roofers with the same carrier and the same premium can be in opposite positions because one of them has a scheduling endorsement and the other does not.
2. The Four Form Numbers Worth Knowing
CG 21 09 is the broad unmanned aircraft exclusion. It removes bodily injury, property damage and personal and advertising injury arising out of the ownership, maintenance, use or entrustment to others of unmanned aircraft. If this endorsement is on your policy and you fly, your drone operations are simply not covered.
CG 21 10 is the narrower version, excluding Coverage A only — bodily injury and property damage — and leaving personal and advertising injury alone. That matters more than it sounds: a drone complaint is as likely to be about a neighbour's privacy as about a broken window, and those two allegations land in different parts of the policy.
CG 24 50 and CG 24 52 run the other way. They give back limited coverage, but only for the specific aircraft listed in the endorsement schedule and only for the operations described there. That is the shape of the fix: coverage comes back attached to a scheduled airframe and a scheduled use, not as a blanket. Buy a second drone, or start doing something materially different with the first one, and the schedule needs to change with you.
There is one more trap worth naming. The exclusion forms do not carve out liability you assume under an insured contract. If you have signed a contract agreeing to indemnify a general contractor or a property manager for anything arising from your operations, and a drone incident is what arises, the assumed liability is excluded too. Hiring a third-party pilot does not automatically move the exposure off your paper either.
3. Part 107 Is a Regulatory Question, Not a Coverage One
Flying a drone for a commercial purpose in the United States means operating under the FAA's Part 107 rules, which require a Remote Pilot Certificate, aircraft registration, and compliance with operating limits on altitude, airspace and flight over people. Roof inspection for a paying customer is a commercial purpose. There is no hobbyist reading of it available to a contractor documenting a job.
Two things follow that roofers routinely conflate. First, holding a Part 107 certificate does not give you insurance; it gives you legal permission to fly. Second, and more painfully, flying without one does not merely risk an FAA enforcement action — it hands any carrier that wants a reason a clean argument at claim time, because you were conducting an unlawful operation when the loss occurred.
Treat the certificate as a documentation asset. Keep the remote pilot certificate number, the aircraft registration, and your flight log where you can produce them, in the same place you keep OSHA training records. If you ever need them, you will need them quickly.
4. Where Drone Claims Actually Come From
The imagined claim is a fly-away that hits somebody. The real claims are duller and more common. A drone descends into a customer's skylight, or clips a satellite dish, or lands in a swimming pool. A gust pushes it into a parked car in the driveway of the house you are quoting. Property damage claims of a few thousand dollars, which is exactly the size of loss an excluded policy leaves you to pay yourself.
The second category is the one contractors underestimate: privacy and nuisance complaints from neighbours. A camera on a mast over a residential street generates complaints that arrive as personal and advertising injury allegations rather than property damage. This is why the difference between CG 21 09 and CG 21 10 is not academic.
The third is data. Inspection footage of a customer's property is a record you now hold, and how you store and share it is a question your customers will eventually ask. It is not a general liability question at all, but it belongs on the same checklist.
5. Tell Your Underwriter Before the Renewal, Not After the Claim
The whole problem is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore. Ask your broker one question: does my current general liability policy carry an unmanned aircraft exclusion, and if so, which form number? The answer is on your policy schedule. If the answer is CG 21 09 or CG 21 10 with no matching grant-back, you have a gap that costs nothing to discover and a great deal to discover late.
From there the options are ordinary. Schedule the aircraft back onto the general liability policy with a limited coverage endorsement, or buy a standalone unmanned aircraft liability policy, which is what most contractors with more than one drone end up doing. The premium for a single inspection drone is not the obstacle; not knowing you needed it is.
Do the same for any subcontracted pilot. If you hire a drone service, collect their certificate of insurance the way you would from any other sub, check it names unmanned aircraft liability specifically, and confirm you are an additional insured on it. A general liability certificate from a pilot whose own policy excludes drones is a piece of paper that proves nothing.
6. A Short Pre-Flight List for the Business, Not the Aircraft
Confirm the form numbers on your general liability schedule and whether an unmanned aircraft grant-back is attached. Keep the remote pilot certificate and aircraft registration on file. Log flights with date, address and pilot. Get certificates from any subcontracted pilot that name unmanned aircraft cover, and be listed as an additional insured on them.
Then check your contracts. If you indemnify others for your operations, assume the drone falls inside that promise and that an unendorsed policy will not respond to it. That is the sentence that turns a small hardware purchase into an uninsured contractual exposure.
None of this makes drones a bad idea. Aerial documentation of a roof before and after work is some of the most useful claim evidence a contractor can produce, and it keeps people off ladders. It is worth doing properly.
This article is general information for roofing contractors, not legal or coverage advice. Policy wording, statutes and rating rules vary by carrier and by state — read your own forms and talk through your programme with a broker who writes roofing. Get a quote.