Why are planes flying so low over my house, and is it legal?

A jet passing over the roof at 1,500 ft, wheels down, can look close enough to hit the chimney. If you live within 10 or 15 km of a runway, near the line planes follow to land, it is almost certainly a normal landing, at the height every landing plane passes your street. The rules on minimum heights do apply to planes, just not to the part of the flight where they are landing or taking off.

Why landing planes are so low

Landing planes descend on a straight, shallow slope, the glide path, which lines up with the runway many kilometres out. The standard angle is 3 degrees. That means a plane loses only about 170 ft for every kilometre it travels (300 ft for every nautical mile), so it has to start low a long way from the airport.

At Heathrow, our recorded flights put landing planes about 400 ft above the ground over Hounslow West, 2 km before the runway, 1,400 ft over St Margarets at 8 km and 2,700 ft over Putney at 15 km. On the other approach, over Windsor, they are about 1,100 ft over Datchet. Every landing plane passes each of those places at much the same height.

Before they reach the glide path, planes are guided in at set minimum heights. At Heathrow they may not join it below 2,500 ft during the day, about 14 km (7.5 nautical miles) out, or below 3,000 ft at night. So a plane flying level at 2,500 to 3,000 ft some way from the airport is lining up to land, not doing anything wrong.

Take-offs are the opposite. They climb far more steeply and turn onto their routes, so a plane that is low over your house several kilometres from the runway is nearly always coming in, not going out. For the full picture of heights on the way in and out, see how high planes fly when landing and taking off.

A few airports use a steeper slope. London City's approach is 5.5 degrees, which the airport says keeps arriving planes higher for longer. In our recordings its landing planes are about 1,350 ft up 4 km out, against about 700 to 750 ft at Heathrow.

Why big jets look closer than they are

Height is hard to judge from the ground. The Civil Aviation Authority says so plainly when it asks people to report low flying, and Gatwick notes that large aircraft such as the A380 can appear lower than they are.

The reason is size. An Airbus A380 is 79.8 m from wingtip to wingtip. A Cessna 172, a typical small private plane, is 11 m (36 ft 1 in). At 2,000 ft, the A380 fills as much of the sky as the Cessna would at about 280 ft. Big jets are also much louder, and a loud sound feels close.

So if one plane in the evening looks lower than the rest, check its type before its height. It is usually a larger aircraft on the same line at the same height. If planes seem lower than they used to be, the slope has probably not changed: Gatwick points out that its approach is still the standard 3 degrees. What changes more often is how many planes use your line, and why that happens is in why you get more planes than last year.

Is it legal? The minimum heights in short

The European, UK and US rules on minimum heights all start with the same exception: they do not apply when a plane needs to be lower to take off or land. Outside that, these are the minimums, measured from the highest obstacle near the aircraft rather than from your garden.

Outside towns, the UK lets planes flying by sight in daylight go below 500 ft as long as they stay at least 500 ft from any person, vessel, vehicle or structure. The US rule also requires, anywhere, a height from which a plane could make an emergency landing without putting people on the ground at risk. The European rules let the regulator give permission to fly lower, and the US rule lets helicopters fly below the town and countryside minimums if they put no one at risk and keep to any routes the FAA sets for them.

In practice: an airliner at 1,000 ft over your street 5 km from the runway is legal. A light aircraft circling at 600 ft over a town with no airfield nearby probably is not. The exceptions, the permissions and how to report a breach are covered in how low a plane can legally fly over houses.

When low is unusual

Some low planes are not normal landings. These are the usual ones.

• Go-arounds. When the crew or air traffic control is not satisfied that a landing will be safe, the plane abandons it, climbs away and comes round again. At Gatwick, a go-around climbs straight ahead to 3,000 ft and then turns south, so it can pass over streets that never see landing planes, lower than people there expect. They are rare: in most months of 2021, between 1 and 4 in every 1,000 arrivals at Gatwick went around. The commonest reasons were a runway still occupied, the weather and an unstable approach.
• Training and checks. Pilots learn by flying circuits around small airfields, at about 1,000 ft above the ground in the FAA's standard pattern and 500 ft for helicopters. The UK allows practice approaches at airfields below the usual minimums. Airports also have their landing systems checked by a small plane that makes approach after approach: at Gatwick about every six months, usually at night.
• Police and air ambulance helicopters. Their work often needs them low. Air ambulances circle to find a safe place to land, and the National Police Air Service says its crews fly higher at night to reduce noise.
• Light aircraft and private helicopters. They fly by sight and must keep to the minimums in the table. The UK's 2026 air navigation guidance asks the Civil Aviation Authority to steer them towards flying with consideration over built-up areas.
• Military jets. In the UK, fast jets train as low as 250 ft in the Low Flying System, but they generally avoid major towns and cities. Military flying has its own rules.

Planes that circle rather than pass straight over are explained in why planes circle.

How to check what you saw

Start with the time. On a flight tracker, or on our free flight map, which replays a whole day of landings and take-offs, find the plane that passed over at that moment. If it was lined up with the runway at about the same height as the planes before and after it, it was a normal landing. If it was off the usual lines, circling, or much lower than the others, it is worth a closer look.

To see what is normal over one address across a whole year, not just one afternoon, a Flight Noise report shows how high the planes pass over it, from every recorded landing and take-off of the last twelve months.

If you think a plane broke the rules, note the time and direction, and if you can, take a photo or video with a fixed point such as a house or a tree in the frame; the Civil Aviation Authority says this helps identify the aircraft and its height. For planes using the airport, the airport's noise team is the first stop. In the UK, the Civil Aviation Authority takes reports of suspected breaches of the low-flying rules. In the US, the FAA's online portal takes noise complaints and safety concerns.