Flying late in the day means knowing exactly when the light-of-day rules end and the after-dark rules begin, because the FAA draws those lines by the clock, not by how dark it looks to you. Two terms mark the boundaries. Night, as defined in § 1.1, is the period between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight, as published in the Air Almanac and converted to local time. Civil twilight itself, for the purpose of § 107.29's lighting rule, is pinned to the sun: outside Alaska, it is the 30 minutes before official sunrise (ending at sunrise) and the 30 minutes after official sunset (beginning at sunset). So the day splits into three regimes — daylight, the two civil-twilight windows that bracket it, and night in between — and each carries its own requirements.

Chapter 1 noted that flying at night no longer takes a waiver; § 107.29 is what replaced that regime, and the swap is worth understanding. Under § 107.29(a)(1), you may operate at night only if the remote pilot in command has completed an initial knowledge test or training under § 107.65 after April 6, 2021 — the date the current night rule took effect. The old system granted night operations case by case through a waiver; the new one folds night into the standard aeronautical knowledge every remote pilot keeps current (the recency requirement covered in Chapter 1), on the condition that the knowledge was tested or refreshed under the post-2021 standard that now includes night operations. A pilot whose last knowledge test or training predates April 6, 2021 does not automatically hold night privileges.

Which regime the clock puts you in decides what the rules demand, and the demands step up as the light goes. In full daylight, neither the night-training condition nor the lighting rule applies. In civil twilight — those 30-minute windows around sunrise and sunset — § 107.29(b) requires the anti-collision lighting covered in the next section, but not the night-training date. At night, both apply at once: the current post-2021 training and the lighting. That is why, before any dusk or dawn job, the first question is not whether you can still see the aircraft but which regime the clock has moved you into, because it sets what the pilot and the aircraft must each carry.