Low Risk, High Reward: European Regulators Move to Promote Unmanned Aircraft Use
European airspace regulators are working toward unified rules that are based on risk, meaning smaller systems, or ones that fly in sparsely populated areas, would be lightly regulated.
Several speakers at the International Civil Aviation Organization’s first remotely piloted aircraft systems symposium said that such flexible regulations could get unmanned aircraft into the skies for commercial use rapidly, and in some cases have already done so.
“Drones clearly are the talk of the year, and many of our ministers are talking about drones,” Filip Cornelius, the aviation safety chief inside the European Commission’s directorate of mobility and transport, said at the Montreal conference. “In Europe, we think we should embrace drones as an essential part of aviation.”
European regulatory officials and other stakeholders, including Amazon, recently met in Riga, Latvia and created the Riga Declaration, which states as its opening principle that unmanned aircraft should be regulated on a risk-based model.
The declaration also says that European Union-wide rules for providing drone-based services “need to be developed now.”
That part is the challenge, according to several speakers, as these rules also need to be harmonized across different countries in order to be effective. Luc Tytgat, director of safety and strategy management for the European Aviation Safety Agency, noted that 16 European countries have already created rules and 11 are developing them.
EASA plans to try to harmonize the rules, and do so on a “quite aggressive roadmap,” Tytgat said, meeting with stakeholders in June and presenting its plan to the European Commission by the end of the year. Whatever that plan is, the rules will depend on the level of risk involved in a given unmanned aircraft flight.
Patrick Gandil, director general for France’s civil aviation regulatory agency, DGAC, gave an example of what risk-based rules have enabled France to do. In 2012, 50 companies offered UAS-based services or products, he said. By 2015, that had grown to 1,300 companies, including 45 manufacturers. The adoption of risk-based rules in 2012 allowed the market to flourish, he said.
“We don’t want to regulate all that can be imaginable, but only to regulate what we can do, really,” Gandil said.
In France, regulators created four scenarios for regulation, two of which cover line of sight operations and two of which allow for non-line of sight use. For instance, in line of sight use in unpopulated areas, vehicles weighing up to 25 kilograms, or about 55 pounds, could fly up to 150 meters. In populated areas, that weight allowance drops to systems that weight 4 kilograms or less (about nine pounds).
Vehicle weighing up to 25 kilograms could fly as far as 1 kilometer beyond line of sight in unpopulated areas, but couldn’t climb higher than 50 meters. The distance restriction is lifted for vehicles that weigh less than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) but they also can only fly in unpopulated areas.
Google, the Internet company that competes in several industries, now plans to revolutionize small UAS use, said Dave Vos, a longtime industry innovator who now head Google X’s Project Wing program.
Like Amazon, Project Wing is working on using unmanned aircraft for package delivery. Vos showed a photograph of a busy city with thousands of car lights, but noted that above it “there’s nothing but clouds and air. We could really make things completely different by being able to get up there.”
Vos said ADS-B, automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, a satellite-based system that lets aircraft identify their location, is “a really great idea” that faces issues of cost.
However, Google plans to introduce “really, really low-cost ADS-B,” he said. “We are going to do this.”
He said widely adopting such technology could make a mess out of the radar screens of manned aircraft, who might suddenly be faced with tens of thousands of new signals announcing their presence, but technology could provide a fix there, too.
Vos said manned aircraft could be treated as Moses, and the much smaller UAS could just part like the Red Sea when a Moses aircraft came through, then resume their original flight trajectories afterwards.
Ultimately, as unmanned systems prove their safety and reliability at low altitudes, the technology could be used in larger systems that fly higher, culminating, Vos said, in his dream of an unmanned aircraft that can ferry passengers.
“There’s no reason to believe we couldn’t accomplish millions of hours of use in the low altitude airspace over the next couple of years and truly earn our rating as very safe, very reliable and very secure systems, and from there be able to springboard upwards in size, weight and categories of airspace as we move into the aerospace community,” he said.
Google and Amazon aren’t the only companies with their eyes set on package delivery. Matternet, a Silicon Valley startup, has been testing a drone-based system that could deliver medicine and other essential items in developing countries with bad road systems or in megacities with traffic-choked highways.
Paola Santana, the company’s cofounder and chief operating officer, said the company plans to unveil its production-ready system next week, and is eager to talk to regulators around the world about using the system in their countries.