Ready for Drones (RPAS) in the European Union (EU): Are you?
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/16th November 2017, DRONE MARKET WATCHTM/ Drones, or remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), as they are known, are no longer used solely by the military. In the UK alone, there are now hundreds of companies, mainly SMEs, using RPAS to provide a range of services, including photography, land surveying, building inspection and crop analysis. RPAS will revolutionise what the aviation industry can achieve and how it is regulated. Europe Union already took a number of regulatory initiatives in order to reap the future benefits of this exciting new technology.
RPAS are becoming a reality and continue to be more and more commercially available on a European scale. The RPAS market poses a real opportunity to foster job creation and a source for innovation and economic growth for the years to come. It also poses new challenges related to safety, security and respect of citizens’ rights which must be tackled before RPAS can be used on any serious scale in a civilian environment. The lack of harmonized regulations across Europe and of validated technologies forms the main obstacle to open the RPAS market and to integrate RPAS in European non-segregated airspace.
Industry is urging rapid steps towards the establishment of an enabling RPAS regulatory framework. It is now the right time to unlock the EU RPAS market with a combination of new and existing regulatory action at the European level dealing with all relevant issues, including the insertion of safety, security, privacy and data protection requirements within existing EU rules in these areas. Also R&D efforts are needed to ensure the progressive integration of RPAS into civil aviation from 2017 onwards.
The European Commission is using the Horizon 2020 programme for supportive R&D actions. In addition, the challenge is to make smart use of existing industrial programmes to bolster the competitiveness of RPAS industry and operators. The European Commission also intends to bring forward, where appropriate, legislative proposals to remove legal uncertainties that hinder the development of the European market and to give European citizens confidence that high levels of protection in terms of safety, security and privacy will be assured.
More information about civil and commercial use of drones (RPAS) and their deployment in the European Union (EU) you may read here: Global Drone (UAV) Flight Regulations
