Within the European Union (EU), legal regulations on the safety of civilian drones are currently in place—covering the operational (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947), design (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/945, and traffic (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664) requirements. These rules regulate human oversight through remote pilots, drone operators and drone designers; and the rationales behind such oversight are attribution of responsibility and ensuring safety. Further, systems backing the drone operation are treated as both tools and threats to aviation safety. Critically viewing such duality and human roles for oversight, this paper discusses three regulatory challenges.
Firstly, the current definition of remote pilot may entail a less meaningful presence of the pilot during the drone operation. Secondly, the provision for fully autonomous operations—which can be performed without any human intervention—stands potentially redundant in view of the responsibilities that the operator must allocate for such operations. Thirdly, the current regulation bears implications for the human-centric approach, which the European Commission remains committed to. Ultimately, this paper argues for the need to bring the designers within the ambit of rules more explicitly for improved human oversight.
Samar Abbas Nawaz works as a doctoral researcher at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) for its research project called RegulAIR. The project overall aims to provide new research based knowledge to Norwegian and European regulatory bodies for safe and secure integration of drones in civilian airspace. Samar is specifically researching the regulatory challenges emanating from autonomous civilian drones from European law perspective. He is also affiliated with the department of criminology and sociology of law (IKRS) at UiO as an external PhD candidate.