10 Years of Regulations in the Drone Industry

Christian S Struwe, VP Government, Regulatory & Industry Affairs, reflects on the past 10 years working in the drone industry with a focus on regulations. Read his blog here:

As we celebrate a decade of Altitude Angel, we reflect on... regulations

A decade of drone regulations – it could have been a century...

The past ten years have been the most significant ever in terms of development in rules and regulations for uncrewed aviation. This is perhaps not surprising, as regulations have obviously followed the technological strides made during this time. Nevertheless, the progress made is so significant that we take this opportunity to highlight where we came from and what is still missing.

In 2014, things were slowly starting to move towards more international cooperation on regulation for drones. Propelled by the advance of military drone technology as well as the progress by early drone manufacturing pioneers, attention was starting to build around rules enabling the most basic of operations – which were still missing in many jurisdictions. The CAA and the UK was, by many industry insiders, seen as a guiding light with CAP722 allowing many different uses of drones and being one of the first drone regulations with a specific approach for allowing Aerial Work. In the US, the FAA was still banning all commercial drone operations (later to be allowed under “part 107”) and in Europe every state still had it its own rules for drone operations – if they had any at all.

This all changed with the creation of JARUS (Joint Aviation Regulators for Unmanned Systems), the establishment of ICAO’s RPAS panel, and the EU’s move towards first enabling EASA to regulate drones, and then harmonising European drone rules. The UK government and the CAA were instrumental in driving these changes and influencing much of the early work on global harmonisation.

While drone use was picking up, regulatory attention also started turning towards the misuse of drone technology - resulting in more restrictions on drone use being introduced. We all remember the farce at Gatwick, as the airport was shut down for many hours due to alleged drone sightings. And regular as clockwork, papers would soon have stories of “near misses” with commercial aircraft, whenever the AAIB published its latest investigations. This led to more regulation and stricter punishments for anyone not following the rules. 

A key change in the regulations came with the introduction of the long-negotiated “risk-based” approach with the Open, Specific and certified categories in 2021. Introduced by JARUS, this is now the cornerstone of regulations in most jurisdictions around the world.

Altitude Angel are eager to help shape next steps of industry development and the rules and regulations enabling that. We already know that 2025 will see the next evolution, when the CAA introduces the SORA methodology for flights in the Specific category and beyond that, there is still plenty of work to be done on the wider question of airspace integration and regulations for UTM and supporting services.

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