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RAeS – the cutting edge since 1866; Or can drones redefine aviation safety?
That most venerable of aviation institutions, the Royal Aeronautical Society of the UK, has a remarkable history. It was established 37 years before the first heavier than air flight. Talk about cutting edge. So perhaps it is no surprise that in the area of drones too, the RAeS is at the forefront.
Even more commendably, it is using drones to review and consider that most entrenched topic in aviation: safety regulation. That is close to heresy in the aviation industry, which is all the more reason to question it, and all the more reason to commend an organisation with ‘R’ for ‘Royal’ in its name for doing so. Safety is improved when we question what is happening, not merely comply.
Sadly, that has too often not been the case. We cling to the way we do things around here, in no small measure because that is the way things are done around here. Furthermore, when you are a safety regulator, or a legislator, there can never be too many belts and too many braces. It takes a deep understanding to change the way safety is done, and there is no up-side if something goes wrong.
But in fact, there is an argument that those that insist on doing things the way things have always been done are taking the risky course. We need to be able to adapt and refine our safety culture to make it better fit for purpose. Enter that most disruptive of disruptive new forces, drones.
Drones cut across a lot of what the aviation does and believes in. Drone operators do not come from a long line of people rigorously schooled in the way things are done around here. But that does not stop many in the legacy industry demanding that be exactly what they do. Drones are arriving in numbers never seen in the industry. There are about 250,000 aircraft in the world, and there are about 35,000 in the air at any time. Last year DJI, a drone manufacturer, but by no means the only drone manufacturer, sold 1,000,000 drones.
Even without the impetus of drones, forward thinking regulators realised that the industry needs to move away from the prescriptive ‘check-list’ style approach to focusing on the risks an operation presents –risk based assessment – to ensure that we can meet the demands of the modern world. Drones have just made those demands more demanding.
So hats off to the RAeS for tackling the issue by hosting a seminar on ‘A Risk Based Approach to RPAS Operations’ . It is fair to summarise the seminar as saying that everybody thinks RBA is a good idea, perhaps even a Good Idea.
This is where it gets interesting, as despite universally supporting risk-based regulations in theory, when it comes to final approvals everyone suddenly tends to favour prescriptive rules. Or perhaps more accurately, no-one is prepared to have their fingerprints on the jettisoning of the prescriptive rules. Thus we risk ending up with a belt and braces approach to a regulatory framework that builds in belts as well as braces.
EASA’s Prototype Commission Regulation on Unmanned Aircraft Operations, released last August, maintains that the measures should be “proportionate to the nature and risk of the type of unmanned aircraft operation”. So far so good. But once the draft regulation came out of Committee, it also included a requirement that regulations must also include the means to ensure ‘the highest possible safety standards’.
How to successfully implement an RBA was discussed during the conference, and there were two contrasting suggestions. David Hunkin, Head of Business Development at Centrik, urged attendees to “embrace your error”. By this, Hunkin meant that drone regulating bodies should learn from mistakes made by the manned aviation industry, when creating their own framework.
Air Commodore Dai Whittingham made a different proposal on behalf of the UK Flight Safety Committee. Whittingham suggested that due to the uniqueness of unmanned vehicles, regulators should ignore manned aviation precedents, and simply seek the best fitting measures for UAVs alone. He advocated new regulations for new technologies, adapting Hunkin’s motto to “learn from your era”.
Both arguments have their merits, and as EASA are handling drone regulations, it is inevitable that it will be approached from a manned aviation perspective. However, this must not distract from the fact that drones are unlike any previous form of transport, and to align them with manned aviation simply because they fly is as logical as leaving bird conservation to EASA.
Perhaps a combination of the two theories would be best going forward, accepting that UAV regulations need to be created with drone operations in mind, rather than by attempting to adapt manned operations to drones, whilst doing so with the collective wisdom of a century of manned aviation trial and error.
A major positive to come from this debate is that the message was decidedly pro-drone, as was the tone of the conference in general. From their inception the RAeS embodied Whittingham’s maxim to embrace their era, so it should be of no surprise that the RAeS are at the forehead of development yet again, organising ‘drone friendly’ conferences and encouraging much needed debate. The RAeS – So cutting edge it risks being Gangsta, since 1866.
