Standards for UAS - Acceptable Means of Compliance for Low Risk SORA Operations

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have been in civil use since several years. A new risk-based approach was developed by the Joint Authorities for Rulemaking of Unmanned Systems (JARUS) which relies on the so-called Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) for the medium risk category. Following this process, operational authorization is based on the assessment of the safety of the operation and not solely on the safety of the aircraft design. To comply with the resulting mitigations it is necessary to convince authorities using Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC). The goal of the European research project AW-Drones is to identify and assess existing standards as a possible AMC for the existing and upcoming regulations. The research in AW-Drones is performed by an international consortium of both, industry and research agencies. Additional stakeholders support the project, i.e. EASA and also other groups of experts, committees and Standard Development Organisations (SDOs). In this paper, the approach and methodology of the project is described, including the current state of work. The results of the data collection step and the assessment will be discussed. The used criteria will be shown and the proposed impact on the SORA process discussed. An Outlook will detail on remaining tasks and the dissemination of the results in a public database, nicknamed the metastandard.