On 5th November 2020, the AW-Drones Project will launch the Drone Standards Info Portal, an online repository supporting the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Commission (EC) in their drones related development actions. The tool will be also open, at no cost, to everyone needing to identify the standards necessary for their drone operations.
The AW-Drones project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. Its scope is mitigating the lack of clear standards for drone-related business in the EU by delivering an Info Portal for drone sector experts.
The user-friendly Info Portal will allow drones operators and stakeholders to easily identify the standards that they need to safely perform UAS operations in the “specific” category and, in particular, when flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS).
In such cases, in fact, Regulation (EU) 2019/947 requires a safety risk assessment based on the SORA methodology, for which AW-Drones has identified more than 600 available industry standards: a significant number to examine, especially for Small or Medium-sized Enterprises. Therefore, the Drone Standards Info Portal by AW-Drones is born: it will allow the quick and easy identification of the suitable standards to apply a given mitigation stemming from the SORA methodology, making the life of UAS operators much easier.
USING THE REPOSITORY
The AW-Drones Info Portal will allow finding and displaying information about a standard, providing an easy access to the stored data via live search and filters (by requirements, domain or keywords). The system also will enable advanced researches by category of operations. For each standard, the title, document, organisation, status, external url, domain, keywords, description, and requirements will be displayed. In addition, users may become editors and add comments or new standards, under supervision of administrators, to further improve the tool. So, the Drone Standards Info Portal is not a new standard, but it works like a compass for orientation among the hundreds of available standards: that is why it is a “metastandard”, the only metastandard in the EU that connects SORA to the myriad of existing industry standards.
SUPPORTING STANDARDISATION
The Drone Standards Info Portal will support EU Institutions and Agencies to identify “gaps” that might require the development of new standards by bodies such as ASD-STAN, CEN, EUROCAE, ISO etc.
In addition to their contribution to the project, one of its partners, EuroUSC-Italia, has also developed a web-based tool to apply the SORA methodology: SAMWISE.
“For EuroUSC-Italia, this is one of the main achievements: the Drone Standards Info Portal goes hand in hand with SAMWISE, providing users both a safety assessment and a list of standards to implement mitigations” said Marco Ducci, CEO of EuroUSC-Italia.
The Info Portal and SAMWISE will be maintained even after the end of AW-Drones, to support the community to effectively, efficiently and safely foster further expansion of drone-based services.
LAUNCH EVENT
The Drone Standards Info Portal will be launched during the 2nd AW-Drones workshop, dedicated to “Technical Standards to Support U-Space Implementation in Europe”. The workshop will take place online on 5 November 2020, at 9.30 CEST, and will be free (but registration is needed). It addresses primarily stakeholders active in drone-related activities: in fact, they will have the possibility to share their opinion and identify priorities and needs in support of U-Space in Europe, thus contributing to the EU rulemaking process.
For further information visit the AW-Drones website.
