AW-Drones (“Airworthiness of mass-market drones”) is a project being developed within the EU research program H2020 with the aim to support the on-going EU regulatory process for the definition of technical rules, standards and procedures for civilian drones. This will enable safe, environmentally sound and reliable operations in the EU.

The upcoming new EASA Regulation will identify three categories of UAS operation (Open, Specific, Certified), with an increasing level of risk. As outlined in the SESAR European Drones Outlook Study (published at the end of 2016), around 95 % of commercial drone operations are going to be conducted in the ‘Open’ and ‘Specific’ categories; therefore, AW Drones will focus mainly on these two categories as they represent the majority of mass-market applications.

In other words, AW Drones is aiming at associating appropriate technical standards to this regulatory framework. These will be accomplished through four fundamental steps:

• Collection of information about standard being developed by Standard Making Bodies worldwide (e.g. Eurocae, ISO etc.);
• Perform a critical assessment of the collected data, analysing the impact on safety, on the environment, the costs for stakeholders and identifying possible gaps and or bottlenecks;
• Propose and validate a “well-reasoned” set of technical standards for each category of operation
• Gather feedback from relevant stakeholders (regulators, manufacturer associations, operators etc..) about AW-Drones findings; this will be achieved through surveys and periodic workshops.

The following technical standards will be considered within the project:

• Command, Control and Communication
• Design & Airworthiness
• Detect & Avoid
• UAS Traffic Management
• Automation