ICAO’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Toolkit

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) represent one of the fastest growing technologies in the world. Their designs and operations are challenging States to safely and efficiently integrate UAS into airspace shared with a highly regulated and well-established manned aircraft industry. UAS may fly near aerodromes, controlled airspace, densely populated areas or near sensitive sites, each of which requires carefully considered regulations.

ICAO's virtual UAS Toolkit is being offered to regulators as a starting point when establishing regulations and guidance for domestic operations, by presenting global best practices, lessons learned and regulations.

Whether used as toys or as professional platforms, Unmanned Aircraft, or UA, can be flown in a variety of configurations using payloads and sensors that best serve their missions. The economic benefits are immense and obvious to all, while the societal benefits include humanitarian efforts: search & rescue, firefighting, infrastructure & crop monitoring and research & development.

UAS operators and remote pilots may be new to aviation and can benefit from the information contained in the Toolkit.

The toolkit supports the achievement of UAS regulations that prioritize safety, take security and privacy issues in to consideration, and support industry.

[AviationLed]

A very challenging goal, regulation, seeing that the industry is evolving so quickly that many of the considerations which formed the basis for current rules are being either made redundant through technology evolution or require rethinking based on scientific analysis. Two such issues, (1) - the new crop of sUAS coming on to the market are capable of 'sense and avoid' and (2) - the notion of Risk Severity (Risk probability + Risk impact) suggest that we should adjust regulations to better suit reality and limit the adverse impact on economic opportunity without degrading the safety margin.