The growth of the drone sector has made it necessary to create standards and regulations for the safe operation of these devices. The Spanish drone industry participates in creating international standards through the CTN 28/SC2 Unmanned aerial systems.
It is essential to keep creating standards that make technological development compatible with the correct use of drones, taking into account safety and privacy.
UNE (The Spanish Association for Standardisation) takes up this challenge and, as it has been said before, through the Technical Committee for Standardisation CTN 28/SC 2 Unmanned Aerial Systems, participates in the development of international ISO standards for the sector, in AESA’s Commission for Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAS) and the creation of European standards.
Experts from 12 organizations from SMEs (small and medium enterprises), universities, and investigation centres to big organizations such as AESA, ISDEFE, and Inta are part of this technical committee for standardization chaired by Julián Gallego from Alter Technology.
The committee CTN 28/SC2 is elaborating the standards for marking open-category unmanned aerial systems. Furthermore, in the international environment, the ISO/TC 20/SC 16 committee is developing ISO standards on operational procedures, terminology, training of personnel involved in UAS operations, and UTM traffic management.
Julián Gallego, the committee’s president, provides more information on the topic. He says that in 2014, the Spanish administration, given the drone sector’s incipient activity and great future, began to bring together all the actors involved to establish the regulatory mechanisms that would guarantee the safety of operations with these systems.
Once UAS were defined as aircraft and not as flying machines, the regulatory and standardization aspects became part of the aeronautical activity. The SC 2 UAS subcommittee is integrated within the CTN 28 Aerospace Material Committee.
This subcommittee started in July 2016, motivated by the constitution in ISO of the subcommittee ISO/TC 20/SC 16 Unmanned Aircraft Systems, UAS, which started working on three standards related to general specifications, system/product, and operations. In parallel, the European Commission was expected to launch the standardization mandate to CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI by 2016.
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