This month we have been able to analyze the situation of drones in the civil world thanks to Expodrónica, the space dedicated to drones within the World ATM Congress. In this article, Bartolomé Marqués Ráez gives us his opinion:
Drones in the civil world
Anyone who has attended Expodronica in recent days will have realized that the introduction of drones in the civil field is becoming a very demanding element and we have been able to see the advances in UTM and in the use of agricultural applications and topography especially.
Urban mobility, mainly air taxis, seems stagnant, although large companies are beginning to have their first prototypes, without regulating the airspace where these devices should move, their introduction is very difficult.
A separate chapter deserves the study of the vehicles themselves, the certification of their design, in my opinion they have sought solutions derived from the small drones on the market, forgetting that when passengers go in the vehicles they should look at the requirements of manned aircraft CS 27 or FAR 27 for example and we would verify that some solutions do not provide the same degree of safety.
The reason for this introduction is to highlight that all air vehicles must have the same safety level if they fly in the same type of airspace.
As I already said in an article on aeronautical legislation “Safety is a quality, like all qualities it contains a degree of ambiguity (how safe it is), needless to say, that in an aircraft it is the basic and fundamental element to take into account, it is clear that the administration must provide the criteria that allow this aircraft safety to be quantified, this process is carried out through the Aircraft Certification Regulations”.
I always like to remember that the Air Navigation Law states that all aircraft must have a valid Certificate of Airworthiness, which is why the administration has acquired the responsibility to legislate, to provide regulations that allow aircraft to have an Airworthiness Certificate.
At this point we must clearly understand that the designs of the aircraft must be submitted to verify that they scrupulously comply with the regulations that the authority has dictated.
My experience of almost all my professional life dedicated to the world of certification has shown me that if we design and manufacture an aircraft without considering the requirements of the certification standards, the result will be a non-certifiable aircraft, with the corresponding economic disaster of the project.
In aircraft world’s, safety is the most important element and cannot be ignored with other criteria of need, time, operation, etc.
Military operations with drones may come to mind for someone and they don’t have so many problems. Let me remind you that most of the drones in the military world are treated as weapons and operate on the battlefield.
In the civil world, the safety demonstration is carried out through a certification process, in which the aircraft manufacturer submits approval to the certification authority (administration), through design, analysis, calculation, simulation documents or tests that comply with the certification regulations that the aircraft must comply with, these technical regulations have been previously established by the Authority and compliance with which ensures a “degree of safety” acceptable to the administration.
At this point we find ourselves with two problems, designing the aircraft, technical and operating knowledge is needed, and demonstrating to the authority that these aircraft comply with the regulations, a task that is not without difficulty and expertise.”
At CENTUM we are developing a tool capable of transferring our design to the certification compliance documents in a way that Bartolomé considers “acceptable for the administration”, as we will see in future articles.
