Dronesafe® ready 4 new ISO on Drone

Dronesafe® is ready for the new ISO standard on Drone usage.

The world of international standardisation is about to catch up with the fast-growing drone sector, with implications for commercial operators of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) globally. Luckily for users of the Dronesafe® drone management system, we anticipated this development from the outset and are ready to seamless incorporate the new standard into the system.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) develops and maintains voluntary international standards across everything from food products to health care. They recently completed a draft standard for the ‘general specification’ of unmanned aircraft systems (ISO 21384-1) ahead of likely publication later in 2019. 

This is the first of what will ultimately be four standards relating to drones; the other three parts will cover technical specifications, manufacturing quality and traffic management.

International standards are important because they provide a uniform global approach. Drone usage is a good case study in the advantages of having such standards. RPL usage is currently governed by regulations on a government-by-government basis. This won’t change under the new standards which, like all ISO standards, are voluntary, however the new standards will likely form the basis for more uniform regulation between jurisdictions and for certification requirements on operators. 

While increased uniformity would make it easier for drone manufacturers to incorporate aspects of regulation, such as geo-fencing, into their machines, the new standards will likely reach beyond the drones themselves and into areas of compliance and risk management. These could include aspects such as pre- and post-flight checks, pilot training and certification, minimum levels of human intervention, privacy controls and so on. These areas won’t be so easily incorporated into drone software and organisations aiming to meet the new standard will likely need to complement their drones’ software with some form of drone management system such as Dronesafe® – provided that system meets the new standard. 

When we developed Dronesafe® we anticipated the likely future development of an ISO standard for RPAs. All aspects of the Dronesafe® application were mapped to the ISO frameworks, meaning that as the standards are published we will simply ‘plug them in’. Dronesafe® will be fully compliant with the new standards from day one and organisations using Dronesafe® will already be well on their way to achieving certification against the new standard. 

While adopting ISO standards is, as I said, voluntary, it’s likely that ISO 21384 will quickly become ubiquitous in the field of drone operation. ISO standards have a strong record of uptake in technology-related industries, and given the complexity of drone regulation across areas such as risk management and privacy it seems more than likely that ISO certification for commercial drone operators will become a common requirement sooner rather than later.