O. Hirling, F. Holzapfel

During the last years Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have risen within military forces from additional surveillance equipment to an indispensable military instrument. Naturally the interest for a civil usage emerged too. An efficient usage of civil UAS requires the integration into national airspaces, which demands operating and airworthiness regulations for all types of UAS. Within the range of UAS, light UAS < 150 kg are the broad majority, regarding different designs, variety and manufacturers. It is obvious that there is an intensive necessity for integrating them into national airspaces too. Currently this class of UAS has to be regulated by national airworthiness authorities and there is no harmonized way in treating them with respect to operational and especially airworthiness aspects. Up to now, the usage of civil UAS in Germany is nearly impossible. If UAS are allowed to fly then only under very prescriptive restrictions. In January 2012, the German Federal Parliament has agreed to change the national Air-Navigation-Act and to include UAS for the first time. However there are not any defined airworthiness regulations for civil UAS < 150 kg in Germany. This paper seeks to show the applicability of military UAS airworthiness regulations for light UAS to corresponding civil systems. Therefore, a review of different civil airworthiness agencies and their UAS related activities is given. Especially the situation in Germany is reflected. Moreover the paper focuses on UAS airworthiness regulations by NATO and the Bundeswehr in order to provide an insight to military UAS airworthiness regulations. Furthermore military UAS airworthiness requirements are compared with traditional manned aircraft airworthiness requirements and a perspective to show the applicability of military light UAS airworthiness requirements in accordance to the current EASA UAS policy is presented.

Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress 2012, Berlin

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V., Bonn, 2012

Conference Paper

englisch

21,0 x 29,7 cm, 25 Seiten

urn:nbn:de:101:1-201210104734

aircraft reliability, airspace, Airworthiness, armed forces, Germany, Light UAS, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), policies, regulations, surveillance, unmanned aircraft systems

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10.10.2012