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Managing drones in very low-level airspace

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Whether you call them Unmanned Aircraft Systems (http://bit.ly/33rrDHW) (UAS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS) or simply drones there is a lot of them flying around sometimes causing costly airspace disruptions (http://bit.ly/32yo8yd). This is why the European Cockpit Association (ECA) has developed a detailed paper (http://bit.ly/2p4kdvi) discussing the challenges of ensuring a safe and efficient co-existence of manned and unmanned aircraft.
The safe integration of UAS into the current environment is likely to include constraints to UAS operations and additional risks to manned aviation airspace users. The collective aim should be to minimise these operational constraints and to remove the safety risks as far as possible while maintaining or improving the current levels of safety and security in the skies over Europe.
Given the variety of UAS operations and utilisation, this paper concentrates on the so-called “Very Low-Level Airspace” (VLL) (http://bit.ly/2PVvoRX), which is usually understood to be the volume of air below 500ft above (non-built-up) ground level. This boundary was chosen under the mistaken assumption that manned aviation does not normally operate below 500ft AGL.
Against this background, ECA developed a comprehensive list of 22 recommendations, which are categorised and summarised below.