By Solomon Asowata
Lagos – The International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) says there is need for a regulatory framework to integrate unmanned air traffic innovations into the global aviation network, to avert safety and related risks.
ICAO’s Secretary-General, Dr Fang Liu, made the call on Thursday while speaking at the United Nations aviation agency’s “Unmanned Aviation Week” in Montreal, Canada.
In her speech obtained by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos, Liu said ICAO was concerned about the usage of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) globally.
According to her, worldwide, RPAS and UAS technologies and operations have been evolving rapidly in recent years.
She said this has spurred thousands of new entrants to the aviation sector and a multitude of new products and services requiring incorporation into the global aviation framework.
She added that despite the new opportunities that this transformation offered, they posed safety and related risks to legacy aircraft and operations, including the populations on the ground.
Liu said: “ICAO’s member states anticipated these challenges when they mandated ICAO to develop new guidance for what are essentially domestic operations.
“Their goal in this regard was to make use of ICAO’s cooperative and consensus-based decision mechanisms, to realise practical and effective operational guidelines, which could be codified for implementation in almost any urban environment.”
She noted that in order for the numerous socioeconomic benefits of unmanned aviation to be optimised, regulators must work to craft and implement a well-structured and flexible regulatory framework.
“Safety concerns such as collision with manned aircraft, the use of unapproved communications spectrum, and even the expectations of privacy for the citizens living among these intended operations, are all of great concern to governments today.
“And there are further issues we must address such as the functional interoperability we can expect to achieve with traditional air traffic management mechanisms, airspace design, and rules of the air for these new aircraft types,” she added.
The secretary-general underscored that the predicted expansion of the unmanned industry would result in an equal number of aircraft operating simultaneously within congested metropolitan areas and airspace.
Liu said this would be a tremendous challenge for regulatory officials and airspace planners, and one which would require completely new approaches in terms of the management of air traffic.