무인항공기 민간활용에 따른 안전규제의 쟁점

Drone or UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has been widely used for military missions in 20th century but recently it is widely applied by civil sector for various purposes. For example, drones are already in operation for the purposes of logistics, broadcasting, telecommunication, emergency services, infrastructure inspection, agriculture and hobbies. The drone sector has a big potential for economic growth with the possibility to create jobs. On the other hands, drone operation poses various safety, security and privacy risks to public. So it is needed to design a regulatory framework to respect the public concern for safety, not hampering the development of relevant industry as well. There being no rules specifically addressing drones, regulating drone-related safety risks under the present aviation law which was mainly made for manned aviation presents a big challenge for many countries. Main issues of safety regulation of drones are as follows. Who should be the regulatory actors, what should be the regulatory target, and how these should be regulated. The first question can be approached by the different ways of regulatory models, that is, formal govermental regulation model, industrial self-regulation model, and co-regulation model. The second question can be framed by technical regulation and operational regulation. Traditional criterion for manned aviation safety regulation has been the weight of the flying vehicle, but recent proposal of European Aviation Safety Authority stresses that not the weight of the drone but the risk the operation is posing to third parties should be the main criterion of drone safety regulation. This proposal introduces three categories of operations, that is, open category(low-risk), specific category(medium-risk) and certified category(high-risk). In the first category, safety is ensured by a minimum rules, operational limitations, industry standards and the requirement to have certain functionalities. In the second category, authorisation is required by an authority following a risk assessment performed by the operator. In the third, requirements comparable to those for manned aviation should be met for operation. Furthermore, traditional airspace regulation needs to be harmonised with the drone operation in low-altitude airspace which tends to be in conflicts with the land-owner’s just interest in the property.