JARUS proposes new pre-defined risk assessment format

The Joint Authority for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems (JARUS) workgroup for Safety Risk Management has completed a proposal for a new form for Pre-Defined Risk Assessments (PDRA) which will now be in public consultation for four weeks.

Workgroup leader Joerg Dittrich said the proposal would update the previously published JARUS STS-02 from 2019. “It provides compatibility to SORA 2.5 [and] it transposes the PDRA/STS into a completely new way of presenting the PDRA, accompanied by a modular pre-defined Operations Manual.”

Dittrich said today’s published PDRAs present too little of an advantage to operators over the direct use of SORA. “We are pivoting the focus from a prescriptive list of requirements (old PDRA format) that leaves most of the work with the applicants, to a system that is directly focused on a standard Operations Manual tailored to the PDRA use case. In other words, instead of providing a set of questions, we now focus on providing a set of answers, lowering the workload for both applicants and authorities.”

The consultation, which will end on 18 November, focuses on the switch of an existing PDRA/STS to the new format. “If the drone community likes our idea and helps to improve this proposal by submitting their views on it, we would as a next step transpose all of our to date 10 PDRAs already published or under development and release them as soon as possible,” Dittrich said. “Drone operators are then offered a new more time efficient way to propose new operations in the Specific Category for these 10 standard use cases to their aviation authorities.”