Towards regulating human oversight: challenges for EU drone law

As technologies acquire self-operating capabilities – whetherautomated or autonomous – their safe use demands humanoversight. Yet these capabilities create challenges for the existingoversight regime in safety rules. This paper identifies regulatorychallenges for the human oversight of civil drones as found inthe European Union (EU) rules on the operational (CommissionImplementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947), design (CommissionDelegated Regulation (EU) 2019/945), and traffic (CommissionImplementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664) safety of civil drones.Accordingly, the oversight regime is challenged by self-operatingsystems in three ways: (a) due to a problematic definition of theterm ‘remote pilot’; (b) because (fully) autonomous operations aretreated paradoxically; and (c) due to inadequacies of design rules.Collectively, these challenges have implications for the human-centrism to which the EU remains committed. Such challengescan be addressed by revisiting different human roles as well asthe ‘operation-centric’ regulatory approach of EU drone law.