Towards regulating human oversight: challenges for EU drone law

As technologies acquire self-operating capabilities – whether automated or autonomous – their safe use demands human oversight. Yet these capabilities create challenges for the existing oversight regime in safety rules. This paper identifies regulatory challenges for the human oversight of civil drones as found in the European Union (EU) rules on the operational (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947), design (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/945), and traffic (Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664) safety of civil drones. Accordingly, the oversight regime is challenged by self-operating systems in three ways: (a) due to a problematic definition of the term ‘remote pilot’; (b) because (fully) autonomous operations are treated 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 challenges can be addressed by revisiting different human roles as well as the ‘operation-centric’ regulatory approach of EU drone law.