Legal and Ethical Recommendations

Abstract

European countries have fragmented regulations about the manufacture and operation of civil dronesCivil drones; therefore, European institutions are trying to combine all these regulations into a common one by 2019. Until this common framework arrives, not only law but also ethics can give guidelines to the industry to satisfy national standards as well as users’ concerns. The European Aviation SafetySafety Agency promotes the highest common standards of safetySafety and develops common safety rules at the European level. This agency and its national equivalents monitor the activity of producers and operatorsOperators, but, depending on the size of the drone, this activity could cover regulationRegulation measures or ethical recommendations. In this sense the aim of our analysis is to categorize the types of hard–soft regulations that we find in the European Union. Our study is based on a content analysis from four sources of information: scientific papers, policies and regulation proposals from the European Union, the regulation and co-regulationCo-regulation of some European countries, and the self-regulationSelf-regulation of some drone companies’ associations. In general, few countries have chosen self-regulation as a solution to the problems, although in other economic sectors there are positive experiences. With our results we would like to give advice to the European industry as well as providing academia and policy makers with new insights.