We have always found a route to yes, says air regulator

The Military Aviation Authority has yet to meet an uncrewed system for which it could not find a path to approval, its head of regulation and certification told the Apex Europe conference in London on Wednesday, and he asked industry to keep testing that.

Commodore Neil Mathieson closed a panel on the interoperability of uncrewed systems with a short message to the companies in the room. “From a safety perspective, industry keep challenging us. I do like a challenge. We have not found any case yet where we have not found a route to yes,” he said.

Certification is triggered by a combination of size, speed, complexity and the job an aircraft is doing, by his account, with casualty evacuation and anything carrying a person taking a system firmly into the regulated category. Most of what Britain currently flies sits below that threshold, leaving one of the roughly 180 uncrewed systems in the inventory holding a certification. “Of 180 odd uncrewed systems in the UK inventory, only one is certified,” he said.

The question that prompted the answer came from the floor, from a representative of a company with an American parent and a British arm set up last year, who argued that the heavier end of the market will bring a different set of regulatory demands than the small systems dominating the discussion. He gave the example of an autonomous aircraft carrying four hundred kilograms and asked how the behaviour of the latches holding that load could be guaranteed unless the software had been engineered to a standard such as DO-178C, the civil benchmark for airborne software.

Commodore Mathieson agreed with him and set out where the heavier end of the market takes the regulator. “If we are going to get into those large uncrewed systems flying around in unsegregated airspace, potentially they will have to be certified to the same level as crewed platforms, because none of you in this room want to take off from Heathrow Airport on your way to Orlando and be hit by something that I have not certified properly that’s flying in civil airspace,” he said.

“At the moment, though, defence goes back to the demand signal. There is no demand signal in defence right now. Everyone is concentrating on the smaller stuff,” he said. “When that day comes, and it will come, we are going to have to certify things to the same standards as we’ve certified MQ-9B.” A panellist put that day at the start of next year, and observed that collaborative combat aircraft are now eight or nine tonne jets.

The MQ-9B he referred to flies in British service as Protector RG1, and its certification is the proof that the route exists. It was designed from the outset to operate in unsegregated airspace, and getting it there took sustained work between the manufacturer, the Military Aviation Authority and civil regulators, which is a reasonable guide to what the next generation of large uncrewed aircraft will need.