Samar Abbas Nawaz has spent three years scrutinising European drone regulations - and what he found should give us pause.
"Self-operating drones and their legal issues weren't things that stakeholders in the civilian drone ecosystem are generally concerned about," says Nawaz. "They see it as a problem of the future."
That future, he argues, is unfolding faster than the law can keep up.
What does 'autonomous' actually mean?
'Civilian drones' is a term for drones which aren't used for military or law enforcement purposes. The EU has ambitious plans to normalise civilian drone use across member states. Drones are already being used for filming, agricultural inspection and package delivery, and plans for urban drone transport are well underway. Many of these drones are highly automated - meaning they can fly and carry out tasks with very little human involvement.
But Nawaz noticed something odd early in his research: the word 'autonomous' was being used loosely and, often, incorrectly.
"Calling something autonomous gives the impression that the drone is very advanced," he explains. "But just because a human is not involved in the operation, it does not mean that the drone is truly autonomous."
There is an important distinction here. A drone that follows a pre-programmed route is automated - it does exactly what it has been told to do. An autonomous drone, strictly speaking, would be capable of independent decision-making. The two are very different things - but European regulations blur this line.
"Autonomy is to do with independence," says Nawaz. "Drones can easily be programmed to function in a certain fixed manner, but that does not make them independent as such."
This misuse of terminology, he argues, is not just a semantic quibble. It has real consequences for how safety is assessed and regulated.
Three laws, three problems
Nawaz analysed three areas of EU drone law: rules governing how drones are operated, rules governing how they are designed and certified, and the framework for a drone traffic management system called 'U-Space'.
He found significant shortcomings in all three. The laws rely on technical concepts that are poorly defined, important certification mechanisms are missing, and - perhaps most fundamentally - the laws fail to account for the broader social and technical context in which drones actually operate.
"Law is at times seen as the cure for all things bad with technology," says Nawaz. "But it has to be seen in a broader sociotechnical context. Safety is not purely a technical or a legal issue that can simplistically be fixed."
A sky without human controllers
One of the most striking elements of Nawaz' research concerns U-Space - the EU's planned system for managing drone traffic. Unlike conventional air traffic control, where human controllers communicate directly with pilots, U-Space is designed to be largely automated: digital systems would feed drones the information they need to navigate safely, without human controllers in the loop.
"It's imaginative - and dystopian or utopian, depending on how you interpret it," says Nawaz.
The idea raises profound questions about accountability and safety that current regulations do not adequately address. If something goes wrong in a system with no human controllers, who is responsible?
Law as part of a larger picture
Nawaz is careful to emphasise that he is not opposed to drone technology or its development. But he argues that the current regulatory approach is too narrow.
"Researching an emerging technology from a legal and social perspective is challenging," he says. "It's like you're a sceptic in a room full of developers trying to create the next big thing, and regulators trying to help them make it possible."
His research calls for a reconceptualisation of key technical terms in drone law, as well as a greater focus on the design elements of drone systems - not just how they are flown, but how they are built.
A question for all of us
For most people, drones remain a curiosity - occasionally visible overhead, not yet a fixture of daily life. But that is about to change.
"Currently, we do not see many drones in our airspace. But the EU, and other countries across the globe, are aiming to change that," says Nawaz. "Public participation is seriously missing in these efforts."
He hopes his research will encourage people to engage with the question of what kind of skies we want - before the decisions are made for us.
"I do hope that it makes people wonder about this future and raise their concerns from different perspectives."
Safe integration of civil drones: Law, self-operation & infrastructure
Samar Nawaz has written a doctoral thesis entitled Safe integration of civil drones: Law, self-operation & infrastructure at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, under the research project RegulAIR: The integration of drones in the Norwegian and European Airspaces at PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo).
The thesis analyses European Union regulations on civilian drone integration, with a focus on operational safety, design safety and the U-Space drone traffic management framework. It identifies key shortcomings in how EU law defines technical concepts and calls for a broader sociotechnical understanding of drone safety.
