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A human operator (remote control and mission planning)
Even the best hardware and software may fail. So far, considering missions with even highest level of autonomy, there is always a human operator whether controlling a UAV directly or monitoring mission progress, ready to step-in, if necessary, to correct mission or abort it.
On the other hand, humans are the most common factor of failure, due to their nature.
The drone operator is frequently named as UAVO (UAV Operator), regardless of the flight nature (autonomous, fully manual, VLOS/BVLOS/FPV).
Aviation learned the lecture and introduced tight verification system, based on procedures that are updated on every air catastrophe or even slight incident reported, to avoid such situations in the feature. Thanks to this approach, aviation became the safest travelling method. Drones are naturally sharing part of the aviation world, but on the other hand, freedom of purchase, mass scale of the operations (mostly RC, unregistered) is naturally so much different than the hermetic world of pilots and ground staff.
Anyway, many of the rules, hints and regulations, as well as good practices for airmen can be adapted for UAVOs, directly wor with slight modifications.
Below we consider human limitations and some of the good practices for UAV operations.
UAVO
Starting a career as UAVO is somehow like learning, how do drive. In the beginning, operations seem to be magic and bit scary, along with the growing experience they become natural and then switch to the routine. And the routine leads to mistakes.
In aviation, there is a known phenomena, so-called “dead zone”, where new pilot starts to operate on his own. Most of the flight accidents and incidents happen between 50 and 350 flight hours. Similar phenomena apply to the UAVOs but exact flight experience time is under investigation. Once UAVO gets used to fly, there appear shortcuts in operation preparation and that lead to accidents. While many UAV accidents are not deadly and most of them finish with hardware damage only, some may cause serious effects on 3rd parties, not only the wallet. Drone operations are not so strictly described as in case of the plane operations but this tends to change, i.e. along with the introduction of the standard and non-standard scenarios for drone operations, as standardised across UE (the details are present in the drone regulations chapter.
