The market demand for RPAS continues to grow as such systems are no longer used only for military purposes but also for commercial and civil applications: agriculture & forestry, civil protection & disaster management, surveillance of sea or urban areas, filming. Therefore, safely integrating RPAS into non-segregated airspaces is a necessity.

Full integration of RPAS into non-segregated airspaces requires the implementation of several RPAS capabilities enabling them to operate safely, even in non normal situations such as loss of the data-link, that prevent the Remote Pilot (RP) from controlling the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA).

The principles of basic automated functions are largely solved today. However RPAS operations beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS), in the current environment, are still restricted to segregated areas, making such operations complex and expensive. This situation will continue until a complete set of standards, procedures, policies, performance specifications, human factors and enabling technologies supporting the safe integration of RPAS is developed and validated.

In this context, the scope of this OSED is, in particular, to capture the high level requirements from existing regulation, standards and methods concerning take-off and landing in civil or military airspaces, then to address the definition of the ATOL capability for certified fixed-wing RPAS operating in non-segregated areas, under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), in different meteorological conditions without visual assistance of the RP, and in compliance with ICAO requirements. The scope of this OSED is aligned with the scope of the draft ICAO RPAS CONOPS released in 2016: