1 Introduction

Over the previous two decades, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS, also known as drones, unmanned/uncrewed/uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV), remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS)) have developed rapidly and become more and more valuable for various research tasks and applications. It is estimated that in Europe, approximately ten billion euros will be invested per year in UAS technology until 2035, with the potential of investments in the order of 15 billion euros per year until 2050 (SESAR JU 2016). Though the drone technology matured remarkably over the last two decades, including autopilots and quality of mechanical and electronic parts, with the increasing number of drones in use also risks during operations in sum is likely to raise. Therefore, having transparent and reliable legal conditions is mandatory to ensure such drone operations. As a result, the European Commission has adopted new EU drone regulations, which are the legal base for UAS operations since January 2021 (EASA 2022Footnote 1). Generally, these rules are seen as a positive step towards UAS rule harmonization in Europe, but at the same time, it is not easy to judge to which extent the new regulations will help or hinder the use of UAS technology and its potential in scientific and commercial sectors. One sector that has also begun seeing the increased drone use in the last decades is the geospatial domain and its applications and services, which are amongst the mostly mentioned applications that use drone technology (VUL 2021). Therefore, in this paper we aim to discuss and analyse how recent drone rules may influence, help or hinder the drone use and affect its economic viability in that sector. We focus the discussion and the analysis process of the rules’ impacts on three main items: the visual contact and range limitations, impact of geofencing and, finally, the effect of ethical considerations connected to privacy aspects of individuals. These items were chosen due to their importance, and they have a direct impact on drone operations. To gain more insight into the actual views of user groups and the commercial sector regarding the mentioned rules’ impact, we compiled a questionnaire, which we sent out to the community based on personal contacts and to collect information from participants who use drone technology. The questionnaire and the analysis of its results are considered as the backbone of this paper. The questionnaire is added in the appendix. The paper first provides an overview about the new EU drone regulations and a short wrap-up of what is behind the current drone rules. Next, we discuss the drone market in Germany as being one of the leading EU states in geospatial sectors, especially in the surveying domain and its geospatial services. Finally, the paper describes the questionnaire results and highlights the consequences that can be derived from the results.

2 New Drone Regulations in Europe

The recent EU drone regulations have been laid down by the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and are in force since 1st January 2021. The regulations are seen as a tremendous step towards rule modernization and harmonization in Europe, which provides a solid legal framework for safe drone use and operation. The new rules are formulated in two main parts, as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
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Implementing and delegated rules

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The first one is the implementing rules (IR) that deals with issues related to drone operations and navigation, while the second part is the delegated rules (DR), which cover the technical requirements needed for drone design and manufacture. Both parts will be highlighted in the following subsections.

2.1 Implementing Rules

The implementing rules consist of 23 articles that address issues related to drone operations with the focus, on the one hand, on the safety during conducting flight missions and, on the other hand, IR have high importance to personnel issues in terms of individuals’ safety and protecting their own data. In other words, IR focus on having a safety level as high as possible, and this imposes avoiding/minimizing risks that may arise during drone operations. From this point of view, the regulators defined three operation risk levels: low, medium and high, based on various factors, such as regarding the drone maximum take-off mass (MTOM). Further, the regulators classified drone operations in three categories (Fig. 2): open, specific and certified, with respect to the mentioned risk levels and additional technical aspects such as visual conditions, or the flight height, expressed as AGL (aboveground level).

Fig. 2
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Drone operation categories

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To characterize the open category—which might be the most often applied use case—refer to article 4 of IR (EASA 2022): “UAS operations are classified in the open category only where the following requirements are met:

  • UAS has a class that is set out in DR EU 2019/945 (see Sect. 2.2).

  • UAS MTOM should be less than 25 kg.

  • UAS operation is conducted in the visual line of sight (VLOS) and the UAS is kept at a safe distance of at least 1.5 km from inhabited areas, airports and sensitive zones, and at least 100 m from infrastructure such as highways, hospitals, power plants, etc.

  • During an operation, UAS do not carry dangerous goods and do not drop any material.

  • Flying height is limited to 120 m above the surface of the Earth”.

If the drone operator/pilot cannot follow the above-mentioned requirements, then the operation does not fit in the open category any more, and the specific category will be in force (see article 5—EASA 2022). The main issue here is that the risk level during the operation may be higher, and therefore an operational permission is needed pursuant to the operation risk assessment or the robustness of measures that may help keep a high safety level during the operation.

Finally, article 6 of IR addresses the issues related to the third category “certified”. Drone operations belong to the “certified” category if only the following aspects/requirements are met (EASA 2022):

  • “if the UAS is certified pursuant to Article 40 of DR; here it deals with the design, production and maintenance of UAS;

  • if the operation is conducting over assemblies of people, involves the transport of people or involves the carriage of dangerous goods that may result in high risk to other parties;

  • if the competent authority may assess the operational risk such that the operation falls into the certified category.”

2.2 Delegated Rules

Drone design and manufacture are fundamental factors affecting how and where a drone operation should be conducted. This is exactly what the delegated rules are about. “They lay down the requirements for the design and manufacture of unmanned aircraft systems intended to be operated under the rules and conditions defined in IR” (§1 article 1 of DR—EASA 2022). To this end, and with respect to drone design and manufacturing specifications, the DR classified the drones in seven classes C0 to C6. Table 1 shows the most important characteristics of these classes: for instance, how to differentiate between drone classes based on their MTOM.

Table 1 Drone classes C0–C6
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However, defining and adopting such classes influence definitively the drone operations in the context of risk level, where the higher drone class may lead to a higher risk during the operation, and also impose more qualifications from the pilot side, e.g. to be familiar with drone operation instructions (Table 2).

Table 2 Impact of VLOS range on maximum operation areas in forest environments (Hartley et al. 2022)
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3 German Geospatial Sector and Drone Rules

Referring to a study done in March 2021 by the German Unmanned Aviation Association, which concentrates on the actual tasks being performed with drones, it was shown that since 2012 around 420 million euros have been invested in German drone companies and institutions, with 67% within the last 2 years (2020, 2021) alone. The investors are concentrating on different drone-based applications such as monitoring, inspections, disaster management, and putting Germany in the second place internationally for investments in this area. A total of more than 400,000 drones are in circulation and about 15,000 individuals in Germany focus on drones in their professions (VUL 2021). Here, it can be differentiated between hardware/software vendors and services (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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German users involved in the drone sector in 2021–source: VUL (2021)

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However, Fig. 3 shows that in 2021 the vast majority (79%) of employees work in the services sector. This includes persons who use hardware and software commercially to support and provide services for other users or companies, and also areas such as research and development, maintenance, and consulting. At the same time, around 15% of the drone users are involved in the hardware sector, while only 6% in the software market (VUL 2021).

Concerning the service sector, the above-mentioned study showed that professional drone users often employ their drones in various applications for multiple services. The study indicated that the surveying domain and its geospatial services are at the top of the list of applications with around 79%; other applications such as inspection, transport, etc. with their percentages are shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4
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Drone-based service sector in Germany; surveying and geospatial domain have the vast majority with around 79% (the VUL study allowed multiple choices, VUL 2021)

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Based on these statistics, the drone users in surveying and the geospatial sector will be expected to be the drone user category in Germany, which may be influenced by the new drone regulations more than others. Alamouri et al. (2022) highlighted the status of new drone regulations in Europe in the past 2 years and proceeded with background information about the drone rules’ impact on the drone operation and its use. To discuss this topic, it is necessary to provide a practical analytical study showing how these new drone rules can affect the drone use in the geospatial sector. To that end, we formulated in a questionnaire the most important issues of the drone regulations that may influence drone use in the mentioned sector. This will be highlighted in the next section.

4 Questionnaire on the Impact of Drone Rules in the Geospatial Sector

The aim of the questionnaire was to reveal how drone regulations can help or hinder drone use in geospatial sectors. The main idea is in collecting information from participants who are actively developing or using the drone technology. Of course, gathering good data and feedbacks from a questionnaire needs, on the one hand, a good definition of the target groups that can attend and make an effective contribution to that questionnaire. In our case, this was a challenge, because we were limited in distributing the questionnaire to large communities, personal contacts, and drone groups due to logistical and cost aspects. Nevertheless, the questionnaire was distributed to various groups and domains in scientific, commercial and governmental sectors, but most responses were from the scientific sector, which might be not the best scenario in terms of result analysis and to generalize the results to a larger group of drone users.

On the other hand, the content of the questionnaire has an impact on collecting correct and sufficient data. For this reason, the questionnaire has been planned in a way to have two types of questions: the first type is to collect general information and data that are not related specifically to drone regulations, such as the drone business, drone type, typical flight times, etc., while the other type focuses on the aspects of drone regulations such as drone operations in visual line of sight (VLOS) and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), operating categories, UAS operator certificates, etc. In line with the objective of this paper, we focused the questionnaire distribution on users of the geospatial sector as a specific target group.

In the end we counted 74 participants, 40 of them with full answers. The participants first had the possibility to give information about the sectors where they were active. Here, we defined five business categories/sectors as follows: producer of drone-related hardware, producer of drone-related software, dealer of drone-related products, drone user for geospatial sector, and finally user of UAS for other applications (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Distribution of participants’ answers to the question “What is your business? (only one selection possible, if you think you have multiple roles, please submit the questionnaire a second time)”

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The results showed that the largest percentage of 40% of participants is for users working/involved in the geospatial domain (UGD). Thus, the questions that may be posed here are: how do those UGD find the new regulations from their point of views? How can they interpret them? How do the new rules affect their activities? These questions and other aspects will be addressed in the following subsections, through analysing the UGD feedbacks in the questionnaire.

4.1 Drone Activities of UGD

Through the answers of UGD, it was found that most users are active in the scientific work and research, with a percentage of 69%. At the same time, we found that there is a combination between scientific and commercial work, where 25% of UGD use their drones in both sectors (Fig. 6), while only 6% of UGD are just active in the commercial area.

Fig. 6
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Distribution of UGD answers to the question “What do you use your drone for? (with multiple choices)”

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In addition, Fig. 7 shows how long UGD have been working with drones. The highest percentage of 56% pointed out that users have been mostly working with drones for 5 years or more.

Fig. 7
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Feedback on the question “How long been working with drone technology?”

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4.2 UGD and EU Drone Regulations

The statistics of the question on the new EU drone regulations and its impact are shown in Fig. 8. As expected, the vast majority (75%) found that it is not an easy task to assess whether the drone rules will help or hinder the drone use and how they will influence the economic potential. Despite that, some of the UGD (38%) were optimistic and believed that the new drone regulations will foster the cross-border usage and support the economy sector.

Fig. 8
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UGD answers to the question “How do you find in general the new EU drone regulations? (with multiple choices)”

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4.3 Impact of Visibility and Range Restrictions

According to the recent EU drone regulations, drone operations classified in the open category are only allowed within visual line of sight (VLOS) (EASA 2021); this means that a continuous visual contact with the drone is required. When this criterion cannot be fulfilled, the operation is not in the open category anymore; as a result, the drone pilot may aim at operating the drone under beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) conditions. The meaning of VLOS and BVLOS is depicted in Fig. 9. Compared to VLOS, BVLOS increases the operational area, but at the same time it needs additional administrative and bureaucratic processes to implement a safe drone operation, which makes it less attractive in terms of logistics and economics. Despite this, and according to the questionnaire, we found that a significant percentage of 63% of UGD prefer conducting their flight missions in VLOS conditions, even if they face challenges in keeping a continuous contact with the drone during their drone operations.

Fig. 9
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Illustration of VLOS and BVLOS

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For a better understanding of how VLOS conditions influence the drone use, we refer in the following to the impact of the requirements of visual contact and range conditions through the discussion of the illustrating example of forest monitoring. Drone-based monitoring in dense forest environments are inherently difficult areas for drone operations due to various reasons for, e.g. the trees themselves are considered an obstacle that may limit the VLOS-based operations and impose continuous movements of drone pilots. Nevertheless, drones as a platform for sensor payloads such as optical cameras or laser devices have found a potential in forest researches and applications (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2014; Yaun et al. 2015; Thiel et al. 2020; Hu et al. 2020; Dainelli et al. 2021; Hartley et al. 2022). Drones are used with onboard digital cameras or laser scanning units and provide high-resolution images and point clouds up to the centimetre-level of details that may be used, for instance, in biomass estimation, which takes an important role in the evaluation process of carbon cycle and its balance in the forests (Li et al. 2020). In addition, when it comes to operational costs and for long-term monitoring of forest environments, drone-based data collection became advantageous over satellite data, especially when high resolution is needed (Hall and Wahab 2021). However, in forests—as in many other drone-based applications—the ability to cover large areas is desirable, but this is not always possible under VLOS conditions. VLOS operations may not be the best scenario for monitoring forest environments, especially in dense vegetations, where maintaining continuous visual contact with the drone is not always possible, for instance: the drone should not be flown behind high trees (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10
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Illustration showing how easily VLOS can be lost in forest environments – source: Hartley et al. (2022)

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To this end, drone pilots cannot cover long distances and large areas during a flight mission, and therefore multiple flights are needed and operation costs are multiplied. The following table shows the impact of VLOS range on possible covered areas with the assumption that all forests have a common visual obstruction, namely trees. Operational experiences showed for instance that a change of the VLOS ranges from 200 to 500 m—which is the useful range of visible conditions for most drone sizes—increased the covered area more than sixfold (Hartley et al. 2022).

4.4 Impact of Geofencing

Geofencing is a virtual geographic boundary around specific areas of interest. In the drone context, a geofence uses global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) technology to keep drones away from sensitive locations such as airports, military areas, and nature reserves (Lykou et al. 2020; Torens et al. 2020). However, the drone regulators assume that geofencing is seen as a technical aid to enforce drone rules. This assumption was supported by answers to our questionnaire, too. In this regard, the questionnaire results showed that 63% of UGD considered the geofence systems important to enforce the drone rules (Fig. 11). This may indicate that they found such systems can reduce risks that may arise within drone activities and operations, for e.g. keeping a distance from objects or protected areas; therefore, the key benefit of geofencing is acting as a precaution that prevents drones from entering restricted areas by mistake.

Fig. 11
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Distribution of UGD feedbacks to the question “What do you think about the geofencing? (with multiple choices)”

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On the other hand, 50% of UGD participants found that such systems hinder the drone use, as shown in Fig. 11. This feedback may come from several aspects, e.g. the demand of regular updates of geofence systems/software by drone manufacturers to include new and temporary restricted areas. To the best of our knowledge, some drone manufacturers such as DJI maintain a geofencing database for their systems or tools, but it is still a complicated issue due to different factors such as the refinement and validation of data (vector layers, statistic data, etc.) that should be implemented in the geofence platform itself. Another aspect also may come from the geofence layers integrated in geofence platforms. In practice, there is a lack of unified data layers that should be used in the digital geofence platforms/tools/maps; therefore, it is possible to find a no-fly zone in one geofence platform that does not exist in another one.

4.5 Privacy Considerations’ Impact

When talking about the effect of ethics on the use of drones, privacy and consent from individuals come first. According to the rules of data protection, no images of recognizable persons are allowed to be captured and/or published without their consent. Of course, this applies first to images taken in a private sphere, e.g. on residential properties (see e.g. §21 h LuftVOFootnote 2 for the German implementation), but also to images captured in the public areas. The critical question here is how to distinguish between private and public spheres. Basically, the public area is one that is accessible to everyone, and the non-public area is the one that not everyone can enter. The private area would then be the part of the non-public area that only a small group or a person has access to, e.g. a private person or family.

Hence, conducting drone flights over private and public areas, e.g. for data collection, requires that the individuals are not personally identifiable. In the case that individuals are recognizable, the disclosure of their identity should not bring them to any risk or harm (Resnik and Elliott 2019). In our questionnaire, we focused on this topic and posted the following question: “Did you face problems related to ethical implications during your drone operation?” The results showed that 44% of drone users in geospatial sector have faced problems with privacy issues, and as consequences they either cancelled their flight missions, or took extra time on identity closure of individuals.

5 Summary

The new EU drone regulations provide a detailed framework of how to define and conduct flight operations, to identify operation risks and analyse situations prior to drone deployment. On the other hand, the new regulations lead to some challenges that may be faced in the current and future stages of rules implementation. From this point of view, we discussed in this paper the impact of new rules on the drone use and the economic viability with the focus on the geospatial domain as being one of the top sectors that implements the drone technology. We discussed drone rules and their impact with respect to three aspects: visual range conditions, geofencing systems and the effect of privacy considerations. For this, we formulated a questionnaire to collect data from participants who are actively involved, developing or using the drone technology in the geospatial sector. The main output of the questionnaire showed that the majority of participants are of the opinion that it is difficult to judge if the new rules will help or hinder drone use. Another outcome is that a significant percentage of participants prefer conducting their flights within VLOS conditions, despite BVLOS-based flights being highly valuable due to the fact that BVLOS conditions allow conducting drone missions to cover long distances and large areas. Finally, we highlighted the impact of privacy issues on drone use in terms of data collection, e.g. for capturing high-resolution images, which requires that the individuals are not personally identifiable or recognizable. In this regard, one might critically add another aspect: professional drone users, such as from the geospatial domain, may need to work with private data, and also with very high-resolution imagery. Today, it is common to fly airborne imagery campaigns at ground sampling distances (GSD) down to 5 cm. Those images are handled with big care in terms of privacy concerns, for instance in mapping projects. In most cases, those images are not available to the public in the highest resolution if at all. For instance, in Germany, there are hints on how to treat privacy in the geosector.Footnote 3 Hence, one might ask, why quite strict rules apply for the case of drone-based imagery if captured for the same task, by the same professionals in the end?

Coming back to the aim of this paper in discussing how the recent regulations may influence drone use, and based on the questionnaire results, it is clear that there are large concerns within the community, and many commercial projects are not feasible currently. The legislation creates uncertainty that may currently discourage companies from investing further in the technology. We made this observation during a hands-on workshop where we talked to some decision makers about these issues. Therefore, we are motivated to transfer the questionnaire results to authorities or organizations that are involved in regulating drone operations with the aim of achieving a fruitful cooperation towards rule implementation. This process is still in an early stage, and it is natural that there is a demand for continuous amendments to the rules, which is something noticeable. Therefore, an effective cooperation between drone regulators and professional drone users should be achieved to realize a reliable and significant legal framework for drone operations. Within it, users can contribute and cover technical aspects, challenges, etc. which can help regulators in adopting new rules or amending the current one. Here, we find that results of studies and questionnaires like ours are good data sources that reflect somehow the users’ needs from a practical point of view.