Drone Regulation and AI Law: Assessing the Intersection of the EU Legal Frameworks for Unmanned Aircraft and Artificial Intelligence

Drones are becoming a more familiar sight in the skies. This growth has potential implications for all aspects of society. To ensure safe, secure and sustainable drone activities, regulatory authorities have been revoking, amending or introducing laws. The primary focus has been on aviation safety rules for the design, manufacture and operation of these unmanned aircraft. These rules do not directly address other domains. This paper assesses how the EU’s drone-specific safety-based rules interact with the EU’s AI legal framework that is currently being developed. While drone rules do not address AI directly, they do indirectly as, for example, autonomous drone operations are permitted in the single European sky. The general AI legal framework also applies to drone activities, despite such not being mentioned. This paper brings together the sector-specific EU drone rules and the EU’s generalAI legal framework to understand what the term ‘AI’ means within the context of drone operations, and assesses whether there are any inconsistencies, contradictions, overlaps or lacunae. This will determine the applicability and suitability of applying the general AI legal framework to a specific technology (drones) and sector (aviation), and whether the drone rules can contribute to the regulation of AI more generally.