Reconciling Registration Policies for Unmanned Aircraft with Unmanned Aircraft Ownership Characteristics

Abstract

Registration of unmanned aircraft is a common policy around the world and forms part of the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s model regulations for unmanned aircraft. This study conducts a review of the various registration policies that have been implemented amongst advanced economies to find commonalities and differences. New Zealand is then used as a case study. The country does not currently have registration of unmanned aircraft; however, their Ministry of Transport has put forward the idea of implementing a registration scheme. As part of this case study, the ownership characteristics of 919 New Zealand unmanned aircraft users were collected using an online survey. The results highlight that personally owned aircraft tend to only be used by their owner, with the number of users being lower than the number of aircraft. For organisationally owned aircraft, there are multiple users per aircraft; however, these users tend to only be employees of the organisation. These findings suggest that for New Zealand, the best way to implement a registration scheme would be to register users and organisations rather than individual aircraft. While specific to New Zealand, these findings also prompt the need for future research worldwide to see whether registration schemes reconcile with ownership data.