EASA Latest News: ETSO Certification for Veronte Autopilot, Third Release of Innovative Air Mobility Hub

EASA (Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency) has been busy releas­ing AAM-relat­ed news in recent weeks. The lat­est two sto­ries are:-

: The basis approval of ETSO Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for the Veronte Autopi­lot.

: The third release of its Inno­v­a­tive Air Mobil­i­ty Hub. 

The approval of the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion basis for the Veronte Autopi­lot, makes it the first guid­ance and flight con­trol sys­tem for UAS and eVTOL to under­go an ETSO-C198 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process.

The com­pa­ny behind this tech­nol­o­gy, Spain-based Emben­tion, who is a pio­neer in autopi­lots and crit­i­cal avion­ics sys­tems for autonomous vehi­cles since 2007, has demon­strat­ed reli­a­bil­i­ty and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. 

After com­ply­ing with avi­a­tion stan­dards DO-178C, DO-254, DO-160, and achiev­ing ISO9001 and EN9100 cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, the Span­ish com­pa­ny has reached the first mile­stone with EASA in obtain­ing such an ETSO autho­ri­sa­tion for the Autopi­lot. This small flight con­trol sys­tem is designed for advanced con­trol of both manned (eVTOL/VTOL) and unmanned (UAS) autonomous vehi­cles.

Javier Espuch

EASA has ver­i­fied and approved the Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Pro­gram and the Arti­cle Tech­ni­cal Spec­i­fi­ca­tion, doc­u­ments that estab­lish the basis for the Veronte Autopi­lot under the frame­work of ETSO-C198 “Auto­mat­ic Flight Guid­ance and Con­trol Sys­tems (AFGCS).

Javier Espuch, Chief Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Offi­cer at Emben­tion, com­ment­ed, “This achieve­ment with EASA rep­re­sents an unprece­dent­ed advance­ment in our path to cer­ti­fy the Veronte Autopi­lot under the ETSO-C198 frame­work. This step rein­forces our com­mit­ment to inno­va­tion and safe­ty to enabling drones to pop­u­late our skies.”

Mean­while, EASA has launched the third release of its dig­i­tal space for the exchange of infor­ma­tion on air taxis and drones with a focus on sus­tain­abil­i­ty and geo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion.

The Inno­v­a­tive Air Mobil­i­ty (IAM) Hub was launched in Decem­ber 2023 and “enables cities, regions, nation­al author­i­ties, oper­a­tors and man­u­fac­tur­ers that have a role in the intro­duc­tion of these air taxi and drone ser­vices to con­nect. They can then share and obtain reli­able infor­ma­tion and data,“ explains the release.

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/domains/drones-air-mobility/drones-air-mobility-landscape/innovative-air-mobility-hub

The lat­est release con­tains these addi­tions:-

: An updat­ed ver­sion of the list of approved drones for EU oper­a­tions. Based on feed­back there is now a direct link for reg­is­tra­tion and guide­lines for drone man­u­fac­tur­ers.

: A new sec­tion on sus­tain­abil­i­ty of drones and eVTOLs. To man­age the envi­ron­men­tal impact of drones and eVTOLs, EASA devel­oped the ini­tial ver­sion of its stan­dard method­ol­o­gy called Envi­ron­men­tal Foot­print Avi­a­tion (EFA) for Deliv­ery Drones. This fol­lows the Com­mis­sion Prod­uct Envi­ron­men­tal Foot­print frame­work of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion and is open for con­sul­ta­tion until August 27th in the EASA Com­ment Response Tool.

: The new geo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the IAM Hub allows to view sta­tis­ti­cal drone opera­tions and pop­u­la­tion den­sity from the EASA Mem­ber States as well as a test case for Geo Zone infor­ma­tion from Por­tu­gal.

: Guid­ance mate­r­i­al has been added for exam­ple on how to access finan­cial sup­port and get EASA design ver­i­fi­ca­tion for drones.

: A new start page con­cern­ing ‘Get­ting Start­ed’; ‘Fly­ing a Drone for Fun’; and ‘Fly­ing a Drone for Work’.

The project is fund­ed by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion and the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en

(Top image: Veronte Autopi­lot, Cred­it — Emben­tion)

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