Crewed aircraft/drone collisions have been identified as a safety risk within the European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) latest EASA Safety Risk Portfolio, the European Plan for Aviation Safety Volume Three which identifies the most important aviation safety issues through the Agency’s analysis of all relevant safety information, including occurrence data.
Two iterations of the risk have been identified by EASA:
“The unexpected presence of military UAS within civilian air traffic areas may disrupt normal operations. There is the potential for misuse of civilian UAS as obstacles, to attack critical sites or to disrupt normal air traffic flows.”
And
“Airborne conflict with an unmanned aircraft system (UAS)”.
According to EASA:
“The increasing popularity of drones, especially drones of less than 25 kg operating in the ‘open’ category, has inadvertently led to an increased likelihood for airborne collision risk between drones and manned aircraft. This is largely due to unauthorised activity of drones in both take-off and approach paths of commercial airlines up to 5 000 ft. While less common, unauthorised activity of drones may also pose a collision hazard when an aircraft is flying en-route. Authorised UAS operations in the ‘specific’ category may include UAS flights at altitudes at which other (manned) aircraft will fly, and therefore these could possibly pose risks as well. For example, failure of the UAS guidance and control system or degradation of technical systems supporting e-identification, geo-fencing, detect and avoid, (self)-separation or collision avoidance, could create the risk of airborne collision between manned aircraft and UAS. Human factors issues and unintended remote pilot/operator errors could result in airspace violations, procedural deviations, and altitude deviations (thereby increasing the risk of airborne collision). This safety issue is exacerbated by the fact that UAS are often not detected by ground equipment and/ or on-board conspicuity devices of other aircraft.
As a result of a drone sighting, aerodrome traffic may be stopped or diverted, leading to secondary risks, such as fuel shortages, airspace capacity saturation and an increased workload of air traffic controllers and pilots.
For more information
European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS) 2026 – 15th edition | EASA
