KOTI - Korea Transport institute

Drones are coming into our everyday lives with a variety of purposes and types while they have been used for military purposes in past decades. The number of drones is expected to dramatically increase in the future, and laws and regulations should be taken into consideration for the management of unmanned aerial vehicles (called ‘drones’). The Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has selected the drone industry as one of the seven major rising industrial areas, and has established a roadmap (‘17-’26) to support the drone industry in terms of law and regulations. Following this stream, this study aims to establish legal amendments for the management of drones, ultimately in order to effectively manage drones and support the economic growth through drones.
In principal, regulations for safety management and deregulation for fostering industries may have trade-offs. In order to minimize the trade-offs, this study provided countermeasures to enforce the registration of drones and to alleviate the authorization of drone navigation. In other words, this study recommended lowering the drone’s weight threshold of registration in order to enlarge the scope of drones that have to be mandatorily registered. On the other hand, this study recommended a reduced procedure for navigation approval, in order to facilitate the uage of drones. With these two basic directions in mind, this study provided legal amendments by seven legal areas: 1) definition and categorization, 2) registration, 3) flight operations, 4) driver license and training, 5) liability and insurance, 6) privacy protection, and 7) enforcement and accident investigation. In addition, to facilitate the legal amendment process, this study proposed a step-by-step implementation approach enabling the current laws and regulations to be revised in the beginning and independent laws and regulations to be legislated afterward.