Air traffic and airborne wind energy harvesting at different altitudes at Valkenburg airfield, Leiden, The Netherlands (11 March 2011).
Richard Ruiterkamp CEO Ampyx Power B.V. Lulofsstraat 55 – unit 13 2521 AL The Hague The Netherlands richard@ampyxpower.com www.ampyxpower.com
Update on Certification and Regulations of Airborne Wind
Energy Systems – The European Case for Rigid Wings
Richard Ruiterkamp1, Volkan Salma1,2, Michiel Kruijff1 1Ampyx Power B.V.
2Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology
As an increasing number of Airborne Wind Energy Sys-tems (AWES) is reaching early commercialization oper-ational safety and system reliability become important aspects. This presentation will provide an overview of existing and expected rules and standards for ensuring safe operation of rigid wing AWES. The objective is to sys-tematically determine the relevant authorities and their points of view from the top down to the national lev-els and provide an overview of relevant system stan-dards independent of the specific AWES concept. This overview will be supplemented by the current specific legislation for rigid wing concepts and the relevant up-coming changes of the European airspace law.
The starting point for identifying the organizations in-volved in the rule-making processes for the use of airspace in an international context is the ICAO (Interna-tional Civil Aviation Organization). This UN agency is re-sponsible for providing international Standards and Rec-ommended Practices (SARPs) to ensure safe, efficient and secure use of civil airspace. The EU member states recog-nise the authority of ICAO and the European Commission (EC) attends suitable ICAO meetings as an observer. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is responsible for drafting the rules and advising the EC during the process of developing common laws for member states. The Fed-eral Aviation Administration (FAA) is the civil aviation au-thority in the US and is responsible for the Federal Avia-tion RegulaAvia-tions (FARs). Accordingly, FAA also references
the ICAO SARPs. Potentially relevant ICAO annexes to all AWE concepts will be discussed and followed down to their implementation in the European legal framework. We will briefly discuss the FAA point of view on AWES based on their UAS roadmap and discuss international actions to align integration of drones into the airspace. Current research activities and technology demonstra-tions by AWE developers rely on special exempdemonstra-tions for using airspace. These prototypes have a limited mass of airborne components and occupy only a limited airspace volume with human pilots in the loop. They are operat-ing in a selected safe area to mitigate risk to third par-ties. Nevertheless, the final commercial products are ex-pected to have significantly larger sizes and mass and will occupy larger areas and ultimately have to fully com-ply with international airspace regulations. On the other hand, AWE technologies have important mitigation fac-tors such as being connected to the tether, operating in a restricted airspace or having speed and range lim-its. Therefore, a compromise may be reached with au-thorities on different mitigations depending on the AWE product type, such as being slow, having soft wing, hav-ing multiple tether etc. We will finalise the presentation with a comparison of different existing AWES concepts and how they fit in the upcoming European airspace law changes for drones, based on the definitions in EASA NPA 2014-09 and the recently published EASA RPAS concept of operations.
