SORA Application to Large RPAS Flight Plans

This paper describes the application of the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA)-a concept developed by the Joint Authorities on Rulemaking for Unmanned Systems (JARUS)-to the flight of large Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) in Australian airspace. Due to the increasing demand of commercial RPAS operations and the complexity of integrating them into existing, nation-specific airspace infrastructure, the JARUS SORA was created as a country-agnostic guidance tool for establishing the safety of a given operation. An archetypical RPAS operation centered on a maritime surveillance mission is investigated to test the applicability of this process. A Concept of Operations (ConOps), representative flight plans, and relevant stakeholders are described for this use case accordingly. Distinguishing factors of Australian airspace are also highlighted as inputs to the SORA and the impact on the currently proposed procedure and outputs are discussed in turn. The inputs, methods, and results of the SORA application demonstrate the prospective capabilities of this tool as well as potential for future document improvement.