The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has revised its forecast of the likely number of drone-involved safety occurrences this year, saying that “significantly fewer” events occurred in the first half of 2017 than previous projections had indicated.
In a report released earlier this month, the ATSB said it still expects the rapid increase in the number of drones — also known as remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) and unmanned aircraft systems, among other terms — to continue. That growth “presents an emerging and insufficiently understood transport safety risk,” according to the report, the second edition of A Safety Analysis of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, 2012 to 2016. The first edition was issued in March.
Both the number of drones and the number of safety occurrences involving drones increased r…
