EMERGING LEGAL ISSUES REGARDING CIVILIAN DRONE USAGE

Unmanned vehicles are becoming a common sighting in our day-to-day life and are soon going to become an important economic drive in creating workspaces and help achieve new milestones in human activities. As such, the technology revolving around the unmanned vehicles will push itself as much as it’s needed but with each achievement in the field of robotics a legal issue arises around how to use the newly acquired piece of technology in a public or private space and whether or not should such a technology be placed under a strict governmental control. As the saying by Prof. Henry W. Haynes (1879) goes “The possession of great powers and capacity for good implies equally great responsibilities in their employment. Where so much has been given much is required.” so does an unmanned vehicle and its operator must follow a degree of legal guidelines on how to properly use the gadget and to also to understand the legal limitations when interacting with other entities. This paper will focus on identifying and answering some legal issues regarding what is required for a drone to fly over an identifiable space, but also if the operator must have a document that was conferred by a state to acknowledge the skills of the pilot or should a software limitation be in place for national security safeguards. The paper will also tackle the issue of identifying legal documents from different states that can be applied to drone flight operations and also if different states have adopted sanctions to persons who did not abide to said legal norms