Unmanned aircraft insurance

From December 19 to 21, 2018, drones sighted around Gatwick shut the airport: more than a thousand flights canceled, some one hundred and forty thousand passengers grounded. An unmanned aircraft inverts the usual proportions of aviation insurance. The device is worth a few thousand euros, the liability it can incur runs to millions, and hull cover almost never matters. Three exposures overlap. First, third-party liability on the ground: in the Union it falls under compulsory insurance whose minimum amounts derive from the regulation applicable to air carriers. Second, privacy and data protection, since most devices carry a camera and filming identifiable people falls under personal data law. Third, the risk of interference with manned aviation, whose potential severity is out of all proportion to the other two. The European framework classified operations by risk level, not by mass alone. Underwriting can therefore rest on a verifiable operational declaration rather than on what the remote pilot claims.