Mr Hadi Sirika, minister of Aviation, yesterday said that the federal government will come up with a “simple policy” to regulate the use of drones for private and commercial purposes.
Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles that are remotely piloted by aviators or by their owners on the ground.
Sirika, at the weekly State House briefing in Abuja, said that lack of regulation for drones could cause “disaster” within the civil aviation space.
He said that “We have also seen that there are remotely piloted aircrafts now; unmanned airplanes or drones. They are fast becoming a phenomenon because everybody is flying drones now. Some are for good reasons but very soon we will find our airspaces dotted with such aircrafts.
“Managing them alone will become such a huge challenge because they will be operating around or within the air space and somebody needs to regulate them. So we thought that we should create a policy.
According to him “If drones are just being flown around and there is a big airplane, it could hit the airplane, get ingested in the engine and cause disaster. We have seen examples of such happenings in the UK, US and many other places. So we thought that we should develop a policy towards those remotely piloted aircrafts to have them organized and regulated,”
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