The Telangana government successfully completed a virtual hazard identification and risk mitigation (HIRM) workshop that was held to ensure that the State's medicine delivery through drones operations are conducted safely and securely. This ensures that the government's 'Medicine from the Sky' project can be started soon. According to a release by the Telangana IT And Industries department, the proceedings of this HIRM workshop shall be included as part of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of all the drone technology partners for approval from the DGCA. The first phase of flights with select consortia are tentatively expected to begin in the last week of June. How does the workshop help in securing drone operations? The workshop explored potential hazards and mitigation strategies during the upcoming trials by discussing the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA ) of the flights in the Vikarabad airspace. The CONOPS included a detailed description of operations, various system checks, communication protocols, daily flight planning, roles & responsibilities of both crew and officials, etc. to ensure smooth conduct of the trials. The SORA methodology of Joint Authorities for Rule-making on Unmanned Systems (JARUS), group of experts from 63 countries including India, was followed to quantify both the ground and air risk. A final Specific Assurance and Integrity Levels (SAIL) score of ‘II’ was calculated on combining the quantified risks and accounting for strategic and tactical mitigations. A SAIL score of ‘II’ on a scale of ‘VI’ indicates low risk. The workshop was held…
