Global Drone Regulation Leaders in 2024

The Drone Readiness Index (DRI) is a proprietary metric by Drone Industry Insights that provides a numerical way to analyze and rank various countries’ regulatory developments. To recap, the DRI factors are:

1. Operational scope(measuring whether and how drones are able to operate BVLOS, over people, at night, etc);
2. Administrative Infrastructure(how much the responsible use of commercial drones is facilitated by insurance requirements, drone regulations, and standard procedures for acquiring flight permission);
3. Airspace integration(between manned and unmanned airspaces);
4. Social acceptance(how much regulation takes into account data protection and/or privacy issues, which can affect the reputation of drones as a whole within the country);
5. Human Resources(how regulations streamline recruitment, training, and certification of humans that work with commercial drones);
6. Applicability(having regulations specifically designed for drones and updated in the past 24 months)

In 2022, the DRI was topped equally by Australia, Belgium, and Norway. Then, in 2023, the UK made enough gains to tie with Australia for the top spot, followed by 9 other countries with the same score. Now, for 2024, Australia stands alone in the top spot as the leader for regulatory developments (with a score of 72 out of 100 points on the index). Among the factors placing it on top are the developments of UTM frameworks, guidelines for vertiport design, regulations for night operations, and new advisory circulars.

With a score of 66 points, the second place is technically shared by Canada and Spain, though Canada made more positive changes in general and is therefore placed above Spain in the ranking. The biggest improvements in ranking since last year were made by Switzerland, Poland, and Germany, which have entered the top 10. New countries that were added to this year’s index are Colombia, Ireland, Malawi, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Find all the latest insights on regulatory progress in the newly-released 2024 edition of our Drone Regulation Report:

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