SORACourse.com is an on-line training course that helps drone operators accelerate their Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) applications to obtain faster authorisation for EU Specific Category operations. A parallel course has been developed for regulatory authorities to help review and authorise SORA applications. Dannick Riteco is Co-Founder and CEO.
What problems are you solving?
Most people don’t realise what the SORA process entails. To fly drones in the specific category you need to complete a SORA application process and most people underestimate the effort it takes to fill in such an operational request. At first sight the SORA looks fairly simple. But it still requires subject knowledge expertise and that takes a long time to accumulate. One delivery company in Switzerland, for example, spent approximately 1,000 hours on an operational request and the regulator spent another 100 hours evaluating it.
So, you do not want to get into a long-drawn-out process with the government because your document quality is bad. Many regulators will disregard your entire document if it does not reach a certain standard; they have a pre-application review and if it doesn’t reach the required level they simply reject it.
The benefit of this course is that it avoids this iterative cycle with the authorities because from the start you will be able to submit a set of high-quality documents. Of course, they will always have feedback because it’s a subjective methodology and depends on the person doing the review.
But with this course you can keep the reviewing process to the minimum – if only because governments don’t have endless resources and prefer to spend what resources they do have on more ambitious projects such as urban air mobility and medical delivery, rather than assessing a mission for a DJI drone to fly over a wedding.
The real value of the course is to know from the start how to draft the document, a skill you can learn quite easily. Then there is the added benefit of being able to access a community of peers if you have technical questions.
Source : “Our SORA course can help you get your SORA approval 10 times faster” – Urban Air Mobility News