Open category transition period extended to 1 Jan 2026. No Class marking in the UK (at all or at least for now).

The Open Category transition period is extended in the UK to 1 January 2026 following a formal decision by the Department for Transport. The CAA has updated its guidance on 2 December, please read here.

This extension follows the outcome of the CAA’s consultation published last June where 70+% of the 4500 respondents favoured an extension beyond twenty-four months. ARPAS-UK was in favour of a 24 months extension.

Presumably, respondents voted for the ability to use their legacy drones beyond December 2022… and may not have considered that the transition extension would also trigger the postponement of class marking drones in the UK.

To be fair, the implementation of Class marking in Europe has also taken more time than anticipated, and many would say that the Open Category has been over-engineered from the start and too complex for the hundreds of thousands of pilots flying in the Open Category.

In Europe, the transition period is extended to 1 January 2024. Identifying and nominating the notified bodies that would perform the homologation, defining precisely the standards for drone class identification labels and going through the process of certification with the drone manufacturers has taken time. We know only of 2 CE marking drones to date:

  • In June 2022,  SenseFly announced that the eBee X Series Drones were the world’s  first to receive EASA’s C2 Certificate.
  • In August 2022, DJI announced that they were granted the world’s first C1 Drone Certificate for its DJI Mavic 3 series.
  • We understand that DJI was targeting the class marked C0 before year-end for its DJI Mini 3.

Coming back to the UK, the EU class marking has no legal recognition in the UK, and the structure of identifying homologation bodies, going through a verification process… is not in place in the UK. “The CAA will start to remove references to class markings from guidance material shortly”.

Drone manufacturers sell global products and drones with EU Class marking will probably be sold on the UK market. Operators will enjoy the additional safety features, but it will not change the authorised operations, they will continue to operate within the existing provisions in the Open category:

CAP2012

ALS 2 Dec 2022