Validation of EASA's Airspace Risk Assessment guidelines for implementing a U-space area in Germany

In recent years, drones or Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) have emerged as a crucial enabler in our increasingly globalized society, offering diverse services ranging from surveillance, agriculture, and delivery to environmental monitoring and entertainment. UAS operations for such use cases have to be operated in a safe and secure manner, and will (partially) share the existing airspace with conventional crewed aviation and other airspace users. In Europe, the concept of U-space has been envisioned as a pivotal framework to facilitate safe and efficient drone operations on a large scale. U-space is designed to create a digital ecosystem encompassing various services such as Flight Authorization, Geo-awareness, and Airspace Reconfiguration to ensure safe UAS operations in very low-level airspace. The establishment of U-space areas adheres to the regulation set by the European Commission (e.g., EU Regulation 2021/664) and will follow the guidelines published by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), as defined in its Guidance Material (GM) and Applicable Means of Compliance (AMC). Prior to implementing a U-space airspace, a comprehensive Airspace Risk Assessment (ARA) is a prerequisite according to these guidelines. The ARA serves the essential purpose of analyzing the entirety of the airspace earmarked for the U-space integration. This publication describes the utilization of the ARA process to assess the Aerodrome Traffic Zone (ATZ) of the Magdeburg-Cochstedt airport in Germany with the aim to implement a fully operational U-space airspace around the mentioned airport. At first, this publication describes the methodology and process steps required for conducting the ARA in order to later validate their feasibility and practicability for the concrete use case of applying them to an active airport in Germany. Second, a detailed and precise execution of the ARA process phases is illustrated by following the aforementioned EASA guidelines entailing the three required phases of preparation, reference scenario development and assessment. Third, this publication details the conducted assessment phase by indicating the assessed risk levels including potential mitigation measures for several key performance areas in order to evaluate the feasibility of the U-space airspace implementation. Finally, lessons learned and best practices are summarized detailing emerged challenges during the execution of the ARA process in order to potentially support policy makers in enriching affected regulations.