# Accelerating future Dock Deployments with SORA Annex H and upcoming SORA 3.0

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 30:45
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/siAUrrPj_mI/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## Transcript

**[0:21]** hello hello and welcome to nesen 2025 I'm Bali your host for this session and the mark marketing manager at FlytBase and today we are going to be diving into a topic that's shaping the future of Boss drone operations the Sora Annex Edge framework and its Evolution now I know that regulations might not sound the most thrilling Topic at first but let's be real without the right Frameworks we simply wouldn't be able to unlock the full potential of drone operations but don't you worry we've brought in a key expert to help us navigate the Sora nxh and the upcoming Sora 3.0 a framework that's designed to making boss operations and Doc operations easier faster and more scalable than ever but before I dive in a few quick uh ground rules if you have any questions please feel free to drop them in the Q&A uh chat box anytime we'll tackle them at the end of the presentation and please uh be a part of this conversation hit me up in the chat and let me know your your

**[1:25]** thoughts and also let us know where you're tuning in from and if you love the session and the content and the information the insights that you'll receive from this session please do not hesitate to share it on LinkedIn or Twitter with the hashtag nesg we also have a few polls coming in so please keep an eye out and we'd love for you to participate finally nesin would not be possible without our incredible sponsors and the the support of you has all helped us shape this event so now let's dive in to guide us through this session we have a very special guest he is the co-founder and CEO of fly freely with s years of experience in the Drone industry as a certified mechanical engineer with over 12 years of experience in mining construction and agriculture he's also been a key member of the jarus helping Enterprises navigate regulatory complexities and accelerate the adoption of Sora so please everyone join

**[2:26]** me in welcoming Dr David hello David thanks Pas um if I can share my screen yes I before we do that why don't we start with the fun question if you had to rewrite any part of the existing drone regulations overnight what would that be and why so you someone has someone has asked me this question before and I couldn't think of a good answer and where to start um so I'm probably going to say it's a it's a very tough question um there's there's a whole range of things and I think we'll we'll probably get into some of them today um particularly around it's not necessarily the the changing the regulations per se but making the regulations automatable or or or digitizing them so that they can be automated I think that's really the the key Insight rather than any specific rule God that'll be really interesting for a lot of people because it's a lot of

**[3:29]** paperwork right at the end know the de yes yeah correct so we we'll hopefully get into a few things that that I think I think are pretty exciting I get excited about regulations hopefully everyone else does as well um so with that I'll I'll I'll kick off um so thanks again um to FlytBase uh for the opportunity to talk to you all today uh hopefully you'll get something out of this and hopefully you'll uh remain awake for the next 30 minutes um before I get into the the detail of the talk I just thought I' give you a little bit of my background um so as B said um mechanical engineer uh saw the opportunities for drones back in 2013 working as as an engineer in the mining uh construction sector and started a drone services company here in Australia um so we learned you know did a lot of innovative things learned a lot of tough lessons on on how to operate drones one of the challenges we had in that process is actually managing all our operations how do we deal with compliance maintenance etc etc um so so what do you do you go and build your own software

**[4:32]** platform to do that um so that's what we did and then we then had people coming to us saying hey can we please please use that um so we ended up pivoting the whole company away from uh providing Services into building software uh since then we've gone on to become verified by the regulator here in Australia in that process we built a global rules and regulations engine um so we can basically handle the the rules and regulations from different countries and that's now sort of subsequently led us on to connecting to different uh low altitude authorization systems around the world so the Australian system the New Zealand system and most recently the Lance system in the USA um so where we're sort of heading is you know working with Partners like flight base um to support our customers to really build some uh vertical Focus Solutions um to make their sort of endtoend operations as as efficient as possible and obviously key part of that is uh the regulatory side and and that's sort of our real focus is

**[5:35]** on tackling that so what do people sort of tell us you know are the challenges to to their doc deployments um we we hear a couple of ones coming through uh the first is around systems integration so you know it's it's often not as easy as just buying a dock and putting it on site there's a lot of other infrastructure that has to go with that um this is a a photo from one of our partners um who have developed a trailer system KJR um and this is like one solution to this problem um and really bringing together a whole bunch of different Technologies uh to make the system Deployable so that that problem is that system integration problem is being solved actively the other real challenge we hear and I'm sure you're going to hear it again and again is on the regulatory side um obviously very challenging um the key piece of I guess infrastructure we've got to address that is is the Sora from gyrus um and

**[6:36]** as was mentioned I'm a a member of jurus on the industry uh side um and you know while Sora is a good framework you know there's definitely challenges in applying it and where it becomes really complicated is the actual interaction between these two things so obviously what you what's physically available and what you can buy limits what you can say in your approval and then likewise if you want a certain approval um that requires more sophisticated systems you then have to integrate those systems um into your actual end solution so it becomes quite challenging this backwards and forwards um between the two so I'm going to dive into uh particularly how jarus is trying to address some of these problems um but before I do that I just thought I' just give everyone a sense of you know why jarus and S is important um because you might think oh well you know s is difficult so let's go use something else um and the reason it's it's super important

**[7:37]** is it's basically been adopted by many countries around the world as as the means of compliance um there's a variety of countries have implemented this fully um others have partially implemented and others have kind of made variations to the Sora um but needless to say it's it's got wide adoption and I'd also point out the the way gyus works is that the voting members are the Regulators so when a new version of Sora comes out that is voted by and approved by All The Regulators so that kind of gives you confidence that it's going to be accepted uh in most countries so just wanted to give that little bit of and and credits to yor um who's the safety risk management uh group leader in gyus who who has the fun job of guiding Sora and uh bringing it all together so what are the what are the challenges we hear around using Sora the big one is it's still considered to be the domain of experts right so anyone who's who's tried to use it um will immediately start asking themselves questions I

**[8:40]** can tell you even at gyus U when some questions get asked it takes about three people in the room to answer the question um because it is quite complex and and there's a lot of nuance and things behind it and so it's not easy for the for the vast majority of operators actually even apply um and this leads to basically people giving up um saying you know it's too hard so I'm not even going to bother which we obviously don't want um the other problem is it is specific so it's in the name specific operation risk assessment uh so what does that mean each operation really needs to be assessed individually so the challenge there is um not only is is the time to prepare and get those uh applications approved the bigger problem is what works in one location may not work in another location right and this is the real impediment to scaling um because you know you've got it all approved and you think excellent I can now go to another location and the risk the air risk and the ground

**[9:41]** risk is changed so there and it's no longer valid and you need to make changes uh the other one is everyone's sort of Reinventing the wheel right so everyone's trying to figure out what is these things how how do you interpret these things how does the regulator interpret them and so we've got a lack of sort of standardized methods of of assessing air risk and Grand risk and which data sources you rely on uh to do that assessment so what's sort of jarus doing about that um in the Sora uh working group um developing what we're calling uh nxh so let me let me dive in into that so what what is nxh um it's a brand new annex to the Sora so it just got released in uh November last year year so it's it's literally hot off the press um currently led by Marcus and and Sebastian um and it's really focused on bringing in um and and sort of enabling some digitization of the Sora so let's let's kind of

**[10:46]** dive into that a bit um the current sort of structure of the Sora is there's a competent Authority and they have a relationship with the operator and that's you know through the main body of the Sora um and the outcome of that is a comprehensive safety portfolio which which is what gets approved what nxh is doing is introducing the concept of a service provider so this is basically a software provider um that's going to provide some things called Sor Safety Services via a service level agreement to the operator so what what this is saying is you know essentially the competent Authority the regulator will approve these Services which then an operator can use and and the regulator will accept that when the operator submits their application and says I'm using those Services they're kind of accepted um and the Really one of the key things is the service level agreement between the the service provider and operator um to make that kind of a binding

**[11:46]** relationship uh furthermore the service levels that are available are aligned to the different levels of of robustness um that you're required to meet in your um comprehensive safety portfolio so it's everything from you know the low level all the way to to very high which has you know requires third party verification etc etc so that's all sounds really great um what are they so here's uh an extract and hopefully this is this is this is legible um but on the left hand side here we've got the the sore process so what what a typical operator would would follow then we have basically these currently we've got three services so the ground risk operations planning safety service the air risk operations planning service and the Tactical the Tactical conflict detection and alerting safety Service uh it's a slight mouthful um and those are really Services designed to support the operator both during and after the sort of process so helping to to speed up

**[12:52]** these steps um but then also for example with the Tactical conflict detection system um me your tmpr requirements but then also be a live system that you would use on in in day-to-day operations and the other thing nxh is doing is setting up this framework for how a competent uh Authority a a regulator um can actually approve a service provider um so there's some structure um in place that that a regulator can then approve these Services which then operators can then use so let's dig into uh an example service so this is the ground risk operations planning service at a at a uh service level one so this is the lowest level um and what you'll see here is there a couple of things so uh we've got some data sources coming in the service provider would be doing a self- declaration on on that data providing some sort of calculation

**[13:54]** mechanism for both the igc and the buffers and that would be feeding in uh to where the operator would be actually defining their flight GE geography and going through the process and then also uh with Sor 2.5 um being a the ground risk models being a quantitative model uh it can actually start to feed in uh shelter Factor data as well so how does it how does it look um the the structure of nxh is really trying to divide up responsibilities between the service provider an operator so it's very clear who needs to do what um throughout this process um so as I said here they got different service levels um depending on the level of uh robustness that's required and obviously as you go up in higher service levels you need more and more um detailed information and then that information needs to be verified and certified by Third parties likewise on the

**[14:56]** operator side um there's they have to provide information as well and we'll get to this part here um in a second because this can be quite challenging for an operator right so how's an operator going to know about probable sing um single malale function failure rates and all those sorts of things so we we we have some suggestions on how we're going to address that well let's just park that for now um and then as another example this this the Tactical conflict detection alerting safety service um is something that would run more in in runtime um so when you're actually performing operations this would be sitting in the background uh making sure you're meeting all your tnpr requirements and again similar structure service provider needs to do things operator needs to do certain things and the um and that's how the the systems designed to or anexat is designed to work so what's the benefits of this well hopefully it's reasonably obvious we we think it's going to help accelerate

**[16:00]** uh some of that risk analysis process um so not just on time but on on cost as well but what we really think is going to be very very important is it'll actually help operators assess feasibility really early on so you'll have a really good sense of where I can go um given certain risk levels what could I what could I potentially where can I potentially operate um we also think it would it's going to help the ex The Regulators as well uh cuz essentially that will be preapproved uh data that's sitting behind it and uh assessment methods that have used to come to those sort of numbers and we're sort of envisioning that's going to you know lead to less arguments um like s 2.0 uh was a little bit uh qualitative so it's open to interpretation and then that just leads to rework by the operator when they've got to go and rechange their application resubmit um and you go around in circles and it just causes everyone

**[17:02]** delays um and then probably the most interesting part of all of this is it it opens up the potential to automate the approval process so essentially you know you could have certain levels of um risk that you're kind of pre-approved operate under and then when you move to a different location as long as those thresholds are being met um you would essentially be approved to operate but that's you know no Regulators done that yet um but that's kind of what we envisage um it will be able to do um and you know and hopefully you're seeing this this is kind of what we think um is the pathway to accelerating our future doc deployments so what's next for nxh and this is where we'd love to get some input from uh the everyone here um currently we're looking at adding in a Weather Service and a communication navigation service um but we'd really like to hear from you uh

**[18:04]** what you'd like to F us to focus on um so it's very much industry driven um the organization and and the tasks that uh I worked on so yeah if you want to uh mention in in the Q&A uh anything you'd like to see sort of preference that would be that would be great um the other thing we're looking at is adding the idea of the OEM as a responsible party so as as we sort of introduced that service provider uh as as a responsible party introducing the OEM so really what's the benefit of that what we talked about before about how the operator needs to provide very technical information about value rates and and things of the Drone that's really best handled by the OEM um and there may be sensitivities in that data as well which the OEM may not want to share with the operator um but they can share that with the with the competent Authority and the regulator and you know that can essentially be uh you know so the RP pass or uas can be

**[19:04]** approved once by the regulator um and then it could be used as um that information can be used and consumed in the services and be confident that that information is correct um and the other bit of work we're doing is aligning with Sora 3.0 um and the and the big focus on Sora 3.0 is air risk so let's dive into how is Sora 3.0 going to help so we've kind of got NX now which is kind of giving us a framework on how to potentially uh digitize and automate some of the the the Sora process what's what's coming in Sora 3.0 I'll start off by saying don't expect anything super fast um expect uh roughly around uh 20126 for Sora 3.0 to go live I believe the goal at the moment is uh for a draft version to be ready by the end of the year uh but it probably won't be live until 2026 having said all that

**[20:04]** what's coming in Sor 3.0 um there's there's currently a whole bunch of work on the means of compliance so this is trying to map different uh standards to the different mitigations in Osos um to give everybody more guidance on exactly how how you can meet the levels of robustness in the Sora there's a bunch of work going on uh guidance for Regulators so obviously some Regulators are more advanced than others have been using it for longer um and so this is really trying to distill all that knowledge um and share it to all other Regulators not just how to use it but also how to how to interpret it um you'll be very pleased to know there's actually some work going to be going on on on special use cases uh that's actually around full autonomous operations and one to many I'm not particularly involved in that but I just know it's it's it's it's going on and it is envisioned to be part of the Sora um but the big piece and and probably the most interesting piece uh we think is the

**[21:04]** quantitative air risk model so this is really shifting away from you know the classic Ark ABCD um into something more data driven and quantitative and and so like as I mentioned like there is a lot of people working uh on the Sora um from all around the world all voluntary uh trying to make all this happen and and bring it all together but let's sort of dive into what does a quantitative model look like so here's uh for those that don't know this this is actually Brisbane you have to trust me that it's Brisbane um in Queensland Australia uh this is Brisbane airport and this is like arcd under that so it's a controlled AER Drome controlled AER Drome North and there's another one sort to the west then we've got sort of uncontrolled aerodromes in the yellow and then uh we've got sort of um s space above this is this is at 1,000 ft so above 400 ft both uh so this is

**[22:04]** urban and this is rural so that's the that's the typical Sora analysis you would you would get out so thanks to qn Boeing so queenzone University of Technology um who have been working on quanitative models for many years now um this is an example of a quantitative model this is not the quantitative model um that will be in Sora it's just it's just an example um but what it what I want to highlight a couple things here so this is primary radar data um that's been processed with um proprietary algorithms that that P have developed around 60,000 flights and it's actually providing a quantitative map of midair Collision risk so to give you some sort of examples um if we look at and and so this is the same um geography but just different overlays so we can see here you know there's there's a blue patch here inside the controlled airspace where it's basically saying you know there's one in uh 10 million chance of

**[23:09]** a collision actually happening there right so that the data is saying there's never really been any aircraft there so we probably should be able to fly there you know whereas the traditional um sort analysis is basically saying it's off limits you you almost guaranteed to hit an aircraft so don't go in there however there's a flip side when you use data um we have a VFR track uh that's actually through here so there is traffic right whereas the Sor analysis basically says there's probably low um L traffic there and but there actually is something there so the flip side of this is some areas which you know s may say is okay is actually not okay right so you know it's it's probably going to be swings and roundabout um but I think the net it'll be a net positive um and obviously what you can see with this is it becomes quantitative and you start to eliminate all those

**[24:09]** arguments around you know what is the risk you actually using real data U from um real operations cool so that was just kind of an an example of what's possible um what's really exciting is the federal government here in Australia has actually funded a program uh called the Australian little hbas characterization project um to turn all of this stuff into reality so again it's being led by quut uh our Boe and ourselves are Partners on this project um and we're really looking to bring essentially some actual toolkits that uh end users can actually use and interact with this data and then produce results which they can actually then submit to Regulators um and it will provide the sort of underlying data that future uh services like the air risk planning service under nxh will actually be doing that that'll be the authority of data source um and the other part of this project is we really want to actually test these uh this data as part of real world applications

**[25:15]** um and I should say this is for the whole country so the whole of Australia um at multiple different altitude levels so the supercomputers are currently crunching like crazy um trying to um do all the modeling for this um but really we think it's it's going to be sort of a national um digital piece of infrastructure which will be super important going forward so we think it's pretty exciting and and sort of how how's the how's the future shaping up so you know we've currently got the the kind of current configuration with r the Box FlytBase driving things um where where obviously we specialized in is in the operations compliance and Fleet Management side of things and obviously we've got a flinx uh integration and development at the moment with FlytBase uh to essentially help streamline operations for for customers uh we'll then also be looking to plug into and develop some of the Sora Safety Services Under Annex H and then that will sort of complement

**[26:17]** our existing um SAS authorization Integrations and UTM Integrations um so we start to actually bring the whole sort of ecosystem together and really uh enable doc deployments to happen at scale I think that's sort of you know every everyone's sort of Desire so that's it from me um feel free to reach out um answer any questions um always happy to talk regulations um and yeah here to help and and kind of see you see you successful thank you so much David for the presentation uh I think this is a very heavy topic and uh thank you for sharing us what's coming up in the Sora anx I think this is Insider information that we got Early Access to so uh it is great to hear about how it's going to accelerate the risk analysis process uh from both from a cost uh perspective as well as timeline do you have any idea around the timeline I

**[27:18]** also have a question uh so you know what is the reduction in the weight time going to look like like I think currently it takes around 3 to six months so is that going to reduce that timeline or how is it going to be yeah so excellent question the I guess the simple answer is we don't know um It's Only just been released and it's really up to The Regulators to adopt it and actually take a service provider through the process or service providers through the process um we guesstimate we guesstimate you're going to have at least a 50% saving I honestly believe it's probably going to be a 90% saving um because you're just basically standardizing everything and everything's kind of preapproved there's almost it's almost by the time it gets to the regulator the the risk analysis side of it is basically agreed that that's correct right you might have some procedural things and other things which you might have to address but on

**[28:20]** the risk assessment side um it should heavily heavily heavily streamline that on both sides of the films got it and we also have a question around U uh so because you mentioned about the safety Services of the service provider what would that typically include the air risk ground risk or anything beyond that yeah so so yep another great question so that's it's we'll we'll keep adding this the nxh is open-ended um we'll just keep adding Services based on demand so there's currently three services uh listed in there um and like I said based on feedback we'll just keep adding um so and and that's where yeah asking for suggestions um of what's critical to you because we can prioritize those or I can put I can put them forward to be prioritized put it that way yes we will also create like content around this and we'll ask this further to a

**[29:20]** wider audience uh because there are happening multiple sessions are happening so people are kind of spread out here and uh one final question before we close up because we have just 30 more seconds to go uh there was one to many operations are going to be coming in through this so is it happening today or do you think that you know after the formulation of this anex it's going to become more streamlined no so I believe that that's an independent piece of work um so which is happening in another sort of um task force within um the safety risk management group in in Sora so um um yeah I don't know enough much about that all I know is it's happening right so yes we are out of time thank you so much David again for sharing everything with us and uh more insights around the Sora anx Edge uh thank you audience for joining in uh we will see you in the next session theyve already uh started right away so why don't you head over to the upcoming sessions and uh yeah

**[30:25]** have a greatness Jen and thank you again uh David will'll be in touch no problem thanks everybody see you later yes bye