SORA stands for Specific Operation Risk Assessment. A SORA application is required for drone operations in the specific category that are not covered by an existing standard scenario or a pre-defined risk assessment. The SORA Tool guides the user step-by-step through the SORA process, providing guidance and information to assist the applicant. This enables non-aviation experts to complete a SORA assessment in a reasonable amount of time.

Last year, Swiss FOCA split the SORA submission into two separate submissions. For the initial submission, only the basic data for the proposed drone operation is provided. This improvement provides tighter feedback loops to reduce the initial time spent on the application. With the latest release of the SORA Tool, the development team has integrated the new published guidance material from FOCA into the tool and added support to automatically generate the new PDF form and additional documents for the initial submission.

The update of the frontend framework from Vuejs 2 to Vuejs 3 along with various bugfixes and improvements provide a stable base from which the team will implement new features. Coming up next:

• FOCA stage 2 submission support with document generation
• Multi-user capability for collaborative work on a SORA application

Stay tuned and don’t forget to test SORA Tool by creating a free account at soratool.ch.

SORA Tool is developed and maintained by the research group Human Factors Engineering.