SORA Is Not the Problem, Implementation Is: A View from Argentina
Recently, Stephen Sutton published a thought-provoking article titled “Grounded by Bureaucracy: How SORA Is Holding Europe’s Drones Back” on SUAS News.
His opening line on X was “Some things just need to be said” sets the tone for a much-needed conversation.
We agree with one essential point:
the current implementation of SORA in parts of Europe is creating friction, uncertainty, and delays that directly affect innovation and commercial viability.
But from our perspective in Argentina (where SORA is only now beginning to be adopted) we believe it’s important to separate the framework itself from how it has been operationalized.
SORA as a Concept: A Necessary Evolution
SORA was never meant to be bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake.
It was designed as a risk-based operational framework, allowing aviation authorities to move beyond blanket prohibitions and into structured, proportional safety analysis.
From a country like Argentina, historically dominated by binary logic (“allowed vs. forbidden”) SORA represents a huge cultural shift:
From aircraft-centric regulation → operation-centric regulation
From prescriptive rules → risk-based decision making
From fear of innovation → managed exposure to risk
In that sense, SORA is not holding progress back, it is enabling it for the first time.
Where the Problem Really Is: Institutionalization Without Learning
The strongest critique is not about safety, it’s about scalability and feedback loops.
We fully agree on several key failures in current implementations:
Approval timelines stretching to 6–8 months
No meaningful reuse of previously accepted mitigations
Little to no reward for good operational track records
Fragmentation between national authorities inside a supposedly unified market
When every SORA submission is treated as a first-ever experiment, the system stops learning.
That is not a flaw of SORA.
That is a flaw of how institutions are choosing to apply it.
Why Emerging Markets See SORA Differently
In regions like Latin America, SORA arrives before the market is saturated.
This creates an opportunity Europe no longer has:
To implement capability-based approvals
To leverage operator history
To standardize common scenarios early
To avoid turning SORA into a de-facto permanent license
For us, SORA is not a ceiling, it is the foundation.
The Real Question We Should Be Asking
Instead of asking whether SORA is “too slow,” we believe the real question is:
How do we evolve SORA so that safety scales with operational maturity?
Some ideas worth exploring globally:
Graduated approval levels based on performance
Pre-validated operational archetypes
Automatic downgrading of requirements after demonstrated safety
Stronger separation between risk assessment and commercial authorization
These are governance problems, not methodological ones.
An Open Invitation to the Global Drone Community
The article is valuable precisely because it forces this conversation into the open.
From Argentina, we see SORA not as a barrier, but as a rare chance to get it right early, before bad habits calcify into regulation.
We would genuinely welcome continued dialogue with the broader international community.
Because the future of drone operations will not be decided by whether we regulate,
but by how intelligently we allow the system to learn.
