Organizational and Socio-Technical Challenges in UAV Incidents: Evidence from a Practitioner Focus Group

2026-08-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the multifaceted sociotechnical challenges inherent in real-world unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) incident response, an area lacking empirical grounding in frontline practitioners’ experiences. Adopting a sociotechnical perspective, the research systematically identifies critical non-technical barriers—spanning organizational coordination, legal and policy frameworks, and forensic capabilities—through focus group interviews with UAV and counter-UAV professionals from U.S. industry and government sectors, followed by thematic analysis. The findings reveal five core challenges: insufficient situational awareness, fragmented inter-agency coordination, limited forensic traceability, regulatory gaps, and inadequate training. By providing the first empirical account of these operational realities, this work fills a significant gap in the literature and offers both theoretical insights and practical foundations for developing more effective UAV incident response systems.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are now widely used across business, government, and recreational contexts, creating new challenges for incident response and digital forensics. While previous forensics research has largely focused on the extraction of technical data from UAV systems, minimal empirical work has examined how UAV incidents are handled in real-world settings or what challenges incident handlers face during this response. To address this gap, this paper reports findings from an in-person focus group with UAV and counter-UAV practitioners from industry and government organizations in the United States. Using qualitative analysis, several key challenges are identified, including situational awareness and airspace visibility, fragmented reporting and interorganizational coordination, forensic and attribution limitations, legal and policy gaps, and shortfalls in training and operational capacity. The research extends socio-technical incident response research to the UAV domain by providing practitioner-driven insight into UAV incident response and highlighting opportunities to strengthen incident response in this domain.

Problem

• UAV incidents
• incident response
• socio-technical challenges
• digital forensics
• organizational coordination

Innovation

• socio-technical
• UAV incident response
• digital forensics
• organizational challenges
• practitioner focus group