Drone Training & Compliance has received approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency to issue recognized operator certificates in all 25 countries where the platform is active. The approval covers both the Open and Specific categories, meaning a pilot can now complete training, testing, and certification in one place instead of routing paperwork through a national aviation authority after finishing coursework elsewhere.
Before this approval, certification was the bottleneck. A pilot could finish DTC's coursework in a few days, but then wait an average of six weeks for a national authority to process and issue the actual certificate. That gap was the single biggest complaint in post-course surveys, cited by 61% of respondents.
What changes for pilots
Certificates now issue directly from the DTC platform once a pilot passes the required exam, with the same legal standing as one issued by a national authority. The average time from "exam passed" to "certificate in hand" is now nine days, driven almost entirely by identity verification rather than administrative processing.
Existing certificates issued under the old process remain valid and do not need to be reissued. Pilots partway through a course when the approval landed will automatically route through the new certification path when they finish.
An operator waiting six weeks for paperwork after finishing their training isn't a compliance problem — it's a process problem. Fixing the process was the actual work here.
Why this took eighteen months
EASA approval required demonstrating that DTC's exam infrastructure, identity verification, and record-keeping met the same audit standard as a national authority's own process. That meant an external audit of the testing platform, a review of every course module against the EASA syllabus, and a data-retention agreement covering all 25 operating countries individually, since certification records are subject to each country's own retention rules.
What's next
DTC is now working through the same approval process in three additional markets outside the EU where a comparable framework exists. There's no firm timeline yet — each market has its own regulator and requirements — but the EASA approval gives the team a template to work from rather than starting from zero.
