Considering the ever-increasing use of drones in a plentitude of application areas, the risk is that also an ever-increasing number of drone incidents would be observed. Research has shown that a large majority of all incidents with drones is due not to technological, but to human error. An advanced risk-reduction methodology, focusing on the human element, is thus required in order to allow for the safe use of drones. In this paper, we therefore introduce a novel concept to pro-vide a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the performance of the drone op-erator. The proposed methodology is based on one hand upon the development of standardized test methodologies and on the other hand on human performance modeling of the drone operators in a highly realistic simulation environment.