Europe’s drone industry stands on the precipice of unlocking scaled operations without lowering safety standards. Three senior officials from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) laid out exactly how they intend to do it during a panel on the state of drone rules across Europe at the recent Commercial UAV Expo.
Julie Garland, CEO of Avtrain and vice chair of the JARUS Industry Stakeholder Body steering committee, moderated the discussion. She sat alongside Daan Dousi, Head of the Innovative Air Mobility Department at EASA; Giuseppe Scannapieco, Section Manager for Innovative Air Mobility Policy at EASA; and Stéphane Vaubourg, Senior Expert for U-space in EASA’s Certification Directorate.
The panel painted a picture of an industry growing quickly but constrained by the sheer complexity of governing airspace across 27 European Union member states plus four associated states, including Norway and Switzerland. It also revealed an agency racing ahead of its own political mandate to cut red tape, while grappling with drone incursions, security threats and a patchwork of 46 air navigation service providers that make scaling operations across borders genuinely difficult.
Europe Builds a Risk-Based Framework From the Ground Up
Dousi opened with a primer on how European drone rulemaking actually works. The European Commission (EC) functions much like the U.S. Department of Transportation, and EASA proposes rules that the Commission and member states ultimately adopt. Dousi called the process “fairly complicated.” The numbers back him up. A full rulemaking cycle typically runs three to five years, moving from a notice of proposed amendment through a two to three month comment period, a formal opinion, and eventual adoption by the Commission and member states.
Garland pressed on the timeline because it matters enormously for an industry moving as fast as drones. “The last sentence literally is one of the most important switches, that it can be up to five years,” she said. “And with the drone industry, that period ends up being a very long period of time.”
Vaubourg offered a counterpoint, noting that political pressure can compress that timeline dramatically. He pointed to U-space, Europe’s unmanned traffic management framework, which went from concept to a fully adopted legal and regulatory process in just one year when the EC prioritized it.
Despite the friction, the framework itself has produced real results. Dousi shared figures showing more than two million registered drone operators across Europe, alongside a rising number of light certificates, operational authorizations and standard scenario declarations since 2021. Growth rates track closely with what regulators are seeing in the United States.
The entire European system rests on two regulations. Scannapieco, who has spent 15 years at the agency after a military career as a flight test engineer, explained that Regulation 2019/945 governs drone products and manufacturer obligations, while Regulation 2019/947 governs operations, training and authority oversight. Together they establish three operational categories: open, specific, and certified, each tied directly to risk rather than to whether an operation is commercial.
“The entire drone regulation is proportionate, risk based and operation centric,” Scannapieco said, describing an approach that diverges sharply from how the U.S. historically separated commercial and recreational flying.
Garland reinforced the point from her own background in crewed aviation. She once assumed operators charging money for flights should face more oversight, but Europe’s experience showed that risk to uninvolved people, not the presence of a paycheck, determines how much scrutiny an operation needs.
SORA Gives Regulators a Common Language for Risk
At the center of the specific category sits the Specific Operational Risk Assessment (SORA) methodology, developed by JARUS, the Joint Authorities for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems. Scannapieco described SORA as a structured, step-by-step process that walks operators through ground risk and air risk, then lets them apply design or operational mitigations to bring that risk down to an acceptable level.
He acknowledged the criticism SORA regularly draws. “It’s true that it may appear cumbersome on one side,” he said, “but on the other side it provides a clear methodology, a very structured approach, very clear steps to be followed.” That structure matters most, he argued, when regulators must ensure that authorities in Italy, Germany, France and 28 other jurisdictions interpret the same risk categories the same way.
Garden expanded on why consistency is so hard to achieve. Each member state operates its own aviation authority and its own air navigation service provider, layered on top of different languages and different cultural approaches to risk. JARUS addresses part of that gap by publishing predefined Risk Assessments, which let operators flying within a known scenario simply declare their compliance rather than undergo a full case-by-case review.
Standard Scenarios push that simplification even further. Under a Standard Scenario, an operator submits a declaration and can begin flying immediately, without waiting for a national authority’s approval, provided the drone carries the right class mark and the operation matches the prescribed conditions.
Scannapieco revealed that EASA’s new simplification package, built from lessons learned over five years of implementation, will introduce three new standard scenarios covering visual line of sight operations, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights, and agricultural and forestry work with drones weighing up to 650 kilograms. The impact could be significant.
“We realized that basically through these standard scenarios we are covering almost 90, 95 percent of the operations that in the past required the intervention of the national authorities,” Scannapieco said.
Garland called the shift a rebalancing of responsibility toward manufacturers, since a drone’s class mark now carries an implicit assurance about how it should be operated safely.
U-space Struggles to Scale Despite Four Years in Force
If the Specific Category shows regulatory simplification working, U-space shows how much harder it is to translate rules into deployed infrastructure. Vaubourg, who joined EASA 14 years ago as a young computer science engineer before moving into cybersecurity and software certification, leads implementation of Europe’s unmanned traffic management (UTM) system.
U-space exists to solve a problem SORA cannot address alone: what happens when many drones operate in the same airspace at once. “SORA is not at this stage efficient enough to ensure that the increase in terms of drone operations in a given volume can be safely handled,” Vaubourg explained, describing the additional layer of flight authorization, traffic information, geo-awareness and conformance monitoring services that U-space provides.
Four years after the regulation took effect, adoption remains limited. Only one U-space airspace has been designated in Europe, alongside a small number of certified service providers, including one certified American company.
Vaubourg attributed the slow pace largely to airspace fragmentation. Europe’s 31 states rely on 46 different air navigation service providers, and each state retains full authority over decisions in its own airspace. Unlike a single national regulator that can mandate change, EASA can only build the toolbox. Each member state decides when and how to use it.
“That creates a bit of a critical tension in all the outcomes,” Vaubourg said. He noted that political appetite, technical capacity and even domestic industry engagement all shape how quickly a given state moves. To counter the stall, EASA is now working on U-space simplification measures aimed at seamless integration, predefined system performance and streamlined safety assessments.
Ports have emerged as an early proving ground. Several major European ports are already exploring U-space as a way to manage rising drone traffic around critical infrastructure, giving regulators real-world data to refine the framework before wider rollout.
Living Labs and the Fight for Public Trust
Beyond airspace mechanics, Dousi highlighted a newer initiative called Living Labs, designed to help commercial drone operators establish themselves in one state and then scale across borders without excessive regulatory friction. The program brings together a select group of willing member states to experiment with vertical alignment between aviation authorities, air navigation providers and local government, then documents what works in a living reference document other states can follow.
Dousi was candid about the obstacles beyond aviation itself. Local and regional officials, most of whom have no aviation background, frequently raise the same questions about necessity and public engagement every time a new operation is proposed. He described the dynamic as a chicken-and-egg problem. Public acceptance grows once people see drones operating safely, but a lack of visible operations feeds public skepticism, which security incidents in parts of Europe have only deepened.
Garland pushed back on the idea that society has already made up its mind. “I don’t know that society sometimes knows what it wants until it has it,” she said, pointing to the absence of scaled BVLOS operations in Europe today. She argued regulators should build on a fear of missing out, the same instinct that makes people wonder why a neighboring country enjoys drone delivery services they cannot yet access themselves.
Scannapieco added a note of caution to that optimism. Operators and regulators alike, he said, need to focus on creating genuine value through drone operations rather than chasing hype for its own sake.
Security Concerns Sharpen the Simplification Push
The panel closed by acknowledging that simplification is unfolding against a tense security backdrop. Dousi referenced recent drone incursions along Europe’s eastern flank tied to the war in Ukraine, along with an incident in Germany involving a drone found near an aircraft.
EASA’s near-term security measures aim to help law enforcement and military authorities distinguish unintentional airspace violations from deliberate ones, while also examining how counter-drone mitigation tactics might endanger crewed aircraft operating nearby.
That dual mandate, opening airspace for legitimate operators while tightening controls against bad actors, defines EASA’s current balancing act. Cross-border recognition of operator authorizations, an expanding library of standard scenarios and the slow build-out of U-space all point toward the same goal Garland described from the moderator’s chair: safe, scalable, and predictable rules that let Europe’s drone industry catch up to the pace of the technology itself.