EASA Officials Outline Plan to Simplify European Drone Rules and Ease Cross-Border Operations
Why It MattersStreamlining rules across 27 EU states plus associated states could accelerate cross-border drone and U-space adoption while easing the regulatory burden that has slowed BVLOS and agricultural drone deployment.
Three senior EASA officials laid out the agency's plan to simplify Europe's drone regulations and expand cross-border operations during a panel at the Commercial UAV Expo, moderated by Julie Garland, CEO of Avtrain and vice chair of the JARUS Industry Stakeholder Body steering committee. The panel described an industry expanding rapidly but constrained by the complexity of governing airspace across 27 EU member states plus four associated states, including Norway and Switzerland, served by 46 separate air navigation service providers.
EASA's Dousi explained that European drone rulemaking typically runs a three-to-five-year cycle from proposal to adoption, though political pressure can compress it, as happened when U-space moved from concept to adopted regulation in one year. EASA's Scannapieco outlined the two regulations underpinning the framework — 2019/945 for products and 2019/947 for operations — and the three risk-based operational categories: open, specific and certified. At the centre of the specific category sits the SORA methodology developed by JARUS.
Scannapieco announced EASA's new simplification package, built from five years of implementation experience, introducing three new standard scenarios covering visual line-of-sight operations, beyond visual line-of-sight flights, and agricultural and forestry work with drones up to 650 kilograms, which he said would cover roughly 90-95 percent of operations previously requiring national authority intervention. EASA reported more than two million registered drone operators across Europe.
On unmanned traffic management, EASA's Vaubourg said adoption remains limited four years after the U-space regulation took effect, with only one U-space airspace formally designated and a small number of certified service providers, attributing the slow pace to airspace fragmentation and member states retaining full authority over their own airspace. EASA is developing U-space simplification measures and piloting a 'Living Labs' initiative to test coordinated frameworks among willing member states. The panel closed on security, with Dousi referencing drone incursions along Europe's eastern flank linked to the war in Ukraine and an incident in Germany involving a drone found near an aircraft, with EASA's near-term measures aimed at helping authorities distinguish unintentional violations from deliberate ones.
