Out of Sight: How, and Why, EU Drone Deliveries Should Take Off

Civilian drones will likely be key drivers of growth and innovation. The EU has the rules in place to be a major player, but more urgency is needed to avoid falling further behind global competitors.

The European Union is no stranger to pressure. Crisis management has largely defined EU governance for the past decade and a half: extrinsically, from global recession, pandemic, regional instability and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; intrinsically, from eurozone debt speculation, Brexit and populism. Transatlantic relations remain strained by trade tensions and hard conversations about burden sharing.

Yet even while managing successive shocks, EU leaders have for years lamented systemic challenges to EU growth and security. The EU’s productivity gap compared to the US and China continues to widen. EU energy prices remain high, as do barriers to operating across the whole Single Market. The vaunted September 2024 Draghi report on EU competitiveness, alongside a host of similar exhortations to start the 2024-2029 EU mandate, called for simpler and more harmonised EU rules. European Round Table for Industry Secretary General Anthony Gooch Gálvez has recently called for a ‘‘second wave’’ of Single Market integration.

At stake is not merely the EU’s marginal prosperity but the fundamental viability of its social-market economic model and ability to influence global affairs. In this context, and under the radar, as it were — given ongoing discussions with EU partners over higher-profile issues like tariffs, defence spending, industrial subsidies, carbon taxes, digital markets or content moderation on giant platforms — the civilian drone sector may be emerging as another source of competitive pressure. Here, too, the EU risks falling further behind.

On 6 June 2025, President Trump, in an executive order (EO) entitled ‘‘Unleashing American Drone Dominance’’, commissioned US regulators to ‘‘accelerate the safe commercialization of drone technologies and fully integrate UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] into the National Airspace System.’’ The EO also aims to boost US drone production and exports. US Commercial Drone Alliance CEO Lisa Ellman hailed the development as an opportunity to ‘‘assure American aviation leadership into the next century of flight’’. Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) President and CEO Michael Robbins touted President Trump’s having advanced ‘‘in lockstep’’ the twin values of innovation and security. Alphabet-owned drone delivery company Wing — which less than two years into its partnership with Walmart plans to go from a footprint of 18 supercentres in Dallas-Fort Worth to 100 additional Walmart stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa — praised the EO’s ‘‘commitment to innovation [and to] bolstering US manufacturing and integration’’, with a particular focus on ‘‘accelerating the rulemaking for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations’’. 

If the US looks likely to see a civilian drones boom — and with it even more relative market growth and innovation — can the EU keep up?

 In April 2025, Joint European Drone Associations (JEDA) President Julie Garland — in June 2025 elected co-chair to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) Drones Community Steering Task Group — warned that Europe’s drone industry is, in fact, in crisis: with no regulatory resources for scaling BVLOS operations. Such calls seem to be growing. In a 3 July 2025 article for Unmanned Airspace, Philip Butterworth-Hayes catalogued how a ‘‘slow rate of U-space adoption in Europe is starting to take its toll on the European drone and wider advanced air mobility industries’’.

What should the EU do?

For starters, EASA needs help. The organisation, which authorises EU-wide certification for non-EU U-space service providers (USSPs) and common information service providers (CISPs), needs more funding and skilled personnel to clear a backlog of applications. Only one USSP has been EASA-certified so far: ANRA Technologies, headquartered in Virginia near Washington, DC. (Butterworth-Hayes notes that two others, D-Flight and Innov’ATM, have been approved by national regulators.) New applicants to EASA can expect a timeline of eighteen to twenty-four months — and costs spiralling to tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of euros.

Member States, too, face a tall task. Each must first of all, for scalability across Europe to be realistic, accept the validity of EASA’s — and of each other’s — USSP certifications. No small ask given Member States’ tendency to cling to longstanding claims of exclusive national competence. Each, too, must step up its game in allocating the available U-Space for which USSP certification is required in the first place. And each must work to harmonise onboarding processes not just between itself and other Member States but also domestically.

All the while, other global players are looking to build and expand their market lead. On 26 June 2025, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) Jan-Christoph Oetjen, Sakis Arnaoutoglou and Paulo do Nascimento Cabral, following a joint event they co-hosted entitled ‘‘Unleashing the Potential of Civilian Drones’’, under the aegis of the European Parliament’s 90+-member Sky and Space Intergroup, signed a joint statement calling for urgent remedies if the EU is to keep from falling further behind the US’s projected ‘‘full-scale commercial [drone] operations by 2026’’ and China’s projected ‘‘[€180 billion low-altitude economy]’’.

The MEPs are pushing a twin-track approach: re-energising the EU’s drone strategy and simplifying its bureaucracy. The first pillar would focus on properly evaluating the European Commission’s existing Drone Strategy 2.0, putting more money behind European start-ups and scale-ups — and ultimately telling a more confident story about all the social goods drones can deliver. The second would entail moving from case-by-case exemptions to standing rules for routine BVLOS flights; cutting paperwork by issuing a risk-based, EU-wide standard scenario for infrastructure inspections; simplifying approvals and certifications; standardising procurement frameworks; and better protecting promising new EU companies vis-à-vis geopolitical rivals.

The news is not all bad for the EU. While the US has set the ‘’benchmark in operations with its deployment of commercial BVLOS drone services’’, according to the 2024-2025 Annual Report published in July 2025 by GUTMA, the Global UTM [Uncrewed Traffic Management] Association, it is ‘’[the EU that] leads in legislation with its U-Space Regulations’’ (p. 13). The EU simply must move faster in implementing its rules: to make possible a thriving, EU-wide civilian-drones market.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, as MEPs Oetjen, Arnaoutoglou and Cabral also underscore: EU stakeholders have to start telling better, more confident stories about the cost-benefit analysis of civilian-use drones. About how much cheaper, cleaner, faster and safer drone deliveries can be. And how potentially life-saving. Tests are underway, for instance, for medical drone deliveries in Milan and Luxembourg, following more advanced existing services in Zurich and London. And while local concerns are certainly legitimate, with regard to issues like privacy or noise, as drone operator Manna can attest from its experience with hundreds of thousands of deliveries across Ireland and Finland: these real concerns can be addressed with sensitivity, clear explanations and constant efforts to improve.

Civilian drones are likely to be a crucial part of future market growth and innovation. The EU has the regulatory framework in place to be a cutting-edge player. What is needed is the push to make it happen. Or else the EU’s global competitors, already flying high, may soon be out of sight.