Global aviation leaders will gather in Tokyo to explore how regulatory trust, international standards and digital infrastructure can turn successful drone and Advanced Air Mobility operations into scalable global services.
Harmonized Skies 2026, GUTMA’s flagship event dedicated to interoperability, harmonization, and the future of digital aviation, will bring the global drone and Advanced Air Mobility community to Tokyo on 5–6 October around one central question: how can safe operations proven in one market become repeatable, scalable services across markets?
Hosted at Dentsu Headquarters in Tokyo, the ninth edition of Harmonized Skies comes at an important moment for the industry. Drone operations are reaching increasing levels of maturity, UTM systems are becoming operational, and governments around the world are preparing for Advanced Air Mobility. As the technology matures, however, the central challenge is increasingly shifting from demonstrating individual capabilities to creating the conditions for routine operations at scale.
Scaling automated aviation requires more than capable aircraft. It requires regulatory trust, reusable compliance, interoperable standards, and digital infrastructure that enable operational volume to increase at the same rate without regulatory or human intervention.
Harmonized Skies 2026 will explore how these pieces fit together: from regulatory convergence and standards to telecommunications, digital infrastructure and real-world operations.
Different Rules, Equivalent Safety
The opening discussions will bring together Civil Aviation Authorities from the United States, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Australia to examine where their approaches converge, where they legitimately differ, and how mutual recognition can develop without compromising national responsibilities for safety, security and resilience.
Global scale does not require every country to adopt identical aviation rules. It does require sufficient regulatory trust to recognise when different approaches achieve equivalent safety outcomes. The objective is not regulatory uniformity: it is to reduce the need to redesign, retest and reapprove fundamentally the same safe operation every time it enters a new jurisdiction.
This question becomes increasingly important as companies move beyond demonstrations and begin operating across multiple markets. Regulatory fragmentation that may be manageable for individual projects becomes a fundamental obstacle when operations need to be repeated hundreds or thousands of times.
From Standards to Reusable Compliance
Organized in collaboration with ASTM International, Harmonized Skies 2026 will examine how international standards can provide the common technical language connecting different regulatory systems.
Mutual recognition cannot depend on regulatory trust alone. Authorities need confidence that performance requirements, testing methods, and evidence of compliance can be understood and relied upon across jurisdictions.
Internationally recognized standards can help provide that foundation. When different regulatory systems rely on common technical standards and comparable conformity methods, evidence generated in one jurisdiction becomes easier to understand in another.
The discussion will therefore move beyond harmonizing standards themselves to a more practical question: how can compliance become increasingly portable?
Regulators, standards-development organizations, operators and technology providers will examine where functional equivalence and interoperability already exist, where gaps remain, and how standards can support a progression from comparable evidence to regulatory trust, mutual recognition and ultimately international market access.
Preparing the Ecosystem for Advanced Air Mobility
Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific region provide an important perspective on the next stage of digital aviation.
Japan and South Korea are actively developing Advanced Air Mobility ecosystems, but bringing new aircraft into service requires more than aircraft certification. Routine operations will depend on the wider operating environment: airspace integration, infrastructure, connectivity, digital services, traffic management and effective public-private coordination.
The conference will therefore examine not only when new aircraft may become operational, but what ecosystem must be ready when they do.
A central question will be which capabilities being developed for highly automated drone operations today (including digital flight authorization, traffic information, connectivity, and automated information exchange) can serve as building blocks for the broader aviation ecosystem of tomorrow.
Building the Digital Infrastructure for Automated Aviation
Conventional aviation relies heavily on pilots, controllers and dedicated aviation systems. Increasingly automated aviation will additionally depend on communications networks, positioning, cloud infrastructure, digital identity, machine-to-machine information exchange and interoperable UTM services.
Telecommunications, therefore, become much more than a means of connecting an aircraft to its operator. Network availability and performance, spectrum, resilience, positioning and standardized interfaces increasingly form part of the operating environment on which automated aviation depends.
Harmonized Skies will bring together the aviation and telecommunications communities to examine what this means in practice. The discussion will explore which digital capabilities require common performance expectations, how aviation can leverage existing telecommunications infrastructure, and how interoperable connectivity can support operations across networks, service providers, and national borders.
The issue is no longer simply how telecom can support aviation, but which elements of the digital ecosystem are becoming part of aviation infrastructure itself.
From Successful Use Cases to Scalable Services
Companies and organizations deploying drone services will examine the factors that distinguish a successful use case from a scalable service. Rather than simply showcasing individual applications, the discussion will ask what happens when demand increases tenfold or a hundredfold. A scalable system must allow the number of operations to increase without requiring human and regulatory intervention to increase proportionally.
The discussion will then apply a second test: transferability. If an operation works safely and economically in one country, what needs to be demonstrated again before essentially the same service can operate in another? And what should not need to be repeated?
Real-world use cases will therefore become the practical test of the regulatory convergence, international standards, interoperability and digital infrastructure discussed throughout the conference.
Keynote contributions and operational perspectives from companies including Wing, Zipline and DoorDash, alongside senior representatives from governments and industry, will provide first-hand experience of the opportunities and remaining barriers involved in moving from individual operations towards large-scale deployment.
Beyond the Conference Room
Harmonized Skies has always been designed as more than a conference.
Alongside plenary sessions and panel discussions, participants will have the opportunity to attend operational showcases and live flight demonstrations that highlight real-world implementation and provide a direct view of how emerging technologies are being deployed.
The event will conclude with a networking cocktail co-hosted by GUTMA and ASTM International, bringing regulators, operators, technology providers, telecommunications companies, standards experts and industry leaders together to continue the discussion and explore future collaboration.
From Harmonization to Market Access
The different discussions at Harmonized Skies ultimately address different parts of the same challenge:
- Can different regulatory systems recognise equivalent safety outcomes?
- Can international standards make compliance evidence reusable?
- Can digital systems connect across providers and borders?
- Can increasingly automated operations scale without human intervention and grow proportionally?
- Can an operation proven in one market be transferred more easily to another?
“Harmonization does not mean that every country needs the same rules,” said Koen De Vos, Secretary General of the Global UTM Association. “It means creating enough trust between different systems that a safe operation does not have to be reinvented every time it crosses a border. Standards can make compliance reusable, interoperability can make digital systems connect, and mutual recognition can turn national markets into an international market. The test is simple: can we move from one safe operation to thousands, and from one country to another?”
That is the ambition behind Harmonized Skies 2026: moving beyond comparing national approaches towards identifying the practical building blocks of a global market for automated aviation.
Prove it safely. Make the evidence reusable. Make the systems interoperable. Automate it. Scale it. Take it across borders.
About the event
Harmonized Skies 2026 will take place on October 5-6, 2026, in Tokyo, Japan, bringing together the organizations and decision-makers helping shape the next chapter of digital aviation.
Register now: https://gutma.org/harmonizedskies2026/
