Since January 2023, Europe has had, on paper, a shared answer to a fast-approaching problem: how do you let thousands of drones, air taxis and crewed aircraft share the same low-altitude sky without anyone crashing into anyone else? That answer is U-space, EASA’s regulatory framework built around four mandatory services – network identification, geo-awareness, flight authorisation and traffic information – designed to give every operator and every regulator a common, digital picture of who is flying where.
Three and a half years on, the picture EASA itself has published is more cautious than the framework’s original ambition. A survey of eleven member states this July found only 496 of 2,486 active operational authorisations concerned beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) work – the higher-risk, higher-value operations U-space was largely built to enable. Of those 496, just 89 were reported as economically viable, and they sit almost entirely in two countries, Germany and Norway, which happen to have the particular operational conditions U-space currently rewards. Everywhere else, the four mandatory services exist as regulation rather than routine practice. For ANSPs and USSPs watching the numbers, that’s the real story: the technical architecture is in place almost everywhere, but the commercial case for using it at scale has only cleared the bar in a handful of specific national conditions.
EASA’s response has been to scale down rather than push harder. Rather than insisting every member state deploy the full U-space architecture, the agency has proposed a lighter tier, informally U-space Light, that lets national authorities designate airspace where the density of drone operations doesn’t yet justify the full weight of strategic deconfliction. It is, in effect, an admission that building the digital rulebook was the easy part; getting real traffic to use it, at a price operators can justify, has proven considerably harder.
The UK never adopted U-space in the first place. Outside the EASA framework since Brexit, the CAA has spent 2026 building its own version of the same foundation, on its own timeline. From 1 January, Remote ID became mandatory across the fleet – described by the CAA as a digital number plate for every drone in the air – and the registration threshold dropped from 250g to 100g, pulling a far larger share of the recreational and light commercial fleet into the regulatory system for the first time. Alongside that, the CAA has begun retiring the General Visual Line of Sight Certificate, the qualification that has underpinned most UK commercial drone work for years, in favour of a new RPC framework, whose Part B extension covering BVLOS visual mitigation is the UK’s own answer to the same question EASA has been wrestling with: how do you let operators fly beyond the pilot’s own eyeline without the airspace becoming unmanageable. Legacy aircraft without built-in Remote ID get a longer runway to comply, but for any operator planning BVLOS work now, the direction of travel is unambiguous.
What’s interesting is that neither regulator has actually solved the problem yet – they’ve simply picked different points to compromise. Europe built the more ambitious framework first and is now scaling it back to match what operators can realistically afford to use. The UK skipped that step entirely and is rebuilding its foundations from the ground up, outside a framework it never joined. Both are legitimate strategies. Neither, on the evidence so far, has produced an airspace where BVLOS drone traffic is routine rather than exceptional.
That gap – between the regulation that exists on paper and the traffic that actually moves through it – is exactly the space where the next wave of UTM providers, USSPs and airspace management technology will be built or broken over the next two years. It’s also, not coincidentally, the same conversation running through the Future of Flight programming at DroneX 2026 (free to attend, 29 – 30 September, Excel London), where regulators, ANSPs and UTM operators working on exactly this problem will be in the same room. Get your pass to join them.
The honest answer to the question in the headline, for now, is: not yet, on either side of the Channel – but for the first time in several years, both sides are building toward the same destination, even if they’re taking very different roads to get there.
