European Network of U-space Stakeholders Meeting in Hamburg

European Network of U-space Stakeholders met in Hamburg on 25th Jun 2025. Hosted by the Ministry of Economy and Innovation of Hamburg, the meeting was preceded by a field trip organised by the hosts to view drone demonstrations followed by discussions with users and operators of drone services in Hamburg. It was exciting to learn from the local drone operators about their need for U-space to ease coordination with stakeholders, improve safety and security, and to scale up their drone operations. This is especially applicable in the city of Hamburg, most of which is in the controlled airspace. That makes Hamburg a challenging place to implement U-space. However, once U-space is implemented in Hamburg, there is no reason why it cannot be implemented in any other part of Germany. There are many stakeholders involved in implementing U-space and they all have different interests, which makes it challenging to implement U-space. For city authorities, planning take-off and landing places for drones in the city is a particular challenge.

Increasing number of end users want services that require drone flights in BVLOS environment. However, BVLOS flights without U-space are not scalable. Currently, BVLOS flight approvals take too long. Drone operators do not understand the reason for late approval of BVLOS flights the same way that a regulator does. There is a need for better understanding of challenges faced by all actors involved in the supply chain of drone delivery. Additionally, business risk introduced due to late approvals of BVLOS flights might drive operators to cut corners, eventually causing safety risk to flights in the air. One challenge for national regulators is the lack of skilled resources to approve BVLOS operations. At the same time, regulators also need resources to support U-space implementation. There is a need for more funding to acquire additional resources by the national regulators. Equally, legal and administrative people involved in U-space implementation have a different perspective of U-space than the technical people; so, both groups end up working at different pace and with different perspectives, slowing down the net progress.

To enable approval of BVLOS operations outside U-space airspace in the CTR, the role of an ANSP to de-conflict manned and unmanned flights needs to be clearly defined. Current rules of the air need to be revised to clarify this aspect. On a technical level, satisfying requirements of e-conspicuity is essential to addressing air risks associated with drone flights. There is a need to have a programmatic approach for U-space implementation at national level to achieve harmonization across all U-space stakeholders.

EASA highlighted status of U-space implementation in the European Union, as follows:

1. MS ready for U-space implementation = 9
2. MS preparing for U-space implementation = 12
3. MS exploring U-space implementation = 7
4. MS not preparing for U-space = 2
5. Certified CISPs = 3
6. Certified USSPs = 3
7. Candidates considering becoming USSP = 9 (4 ongoing USSP certification)
8. Candidates for CISP = 10 (1 ongoing certification)
9. Candidates for U-space airspace > 30 (in different stages of development)

Both distributed and centralised models of CISP are being pursued, with three MS exploring the distributed model.

Accessibility to funding by SMEs is another key challenge. Private Venture Capital funds are more interested in funding (Series A) high risk projects by buying equity in the SME businesses. They focus on the vision of a company and provide investment using equity-based model. Public institutions such as the European Investment Council have equity-funding models (Series B and Series C) that focus on results while others such as the European Investment Bank provides debt-funding in more advanced stages of the business financial cycle. Some SMEs such as Unifly, producing U-space technologies, have benefitted from having a combination of governmental and private investors. There are more private investment opportunities available in the USA compared to that in Europe. Majority of private investment in European SMEs has also come from non-European investors. In these circumstances, funding support from national government becomes vital for European SMEs.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) is organizing an info session about an EIC accelerator challenge on “Breakthrough innovations for future mobility”, focusing on start-ups and SMEs on Tuesday July 22nd at 11 am. This initiative focuses on supporting companies developing cost-effective and scalable deep tech breakthroughs that will help deliver reductions in mobility-related emissions in their many facets, from the manufacture of vehicles to their use. Specific objectives of this accelerator can be accessed here.

As far as U-space test centres are concerned, there is a good ongoing top-down initiative, led by DG Move and EDA, and supported by EUROCONTROL to create a synergy between civil and military test centres. This is part of the flagship action 14 of current EU Drone strategy 2.0. A joint civil and military test centre database is being created that provides a wide range of technical and functional capabilities for U-space technology companies to test their technologies. For test activities in these joint test centres to be valuable, there is a need to harmonise regulatory requirements of test centres from both sectors. There is also confusion between the terminology used for a test centre and a regulatory sandbox; this needs to be clarified.

Recently certified USSPs and CISPs shared key findings from their certification journey. In general, both the candidate organisations applying for certification as well as the regulatory bodies involved resources that ranged between two and four from each side. As far as time taken over the entire certification process is concerned, it took around 2 years for a USSP certification and between 10 months to 20 months for CISP certification. Lessons learned during the certification process included:

1. Take time to understanding the certification process and adapt it in a common way with full agreement with all parties involved
2. Different parties involved might speak the same language but mean different things
3. Interpreting ways to demonstrate separation of CISP and USSP functions can be difficult, where the parent company is the same
4. Have realistic expectation about the time it can take to complete the entire certification process, especially when it is being done for the first time
5. Continued support is needed from the State for CISP certification of an ASNP
6. Having a big customer of U-space services helps to go through the certification process (D-Flight had Amazon as its customer)
7. Certification of USSPs is not the end target; it’s the beginning of a journey to deliver U-space services, with the next challenge being the onboarding process, which will have its own specificities based on location of U-space airspace

The meeting ended with a poll where the audience identified U-space areas the next meeting should focus on in Bordeaux on 15th Oct 2025.

The Support cell of European Network of U-space Stakeholders (DG Move, EUROCONTROL, EASA, SJU and EDA is grateful to the Ministry of Economy and Innovation of Hamburg for organizing and hosting a highly productive meeting.