EASA has proposed a “light” version of U-space. Under NPA 2026-103, Member States would be able to designate a new Level 1 airspace in which the requirement for strategic deconfliction – the mandatory flight authorisation service – is dropped.
This is precisely the part we criticised back in 2021 as the U-space’s most fragile (and, frankly, crazy) part. We thus think this is a welcome and sensible step.
Five years, one U-space area
That something is wrong with the original design of U-space is now abundantly obvious: Three and a half years after Regulation (EU) 2021/664 entered into force, there is only one (limited) U-space area in the entire European Union, and only a handful of certified U-space service providers and common information service providers. Economically viable BVLOS operations are concentrated in just two Member States that benefit from particular local circumstances. Whatever your view of the concept, it is hard to argue that U-space is a success story.
What we argued in 2021
Our point five years ago was not that U-space is bad in general: Weather information, geo-awareness or fleet management are useful services that can be implemented independently by each service provider. The difficulty is concentrated in one function: flight approval – uniquely reserving a slab of airspace for a defined span of time. That is the one place where service providers must stay tightly synchronised, and it is exactly where distributed systems become hard to get right: Transactional integrity, consensus between providers, and trust are all hard problems to solve in a decentralised setup.
Our conclusion was that a simpler, less distributed design would be more practical and more likely to actually ship. For the full argument, read our blog post from June 2021.
What Level 1 actually does
The proposal lets a Member State designate airspace where the four mandatory services are reduced to a subset, removing the pre-flight flight authorisation. In its place, separation is handled tactically in flight, on a “remain well clear” basis, rather than strategically before take-off. To keep the safety case intact, Level 1 is confined to airspace below VFR minima and outside controlled airspace, urban areas and complex environments such as ports. The stated aims are faster BVLOS operations at scale, off-the-shelf solutions, and a lighter certification burden.
Same diagnosis, a different cure
In 2021, we argued that decentralised, federated flight approval is too hard and should thus be centralised instead. EASA has apparently reached the same diagnosis, but chosen a different approach: Rather than centralise the hard function, Level 1 avoids it altogether. The lack of risk mitigation is compensated by restricting the new airspace to low-density, low-risk conditions where pre-flight deconfliction is less essential.
This is a pragmatic approach by the regulator: Our proposal would have required additional regulation, while theirs simply requires deleting (or making optional) parts of the regulation.
Electronic Conspicuity to the rescue
Removing strategic deconfliction does not remove the need to keep aircraft (and drones) apart. It moves that responsibility from the ground, minutes to hours ahead, to the air, seconds to minutes ahead. In other words, the burden shifts onto real-time separation between aircraft – and the open questions are already being raised.
In September 2026, the Alliance for New Mobility Europe, Drone Alliance Europe, the Joint European Drone Associations (JEDA) and the Global UTM Association (GUTMA) jointly published high-level principles on Level 1, noting among other things that a “remain well clear” criterion is being introduced without a firm definition and without accounting for existing technology, and warning of interoperability issues with manned aircraft, many of which already carry collision-avoidance systems.
Clearly, we will need Electronic Conspicuity systems such as FLARM or ADS-L to achieve the “remain well clear” criterion, however it may be formulated by Member States.
A step in the right direction
In 2021 we noted that manned aviation earned its safety record through decades of incremental, practical improvement, and that U-space would benefit from the same humility. Level 1, despite its rough edges, is a step towards something practical and commercially feasible today. The problem of air risk has not disappeared, though – it has migrated from pre-flight approval on the ground to tactical separation in the air. Getting that layer right is the next thing worth watching, and it is a layer we have worked on for many years.
