By Claudia Bacco
Declan Fitzpatrick, CEO, Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) set the stage for the discussion during the two-day Aerial Cities event on 11-12 November in Dublin. Kicking off the conference as the first keynote speaker he discussed the eighteen-month-old National Policy Framework for Unmanned Aerial Systems to address the use of airspace and planning, compliance and enforcement, and enterprise and innovation. The challenges facing Ireland (and many other regions) are scaling beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, implementing U-space, societal acceptance of the use of drones and regulatory agility. These topics led to his statement, ‘policy doesn’t move aircraft.”
In October of 2024, the Dublin City Council launched the Drone Innovation Partnership to shape the future of drones and urban air mobility in the region. The two-year collaboration includes the Dublin City Council, Maynooth University, Lero (Research Ireland Centre for Software), and the IAA. While this is great to see a city taking a lead in these topics in partnership with the aviation authority, it seems like Air Nav Ireland, Ireland’s air navigation service provider (ANSP), is noticeably absent from these efforts. This is surprising as at some point it will need to have some involvement in airspace management for drones, or at a minimum be sharing information with UTM providers.
The panels that followed during the first day of the conference looked to address the challenges to moving forward with BVLOS flight and the ability to scale drones. In the navigating urban skies panel EASA shared their view on the main challenge as available detect & avoid solutions. It also stated its belief that once U-spaces have been implemented, investment will follow. The IAA reiterated the concern regarding detect and avoid soutions, but added that a reliable air risk situation tool is still needed along with conspicuity with general aviation.
The Dublin City Council discussed ‘drones for good’ – first responder solutions – vs drone delivery. It felt that people need to be educated that drones play different roles. One concern additionally mentioned was their challenge with reaching and educating citizens who are not on social media. The Municipal Transport Authority, Gdańsk shared some statistics from a recent email survey to their residents. Of 2,600 respondents, 50% said they had drone interaction and were not concerned about drones overhead. This result changed in September following the Russian drones that illegally entered Polish airspace, immediately reducing the public comfort level by 2%. This illustrates how a single occurance can greatly impact the public opinion likely in the positive or negative direction.
The next panel considered urban infrastructure from the perspective of two cities, Madrid and Dublin. Madrid raised concerns that the city points of view aren’t being considered when planning air mobility within their city limits. The cities need to provide support for deploying services. Today there are no business cases that have been presented from the drone industry asking for their support. The first deployment will be for delivery and first responders, but U-space is still some years away and eVTOLs are too far in the future to include in the discussion today. As Madrid is already a very noisy city, there wasn’t concern for the impact of drones and public acceptance in terms of noise.
However, during a latter panel on day two, Fuertaventura Technology Park’s CEO mentioned 140,000 drone operations and SORA since 2018 in the Canarias – showing that parts of Spain are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to drone flights.
Dublin City Council raised an interesting perspective about the future design of city buildings as this will impact drone (and some day eVTOL) flights within the city limits. A question was also raised about the environmental impact of these flights and if anyone is studying this?
One challenge raised in the global supply chain panel was that manufacturing compaines have not been able to build a global component strategy. Nokia shared that this is a real factor that will need to be addressed if regulation was to suddenly open the skies.
During the second day of Aerial Cities a series of end users shared their experiences.
NUAIR kicked off with a discussion of the current state in the USA. The problem focussed on regulatory and infrastructure barriers to UAS and AAM market realisation. There are more than 822,000 registered UAS aircraft in this region that cannot operate at scale. The current aviation infrastructure is designed for around 6,500 commercial aircraft. That’s a pretty big gap! How can you manage and integrate something you can’t see?
The solution presented is an FAA-accepted infrastructure for enabling low altitude operations, the near-term approval process (NTAP). The components include – UTM to enable flight planning, authorisation, and conflict management – automated data service providers (ADSP) part 148 to gather raw data, process it, and then provide it in a usable format to airspace users, and – an evolving infrastructure to support BVLOS operations with sensors, radars, and technology stacks.
Manna continues to wait for regulation to open in Europe. Bobby Healy, founder of Manna, stated that “the market is currently slanted toward companies who have enough funding to wait things out.” Even funded companies can only wait so long. His view as to why we can’t move in Europe was because regulators are over-thinking, ANSPs don’t want to change or integrate traffic and there is no strong political leadership to get things moving like in the USA.
