Conflicting visions around technology integration: A look at recent EU drone policies

For many years, the European Commission (EC) has been envisioning integration of drones into civilian airspace. This vision entails scalable drone operations in the European civil airspace for commercial and private purposes such as inspection, urban mobility, logistics and so forth. In such regard, one finds various European declarations, strategies and regulations around civilian drones. Most recently, in late 2022, the EC adopted the ‘Drone Strategy 2.0 for a Smart and Sustainable Unmanned Aircraft Eco-System in Europe’ (Drone Strategy) with an aim to create a drone ecosystem for sustainable future mobility. Around half a year later, the European Union (EU) Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) passed the ‘EASA AI Roadmap 2.0 Human-Centric Approach to AI in Aviation’ (AI Roadmap) outlining future challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the European aviation sector, including civilian drones. Common in both instruments is a time-bound vision: whereas the Drone Strategy envisions various facets of drone normalization to manifest in 2030, the AI Roadmap produces a timeline (2019–2050+) reflecting the planned standardization of AI systems and their approvals. Another common feature is AI because the prevailing state of drone technology shows a growing reliance on AI systems. It thus becomes imperative to read them in conjunction, as drone normalization is dependent on the regulatory approvals of such systems. Such political and legal analysis, as conducted in this article, shows a glaring inconsistency between the two visions.

The inconsistency in different policies on the same point puts into question the institutional coherence within the EU, an idea that refers to a situation where ‘a single policy area is served by two set of actors and their different procedures’ (Marangoni & Raube, 2014, p. 475). As discussed in the succeeding section, drones form part of various European policy agendas, such as sustainability, green transition, security and defence, and urban mobility. Therefore, the alignment of visions around its integration ought to be well-tuned. A lack of consistency in such regard raises questions around political harmony amongst different institutions and their priorities, which may hinder different political agendas.

This article begins by briefly introducing the two instruments through separate sections. In the subsequent section, I highlight the inconsistency between them by also touching upon the current state of drone technology. The concluding section then summarizes the findings and points to future implications of such inconsistency.

The Drone Strategy 2.0 was released in November 2022 by the Directorate-General Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), the DG in the EC with the political portfolio of mobility and transport, with the collaboration of different stakeholders. The instrument is also backed by a working staff document containing studies and surveys regarding drones. Despite its name, this strategy is the first of its kind, since it holistically covers various facets of civilian drone use such as civil-military synergies, counter drone technology, impact on sustainability, digitalization of European economy and aviation regulation. That comprehensiveness did not exist in the previous drone-related policies.

In 2014, the EC came up with a similar instrument as the Drone Strategy 2.0, entitled ‘A New Era for Aviation. Opening the Aviation Market to the Civil Use of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems in Safe and Sustainable Manner’ (EC, 2014). That communication highlighted the potential benefits of civilian drones and remarked a commitment towards rulemaking for its safety, security and privacy, as well as ensuring more investments in the research and development of this technology. It was followed by various instruments. Among them is the 2015 ‘Riga Drone Declaration’ and Communication ‘An Aviation Strategy for Europe’ outlining aims for drone-related rules. In 2019, two regulations were passed covering the operations (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947) and design (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/945) of civilian drones. In 2020, the EC passed the ‘EU Security Union Strategy’ and the ‘Counter-Terrorism Agenda for the EU: Anticipate, Prevent, Protect, Respond’, which touched upon the issue of counter drone technology. To deal with the issue of unmanned traffic management, also known as ‘U-Space’, the Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664 (EC, 2021) was passed as the basis of U-Space. On the security and defence front, the ‘Roadmap on Critical Technologies for Security and Defence’ was passed in early 2022, holding relevance when it comes to dual-use technology research within the EU. One finds the explicit aim of formulating Drone Strategy 2.0 in the 2020 Communication for a ‘Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy—Putting European Transport on Track for the Future’, which generally outlined the future challenges and benefits offered by drones for European transport (EC, 2020).

While the suffix ‘2.0’ with Drone Strategy may give an impression that it is preceded by another similar holistic document, this is not the case, as highlighted above. Accordingly, the so-called ‘Drone Strategy 1.0’ is presumed to be a set of the referred action plans, communications, regulations and reports around civilian drones that have been produced up until the Drone Strategy 2.0 came about (EC, 2022b, p. 7); the most important of which I have mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Considering the nature and scope of this article, I have not addressed the full list of instruments that precede the strategy, but the ones covered here already provide a broad idea of the EC's endeavours around drone integration.

Implicit in the above vision is the presumption that by 2030, the institutions, policies and standards would be sufficient to pave the way for drone normalization. However, the strategy suffers from obscurities by not addressing the regulatory efforts required for the integration of civilian drones (Scott & Andritsos, 2023) or considering the ‘difficulty of scaling operations’ (European Parliament, 2023, p. 11). Much could be questioned about the politics behind such high-level goals. For instance, less attention is paid to social acceptance (European Parliament, 2023, p. 69) or the issues of noise and visual pollution (Bergersen, 2021). However, this article is particularly interested in the planned standardization around AI systems and the regulatory approvals that will enable drone operations in civilian airspace. In such regard, the AI Roadmap released by the EU specialized aviation agency, EASA, holds great relevance. The next section analyzes that instrument.

The envisioned timeline showing EASA's plan to develop necessary guidelines for each level and their consequent approvals is shown in Figure 1. In contrast to AI Roadmap 1.0, the second version extended years for approvals of commercial Single Pilot Operation from 2030 to 2035, and for autonomous AI (systems of the highest automation level) from 2035 to 2050+. This extension reflects EASA's realization of the complexities involved in developing standards and granting approvals for AI systems.

Considering the later release of the AI Roadmap 2.0 than Drone Strategy 2.0, one expected more alignment in the visions and further clarity. Nonetheless, the modifications were crafted in a different fashion. The inconsistency arises because the systems that will normalize drone operations, as envisioned in the Drone Strategy, lie at level 3A. In addition, as can be seen in Figure 1, their approvals would not even commence before 2035. This section argues that such systems would lie at level 3A from two angles: first, by analysing EASA's elaboration of AI levels, and second, by highlighting the current state of drone technology.

The commitment to integrate drone technology in the civilian domain is quite prominent at the EU level. The Drone Strategy and EASA's AI Roadmap emerge as a reassurance of that commitment. However, in delineating the visions around it, the key European institutions lack coherence. Looking at the strategy, one gets an impression that EU airspace would be highly automated and digitalized by 2030, where drones would be operating with minimum human control. Yet, the EASA's roadmap extends quite the opposite impression for 2030. According to the latter, automation would be at a very low level, where humans would still be taking decisions and performing actions while the system would only be assisting them. Also, the current drone technology operates at a higher automation level. Complicating things further, the U-Space is also planned to be automated. Large-scale drone operations, as the strategy envisions, would thus not be possible at a low automation level. This article studied the most recent key policy instruments, but indeed with only two cases one cannot make out a case of general incoherence amongst EU bodies. Yet, the inconsistency exhibited in my analysis does raise questions about how coherent is policy-making at the general and specific levels within the EU.

This case also highlights that the regulation and integration of new technologies is a mounting task, even for experienced regulatory entities such as the EU. This has important implications, because drones are increasingly penetrating in different European policy agendas, and therefore incoherent visions amongst institutions can cause political and regulatory challenges in the future. While harmonization between member states, the EC and the European Council in relation to the strategy remains a challenge (Lavallée & Martins, 2023), the inconsistency highlighted in this article raises questions about harmonization among EU bodies. These issues may also impact the global regulatory influence exercised by EU, a phenomenon labelled by Anu Bradford as the ‘Brussels Effect’, highlighting how EU policies in areas such as data protection, health and safety, and environment have become global standards (Bradford, 2020). These EU drone policies thus bear potential regulatory influence elsewhere too, and less attention paid towards noise or visual pollution, and on social acceptance of these measures, can create an undesirable precedent. Finally, for a political entity like the EU, issues of policy coherence also have crucial implications regarding the effectiveness, legitimacy and credibility of its actions (Marangoni & Raube, 2014, p. 486); for all these reasons, future regulatory efforts could benefit from greater consistency.