#106 Koen De Vos: U-Space, U-Space… Where Art Thou?

In this episode of The Vertical Space, Koen De Vos — Secretary General of GUTMA and a 30-year European Commission veteran — unpacks why U-Space still feels more aspirational than operational, five years after the regulatory framework was put in place. Drawing on parallels with the automotive sector, Koen explores how green technologies, automation, and system-level thinking could reshape aviation if the institutional and political pieces ever align.

The conversation covers the evolving role of EASA, how European and US approaches to UTM diverge in philosophy and execution, and why many UTM business cases quietly fall apart when you ask who is actually willing to pay. Koen also raises an uncomfortable question for European aviation: with a war ongoing and military drone capabilities advancing rapidly in Ukraine, is Europe fast enough to flip those capabilities into commercial opportunities before the window closes?

Key Topics

• Why U-Space has not meaningfully materialized in Europe five years after its regulatory framework was created
• The circular trust problem in drone regulation — you need the system to earn trust, but you need trust to authorize the system
• How European and US approaches to UTM differ fundamentally in philosophy, fragmentation, and execution
• Whether U-Space is being used as a safety crutch and what that means for real-world deployment
• Why most UTM business cases fall apart when you ask who will actually pay for it
• What aviation can learn from the automotive sector's shift to electrification and automation
• The geopolitical urgency for Europe to commercialize military drone capabilities before the window closes
• What UTM would look like if you were brave enough to design it from scratch today

+ Read Full Transcript

Koen: It is the digitalization of your aviation rules where for the first time, the aviation regulators, which in many cases come from aeronautical engineering, and then suddenly they are not dealing with aircraft, but they have to deal with big data. Where are the software engineers? I can count the number of software engineers in EASA on my hand, and it is one little finger.

Jim: Hey, welcome back to The Vertical Space and our conversation with Koen De Vos, the Secretary General of the Global UTM Association, otherwise known as GUTMA. Koen starts with a discussion around the importance of learning from other industries like the automotive sector to advance aviation, particularly in green and automated technologies. We discuss the challenges in transitioning to digital aviation and the roles of institutions like EASA. Key challenges include maintaining public safety, balancing political risks, and implementing complex regulations. The discussion highlights the differences in approaches between Europe and the US in managing air traffic for drones and emphasizes the importance of political will and practical solutions to advance the European ecosystem. Koen joined GUTMA in April 2021 after nearly 30 years at the European Commission, where he worked on aviation, transport, and labor policy. From 2013 onwards he served as a senior drone expert contributing to the development of the EU's regulatory and policy framework for unmanned aviation and U-Space. Koen holds a master of law and a master of economics. Welcome to The Vertical Space.

Jim: Is there anything that very few in the industry agree with you on?

Koen: There are many things that I sometimes find myself quite alone in believing — that aviation can and must learn much more from outside its own sector. Every morning I read all the newspapers and try to translate the lessons of other industries towards aviation and drones. I'm particularly interested in the European car industry, which is subject to the same pressures as aviation: the push to greening, automation, and the new geopolitical context. Many aviation people think the good ideas can only come from aviation people because of the unique safety culture. But we can always learn from other industries. The car industry is a little bit ahead of us. Tesla builds its own batteries, has its own mines, and on top of that builds a car. Wing and Amazon are exactly doing that in aviation — they build their own drones, operate them themselves, are their own airport, their own UTM provider. That vertical integration — that's what we have to learn to navigate.

Jim: What are the most controversial parts of what you've seen from other industries where you get the most pushback?

Koen: Where I see resistance is people are not able to smartly translate analog aviation to digital aviation, and they are not able to move from moving aircraft and moving people to services and the value that will be created in those new value chains. If you have autonomous cars, what is the value of car ownership if you are no longer able to think in terms of mobility? There I get pushback when I start reasoning in terms of mobility and completely different value chains for aviation.

Europe in Crisis

Koen: We have to adapt to a new geopolitical context — no longer a global world where we all live according to the same values and open markets. We have to think more in terms of geopolitical influence zones. And what has changed in the last year or two years is that everything now must be seen through a geopolitical lens. We have a war going on in Europe. If we are not ready to flip these military Ukrainian capabilities — manufacturing, managing, swarming — into civil commercial opportunities, we are losing our edge. Never waste a good crisis. We are in a big, big crisis. I'm a little bit concerned that I don't see the necessary progress in building our drone ecosystem. People working within the aviation silo don't see these geopolitical tensions and the need to move on. That's disappointing.

UTM Overview and Geography

Jim: Give us a quick overview of UTM as you see it, and how different countries approach it.

Koen: I don't see UTM as a standalone service. It's a key enabler — but to what extent should you focus all your attention or your hopes to make a fortune on UTM? What will be the drone service for which you will be able to convince people to pay you? Who will you be able to invoice? Will you be able to invoice somebody for a UTM service which can be fully automated? If you do infrastructure inspections, your customer wants a list of places where the company has to send its maintenance teams. They are not interested in how many hours you have been flying. They are interested in the drone service. In the US, the FAA together with the industry is able to make very concrete steps forward — the Dallas operations, where the FAA requested a consortium to focus on strategic deconfliction. The FAA said from the beginning: UTM services are third-party services. You have a single market, a single authority. That's completely different from Europe, where we have a de facto fragmented market. If the Commission does not act, we will end up with 27 markets. That led the Commission to come up very early with use-based regulations — three regulations that swapped from analog aviation to digital aviation. In Europe, U-Space was from the beginning about robots, flying robots. The one-to-N thing: you don't want one pilot against one aircraft. You want to automate. Scale the one to N and that N must become 30, 40, 50, whatever. That's the name of the game.

Why Is There No U-Space Implemented Yet

Luka: The regulatory framework has been around for about five years now, and to my knowledge there is no single U-Space currently implemented in Europe as envisioned. What is the real bottleneck?

Koen: It's a combination of many things. Even if the rules are quite okay, we were doing many things for the first time and EASA was asked to come up with acceptable means of compliance and guidance material. Of course, they went for safety first, and maybe they have been overcomplicating. The air risk assessment, which every CAA must undertake — for the first time they have to manage so many data which are not yet available. It is the digitalization of your aviation rules where the regulators — which in many cases come from aeronautical engineering — suddenly are not dealing with aircraft but have to deal with big data. Where are the software engineers? I can count the software engineers in EASA on my hand, and it is one little finger. Out of 800 EASA collaborators. I hope that with a dose of geopolitical reality, the aviation people will move on and invest in these things. I see good things — for instance, our Harmonized Skies conference in Zurich, which is hoping this year to become the first U-Space airspace in Europe fully according to the book. And bad things where you see strong ANSPs still going for a digital monopoly.

Luka: This seems to be this core contradiction: regulators don't trust automated distributed systems enough to authorize drone operations at the scale we're talking about, but they require those same systems to exist before they authorize drone operations. It's a circular system where trust is required to build a system, but you need the system to earn the trust.

Koen: Yes. And it's a consequence of applying too much legacy aviation thinking. In aviation safety, you certify the vehicle, certify the pilot, control the airspace centrally, assume near-perfect compliance. UAS turned that model upside down. Regulators are being asked to authorize automated drones before they've seen them operate at scale, but operators are told they need those systems in place before they can achieve scale. That loop needs to be broken. We have to learn from others. We have our members in Dallas — Wing, Zipline, Anra. If we could get information on those operations and have it as an input for the regulator, that would be very useful. Part of those rules have been developed by people who were also responsible for civil aviation. The guy who drafted the list of requirements for U-Space service providers just made that same list for aviation service providers. So with that background, he applied that to USSPs.

Luka: This seems paradoxical — Europe has had a regulatory framework published for five years, and yet it still feels like we need to go and learn from operations in Dallas to inform these rules.

Koen: It makes sense. We learn from BVLOS operations taking place everywhere. In Europe we learn from projects like SESAR that flows into the rulemaking. The problem is that implementation at the acceptable means of compliance level is over-complicated. A German member wants to have an authorization and operations license for three years. They're waiting, trying to push a little bit with political pushing. And what they get back is a letter — by post — complaining that they are pressing too much. Can you imagine? I'm reading in the newspaper that you have a German minister for digitalization. And the same evening you hear that your German member has received a letter by the post box saying: don't push too much because you want to go too fast.

Air Risk Mitigation

Luka: Can you give us a more granular view of what the current method of air risk mitigation is and why it is so controversial?

Koen: Air risk mitigation in U-Space regulation: the operator must make a specific operation risk assessment — the SORA. Then he has to rely on U-Space services. The core service is strategic deconfliction. You can deconflict the whole operation in advance, and because you no longer have a natural monopoly, you are creating a competitive market. We are interested in Dallas because that is mainly focused on strategic deconfliction and how the ASTM standard 3548 is being implemented. The rule is: you have to rely on U-Space services to strategically deconflict. How you do that in practice is you implement ASTM 3548. The devil is in the detail. For instance, if you have to communicate with ATC in U-Space airspace, how exactly is that done? There are no such protocols yet established. What if suddenly a dynamic geo-zone is established? Is everybody aware? Who can trigger such a dynamic geo-zone? It's not only the ANSP — every military zone can do it, every city, a geo-zone manager. Those loose ends remain loose ends. That's exactly why the first U-Space airspace is so difficult to establish. That's why Zurich is so important.

Is U-Space Used as a Safety Crutch?

Luka: Do you think U-Space is being used as a safety crutch — a prerequisite safety blanket that must exist before regulators will approve operations at all?

Koen: I see that CAAs are more and more willing to approve BVLOS operations. Look at Ireland where MANNA can grow and fly BVLOS under its own look. But the limit of his growth is then U-Space. If there is another drone operator willing to enter his space, then you must deconflict. So you must have U-Space in place in order to grow. I still see U-Space as an enabler to scale and lower the cost. It is software running, which operators themselves can do. If Wing wants to join MANNA in Dublin, Wing will run its own UTM provider. That will not cost many euros — we're talking cents per flight, per operation. The showstopper is really the CAAs who don't have sufficient trust in the system, don't understand the details of it, and hesitate. They don't want to be the first to sign off. They want to learn from each other.

Europe Needs Political Will

Luka: What needs to change to break this deadlock?

Koen: Political will. Just political will. U-Space is part of your digital aerospace infrastructure. If you don't see drones for competitiveness, fine. If you don't see it for greening and sustainability, fine. But if you don't see the importance of drones and U-Space to maintain and preserve your sovereignty — we had drones flying over Belgian military bases where nuclear heads are stored and they were not able to see and intercept these drones. They even didn't know whether they were real drones or not. The political equation has changed completely. If they have to close an airport again because of drones — that is a tremendous cost. The political equation to take that drone risk has changed completely. I hope in the coming years we'll see advance. We have to catch up if we want to stay relevant and sovereign.

Luka: If you can be more concrete — who assumes public safety risk, political reputational risk, legal liability risk?

Koen: You described it well. In the past the political will was balancing safety and public risk against competitiveness. One child hurt by a drone and you lose out. But the equation has changed. The political balancing between the safety risk and the political risks of doing nothing — that equation has changed dramatically. Do we have to lower our safety objectives? No. But we have way forwards. If Foca, the Swiss Federation, signs off, then why wouldn't the French, the Germans, the Belgians? There are green sprouts popping up everywhere — in Belgium, in Rotterdam. Given that political will, I hope in the coming years we'll advance. We have to catch up simply.

How UTM Has Changed in the Last Four Years

Jim: If we were to define UTM four and a half years ago in a certain way, how has it changed?

Koen: The definition in the European view has not changed. At the very first meeting with the Commissioner in 2015, she asked us: "Do you know Isaac Asimov?" Philip, my director, and I looked at each other. She was fascinated by the Three Laws of Robotics. That was her view — build the systems that will support large-scale drone operations. The term U-Space was coined later, in November 2016. But U-Space was branded differently from UTM because from the beginning she wanted to move away from "uncrewed." At the end of the day, U-Space can cater to both crewed and uncrewed traffic. It's all about automation. While you in the US were focusing on UTM below 500 feet for small UAS, we had to come from the beginning with an overarching policy line on how to create the digital aviation world. That's why the US can progress easier — you kept your system simpler. We are struggling because we are dealing with a system which is able to manage much more complex operations too. What we need to change is not the rules as such — it is the way to implement them.

Willingness to Pay for UTM

Jim: Did you see providing UTM services as a business opportunity?

Koen: UTM alone is not a sustainable business and you have to integrate vertically or horizontally. In a digital world with open source evolution, knowing the regulations, knowing the standards, knowing the flow of data — this can be done through open source. I hope that bigger companies will be able to automate their drone operations and automate themselves their UTM service. A company like BASF has to inspect their pipelines to detect metal leakage. If I was BASF, I would like to keep those capabilities under my own responsibility without a third party knowing exactly where I'm flying, because I could be suspected of having a metal leakage. That investment would be worthwhile against reputational damage. I sometimes compare it with the piccolos handling the levers for the elevators — in rural times you had people handling those levers, but then these functions were automated and now we just push a button. UTM will go the same way.

Jim: So what you're largely saying is there isn't necessarily a UTM market for dedicated UTM companies — it will more be a vertically integrated capability.

Koen: Yes. Wing and Amazon just vertically integrate. There is no separate business case for UTM as such. You can expand horizontally — like Anra with fleet management. But at the end of the day I believe in the drone service. The second message our early Commissioner conveyed was: "Don't focus on operations. Focus on services." What value are you creating? By letting a drone fly, you don't create any value at all as such.

Peter: Six or seven years ago, I was asking who is the customer paying for this service and who is receiving that money. Since then I haven't really seen anything that builds the business case for UTM as a standalone business. What we've seen is that the operators that have built real-world flying experience — in particular the drone delivery guys — have either built it in-house or effectively taken it in-house. None of that builds a case for UTM as a service as a standalone business. I think it is a system that is built into a scaled-up, sophisticated, profitable operator, but that's the only place where it sits.

Koen: That's the main take. There are still many people in aviation who see UTM as a self-standing issue. That's why it drives me sometimes crazy where you see ANSPs willing to keep and build a digital monopoly — supported by SESAR projects and preached as EU best practices, they create a digital monopoly. I'm sometimes depressed that I'm the only one who sees these things coming. You hear so much noise. Filter that out and focus on what are the real green sprouts that you see popping up and build on these.

What Would UTM Look Like If Starting from Scratch

Luka: If Europe were starting from scratch today, knowing what we know now, would you design U-Space the same way?

Koen: I've been thinking about this every single day. What would I change is not so much the rules as such. It's the underlying acceptable means of compliance and guidance — where we should learn from others and not always by default go for the most strict, safest mode. I would make a difference between UTM providers who are just providing U-Space services for their own fleet — operations are known, aircraft are known — versus UTM providers who want to build a UTM business for thousands of other operators with unknown operations. I would change things at that lower level. The European need to build a strong, seamless European market is still right. The main take is that institutional differences drive differences in UTM concepts. We have a continent of 27 different markets. If we don't have strong European rules, we have 27 fragmented markets. Why is Wing interested in coming to Switzerland? Not for the Swiss mountains, but because it is a foothold into the European market where they should be able to enter seamlessly. Member states are entitled to go for another acceptable means of compliance — you have the burden of proof, but you can do it. And that can be the way forward.

GUTMA Overview

Jim: Tell us about GUTMA — what's its role and what value does it provide?

Koen: GUTMA is a unique association — not a standard lobbying association defending the interest of a particular stakeholder. It is an association that wants to build the ecosystem. We started with UTM because we thought this is a pinnacle, and underneath the ecosystem will develop automatically. As we saw that UTM would be vertically or horizontally integrated, we expanded to defending the establishment of the whole drone ecosystem. That's why we not only have members of companies very active in the drone ecosystem, but also members of regulators — the Swiss FOCA, the Israeli CAA, the FAA. We are recognized by EASA, by the FAA, and at ICAO level, where we are a specific stakeholder contributing to the Advanced Air Mobility Study Group. We want to do that at the global level — members from China, Australia, Japan, Europe, the US. The only continents missing are Africa and Latin America.

Jim: What outcomes would you say GUTMA will facilitate in the next couple of years that wouldn't have existed without it?

Koen: We focus on very concrete contributions. When the U-Space regulation was adopted, we had already the ASTM 3548 on interoperability and strategic deconfliction. But you must first check whether all the details of the requirements are actually met if you apply the standard. We created a multilateral agreement, governance, and data exchange so that the market can function better. That agreement has been used by the FAA and industry partners in Dallas. Also, the link between the operator and the UTM provider — as a regulator you want to know exactly who is responsible for which task and who's liable. We came up at the request of the FAA with an SLA between operator and UTM provider. Aviation is so focused on safety but forgetting a little bit on cyber. We think cyber should be treated on equal footing. We already delivered a concrete list of things that a cybersecurity system should comply with — and that list has been used by EASA in the certification process of Anra. Every time there is a concrete element missing in establishing the ecosystem, we try to fill the gap. If there is a need for UTM to communicate better with more robust protocols with ATM, we will come up and create those protocols. I also try to understand the value chain — who will make a sustained business from UTM alone? If you see some niches of digital monopolies being created, you can piggyback not only on the value of the UTM service, not only on the value of the operation service, but also on the drone service. If a digital monopolist can suck away part of the big value of the BASF inspection service, he can suck away value of the whole economy. That is a big concern, but not so many share it.