By Philip Butterworth-Hayes
The only fully-certified U-space airspace currently operating in the European Union is San Salvo in Italy, which launched in January 1, 2026. So how have things gone?
“There’s still work to be done – but it looks like it can be done,” according to D-Flight’s Alberto Iovino, who earlier today provided Airspace World 2026 visitors with a refreshingly candid view as to positives and negatives for others to consider when implementing U-space airspace.
The U-space area had been under development since October 2024, a joint collaboration between ENAC (the regulator), D-Flight (the U-space service provider) and ENAV (the air navigation service provider). It is a modest airspace area of approximately 307 square kilometers above a sparsely populated area, with a radius of 12 km and a height of 12 km, close to, but not including, the coast.
The U-space is segregated from surrounding traffic areas and at the very centre is rectangular area reserved for helicopter operations and not included in the U-space airspace.
There are now 11 drone companies onboarded on the system but with very different operational profiles to those originally conceived. It was originally designed to support Amazon Prime Air’s drone delivery operation and trials started there back in December 2024. A few days before the launch of the U-space area Amazon pulled out of the project and the partners faced a tricky choice as to whether they should abandon the project or forge ahead.
They went ahead.
For the Italian U-space architects, this change from a concentrated hub operation to a much lighter series of point-to-point missions made life both easier and more complex.
According to Alberto Iovino, U-space is designed primarily for point-to-point operations, where flight authorisations are processed in relatively manageable sequences. In a hub operation many flight authorisation requests are required for closely-space operations, which puts pressure on both the CISP and USSPs.
The previous partners had worked closely together over many months to fine tune the procedures and technologies. When Amazon pulled out new drone operators, with only a very basic knowledge of U-space, had to be on-boarded and this took a lot longer and was more complex than originally planned. Also, the business model completely changed. The U-space developers had envisaged a charging system based on very large numbers of drone deliveries, which no longer worked.
Alberto Iovino also highlighted there is currently no way of logging whether flights had actually been carried out after the flight authorisations had been granted.
Despite the problems, San Salvo remains a monument to Europe’s U-space ambitions. Its architects had expected regulators, USSPs, ANSPs, drone operators to flock to the area to see how the technology and operations worked, perhaps even providing a catalyst to U-space adoption throughout the EU. They still might.
