COLOGNE, Germany — The airspace below 120 meters used to belong to birds, kites and the occasional model aircraft. Now it is contested ground, and Europe's aviation regulator is trying to write the rules before the traffic arrives.
A draft framework published this week would require every drone heavier than 250 grams to broadcast its position and operator identity continuously, using a standard that police and airports can read with inexpensive receivers. Cities would gain the authority to close corridors of airspace within minutes, a power that today sits with national regulators and can take weeks to exercise.
The proposal follows a year in which unauthorized drones closed three major airports for a combined 41 hours and were implicated in at least two incidents at power plants.
“The hobbyist with a camera drone is not the problem,” said Ingrid Sauer, who heads the regulator's unmanned aircraft division. “The problem is that today we cannot tell the hobbyist from anyone else.”
Manufacturers broadly support the broadcasting requirement, which most new consumer models already meet. The sharper objections come from delivery and inspection companies, which argue that letting every city council close airspace would make routine operations impossible to plan.
Detection firms, meanwhile, see opportunity. Several European startups now sell camera-and-radar systems that can spot a small drone at more than a kilometer and track it across the sky, a capability that until recently was limited to military customers.
The consultation runs until January. Officials expect the rules to take effect, in some form, by 2028.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 11 of the European edition with the headline: Small Drones, Big Questions: Europe Rewrites the Rules of Its Lower Airspace.
