At the end of last year, on December 11, 2025, the Drone Forum Hungary 2025 conference organized by CloudIA Zrt. took place. The event focused on the relationship between drones and education, but Mónika Magyar, representing HungaroControl (HC), also gave a presentation on the regulatory challenges of innovative urban mobility. The relevance of the event and the presentation is further strengthened by the publication of the first European U-Space Implementation Handbook on January 18, 2026.
As the HC presentation showed, by 2030 approximately 340 million people in the European Union will live in cities, underscoring the need for new solutions in urban transport and mobility. Aviation and drones will also play a major role in this process. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is estimated to create around 90,000 new jobs by the end of the decade. This is why urban air transport regulation requires special care: many interests must be reconciled in a way that also serves flight safety, privacy and sustainability.
From a regulatory perspective, the EU legislator’s solution is the so-called U-space, which allows traditional aircraft and drones to share the same airspace in large numbers. U-space can be particularly useful in urban environments, where there is a need for air transport between the city centre and the airport, or where the proximity of the airport and the presence of drones performing services in the city (e.g. home delivery) can lead to conflicts between individual aircraft. This also shows that it is a very complex task to be carried out both legally and technically, a complexity that slows down the development of such airspaces.
The aforementioned handbook brings together the experiences of U-space pilot projects, helping Member States and growing cities efficiently and safely serve the economy and residents of densely populated areas. It is highly recommended reading for all professionals and operators involved in this field.
In our next article, we will provide a summary of the handbook’s contents.