Ready to fly¶

In November 2022 the drone was a transport matter, which in Brussels is a respectable thing to be. The Commission’s second drone strategy gave it a market to grow into, rules already in force and a date at the Olympics. Nobody yet counted it in millions.

With the right framework¶

The Commission’s questions and answers on the strategy put the European drone services market at €14.5 billion by 2030, with 145,000 jobs, “with the right framework in place”. The Union had by then spent almost €980 million on drones since 2003, across 320 research projects, which is a great deal of scholarship for a thing that is sold in a box.

The forecast was conditional and said so. The condition was a framework, which the Commission was writing.

Air taxis were to lose their pilots, and the Paris Olympics of 2024 were “one of the target dates for certain operators to start such pilotless transport services”. In August 2024 the test flights planned for the Games were scrapped, AFP reported, because certification had not come through. Flights without passengers were planned instead at an aerodrome west of Paris.

The future had been booked for the Olympics. It turned up afterwards, in the suburbs, with nobody on board.

First in the world¶

The rules had arrived first, as rules in Brussels generally do. The class mark on a drone’s box says which of them it flies under. EASA’s list of class-marked drones held 162 entries on 29 September 2026, 44 of them from DJI. The list rests on “the voluntary information provided by the manufacturer”, EASA notes, and marked drones missing from it may still be on sale. Registers compiled from what people volunteer have a long and hopeful history.

A European Parliament briefing of May 2025, citing industry reports, counted over 40 per cent of the world’s drone companies as European in 2022. The same briefing describes the market as “dominated by Chinese manufacturers”.

Europe had the companies. Someone else had the market.

Counted somewhere else¶

Drone operators register with national authorities, of which Europe has a generous supply. U-space airspace, where drones fly with the support of traffic services, is designated by each member state after its own risk assessment. Neither the Commission’s pages nor EASA’s carried an EU-wide count of either in September 2026.

The 2022 forecast is easier to find than anything measured against it.

The world around us¶

On 11 February 2026 the Commission presented its action plan on drone and counter-drone security. Three commissioners spoke. Magnus Brunner gave the reasons: airports and military sites disrupted across Europe in three months, more than 1,300 illegal overflights at a Vienna utility, 200 kg of smuggled drugs. The transport commissioner, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, spoke last. The Union “was the first in the world to regulate drones”, he said, “And that position has not changed. But the world around us has changed.” He listed what civil drones already do, from medical deliveries to oil-spill detection, and said that no action of those who wish Europe harm can change that perspective.

The civil drone had been defended, courteously, by the last speaker at a press conference about stopping drones.

By September 2026 the defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, was counting European drones by production: around 1.5 million a year. The market had been measured in euros. The drone was now measured in units, which is how armies prefer to count things.