The lower airspace is increasingly used for commercial UAS operations and for rescue and reconnaissance missions by police and fire departments. At the same time, drone sightings around airports and military installations have shown significant security gaps, particularly in these areas. Those looking to shape urban flight operations – for example, through U-Space zones – must therefore implement appropriate protective measures from the very beginning.

Warning signal, hybrid threat, wake-up call. When illegally operated drones are sighted near airports or other critical infrastructure, there is considerable commotion, and the discussion about how to detect and defend against uncooperative UAS begins anew. This has been repeatedly observed in recent months. The failed attack attempt on Leipzig/Halle Airport has further heightened the urgency of the situation.

Friend-Foe Issue

And although coherent answers and concrete measures have largely been absent, the various incidents across Europe have made one thing unmistakably clear: the lower airspace, which we want to open to logistics flights and inspection missions, is precisely the flight path most exposed to hostile or careless intruders. Against the backdrop of the diverse efforts to utilize the European U-Space concept, this is an alarming finding. Counter-UAS must not be a security measure retrofitted onto U-Space; it must be embedded from the ground up in the architecture’s foundation.

Without real-time situational awareness, regulatory and security authorities cannot monitor the lower airspace or organize increasing air traffic

The fundamental challenge lies not in detection itself but in precise identification, or rather, in the “friend-foe distinction”. Legally operated drones fundamentally produce the same signatures as illegally used UAS. This is especially true in a densely built-up area and amidst the electromagnetic background noise of a city center. Not to mention that it is difficult to distinguish between inadvertent and intentional violations from a distance.

With the “Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security”, published in February 2026, the European Commission has tasked EASA with developing certification criteria for counter-drone systems. Furthermore, the EU Commission is pushing for detection data to be integrated into a common European situational picture alongside findings from the European border surveillance system, EUROSUR. Notably, the Commission’s analysis acknowledges that most member states still lack a standardized, certified interface for directly integrating U-Space or Remote-ID data into national air traffic control and police systems. The result: A sensor may trigger an alert, but the warning goes unheeded due to the lack of a reliable target address.