Drone Tech Is Global. Market Access Still Stops at the Border

A company that has proven its drone operation safe in one country can still be forced to repeat most of the certification process in the next one. That gap between global technology and national market access anchored Harmonized Skies 2026, held in Tokyo, where aviation authorities, drone operators, technology providers and standards organisations gathered from around the world.

Koen De Vos, Secretary General of the Global UTM Association (GUTMA), distilled the conference's core message in blunt terms: "Companies should not have to demonstrate the same thing twice simply because they cross a border."

Why a common rulebook isn't a single market

Europe shows how harmonisation stalls in practice. The EU has built a common regulatory framework for U-space, including certification of service providers, yet national implementation arrangements, infrastructure connections and onboarding requirements still create barriers to cross-border operations. De Vos's verdict: a common regulatory framework does not automatically create a single market.

His argument, laid out after the Tokyo gathering, is that the industry is chasing the wrong target. Regulators don't need identical rules everywhere — they need interoperable systems, common standards and approval processes that let companies operate across borders without starting from scratch.

Regulatory frameworks will naturally differ, reflecting national institutions, operational environments and different stages of market development. But De Vos points to real convergence around the building blocks of automated drone operations:

• risk-based approaches to authorisation
• electronic conspicuity
• strategic coordination of flights
• internationally recognised standards

The unfinished work is turning that convergence into actual market access.

What does practical interoperability look like?

Full mutual recognition of regulatory approvals may stay out of reach while national frameworks keep evolving. The more immediate path, De Vos argues, is recognising equivalent technical requirements, test results and compliance evidence — reducing duplication while national aviation authorities keep responsibility for safety oversight.

Standards alone won't carry the load. They facilitate market access only when regulators trust the evidence behind them, which means clearer links between regulatory objectives, technical requirements and the tests used to verify compliance. Where requirements are equivalent enough, evidence produced in one jurisdiction should be reusable in another.

The economic stakes are concrete. Fragmentation raises market entry costs, limits economies of scale, splinters demand and discourages investment in technologies built for global markets. De Vos proposes a sharper yardstick for success than counting standards published: has it become easier, faster and cheaper for a company to enter another market?

What comes after certification?

As the industry moves toward Advanced Air Mobility and increasingly automated operations, certifying new aircraft won't be enough. The supporting digital infrastructure has to scale too — interoperable traffic management services, real-time information exchange, and tighter integration with existing aviation systems.

Automation is the load-bearing wall. "An operating model dependent on increasing levels of human intervention cannot scale indefinitely as traffic grows," De Vos writes. Machine-to-machine communication, automated monitoring and coordinated traffic management will be essential to grow capacity while holding safety and controlling costs.

Connectivity is entering the operational equation as well. Operators need to know whether sufficient connectivity exists along a planned trajectory, how reliably it holds, and what alternatives exist if a link deteriorates. That pushes aviation and telecommunications sectors to work together, translating network performance into information that can actually support flight planning.

Where the business case stands

Technology and regulation only matter if they enable services with real value. Across Asia-Pacific, drones have become commercially relevant in infrastructure inspection, energy, railways, agriculture, public safety, logistics and maritime operations — wherever they solve genuine operational problems better than existing alternatives. The next step is making those applications scalable through automation, one-to-many operations and more efficient regulatory approvals.

The United States offers a parallel lesson: scale emerges when standards, regulatory oversight and industry collaboration evolve together through real-world operations. Common rules and interoperable services, De Vos notes, can let an ecosystem grow without a single, centrally operated UTM system.

Harmonized Skies 2026 also moved the debate beyond the conference room. An international UTM showcase and live flight demonstrations at Uminomori in Tokyo Bay showed how interoperable systems and pre-flight deconfliction can support coordinated operations in practice.

Harmonisation, in De Vos's framing, is not about imposing identical solutions but about creating conditions in which different systems, companies and regulators can work together. Technology is global; institutions remain national — and bridging that divide, he writes, is what turns the promise of digital aviation into a functioning global market.