Drones in the City: Are the urban skies ready to become the next mobility layer?

Stand on any busy street corner and you can feel it: urban mobility is changing. Bikes and e-scooters zip past, buses hum on electric power, and, if planners get their way, small aircraft will soon be transforming the air above into a new layer of transport. Drones and electric vertical take-off and landing taxis (eVTOLs) promise to move medicine, groceries, and eventually people, while taking pressure off congested roads. The questions now are where this is working, how it scales, and who is writing the rules.

Indeed, only last month the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) published research identifying key safety risks and potential solutions for integrating eVTOLs into the UK airspace, focusing on airspace integration, vertiport operations and automation oversight. The 18-month Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) study, conducted with the University of Warwick's WMG and the eVTOL Safety Leadership Group, uses a systems-thinking approach to find hazards and safety gaps in aircraft, hardware, software and human interactions, providing a live document to guide the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector.
 

From pilot projects to daily service

In the United States, the most tangible drone-centric progress is in the field of logistics. Alphabet’s Wing and Zipline are expanding suburban delivery networks that feel, frankly, useful. Wing’s partnerships with Walmart and DoorDash are rolling out across major cities, including Dallas-Fort Worth, and the company says it’s routinely delivering small baskets (think eggs, baby wipes, forgotten ingredients) in under 20 minutes. Zipline, meanwhile, has parlayed years of medical delivery expertise into US city deployments; it achieved a key beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) milestone with the FAA in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has logged more than a million autonomous deliveries worldwide.
 

Last mile at scale: automated warehouses and drone fulfilment are getting closer.
 

The UK is stitching together something similar with a public-service twist. Scotland’s CAELUS programme, backed by NHS Scotland, airports, and UTM providers, completed extensive live trials in 2024, moving lab samples and medicines between hospitals, cutting journey times from hours to minutes and proving the airspace management needed for scale. On England’s south coast, Hampshire’s Solent Transport trials have demonstrated routine medical deliveries across the water to the Isle of Wight and are now pushing BVLOS operations under CAA oversight to explore permanent services.

Medical logistics proves the value: CAELUS trials connect hospitals with drone deliveries.
 

Scotland’s CAELUS programme, backed by NHS Scotland, airports and UTM providers, completed extensive live trials in 2024, moving lab samples and medicines between hospitals, cutting journey times from hours to minutes.

Belgium’s Port of Antwerp-Bruges has emerged as a living lab for industrial drone use: surveillance, parcel shuttles, medical transport, and inspection have all been made possible under a maturing U-space/UTM framework, with thousands of operations recorded and the country now preparing its first designated U-space airspace over the port. Hamburg’s long-running “Medifly” programme is likewise scaling hospital-to-hospital medical transport while Germany turns ‘sandbox lessons’ into national U-space deployment plans.

Singapore and the wider Asia region are also busy proving business cases. Alongside its well-known air-traffic pragmatism, Singapore has recently run successful maritime drone deliveries — bunker samples to and from anchored vessels — foreshadowing city-port logistics networks that bypass road congestion altogether.

 

Air taxis: promise, progress — and growing pains

Moving people, not parcels, is the ‘moonshot’. It might sound overly ambitious but in the 1960s reaching the moon was the original moonshot. Paris made global headlines by planning eVTOL demos during the 2024 Olympics, and although full commercial certification didn’t materialise in time for the Games, Volocopter did fly demonstration missions — an important signal that the hardware and ground infrastructure (vertiports) are maturing even if regulatory timelines remain tight.

Dubai has taken a bolder path: a binding agreement with Joby Aviation to launch air-taxi services, with exclusive rights for six years and city authorities (RTA, DCAA, GCAA) aligned on infrastructure and integration. The plan targets commercial operations by 2026, leveraging Dubai’s habit of moving quickly from pilot to deployment. Seoul, meanwhile, has sketched a “low-altitude economy” roadmap with UAM services in the 2030 timeframe and metro-area coverage by 2040, building on corridor trials that link airports and satellite cities.

These efforts share two realities: public acceptance grows when people see safe flights, and certification is a grind. Demonstrations buy credibility; robust, repeatable operations earn trust.
 

Dubai has taken a bolder path: a binding agreement with Joby Aviation to launch air-taxi services, with exclusive rights for six years and city authorities (RTA, DCAA, GCAA) aligned on infrastructure and integration.

The rules of the (urban) road

If the first wave of micromobility was about street design, the drone wave is about airspace design. In Europe, the key framework is “U-space,” a suite of regulations and services that enable high-volume drone operations, especially BVLOS, while protecting other aircraft and people on the ground. The rules formally took effect in January 2023 through Regulations (EU) 2021/664–666, and EASA has since published “Easy Access Rules” to help authorities, providers, and operators implement them consistently.

Safety first: certified operators and clear corridors are crucial for scale.

Real-world application is advancing unevenly, but the direction is clear: designated U-space areas with certified service providers, common information services, and digital authorisations that make a city’s low airspace function more like managed infrastructure than a free-for-all. Hamburg’s sandbox demonstrated the concept “works in practice,” while Antwerp-Bruges is moving from pilots to operational U-space readiness. In parallel, SESAR and other research programs catalogue the remaining challenges: data interoperability, cybersecurity, business models, and who pays for the digital “roads in the sky.”

Outside Europe, regulators are making pragmatic moves. The US FAA’s incremental approvals for Zipline’s and Wing’s BVLOS operations are de-facto precedents for scaling suburban delivery without overhauling the entire regulatory edifice at once.
 

Outside Europe, regulators are making pragmatic moves. The US FAA’s incremental approvals for Zipline’s and Wing’s BVLOS operations are de-facto precedents for scaling suburban delivery without overhauling the entire regulatory edifice at once.

What “good” looks like in city deployment

Across these examples, three design patterns stand out:

Start where the value is obvious. Medical logistics clears barriers faster because benefits are immediate and non-controversial: faster diagnostics, fewer missed treatments, less pressure on ambulances and ferries. CAELUS and Medifly embody this approach and create public familiarity and trust that later supports broader services.

Treat the sky as shared infrastructure. Antwerp-Bruges and Hamburg show that a managed “U-space” with clear geozones, digital approvals and accountable service providers reduces friction for operators and keeps officials comfortable with scale.

Integrate with the mobility ecosystem, not above it. The most promising visions connect vertiports to metros, use ports as intermodal hubs and link drone routes to hospital networks. When air links shorten trips that are long or brittle on the ground, public value is easiest to see.

 

What could go wrong… and how to get it right

Cities considering drones face five predictable friction points:

Noise and flight paths. eVTOLs are quieter than helicopters but not silent; without thoughtful corridors and curfews, public patience wears thin. (Paris’s Olympics journey is a reminder that social licence and certification timelines rarely align neatly with political moments.)

Safety and liability. BVLOS and autonomy demand robust detect-and-avoid, remote ID, and clear accountability. Europe’s U-space provides the scaffolding; cities still need to plan where U-space starts, who pays, and how to phase it.

Equity. If air taxis debut as premium services only, expect a backlash. Programmes that start with public goods (medical logistics, emergency response) build wider support.

Urban design. Vertiports, charging and curb-to-sky wayfinding must plug into public transit, not compete with it. Dubai’s early integration efforts are instructive.

Data and cybersecurity. U-space is a digital system; resilience and interoperability are not optional extras. European research bodies are already flagging gaps cities should plan for now.

 

The near horizon

So, what might the next three years bring? Expect more cities to push air-taxi pilots into limited commercial service. Dubai could be first to true revenue flights at scale; Seoul’s methodical roadmap suggests durable growth later in the decade; Paris will likely pivot from Olympic partial-spectacle to steady certification work; and European ports and regions will quietly become the backbones of drone normality.
 

The conversation has moved from “Will drones change cities?” to “How do we design cities so drones change the right things?”

The conversation has moved from “Will drones change cities?” to “How do we design cities so drones change the right things?” For planners, the takeaway is simple: start with clear public value, build the digital airspace like civic infrastructure and measure what matters — time saved, emissions avoided, lives improved — so the urban sky becomes not a novelty layer, but a vital one.