The cover image of Black Sunday, a hit novel from 1975, depicts a blimp looming over a packed sports stadium. The blimp’s pilot has been radicalized, and he is steering the airship straight at the Super Bowl to cause death and destruction.
Although Black Sunday was fiction, fast forward to 2024 and a new danger has emerged: drones. A total of 2,845 “drone incursions” took place in the controlled airspace around NFL stadiums during the 2023 season, according to NFL Chief of Security Cathy Lanier’s Congressional testimony.
New safety regulations are urgent to prevent drone disasters — while allowing the drone industry to grow and provide essential services, from spraying crops to providing emergency relief. Regulations should include rolling out digital drone license plates. The US is rushing to catch up but remains behind its allies.
Consider how airline traffic is managed. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) deploys more than 35,000 controllers, technicians, and engineers to safely navigate more than 44,000 daily flights. Tower operations direct planes during takeoff and landing. En route centers guide aircraft at high altitudes.
The International Civil Aviation Organization sets global standards, regulations, and flight path boundaries. A United Nations organization, it does not direct planes itself but dictates how nations must manage them.
Drones require a similar control system. Drone ownership and usage numbers are growing — they are more dangerous than blimps, which are large, easy to spot, and easy to stop. Even the smallest drones can do significant damage. In 2025, a tiny device, weighing less than 250 grams, accidentally hit and grounded a plane combatting wildfires in Los Angeles.
A United Airlines Boeing 737 recently encountered a drone during its descent into Newark Liberty International Airport, threatening its 100 passengers. Although the pilot managed to land safely, airports in the US, Europe, and elsewhere have shut down or curtailed operations due to unapproved, unsafe drone usage. So far, most, if not all, of these examples represent inadvertent safety breaches and not willful attempts to harm people or property.
Drone management regulations have evolved from voluntary geofencing via software to digital license plates and drone traffic control systems. There are exemptions to rules for drones below a certain weight, generally 250 grams, or with a limited range, usually less than 500 meters.
Outright bans are becoming common. The FBI banned all unapproved drone usage in Miami during the 2026 World Cup. Paris and Beijing have banned unauthorized drone flights altogether. Such blanket bans represent overreach; what’s needed instead is a requirement for manufacturers to display and record digital license plates on all devices, paired with an effective drone traffic control system.
Real-time information exchange is crucial. A drone operator needs to know when and where they can fly their drones. The “controller,” the person or system responsible for keeping the airspace safe, needs to be able to identify drones in the air and potentially communicate with the operator or the device itself.
Geofencing software prevents a drone from entering restricted airspace by comparing its GPS position against a proprietary database of no-fly zones. The world’s biggest drone maker, Chinese company DJI, implemented geofencing as a safety standard in 2013, effectively setting “civilian drone” safety standards. But in January 2025, DJI removed hard geofencing in the US and most other jurisdictions due to data privacy concerns.
Instead of geofencing, digital license plates, called Broadcast Remote IDs, are being installed. They show the location of a drone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth during flight. All major jurisdictions have adopted Broadcast Remote ID.
The US requires users to self-certify, and then only requires Broadcast Remote ID to work within 300–1,000 feet of a physical receiver. This is insufficient. Meaningful drone traffic control is only possible if devices can be identified from a much greater distance.
The FAA is developing an interface to share drone registration details via Remote ID with law enforcement, but no plan or timeline has been announced. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security is developing an app that would connect to the FAA’s system, yet it also has no set plan or timeline.
Even worse, US operators of drones that fly beyond eyesight — known as Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) — must apply for an individual waiver for every operation. In 2024, the approval rate was only 19%, with processing times reaching up to 24 months for complex operations. This bottleneck currently makes routine commercial drone operations economically unfeasible. However, the FAA is reviewing a newly proposed rule that could potentially create a single, cohesive framework for BVLOS drones to operate. The cooperative approach in place for large events that could serve as a template.
Europe is ahead. Within the European Union, drone manufacturers must build Remote IDs into their devices and have them verified by an independent notified body before sale. EU users then register once with their national aviation authority to receive an Operator Registration Number that is valid across the bloc. In theory, the EU approach means a device and operator can be easily identified.
The EU also is implementing U-space, an air traffic control system to support safe and efficient drone operations. Compliance is mandatory for BVLOS drones, but challenges in accessibility and affordability have made the pace of implementation uneven across member states. Drone detection and enforcement still depends on manual coordination between people at government agencies in different EU countries.
Within the EU, France is moving fastest to close this gap. The government is legislating to strengthen protections for sensitive sites, allowing civilian operators of critical infrastructure to deploy anti-drone jamming systems, which are currently restricted to military use. France boasts Europe’s fastest-growing counter-drone market. Orange, a French telco, has launched Europe’s first anti-drone solution as a service, using 19,700 telecom towers as a national detection network.
Canada is also racing ahead. It has expanded rules for routine operations through a tiered, competency-based certification system, replacing the flight-by-flight permission system practiced in the US. Industry response has been generally positive.
Sensible regulation is required not just to protect people, infrastructure, and other aircraft, but also to allow the drone industry to take off and realize its potential. The French and Canadian models show the way forward. It is time for the US to start building drone traffic control.
Marta Granados Hernández is a US Google Public Policy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a master’s candidate at Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program, concentrating in Science, Technology, and International Affairs.
Ronan Murphy is Director of the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Tech 2030
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
