Drones: The externalities come home to roost...

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June 22, 2026

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of my employer.

Last week we saw a high profile Irish drone operator 'up sticks' and stop flying in Ireland, blaming 'planning delays' and 'regulatory vagueness'. I would argue that the truth is different - the company in question has ignored the externalities associated with their business, and that what's happened is totally unsurprising.

According to Wikipedia an 'Externality' is:

... a cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties')

Delivery Drones have three major externalities:

Noise.

Everyone is aware of this issue, but it's more or less impossible to fix at source. Drones use propellers, and propellers make noise. Observers describe it as sounding like a 'swarm of angry bees'. People who live near drone bases use somewhat stronger language. The externality here is that the drone company makes money, the customer gets their delivery and people next to drone bases or underneath delivery routes get endless bursts of noise passing overhead. The average noise is not the issue here. Cape Canaveral is, on average, quiet, except for a few minutes every week or so when they launch rockets. The reality is that the people who bear the 'cost' of the noise have no commercial relationship with the drone company. This is why it's an 'externality'. Now if the drone in question were carrying blood plasma, or operated by the police and protecting the community, people might be forgiving. But in many cases it's delivering fast food, which is why public opinion is hardening on this one.

Safety.

A second issue is safety. The aviation industry has spent a century creating and implementing frameworks that make it incredibly safe. The drone industry moves much faster (think aviation in the 1920's...), and doesn't have similar regulatory framework. You therefore can't use aviation's safety figures to justify claims about drone safety. Note that I'm not saying that they don't take safety seriously, but that it's a case of "Different Circus. Different Monkeys".

This matters. In order to deliver a 2.25kg payload you need a 21kg drone. That's a drone the size of a sheep and the weight of the heaviest suitcase you can easily check in as luggage. if it fails it will, in theory, deploy a parachute and land. As a former skydiver I can assure you it's not as simple as that! The chute in question is round, and deployed by low grade explosives. If all works perfectly the final descent rate will be about 5m/s, or the same as dropping the suitcase from above from a height of 1M. The empirical data so far is not reassuring. We've already had one incident where a drone lost a blade, injuring a bystander. The report is eye-opening reading if you have an aviation background.

From an externality perspective this is where 'S**t gets real'.

• I don't know about you, but I have no problem with a 1 in a million chance of injury or death from a vaccine, as there are people with compromised immune systems who can't protect themselves from nasty diseases like measles or covid. I am also OK with drones operated by 'blue light services'.
• I have an issue with being asked to run the same 1:1,000,000 risk, every day, so that someone else can get a burrito. Even if it's a good burrito.

Airspace Management

The elephant in the room, which has yet to get the attention it deserves, is airspace management. In normal aviation the pilot is responsible for collision avoidance, under the 'see and avoid' principle, or is under 'positive control' from ATC. In the drone universe you are supposed to have the drone in sight at all time, unless it's "BVLOS" - 'Beyond Visual Line Of Sight'. Now, you can fly a drone you can't see, provided you have a data link to it and know what else is in the airspace. And you can even co-ordinate your drones with other ones you control. But what happens when someone else wants to use the airspace? Another drone delivery company? A wedding photographer? The police? The council's 'dangerous buildings' department?

At that point you need some kind of automated airspace management system for the space between ground level and 500ft AGL ('Above Ground Level'), which is where drones operate. It's not a job for a human. Too much is happening, too quickly.

No such system exists in Ireland, and it's not the job of my local county council to write one. Such a system will be equal in complexity to the mobile phone network. It can't make mistakes. It can't go down. It can't favour one delivery company over another, but needs to facilitate 'blue light' services. 30 years from now we'll probably have a working global standard for drone ATC, and 3-4 global providers that bid for the right to manage chunks of airspace. But these companies will need to be paid, and I don't see the taxpayers being willing to pay them. Which means ATC fees of (wild guess here!) €1 to €2 per delivery. Given that drone delivery industry margins are going to be low - they compete with kids on electric bicyles - this has worrying implications for long term viability.

So what's being going on up to now? The drone company in question has been operating as the sole user of the airspace it uses, with the approval of the authorities, with no automated mechanism for other people to share the space. Another externality..

Conclusion

I would argue that blaming 'planning' and 'regulation' is a cop-out here. The externalities of drone delivery have been clearly visible all along, but all of the energy appears to have gone into clever technology, and none into mitigating the issues. This is in some ways a re-run of the public unhappiness around 'smart glasses'. "It is better to seek forgiveness than ask permission" might work within a corporate environment, but in a society like Ireland that has a deep routed obsession with property ownership and associated rights, as well as a hyper-local brand of politics, it's asking for trouble.

The bottom line IMHO:

• The local council was within its rights to dis-approve planning permission. They are under no obligation to change or lower standards for anyone.
• Just because there's no standard product for drone ATC, doesn't mean that the government can throw its hands up in the air, and let one company effectively privatise large chunks of low level airspace. Until the EU comes up with a clear plan for shared drone use of < 500ft AGL airspace, this will remain an unresolved issue, and 'here be dragons' for commercial ventures.