Article 15 of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947 asks for something that sounds simple. Member States define UAS geographical zones and make the information public "in a common unique digital format". That is the sentence that produced the EUROCAE ED-269 standard, and the reason a C1-class drone should be able to work out for itself where it must not go.
We tried to download that information. All of it, country by country, opening the official pages and trying the addresses. It did not go the way the regulation says.
The count, before the details
Across some thirty European countries examined, the line that matters is not who publishes a file. It is who says what may be done with it, and where they say it. Every country below has its own row in the register of sources, with the link to the page and the sentence that classifies it, copied word for word.
Nine countries publish a file and say it may be used: Norway (NLOD 2.0, commercial use and modification expressly allowed), Sweden (CC BY 4.0), Denmark ("frit anvendes med kildeangivelse", free use with attribution), Luxembourg (CC0, on the dataset itself), Switzerland (Opendata BY, source must be cited, and the zones of Liechtenstein inside it too), Germany (CC BY-ND 4.0: redistribution yes, derivatives no), France (Licence Ouverte, but on a dataset that is not the common ED-269 format: the SIA's ED-269 file is excluded in writing from the open licence), Finland and Estonia, with a written answer from the authority, at the foot of this page.
Six countries declare the file public in an official act or in the AIP, and set no conditions where the file is. Ireland writes it in an Aeronautical Notice signed by the IAA's director general and in the AIP; Bulgaria in an ordinance, and its re-use rules say that information without conditions is used without conditions; Slovakia, Belgium and the Netherlands in the AIP; Portugal publishes the file without a line of conditions, and its law on the re-use of public documents says that those put online may be re-used without authorisation. These are not licences, and we do not call them that. They are written declarations by the authority, and from today they count for us the way the Finnish answer does: these countries are on the Dronetrake map, with their source cited.
Eleven countries publish the data and restrict it. Austria, whose disclaimer states that providing the dataset conveys no transfer of rights and no other right of use; Spain, where the legal notice forbids reproduction without written authorisation; Czechia, whose terms forbid commercial use and forbid supplying the content as part of another product; Lithuania, where the system serving the file writes "Commercial use of provided data is strictly prohibited"; Latvia, where a government regulation gives the data free of charge only if it is not redistributed to third parties for profit; Poland, which by law since 2025 releases data beyond name, area and validity only by contract and for a fee; Croatia and Slovenia, whose official maps serve the zones to anyone but forbid their reproduction or commercial use; Malta, where the official platform limits use to "your own civil-end purposes"; Romania, which intends the data "exclusively to the aeronautical users"; and the United Kingdom, outside the EU, whose file carries "Not for resale" and "For aviation use only".
One country contradicts itself. In Cyprus a decree requires the zones to be made public and the re-use law rules out conditions, while the file's page reserves all rights and the AIP forbids any reproduction. Until the authority clarifies, it stays off the map. Until 25 September Estonia was here too: its answer is at the foot of this page.
Iceland publishes a file, through the download button of its official map, and says nothing about what may be done with it. Silence is not permission: it stays off.
The others publish no file: Greece, Italy, Hungary, and outside the Union Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia. Italy belongs to this group for a reason all its own, and deserves the paragraph you will find further down.
Article 15 dates from 2019.
What we found
Europe's best case is Finland. Traficom publishes a complete ED-269 file — 731 zones — that downloads in a single HTTP request, with no registration. The page hosting it exists only in Finnish (the English version returns a 404), but the data is the right data, in the right format, within anyone's reach. And on that page, in Finnish, there is a sentence we found nowhere else in Europe: the data is provided "to external service providers" and for loading into class C drones. It does not say under which licence. It does say who it is for, and they are the only ones who do.
Czechia does something nobody else does: it publishes zone boundaries as GeoJSON files declared legally binding, alongside a generalised ED-318 version for geo-awareness. The distinction is explicit: the interactive map is for looking at, the reference files are what counts. The disclaimer that comes with the datasets adds no prohibitions of its own: AIRAC cycle, no warranty, Czech law. But it refers to the terms of use of the site the files live on, and those, dated 2012, forbid commercial use and forbid supplying the content "as part of other products" without prior written consent. The best data in Europe, behind a clause written before drones had geo-awareness.
Switzerland, outside the Union, serves an ED-269 file refreshed daily that also contains the three zones of Liechtenstein, which has no portal of its own.
Sweden exposes an open WFS service, updated every AIRAC cycle, technically faultless, and today under a CC BY licence: attribution, nothing more. A month ago the same page declared CC BY-NC-ND, non-commercial and no derivatives: the licence changed, and with it the group Sweden belongs to.
Norway went from the bottom of this survey to the top of it in one evening. On 7 September, when we checked, the three links on dronesoner.no — ED-269, ED-318 and KML — all returned "page not found". At 19:20 UTC that same evening the files went up: ED-269 (7.2 MB), ED-318 (7.1 MB) and KML (11.6 MB), 4,341 zones issued by the Luftfartstilsynet. And with them, the same day, a licence: NLOD 2.0, the Norwegian licence for public data. "Dataene kan fritt brukes, kopieres, endres og videredistribueres, også i kommersielle produkter og tjenester" — freely used, copied, modified and redistributed, including in commercial products and services — and "bruk i tredjepartsapplikasjoner (f.eks. droneapper, planleggingsverktøy) er tillatt". The only obligation is a line of credit: "Kilde: Luftfartstilsynet / dronesoner.no".
On 20 September this survey said the opposite: that no terms existed anywhere. They existed, in the "Om" panel of the portal, since 7 September. We read the page's HTML and the licence lives in the panel the browser draws, and we did not open it. Of every country in this survey, Norway now has the most permissive terms in Europe.
The Netherlands withdrew the official service on PDOK on 30 June 2026, and the terms of GoDrone, the official viewer, forbid downloading its data. But the AIP, in section ENR 5.3, says the zones "are publicly available as a digital data set in JSON format", and the ministry offers the updated file on its page dedicated to drones: 743 zones, December 2025 version, no conditions. The link the AIP carries still points to a July 2024 version.
Ireland publishes a GeoJSON in the ED-269 schema, dated to the current AIRAC cycle, with a warning in capitals: "reference only, not to be used for navigation". On the page, in the file and in the metadata of its map there is no condition of use. There is, however, the act by which the IAA establishes the zones, Aeronautical Notice U.04 of 17 September 2026, signed by the director general: the file "is publicly available via the following web-link". The AIP repeats it. Until 22 September we called it the clearest case of silence: we had not read the act.
Then the fragmentation begins.
Those who have the data but will not let you use it
Denmark was in this group at our check of 7 September: it publishes its zones in five formats — GeoJSON, GeoPackage, Shapefile, KML, KMZ — with direct links and no account, and underneath the links sat one line: "The data below is exclusively for personal use." On 13 September, Trafikstyrelsen's data pages read "Data kan frit anvendes med kildeangivelse": free to use, with attribution. The licence changed, and so did the group.
Austria publishes an ED-269 versioned at every change, and on the download page a disclaimer that leaves nothing open: "Mit der Bereitstellung des Luftfahrtinformationsproduktes 'Datensatz der geografischen UAS-Gebiete' ist weder eine Einräumung/Übertragung derartiger Rechte noch irgendeines anderen Nutzungsrechts verbunden." Download yes, anything else no.
Spain publishes three ED-318 files in the AIP. The API document grants access and use on condition that ENAIRE is named as the holder of the rights, and then refers to the legal notice, which forbids "cualquier reproducción, transmisión, adaptación" without prior written authorisation. The two sentences pull in opposite directions, and the stronger one wins.
Czechia, whose data are the best in Europe on the technical side, attaches terms dated 2012 that forbid commercial use and forbid "poskytovat obsah Webových stránek či kteroukoliv jeho část jako součást jiných produktů" — supplying the content as part of another product — without prior written consent.
Poland, one of the continent's most dynamic drone markets, publishes no file: the data comes out of an interface that asks for an account, under a PANSA regulation that refers to the Polish open data law. Since 2025 the law adds a boundary: a zone's name, area and period of validity are public, the rest "Polska Agencja Żeglugi Powietrznej udostępnia na podstawie umowy", and access "jest odpłatne". By contract, and for a fee.
In these cases the data exists, it is public, and it is unusable by the people who build the tools pilots actually use, short of negotiating case by case with each national authority.
Germany is not in this group, and until 21 September this survey said it
was. DIPUL, the DFS platform, publishes the zones under CC BY-ND 4.0, with
the attribution "dipul, CC-BY-ND 4.0" stated on the download page, on the
WFS/WMS page, in the service's own Fees field and in the site notice.
Redistribution is allowed, including commercially. What is not allowed is
derivatives — and that is a real obstacle for any tool that reprojects, clips or
merges those polygons into a dataset of its own, which is what a pilot-facing
tool does. A map that shows the official service as it is stays inside the
licence; a map built on a copy of the data does not.
Those who publish nothing
Hungary states on its AIS page that the zones "can be downloaded at the bottom of the article". At the bottom of the article there is nothing: in the page source, in Hungarian and in English alike, there is not one link to a file. The zone coordinates live in the text of a 2007 decree.
Croatia publishes no file, but its official application hands the zones to anyone who opens it, with no account. The application's own terms forbid copying or redistributing them without written permission.
Albania and Montenegro transposed the obligation to the letter — Montenegro reproduces the consolidated text of the European regulation, Albania writes it into the authority's duties with the phrase "in a common unique digital format". Neither has implemented it.
Cases that deserve a paragraph of their own
Iceland encrypts the configuration of its own map, and until 22 September we counted it as a country with no file. The file was there: behind the download button of the official map there is a public service that returns 220 zones in a format close to ED-269. What is missing is a line on what may be done with it.
Italy did the work three times over, and none of the three is a file. The Italian zones exist, they are maintained, and they are updated every AIRAC cycle: they sit in the AIP published by ENAV on behalf of ENAC, in sections ENR 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6. But the AIP is consulted as a document — pages, tables, coordinates in running text — behind a free registration: there is no zone file to download. The portal pilots know, d-flight, requires an account and warns, in a panel next to the map, that the information may be used "solely for one's own use" and may not be passed on to third parties. Finally there is a route built for machines — a WFS service in AIXM, operational since June 2026 — but access is restricted: mutual certificates, accreditation, terms to be agreed. Three well-built roads, and not one a drone manufacturer can travel to read the Italian zones automatically.
Romania has the data, and a server that talks to few. The zones GeoJSON is
complete, but it is not ED-269. From an up-to-date Debian machine the
connection is refused before it even begins, because the server negotiates the
encrypted channel with a Diffie-Hellman key that is too short (dh key too small); from other systems it goes through. And the page that offers it refers
to a disclaimer that settles the matter: "The use of the information and
documents provided on this website is intended exclusively to the aeronautical
users".
The United Kingdom, outside the EU, does better than half the Union. NATS publishes the Flight Restriction Zone dataset in AIXM 5.1 and KML, per AIRAC cycle, with a direct download and no account. It is not ED-269 — the UK is not required to produce one — but it is complete, versioned and verifiable. And it carries its limit in writing, in the metadata inside the zip and in the AIP: "For aviation use only" and "Not for resale". That is why, since 23 September, the United Kingdom is not on the Dronetrake map.
Outside Europe: the absence is a decision
Outside the EASA area the common format simply does not exist, because the obligation that produced it does not exist. The most instructive case is Saudi Arabia: the national regulation tracks the European article almost word for word, deleting the phrase "in a common unique digital format". The very sentence that in Europe produced ED-269 was, elsewhere, deliberately removed.
In seven countries out of eight, across Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East, aerial filming is not a matter of civil aviation but of national security: in Jordan, missions require an armed forces escort and review of the footage; in Saudi Arabia the separate authorisation covers the mere collection of geospatial data — that is, photogrammetry.
Why this matters now
This is not a question of developer convenience. It is that the geo-awareness of the new drone classes feeds on precisely these files, and that a pilot crossing a European border — something done in Europe in an afternoon — changes format, licence, and sometimes the very possibility of having the data at all.
Meanwhile the common map published at European level covers two States and declares itself unusable for operational planning.
The practical outcome is that the serious operator ends up trusting commercial apps that aggregate data of uncertain provenance, or looking at nothing at all. Neither is what Article 15 had in mind.
There is a further aspect, and it concerns those who wrote the rules. An obligation introduced in 2019 and unimplemented by half the continent seven years later is not a technical problem: it is an obligation that carried no consequences. Meanwhile those same States require operators — often sole traders — to be compliant by precise deadlines, and drone manufacturers to implement geo-awareness by reading files that in half of Europe do not exist.
Method
Every line of this survey comes from opening the official page of the authority or the air navigation service provider and — wherever a file was announced — from actually trying to download it, checking its format and contents. Where a source could not be reached we wrote that down instead of inferring. The survey dates from 31 July 2026, was re-checked on 12 August before publication and again on 7 September 2026, after the AIRAC cycle changed: the Romanian case reproduces identically, the Icelandic encrypted field is still there, and four countries differ from a month earlier — the Swedish licence, the Czech terms, the Dutch file, the Norwegian announcement. On 13 September Denmark followed, and it now grants the use of its files. On this subject a date is not a detail, because portals change and AIRAC cycles last 28 days.
On 21 September 2026 we went back over every country that publishes a file and re-read its licence with a stricter method, described in the correction below.
On 23 September 2026 we re-read every country with four readings each, in the country's own language: the file's page, the body's re-use rules, the national law on the re-use of public data, the AIP and the acts that establish the zones. Every classification now has its link and its sentence in the register of sources.
We keep the list up to date and make it available to anyone who wants to use it or correct it: if an authority publishes a file we did not find, we are the first to want to know.
Correction, 21 September 2026
Until today this survey said that eleven countries published a file "under terms that allow it to be integrated". That sentence did not hold. Four things were wrong, and they are corrected above.
We went looking for the licence in the wrong place. We were reading the
general legal notice of the institutional website, which governs the site. A
licence on a dataset lives somewhere else: in the AccessConstraints and Fees
of a GetCapabilities, in the licenseInfo of a map service, on the page that
offers the download, in the metadata record of the dataset. Read that way, four
countries move.
- Norway has a licence, and it is the most permissive in this survey: NLOD 2.0, added on 7 September, the same day the files went up. We wrote that no terms existed anywhere. They did.
- Germany does not forbid the use of its data. DIPUL publishes under CC BY-ND 4.0. Our earlier text described conditions — use only for the stated purpose, distribution and commercialisation forbidden, a contractual penalty of 1,000 euros per breach — that we cannot find on the DIPUL pages today and that should not have been written.
- Cyprus, Estonia, Finland and Portugal publish no terms of use at all. We had counted them among those whose terms allow integration. They belong with Ireland. (This line, written on 21 September, is wrong about all four, and we leave it here so it can be seen: the corrections are in the two notes below.)
- The Netherlands: the official PDOK service was withdrawn on 30 June 2026.
The rule we apply to our own product is the one that should have been applied here: silence is not permission. We had applied it to Norway and Ireland, and not to four other countries that were in exactly the same position. A survey that measures how others treat their data has to be at least as strict with itself.
Every correction above was verified on 21 September 2026 by opening the source again. Where a page could not be reached — Bulgaria answers 403 to every request we could make — we say so rather than infer.
Correction, 22 September 2026
The day after the correction above, we re-read the six silent countries one by one, looking only at where the file is: the page that offers it, the file itself, its metadata. That box held three different things, and calling them all silence was wrong.
- Cyprus, Estonia and Portugal are not silent: they refuse. The Cypriot page reserves all rights; the body that serves the Estonian file requires prior written consent; the Portuguese terms reserve the content to personal use and exclude commercial exploitation. Three written refusals, not three silences. They move to the group that restricts, which becomes the largest.
- Finland is not silent. It writes who the data is for. That is not a licence and we do not call it one, but it is not the same as nothing.
- Two are genuinely silent: Bulgaria and Ireland.
This correction comes from a question put to us in-house, and it ran: one day you give a different reading for every country. It was fair. The rule we adopt from today, and which will hold for future revisions, is that in this survey a country is classified only by what is written where the data is. An internal regulation, the terms of another domain of the same body, a national practice: those are things we ask the authority about, not things we judge it by.
And we applied it to ourselves. Since 22 September the zones of Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia and Portugal are no longer on the Dronetrake map: 1,637 zones removed, and where they used to be the map now says that the country publishes its UAS zones but does not authorise their re-use by third parties, and names its official source. Ireland we had never imported. Finland stays, attributed to Traficom. We have filed a formal re-use request with all six authorities, each founded on that country's own law. The day one of them answers, its country returns to the map and this page says so.
Writing that silence is not permission, while serving the data of those who stay silent, would have been a rule for other people.
Update, 22 September 2026: Finland answered
On 22 September we wrote to Traficom to ask on what terms the UAS zones file may be re-used. They answered the same day:
"The dataset is freely usable and requires no licences or the like. You may of course cite Traficom as the source. The dataset is updated whenever we have a change, for instance when a temporary UAS zone is established: so it may change daily."
Mika Saalasti, Senior Inspector, Air Navigation and Aerodromes Unit, Traficom, 22 September 2026.
Finland therefore moves to the countries whose data may be used, and it is the eighth. It has no licence published on the page, which is the thing we keep asking everyone for, but it has something worth more to anyone deciding whether to use that file: a written answer from the authority.
We got this country wrong twice, in opposite directions. On 21 September we wrote that it published no terms of use at all, and filed it with the silent ones. On the 22nd, re-reading, we saw that its page at least says who the data is for. Neither reading was the right one, and neither could have been settled by us: only Traficom could answer, and it did so within hours.
That is also why we started writing to the authorities instead of going on interpreting their pages. The other five letters went out the same day. When the answers arrive, this page will say so.
Correction, 23 September 2026
On 22 September we wrote that Cyprus, Estonia and Portugal forbid, and that Bulgaria and Ireland are silent. Re-reading with a broader method, none of those five sentences holds.
- Portugal does not forbid. The sentence about personal use that we quoted is in the terms of the www.anac.pt portal, and it concerns the content of that portal. The file is on dnt.anac.pt, and nothing is written there. It was the mistake our own rule, written that same day, ruled out: a condition taken from another site. It was pointed out to us by Frode Friestad, editor of Droneavisa.no, whom we thank. The Portuguese re-use law adds that documents put online may be re-used without authorisation, citing source and date: Portugal returns to the map.
- Estonia does not forbid in the place we quoted. The prohibition we reported belongs to another portal of the same provider. Where the file is, the application's terms forbid copying the data; Estonian law says open data may be re-used without conditions. That is a contradiction, and it stays off.
- Cyprus contradicts itself. The page reserves all rights and the AIP forbids any reproduction; the decree that establishes the zones requires them to be made public, and the re-use law rules out conditions. It stays off.
- Bulgaria and Ireland are not silent. A Bulgarian ordinance and an Irish Aeronautical Notice declare the file public, without conditions. They return to the map, with their source.
- Belgium, Slovakia and the Netherlands were among the countries with no file or were not in the count: their AIPs declare the zones public. They come in.
- Latvia declares the file public in the AIP, but a government regulation forbids its commercial redistribution without an agreement: it stays off.
- Croatia, Slovenia and Malta deliver the zones through their official maps, and the terms of those maps forbid their reproduction or commercial use. Iceland publishes a file without saying anything about its use. France excludes the SIA's ED-269 file in writing from its open licence.
- Poland and Lithuania are not countries without a file: the data exists, and their conditions restrict it. The United Kingdom carries in its file a limit we had not written down: it leaves the map.
So that we no longer have to correct from memory, from today every country has a row in the register of sources: the link to the page, the date we read it and the sentence that classifies it, copied word for word. If one of those sentences changes, the row changes, and this page says so.
Update, 25 September 2026: Estonia replies
On 22 September we had written to Transpordiamet, the Estonian transport authority, to ask on what terms the UAS zones file may be used. On 25 September Marko Liiva, inspector in the UAS department, replied:
"Since our JSON file is publicly available via the link you have found so from our side you can freely download and use it the way you like."
The file, he adds, is updated every 30 minutes and also contains NOTAMs: read at night, it may no longer be accurate by day.
Estonia therefore moves to the countries that grant use, like Finland, and returns to the Dronetrake map, where the file is re-read every half hour. The count becomes: nine countries grant use, six declare the file public, eleven restrict it, and only one, Cyprus, contradicts itself.