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 picture splits into three groups of surprising size.
Seven countries publish a downloadable file under terms that allow it to be integrated: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Switzerland — which is not in the Union.
Seven countries publish the file and then forbid its use: Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden. Some of them did excellent technical work — Czechia publishes geometries declared legally binding — and then placed a licence on top of it that rules out any use in a tool meant for pilots.
Fifteen countries publish no file at all: Albania, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Serbia. Italy belongs to this group for a reason entirely its own, and gets its own paragraph below.
Article 15 dates from 2019.
What we found
Europe's best case is Finland. Traficom publishes a complete ED-269 file — 723 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.
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.
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.
Then the fragmentation begins.
Those who have the data but will not let you use it
Denmark publishes its zones in five different formats — GeoJSON, GeoPackage, Shapefile, KML, KMZ — with direct links and no account. Underneath the links sits one line: "The data below is exclusively for personal use." Any other use requires an agreement with the authority.
Sweden exposes an open WFS service, updated every AIRAC cycle, technically faultless. The licence is CC BY-NC-ND: non-commercial, no derivative works. An app integrating that data would breach both clauses.
In both 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.
Those who publish nothing
Poland — one of the continent's most dynamic drone markets, with an agency that pioneered BVLOS and traffic management in Europe — publishes no file. It has a map to consult and a system for filing flight plans. Nothing else.
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 writes two things on the same page that do not fit together: that the official portal is where you view the zones, and that the operator "is required to upload the data into the geo-awareness system". The file to be uploaded does not appear to have been published.
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.
Four cases that deserve a paragraph of their own
Iceland encrypts its own map. The official viewer does not fetch a readable
configuration: it calls a service of its own and receives a JSON object with a
single field, {"lets_start_the_show": "<encrypted text>"}, which it decrypts in
the browser before drawing anything at all. The map layers — that is, the list
of zones and where they come from — exist only inside that encrypted blob. There
is no documented way to reach the data, and the official page offers no file:
only the viewer.
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, but its server no longer speaks to up-to-date systems.
The zones GeoJSON is open and complete. Trying to download it from an up-to-date
Debian machine, the connection is refused before it even begins: the server
negotiates the encrypted channel with a Diffie-Hellman key too short for current
security standards (dh key too small). It can be worked around by lowering the
security level of your own system. That does not strike us as a reasonable thing
to ask of anyone integrating aeronautical data. We tried again two weeks later,
from the same up-to-date machine: identical.
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.
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 and was re-checked on 12 August 2026 before publication: the sources we rely on all respond, the Romanian case reproduces identically, and the Icelandic encrypted field is still there. On this subject a date is not a detail, because portals change and AIRAC cycles last 28 days.
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.