Electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft have attracted enormous investment as a potential transformation of urban passenger mobility. Their development is frequently conflated with drone delivery in media coverage and investor presentations. The two industries share technology but address different problems with different economics and different regulatory paths.

Every commercial drone delivery follows a route that has been planned, validated against airspace constraints, filed with the UTM system, and monitored in real time. The route planning and airspace deconfliction process is one of the least visible and most technically demanding elements of commercial drone delivery operations.

Counter-UAS systems are designed to detect and defeat unauthorised drone flights near sensitive infrastructure. As these systems proliferate, legitimate commercial delivery operators face a growing risk of interference from systems that cannot distinguish authorised from unauthorised aircraft. Here is how the problem is developing and what it means for commercial operations.