Mr. Philip Hughes:

That is just a summary and to emphasise the point about the network manager. To go back to Deputy Smith's point about what we can do to help out, we will support the stakeholders. The next slide deals with the issue of drones. Obviously, this is very topical. By 2030, up to 5 billion people will live in cities, which will be 60% of the world's population. Drones will play a very big role in everything, from delivering a person's coffee and pizza to medical devices, etc. Therefore, this is part of the challenge. To do that, there will need to be an investment in infrastructure to try to ensure that will work.

The next slide deals with what the future urban environment will look like. I received this particular slide from Manna Drone Delivery that is based in Blanchardstown and has been running an operation out there. It has worked very closely with the IAA and is at the cutting edge of innovation. There is everything from surveillance drones, connecting to urban and suburban regions, and integration with intelligent transport needed so things can be moved around. It is a complicated picture and there are a lot of different services that might be provided as part of that. For instance, using Manna as an example, in terms of developments it has just been licensed by the IAA to provide drone services in Helsinki to be operated remotely here. We start to see the whole situation is changing.

In Fort Worth in Texas in the US, they are doing an integration between whole airport operations and drones for cargo.

That is another thing we see. There are a number of sandboxes in terms of development in Europe. We are talking to the Japanese at the moment because they are proposing to roll out electrical vertical take-off aircraft at Osaka for the World Expo next year. It can be seen that things are moving ahead very rapidly.

I will go to the next slide. Our role is trying to engage with all of the aviation players. There are many players in that space. The Commission is driving it at a political level. EASA is devising the regulations on U-space. A great deal of work is also being done by all of the air navigation service providers, ANSPs. In Ireland, AirNav Ireland has been working very closely with Manna and a number of others, including Maynooth University, with regard to development. A lot of the stuff is being driven by the cities themselves, that is, by urban areas and urban district councils. We see that particularly in rural areas. The example I am thinking of is in Finland, where a cluster of cities are working on developing drones. It can be seen that it is very dynamic. The other interesting people are the military. Particularly with the situation in Ukraine, the development of drones is accelerating rapidly. The situation is interesting but it also means that there will be greater competition for airspace, to go back to our discussion about the network being saturated. In some ways, we need the system to integrate that.