Manna Points to Trinity Study After Coolmine Refusal

Manna has issued an official response to Fingal County Council’s May 19 refusal of its Coolmine drone delivery hub, anchoring its defence on a Trinity College Dublin acoustic study and on World Health Organization, EU, EASA, ISO, and Irish EPA noise standards.

The company told DroneXL through its public relations team on June 18 that planning frameworks built for cars are now being applied to commercial drone operations without a national rulebook that addresses them directly.

The Refusal Manna Is Now Responding To

As reported by The Irish Times, the May 19 decision on planning reference 102570 refused Manna’s retention application for its Coolmine Industrial Estate hub in Dublin 15. The hub has flown more than 80,000 deliveries from the area alongside a second base at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre.

The planner’s report concluded that Manna’s submitted material “does not provide sufficient evidence to robustly determine that adverse noise effects associated with the aerial delivery hub can be avoided.” The council’s Air and Noise Unit added that drone acoustic character differs from road traffic noise, and that the assessment did not model cumulative impact from both Manna hubs operating in parallel.

The framing matters. The council did not find that drone operations are inherently too loud for a residential area. It found the evidence submitted under the current framework was not sufficient to prove they are not. That distinction is the opening Manna is pushing on.

The Trinity College Dublin Numbers

The peer-reviewed work Manna’s response leans on is a noise-footprint study authored by Dr John Kennedy at Trinity College Dublin, first issued in November 2024 and revised in May 2025. The study combined Manna flight-test telemetry with iNoise computer-mapping software and validated the model against additional flight data. It was built around the Blanchardstown operating area, the company’s other Dublin 15 base, rather than Coolmine itself.

The acoustic figures sit below what a casual reading of the refusal would suggest. A single drone fly-over at the standard 213 feet (65 m) cruise altitude registers up to 59 dBA at a house directly under the route, roughly the level of normal conversation at 3 feet (1 m). Against the area’s measured urban background of around 52 dBA, that is a 7 dB rise, audible but lasting about 10 seconds per pass.

Raising cruise altitude from 164 feet (50 m) to 213 feet cut perceived noise by 2 to 3 dB, a 20 per cent drop in loudness. A further lift to 262 feet (80 m) cuts another 2 dB.

The loudest phase is the delivery hover at 46 feet (14 m) above a garden, in the 66 to 68 dBA band, comparable to a washing machine or distant vacuum. The study concludes that World Health Organization guidance for aircraft noise would not be exceeded unless the same route saw 300 to 450 flights per day.

Coolmine averaged 26 flights per Saturday at its peak, with single Saturdays topping out at 42. The current tempo sits roughly an order of magnitude below the WHO threshold the study identifies.

Manna’s Statement Adds WHO, EU, EASA, and ISO References

A Manna spokesperson told DroneXL: “Manna will study the planning outcome and is committed to growing its operations in Ireland and United States. As part of the Dundrum planning process, independent expert assessments concluded that ‘the predicted operational noise impact of the air delivery hub is insignificant’ and that drone operations would result in ‘little to no perceptible noise level change’.

The Operational Environmental Management Plan also concluded that there would be ‘no significant adverse noise impact associated within the standard operations of the drones’ in relation to biodiversity and wildlife.”

The spokesperson added that “these assessments were based on measured drone operations, detailed acoustic modelling and internationally recognised standards, including WHO guidance, the EU Environmental Noise Directive, EASA guidance, ISO standards and Irish EPA methodologies.”

The Operating Numbers Behind the Pushback

The scale Manna brings is not small. CEO Bobby Healy has publicly stated the company has crossed 300,000 deliveries across its Irish, Finnish, and US operations. On April 1, 2026, Manna announced 400 new jobs after closing a $50 million Series B round that brought total investment to $110 million, split 300 in Ireland and 100 in the United States.

Global headcount climbs from 170 to roughly 570. The company’s response also pointed to a Change.org petition started by Dublin resident Daniel Seavers in August 2025 calling for accelerated drone delivery adoption in the city, currently at 6,163 verified signatures.

Irish Planning Law Sits Below the Operation

The Irish Planning Act of 2001 predates commercial drone delivery and does not mention unmanned aerial vehicles. The Irish government announced a National Drone Framework last year to fill the gap. It has not yet been implemented.

In the meantime, individual planning authorities are applying noise-impact frameworks designed for road traffic and stationary plant to a category of operation those frameworks were never built for.

Irish business and legal coverage through 2025 and 2026 has flagged planning delays as the largest constraint on infrastructure rollout in the country. Coolmine is the first major Irish planning decision to apply that bottleneck to an operating commercial drone delivery hub.

Where Manna Sits in the Global Race

Wing, owned by Alphabet, announced in January 2026 that it would expand its Walmart partnership to 150 additional US stores, targeting over 270 delivery locations and more than 40 million Americans by 2027. Amazon Prime Air operates from a small number of US sites. Zipline runs large-scale US and African operations.

Of the named players competing at scale in last-mile drone delivery, Manna is the only one not headquartered in the United States. That cuts both ways. Ireland has a domestic champion in a category every major economy is trying to enable, and a single Irish planning refusal at the company’s home base carries weight no single US refusal would.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the press release language, this is a story about a planning system that has not caught up to the operation it is being asked to judge. The Trinity College Dublin study Manna cites is built on flight-test data, validated against additional flights, runs on ISO 9613 modelling, and concludes that current operations sit roughly an order of magnitude below the WHO aircraft-noise threshold.

The planner’s report does not engage that work directly. It applied a methodology built for road traffic to a workload of 26 Saturday flights and concluded the evidence was not sufficient. Both can be true at once. The point is that the framework being used to judge the operation was not built to read the operation.

The unanswered question is whether Manna filed an appeal to An Coimisiún Pleanála inside the four-week window that ran from May 19 through roughly June 16. The company’s statement does not address that point, and its PR team did not raise it.

The answer matters because it determines whether the Coolmine decision becomes Irish drone-delivery case law, or whether the appeals body gets to test the planner’s methodology objection against the Trinity dataset in writing.

For me, it matters that disputes like this play out in public. Both the filings and the defences belong on the record. Manna is the only European company that holds its own against Google, Amazon, and Zipline, and impartially, I think the studies the company has produced show drone noise sits inside the limits the international standards already accept.

If the technology is going to keep developing, every country’s planning frameworks need to catch up to the operations they are now being asked to judge. Otherwise, the benefit to a few will keep blocking the benefit to society.

Photo credit: Manna, Dr. John Kennedy.