EuroUSC-Benelux, the accredited body that has audited and examined drone operators across the Benelux for years, is now called Unifly Compliance. Unifly announced the rename Tuesday from Antwerp, six months after buying the firm outright.

The new name puts the relationship in plain sight. Unifly sells UAS Traffic Management software, and through Unifly Consulting it sells the Specific Operations Risk Assessment and Light UAS Operator Certificate advice that operators buy on their way to an authorization. Unifly Compliance runs the independent audits and examinations that test whether operators meet the requirements. One parent, both halves.

DroneXL flagged that convergence last October, reporting on Unifly joining a European Defence Agency project to standardize military drone risk assessment. Unifly says the compliance work is conducted independently from its technology, consulting and commercial activities. That sentence carries more weight than corporate boilerplate usually does, because European law makes independence a condition of the accreditation rather than a courtesy.

Unifly Compliance Keeps Its Qualified Entity Status Under Article 69

Unifly Compliance carries the same accreditation EuroUSC-Benelux held, a Qualified Entity under Article 69 of Regulation (EU) 2018/1139. That status lets an accredited third party take on certification and oversight work for the European Union Aviation Safety Agency or a national aviation authority, under that authority’s control.

Michael Maes, who ran EuroUSC-Benelux and now directs Unifly Compliance, said the work targets organizations with complicated operational structures and holders of a Light UAS Operator Certificate. “Our role is to provide the independent expertise, and continuous oversight operators need,” Maes said in the announcement.

The service list is specific. Compliance manager duties for LUC holders, audits that identify gaps ahead of an inspection by a competent authority, and examination and assessment work performed under the Article 69 accreditation. That last item matters most, because examinations and assessments are things a national authority would otherwise do itself.

Three Acquisitions In Eighteen Months Built Unifly’s Compliance Arm

Three deals in under eighteen months assembled this. Unifly bought all shares of EuroUSC Italia in April 2025, expanded into Switzerland by acquiring SORA Consulting earlier this year, and announced the EuroUSC-Benelux acquisition on March 24. Every target was a regulatory advisory firm rather than a software company.

Above Unifly sits Terra Drone, the Tokyo-listed company that raised its stake to 51% in August 2023. Terra Drone is not a bystander in drone operations. By its own account it has run more than 3,000 projects worldwide and took the top spot in global drone service provider rankings for 2024. The EuroUSC Italia purchase was disclosed through Terra Drone’s investor communications, which is how the ownership chain became public in the first place.

So the line runs from a drone service operator in Tokyo, through a UTM vendor in Antwerp, down to an accredited body that assesses whether European drone operators are flying within the rules. That same vendor is already writing risk-assessment standards for defense operators through the European Defence Agency project we covered last October, using EuroUSC Italia’s SORA expertise.

EU Law Already Bars A Qualified Entity From Selling Into Its Own Market

Annex VI of Regulation (EU) 2018/1139 sets the conditions every Qualified Entity must meet. The entity, its director and its assessment staff may not be involved in the design, marketing, operation or service provision of the systems they assess. Impartiality must be guaranteed. Pay must not track results.

Those are the words of the regulation, not a guideline. “The impartiality of the staff responsible for certification and oversight tasks must be guaranteed.” Remuneration may not depend on how many investigations someone runs or how they come out, and staff must be free of pressure or incentive of any kind, financial incentives above all, coming from anyone affected by the results of their work. Article 69 requires the accrediting authority to check compliance with those criteria when it grants the accreditation and continuously afterward, and to limit, suspend or revoke it the moment an entity stops meeting them.

Read against that text, Unifly’s line about independence from its technology, consulting and commercial activities stops sounding like a press release and starts sounding like an assertion that the Annex VI test is satisfied. It may well be. The judgment is not Unifly’s to make and it is not mine, and the authority that granted the accreditation owns it on a continuing basis.

What the drone rulebook adds to this is nothing at all. A March 2026 position paper from the Alliance for New Mobility Europe points out that Regulation (EU) 2019/947, which governs drone operations across Europe, contains no provisions on the role and use of Qualified Entities, and that “the provisions governing them are a patchwork.” The same regulation does spell out a conflict-of-interest test for Recognised Assessment Entities, the bodies that train and examine remote pilots, requiring them to keep training separate from assessment. Operators reading the drone rules find that test and nothing about the entities auditing their whole organization.

Europe is not short of pressure to lean on accredited third parties. EASA’s NPA 2026-103 acknowledges that professional operators face individual authorization processes for thousands of relatively low-risk Specific category flights, a workload the agency says is unnecessary for operators and authorities alike. Spain’s AESA cleared its first SAIL III cargo authorization in June, and each approval of that complexity consumes authority time that barely exists.

The Association Pushing To Widen Those Rules Is Led By Unifly’s CEO

Andres Van Swalm co-founded Unifly and still runs it as chief executive, and he has been president of the Alliance for New Mobility Europe since July 1, 2025. AME published the March 2026 position paper asking Brussels to expand what Qualified Entities are allowed to do.

AME is not a fringe outfit. It sits in the European Commission’s Expert Group on Drones and Innovative Air Mobility, in EASA’s Drone Community and its steering group, chairs the EASA activity group on airspace integration and U-space, and is a founding member of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking. When it files a position ahead of a rulemaking, the position is read.

Two of the paper’s asks deserve attention. It argues applicants should be able to contract Qualified Entities directly rather than waiting for a national authority to allocate the task, and it argues a top-tier entity should issue, amend and revoke certificates on an authority’s behalf with no further signature from the authority. Article 69 already permits that second privilege where an accrediting authority chooses to grant it. What the paper wants is the tiers written down, which would turn a discretionary power into a defined market.

Fairness demands the rest of the picture. The AME presidency rotates among executives of member companies, and Van Swalm took it over from Jan-Eric Putze of Droniq, who moved to vice president. Unifly co-founder Jürgen Verstaen held an AME vice presidency until the same date, so the company’s involvement predates the compliance acquisitions by years. The paper is a members’ position drafted for a membership spanning operators, manufacturers, air navigation service providers and research bodies, and it never mentions Unifly.

DroneXL’s Take

The most interesting sentence in Tuesday’s announcement is the one that reads like filler.

When Unifly says its compliance and audit work runs independently from its technology, consulting and commercial activities, it is not being modest. It is stating the condition Annex VI attaches to the accreditation, the one that reaches the entity, its director and every person signing an assessment. Companies do not usually write their legal tests into a rebrand announcement. Unifly did, which tells me somebody there thought about this carefully before the name went on the door.

So give them the strong version of the case. Europe has a real shortage of people who can drive a SORA package to a standard a national authority will accept, national authorities are visibly underwater, and consolidating the handful of firms holding that expertise shortens a queue operators have been sitting in for years. We have covered Unifly as a serious technical participant since at least the ENSURE project work in April 2025, and nothing on Tuesday changes that.

My problem is not with the rule or with the company. It is that the answer is filed somewhere an operator cannot reach. Unifly’s announcement does not name the authority that accredited Unifly Compliance or the scope it granted. Article 69 sends exactly that information, the accreditation and the privileges attached to it, into the repository EASA maintains under Article 74. Access to that repository runs to the Commission, the Agency, national authorities and accident investigators. The Agency is obliged to publish a short list of other categories, and Qualified Entity accreditations are not on it. The record exists. The people choosing an auditor are not among the people who get to read it.

That is the gap worth closing, and it is small. Publishing the accreditation register costs nothing, breaks no confidentiality, and would let an operator in Rotterdam see which body holds what privilege and on whose authority. AME’s own paper argues for publication, noting that operators otherwise pick a consultant on price. The forthcoming revision of Regulation (EU) 2019/947 is where that could land, and it is the revision the paper was written for. Watch the draft text for two things: whether Qualified Entities appear in the drone rules at all, and whether the register becomes public.

DroneXL usually argues that the danger in drone regulation is overreach. This is a different failure, and a cheaper one to fix. Europe wrote a demanding independence standard and then filed the proof of who meets it where the people relying on it cannot look.

Sources: Unifly, Terra Drone, Alliance for New Mobility Europe position paper on Qualified Entities, Regulation (EU) 2018/1139, Article 69 and Annex VI

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.