Developing Skills for Innovative Air Mobility: The Spanish CoVE Roadmap within the AIRMOB European Transformation Framework

The rapid growth of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in Spain, with an increase of more than 1,600% between 2019 and 2024, is accelerating the transition toward Innovative Air Mobility (IAM) and creating new workforce requirements across the aviation ecosystem. To support this transition, the AIRMOB project, co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ Programme (Project No. 101194074), has established a network of Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs) aimed at strengthening education, training, and skills development for the emerging IAM sector. Within this framework, the Spanish CoVE developed a national IAM Roadmap based on ecosystem analyses, stakeholder interviews, surveys, and collaborative workshops.

The roadmap identifies Spain’s key strengths, including strong institutional commitment, advanced regulatory readiness, active participation in flight demonstrations, and a well-established collaboration network involving authorities, industry, academia, and air navigation stakeholders. At the same time, significant challenges remain, particularly regarding U-space deployment, certification processes, vertiport infrastructure, and the availability of qualified professionals.

To address these challenges, three strategic priorities are proposed: developing deployment-oriented training programmes aligned with operational needs, strengthening IAM competencies within public authorities, and anticipating future regulatory and certification skills requirements. The roadmap promotes modular lifelong-learning pathways, hands-on training linked to real use cases, stronger academia–industry collaboration, and the use of innovative digital learning tools. These actions aim to ensure a skilled, future-ready workforce capable of enabling the safe, scalable, and socially accepted deployment of IAM in Spain.