On July 27, 2026, Italy's civil aviation authority ENAC updated the official D-Flight airspace map with three new permanent no-fly zones for drones (UAS GZ SEC017, SEC018 and SEC019), covering SNAM gas storage and dispatching facilities in Brugherio, Settala and San Donato Milanese, on the northeastern edge of Milan (Quadricottero News). The zones are unremarkable in isolation — circles of 600 to 1,600 meters radius, absolute prohibition from ground level to 1,500 meters, enforced around the clock. What they reveal is more interesting: Italy is still protecting its energy infrastructure from drones one operator request at a time, even as European airspace incursions near sensitive sites multiply and a general national rulebook remains stuck in draft.
What ENAC Actually Did
The three zones carry the same legal weight as the red zones ENAC already draws around airports: absolute prohibition for all UAS categories, Open or Specific, with no drone permitted to enter without a specific exemption. SEC017 in Brugherio (45°33'47.50"N, 09°13'57.98"E) covers an 800-meter radius around a SNAM storage facility; SEC018 in Settala (45°27'04.42"N, 09°24'15.08"E) is the largest at 1,600 meters, also protecting storage infrastructure; SEC019 in San Donato Milanese (45°25'25.5"N, 09°15'36.3"E), a 600-meter zone, covers a dispatching facility (Quadricottero News). The paper trail behind the zones is the real story: SNAM filed a formal protection request with ENAC (document MOD ATM 03C) on July 17, 2026, but the Milan Prefecture had already signed off on the underlying request a month earlier, on June 15. ENAC then converted that local security clearance into a national airspace restriction inside six weeks, published not in the Gazzetta Ufficiale but directly on the D-Flight digital map.
That sequencing matters because D-Flight — a company under the ENAV air-traffic-management group — is, in its own trade press's words, "the only tool with certain legal validity" for identifying where drones cannot fly (Quadricottero News). There is no statute enumerating Italy's protected energy sites; there is a live map that gets updated when an operator asks and a Prefecture agrees.
Steelmanning the Case-by-Case Model
Before criticizing that approach, it deserves a fair hearing. Drone incursions near critical infrastructure have become a serious European security problem in 2026, not a hypothetical one. On August 4, a quadcopter carrying plastic explosives struck a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany and failed to detonate; it was found on the tarmac four hours later. On September 10, Russia sent almost two dozen drones into Polish airspace, forcing four airports to halt flights, with only two of the drones intercepted. The International Institute for Strategic Studies has tracked drone incursions across a dozen NATO members and Ireland since 2024 (Al Jazeera). Against that backdrop, a gas dispatching hub for Milan is a plausible target, and a narrow, fast, request-driven process that adds protection within weeks — rather than waiting for a statute to work through Parliament — is a legitimate way to close a real gap quickly. Speed is a genuine public good here, and ENAC deserves credit for using the tool it has.
The Gap the Speed Creates
The cost of that speed is legibility. An operator anywhere in Italy has no way to know in advance which of the country's hundreds of energy, water or telecoms sites might acquire a no-fly zone next, because eligibility isn't written down anywhere — it depends on which infrastructure owners think to ask and which Prefectures agree. That's a materially different regime from the EU's baseline UAS rules (Regulation (EU) 2019/947), which at least specify the general criteria a member state must use to designate geographic zones. ENAC is working on a fix, just not this one. A draft regulation, "Zone geografiche UAS," published for consultation on June 24, 2026 and closing July 24, would replace the decade-old ATM-09A circular and rationalize the height limits and dimensions of ordinary airport-adjacent red zones. But even its own trade coverage confirms it says nothing about a statutory list of protected non-aviation infrastructure, and it isn't expected to reach the Official Gazette before autumn 2026 or take effect on D-Flight before spring 2027 (ENAC consultation notice).
The Right Fix Is Publication, Not Slower Approvals
The answer isn't to make ENAC's SNAM-style process slower or more bureaucratic — that would trade a real security gain for a paperwork exercise while doing nothing for operators. The answer is publication discipline: a standing, publicly searchable registry of which categories of infrastructure qualify for expedited zone requests, and the criteria a Prefecture applies before signing off, published alongside — not instead of — the fast D-Flight update mechanism ENAC already uses. Operators would still learn about SEC017-style zones from the map, as they do today; they would just be able to anticipate the universe of sites that might get one next, the way EU aviation authorities already require for airport zones. Italy doesn't need to choose between protecting gas infrastructure quickly and regulating drones predictably. Right now it's only doing the first.