Through the lens of ‘Project Skyway’, the world’s longest under-development drone-highway connecting 165-miles of airspace above six UK towns and cities, the Urban life and design in the drone age project engages with local authorities, regulator, industry and academic stakeholders and participants to explore timely questions about the ambitions and intersections around drones, geography and urban planning and design. In this presentation, we’ll outline some initial project findings in relation to two key themes. We will first focus on the practical aspects of drone implementation, addressing the challenges related to decision-making and public-facing interfaces. Second, we’ll turn attention to emerging theoretical reflections around the spatial implications of planning in volume. Geographers, alongside scholars across the social sciences, are increasingly embracing volumetric, that is three-dimensional understandings of space, attentive to heights and depths. Drawing on project data, we thus reflect on volumetric frameworks as a tool to understand changing airspace.