We are very concerned about the lack of speed and ambition to implement the recommendations of the Draghi’s report in aerospace and defence, even if there seems to be a growing recognition that aeronautics, space, and defence are EU strategic sectors which contribute to the EU strategic autonomy. The EU sovereignty and priority for strategic sectors are still not protected in the different regulations, even if we saw some progress on the SAFE defence instrument. The MFF proposal of the Commission will not allow to fund the € 40 billion needed for space programmes and the € 150 billion which had been quoted as necessary to allow meaningful innovation, both in EU defence technologies and common procurement for European defence equipment which is necessary to create enough leverage and scale. ‘More’ Europe would also be of utmost importance in the standardisation of weapons systems and dynamic, needs-based procurement. There is still no EU strategy for aeronautics and we don’t know how much money aeronautics will get on research to decarbonise itself, but the overall proposed budget for clean transition and industrial decarbonisation across all sectors for the next MFF (€ 67,4 billion) is similar to the annual amount needed just to decarbonise aviation (€ 61 billion). Specifically, the Investment in SAF, absolutely critical to decarbonise aviation, has not started yet. There is no reference either to major digital transnational investment. On simplification, progress has been made but sometimes big corporations are overlooked, as if big groups did not belong to Europe nor were necessary to feed European SMEs.