As of late 2024, 190 BVLOS waivers had been issued to 134 distinct operators across the entire United States. By 2027, the FAA forecasts more than one million annual approvals. The gap between those two numbers is why Part 108 exists — and why the drone industry's most consequential rulemaking is still, as of June 2026, unfinished.

The current system was never built for what the industry needs it to do. Beyond visual line of sight — BVLOS, the ability to fly a drone beyond the direct unaided sight of the remote pilot or visual observer — is the gating capability for every economically serious drone application: package delivery at scale, pipeline and transmission-line inspection, precision agriculture, wildfire and public safety response. You cannot do any of them routinely under the visual-line-of-sight (VLOS) default baked into Part 107, the FAA's commercial UAS rule in force since August 2016. BVLOS under Part 107 requires a §107.200 waiver, processed case by case, geographically scoped, with no guaranteed approval timeline. The FAA's own waiver apparatus, as the agency has acknowledged, "was never designed to support widespread, routine BVLOS operations."

Why Visual Observers Don't Scale — and What the Data Actually Shows

The standard workaround has been the visual observer: post a person in the field, have them watch the aircraft, and the operator can claim VLOS through a human proxy. It works for a film shoot or a one-off infrastructure inspection. It does not work for a delivery network.

The most instructive data point on this comes not from the industry but from the FAA's own four-year BEYOND program, which ran from October 2020 through 2024 and logged 70,563 total flights, 48,383 of them BVLOS. Of those BVLOS flights, fewer than 763 — roughly 2% — were flown without a visual observer present. Two participants accounted for 95% of all BVLOS flights in the program. Only one of eight participants achieved what the program defined as scalable BVLOS operations without observers. Six of eight key performance indicators went unmet. The DOT Office of Inspector General issued those findings on June 30, 2025; the FAA concurred with all seven OIG recommendations.

BEYOND Phase 2 runs 2025–2029 and is meant to address the gaps. But the program's Phase 1 record makes the economic reality plain: routine, unobserved BVLOS at any meaningful scale does not exist yet in the United States, not because the aircraft can't fly it, but because the regulatory and operational infrastructure to support it hasn't been built.

Amazon's Prime Air targets 500 million packages per year by drone by decade's end. Its MK-27 carries up to five pounds. Amazon holds an FAA Air Carrier Certificate issued in 2020. Wing and Zipline hold similar certificates — six Part 135 Air Carrier Certificates have been issued total, a pathway whose processing time was cut from 2.5 years to 6–8 months. Skydio customers have logged 27,000-plus flights under current waiver programs. The infrastructure for scale exists in pockets; the framework for it does not.

The Rulemaking Road: A Missed Deadline, an Executive Order, and 3,000 Comments

The formal push toward a BVLOS framework began in earnest with the UAS BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee, which delivered a 381-page final report on March 10, 2022, carrying more than 70 recommendations. The ARC proposed creating Part 108 as a new regulatory part, a new BVLOS pilot rating, a kinetic-energy risk threshold up to 800,000 ft-lbs, and a third-party services framework. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 directed the agency to publish a proposed rule by September 2024 and a final rule by September 2025. Both deadlines were missed.

Executive Order 14307, signed June 6, 2025 and titled "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," set new marching orders:

"Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Transportation, acting through the Administrator of the FAA, shall issue a proposed rule enabling routine BVLOS operations for UAS for commercial and public safety purposes. A final rule shall be published within 240 days of the date of this order, as appropriate."

The NPRM — docket FAA-2025-1908, Notice 25-07, "Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations" — landed in the Federal Register on August 7, 2025, roughly one month past the EO's 30-day target. At more than 700 pages and co-issued with the TSA, it is among the more consequential aviation regulatory proposals in years. Bryan Bedford had been confirmed as FAA Administrator in early July 2025.

More than a million comments flooded the docket — over 1,025,000 by the Federal Register's count. Requests for an extension were denied on September 29, 2025. The comment period was then reopened on January 28, 2026, with a new deadline of February 11, 2026. The EO's 240-day deadline fell around February 1, 2026; a 43-day government shutdown pushed realistic expectations to approximately March 16, 2026. As of June 2026, no final rule has been published. Part 108 is still a proposed rule — an NPRM — and nothing in it has legal effect.

What Part 108 Actually Proposes

The NPRM takes a performance- and risk-based approach rather than a prescriptive one. It would cover UAS up to 1,320 pounds (versus Part 107's 55-pound ceiling), with a maximum wingspan of 25 feet and a maximum airspeed of 87 knots. Critically, it would not require traditional airworthiness certificates; instead, manufacturers would establish operational limits against industry consensus standards, with 150-plus flight hours of functional and reliability validation. Individual airman certificates are not proposed — the corporate responsibility model places accountability on the operating company, not the individual pilot.

Two authorization pathways are proposed. Operating Permits are the lower-risk path, covering eight categories — training, flight testing, demonstrations, package delivery, agriculture, aerial surveying, civic interest, and recreation — with 24-month validity, 120-day advance notice requirements, and restriction to Population Density Categories 3 and below. Fleet caps under Permits are specific: delivery operations are capped at 100 concurrent drones at 55 pounds; agricultural operations at 25 drones, with airframes up to 1,320 pounds; surveying at 25 drones at 110 pounds. Operating Certificates address higher-risk operations — delivery, agriculture, surveying, and civic categories — in denser populations (Categories 4–5) with full safety management systems and ongoing FAA oversight.

Population density runs on a five-tier scale, with Category 5 defined as within half a mile of 2,500 or more people; automatic detect-and-avoid is required at Category 5. All operations are capped at 400 feet AGL. Launches must originate from pre-designated, access-controlled locations, with FAA flight-area approvals specifying boundaries and daily operation estimates.

Two new operational roles are proposed. The Operations Supervisor (§108.35) carries a 14-hour daily and 50-hour weekly duty limit with a 10-hour minimum rest. The Flight Coordinator (§108.310) issues high-level commands — altitude, heading, return-to-base — and requires a minimum of five hours on the specific make and model and five hours of currency within any 12-month period.

The ADS-B Right-of-Way Fight and the ADSP Framework

On detect-and-avoid, the NPRM requires DAA capability for all Part 108 operations; Class B and C airspace requires onboard optical or radar-based detection. ADS-B In on both 1090 MHz and 978 MHz is required. The proposed right-of-way provision is the sharpest edge in the rule: Part 108 drones would receive conditional priority over non-ADS-B-broadcasting manned aircraft in uncontrolled airspace below 400 feet, outside airports, B/C airspace, and Category 5 areas. Part 108 drones must yield to ADS-B-Out aircraft, Class B/C traffic, and airport arrivals and departures.

The proposed rule simultaneously prohibits Part 108 drones from broadcasting ADS-B Out, citing RF congestion. AOPA, the EAA, ALPA, and the NBAA have flagged this as a one-way visibility gap: manned pilots would not see Part 108 drones on traffic displays, while those drones claim right-of-way over unequipped aircraft. ALPA has demanded airline-grade operational standards. The Aviation-Impacted Communities Alliance cited the January 2025 mid-air collision between a DJI drone and a firefighting aircraft during the Los Angeles wildfires as evidence against relaxing airspace access rules.

Alongside Part 108, the NPRM introduces proposed Part 146, which would create federal certification for Automated Data Service Providers — the UTM backend layer handling strategic deconfliction, conformance monitoring, airspace data, and conflict alerts. A certified ADSP would be required for BVLOS in controlled airspace or over dense populations; self-certification is possible. ADSP requirements include cybersecurity programs, change management, a quality management system incorporating SMS, software versioning controls, interoperability, and authentication. Airspace Link has received a Letter of Acceptance for its UTM services via the FAA's Near-Term Approval Process. ANRA Technologies has positioned itself as Part 146-ready; CEO Amit Ganjoo called the framework one that "ensures operators and service providers can plan and invest with confidence [and] moves us from waivers to a predictable framework that enables innovation while maintaining safety."

The DJI Exclusion and the TSA Fight

Two provisions have generated the most industry opposition. The first is §108.700, which limits airworthiness acceptance to drones manufactured in the United States or in countries with bilateral unmanned-aircraft agreements. The United States has no such bilateral agreements in place. The practical effect is a de facto exclusion of DJI and all other foreign-manufactured drones from Part 108 operations. Critics have noted this "would exclude the vast majority of drones currently in use" — a significant fraction of the existing commercial and public safety fleet.

The second is the TSA security layer. The NPRM proposes Level 3 Security Threat Assessments — criminal history, immigration, intelligence checks, FBI fingerprinting, and DHS biometrics — for all "covered persons": operations supervisors, flight coordinators, and anyone with unescorted access to drones or cargo. Package delivery operators would need a limited security program approved by TSA. Amazon Prime Air called the requirements "disproportionate, unjustified and operationally unworkable." The Commercial Drone Alliance's CEO Lisa Ellman, summarizing operator feedback on the full proposed rule, put it plainly: "Could you continue your operations that you're doing today under Part 108? And the vast, vast majority said no." Airlines for America, representing the major carriers, endorsed the TSA requirements.

A concern running through the DLA Piper analysis and others is that the proposed FAA "operational area approvals" — requiring advance specification of flight boundaries and daily estimates — may functionally recreate the waiver system the rulemaking is intended to replace. The rule also proposes no grandfathering for existing Part 107 BVLOS waivers; existing authorizations would remain valid during a transition period, with implementation of a final rule anticipated to take six to twelve months post-publication.

For operators planning now, the practical picture as of June 2026 is this: the three existing pathways — Part 107 §107.200 waivers, Part 135 Air Carrier Certificates, and Section 44807 exemptions — remain the only legal routes to routine BVLOS. The NPRM defines what the framework could look like; it does not yet define what operators must do. Until a final rule publishes and its compliance date passes, nothing in the 700-page proposal has regulatory force. The industry has been waiting on that day, in one form or another, since 2022.

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