Comments made by new US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy during his Senate confirmation hearing indicate the FAA will move forward with a rule-making process to establish regulations for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone operations, according to industry observers closely following the issue.

The FAA reauthorization bill passed by Congress last year mandated the agency issue a BVLOS Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) by September 2024, but the Biden administration missed the deadline. During the January confirmation hearing, Sen. Ted Budd (R-North Carolina) told Duffy that “without clear guidance from the FAA, commercial drone companies are forced to operate on a patchwork of waivers and exemptions. It stifles innovation. It puts the US further behind China.”

He urged Duffy to “streamline” the process for issuing a BVLOS, or Part 108, NPRM and establishing a final rule.

Duffy agreed the FAA, which he oversees as head of the Department of Transportation, needs to provide “clarity” to commercial UAV operators regarding BVLOS flights.

Without clear Part 108 regulations, Duffy said, commercial drone operators may “pack up and they'll go to a different country where they have clarity of rules, where they can test their products and continue to innovate as opposed to the patchwork” approach currently in place in the US. 

“We have to have clear rules on beyond visual line of sight and make sure that this innovation continues to happen here,” Duffy added. “I want to offer clarity to this space. [Drones have] the potential of revolutionizing so many different things in the way our economy works. Let's make sure it happens here.”

Drone Service Providers Alliance CEO Vic Moss, who has spent considerable time in Washington DC pushing lawmakers and regulators to move forward with a Part 108 NPRM, said he is encouraged by Duffy’s public comments. 

“I'm pretty high on some of the stuff that Sean Duffy said in his testimony, so I'm pretty optimistic we're getting somewhere with the NPRM pretty soon,” Moss told Commercial UAV News.

In a March 3 letter to the White House, Commercial Drone Alliance (CDA) CEO Lisa Ellman urged the Trump administration to “remove the bureaucratic red tape inhibiting drone technology in America” and advance a BVLOS NPRM. She added that the “deployment of drone technology has been trapped in a regulatory quagmire, which threatens American competitiveness with foreign nations.”

Ellman told Commercial UAV News she believes there is an understanding at the DOT and the FAA that Part 108 regulations need to be developed and finalized, a process that would begin with issuing the delayed NPRM. 

“In order to actually enable, at scale, the efficiencies and societal benefits of commercial drones, you need to be able to fly farther than the human eye can see,” she said. “That's just an obvious statement, but it's something that has been very challenging for the drone industry. So, a BVLOS rule would deregulate the commercial drone space in a way that provides more risk-appropriate rules that are designed for drone technology. Right now, we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We're trying to meet [manned aircraft] regulations that weren't designed for our industry, and it just simply isn't working.”

Currently, BVLOS operations are only allowed through FAA waivers that are not easy to obtain. Moss, who owns a photography business, has an FAA waiver to conduct BVLOS UAV operations to do mapping and take photos. He is allowed to conduct BVLOS flights up to 2 miles. 

Getting the waiver “took a little longer than I really wanted it to,” he explained. “The FAA is a safety driven organization, and not everybody who's making decisions at the waiver level are very comfortable with drones doing certain things because they don't come from a drone background, which is not a slam on them. Drones have been around 12 years. [The FAA does not have] the data set to really prove what's safe and what isn't.”

He noted his BVLOS waiver application was 25 pages long and “there’s a lot involved” in getting one.

The FAA has not provided any details on what the Part 108 NPRM could look like, but there is an expectation it will be heavily influenced by the BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC), which issued a final report in 2022 providing recommendations to the FAA. The ARC was composed of a wide range of members, including commercial drone operators, academics and privacy advocates.

“It has become evident that the current aviation regulatory framework is not capable of accommodating [UAV] operations at the existing levels, and certainly not at the levels anticipated as the industry grows,” the report stated. 

A key issue is whether the NPRM will include blanket proposals for regulations for all types of BVLOS operations or will propose specific rules for different kinds of operations.

“While the majority of the ARC desired a single value for all operations, some members suggested that the level should vary based on the type of operation,” the ARC report stated. “After substantial discussion, the consensus of the ARC is that a single set of [regulations are] appropriate to support all types of BVLOS operations … This approach is expected to ease implementation, increase understanding and streamline compliance methods while promoting interoperability between differing UAS use cases.”

Catherine Cahill, director of the Alaska Center for UAS Integration at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said it is likely the NPRM will keep in place a general 400 ft. altitude limit for flying drones. “The best way to look at what we think the [NPRM’s proposed rules] are going to be is to take a look at the recommendations of the ARC,” she told Commercial UAV News. “There were a lot of recommendations about having under 400 ft. be the area for drones.”

Other points being considered by the FAA are distance limits for BVLOS operations, with 2 or 3 miles viewed as possibilities, and what kind of training should be required for operating BVLOS flights. 

“I believe that there should be training” to be allowed to operate BVLOS flights, Cahill said. Under current Part 107 rules governing operations for drones weighing under 55 lbs., “you do not have to demonstrate aircraft competency,” she explained. “You take the test online or with a certified tester, and you don't have to have ever touched an aircraft. For BVLOS, you're going to want to have additional training.”

Moss said UAV operators flying BVLOS missions need to learn to “have command of the airspace” without directly viewing the drone. “If you don't, then you shouldn't be out there. That's first and foremost. You have to have the ability to know where your drone is even if you can't see it. You have to make sure you're not flying over a school or any kind of critical infrastructure.”

The NPRM would start a process that would include a public comment period followed by the FAA moving to promulgate a final BVLOS rule.

“My guess is that the NPRM is close, if not fully written by now,” Moss said. The FAA, he added, “is holding this one very, very close to the vest, much closer than normal. But if they follow the BVLOS ARC at all, I think [commercial drone operators are] going to be pretty happy.”