Part 108 BVLOS: Why the Final Rule Is Stuck

The one-paragraph version

Part 108 doesn't exist yet. It's a proposal that would let operators fly beyond visual line of sight under a standing set of requirements instead of a one-off waiver, and until a final rule is published and takes effect, the only legal path to BVLOS remains the existing Part 107 waiver process. An executive order signed in June 2025 gave the FAA 240 days to publish a final rule, putting the deadline at February 1, 2026. That deadline came and went with nothing published. The final rule didn't even reach the White House's own review desk until July 10, five months late, and as of this writing, it's still sitting there. The reason isn't a paperwork backlog. It's one contested provision that would flip a basic assumption of American aviation: which aircraft has to get out of the way.

The deadline the FAA already missed

Executive Order 14307, signed June 6, 2025, told the FAA to propose a BVLOS rule within 30 days and publish a final rule within 240 days, with a soft qualifier attached: "as appropriate." The FAA was already a little late out of the gate. The actual proposal, covering both Part 108 for operators and a companion Part 146 for third-party traffic management services, didn't land in the Federal Register until August 7, 2025, about a month past the 30-day mark.

The bigger miss came later. The 240-day clock from the executive order put the final rule deadline at February 1, 2026. The FAA didn't just miss that date; it didn't send the final rule to the White House for review until July 10, more than five months after the deadline had already passed. That's not a rounding error. That's an agency that needed most of a year longer than the order asked for, and it still isn't done.

The one provision holding up the whole rule

Here's the part most of the "drones will deliver your package soon" coverage skips. Buried in the proposed rule is a change to sections 108.195 and 91.113, the rules that govern which aircraft yields to which. For the entire history of the National Airspace System, crewed aircraft have had the right of way. The FAA's own proposal would flip that for Part 108 operations: an uncrewed aircraft flying under the new rule would get presumptive right of way over a manned aircraft that isn't electronically broadcasting its position.

Exceptions exist. The drone doesn't get priority when the manned aircraft is broadcasting through ADS-B Out or an approved alternate device, when the flight is in Class B or C airspace, when the manned aircraft is taking off or landing at an airport or heliport, or when the operation is over a Category 5 population area. Outside those four carve-outs, the burden shifts to the pilot in the cockpit, and a lot of general aviation aircraft, especially older and recreational ones, don't carry the equipment that would let them keep their priority.

I want to be direct about why this matters more than a typical contested provision. This isn't a fight over paperwork or fees. It's a fight over a physical safety assumption that's held since before most of us were flying anything. As someone who watches this space closely, I don't think the FAA is dragging its feet here. I think it's trying to get a genuinely hard problem right before it ships something it can't walk back.

One reopening, then a denied extension

An agency confident in its own rule doesn't reopen the comment period on one narrow issue, then refuse to extend it when asked. The FAA did exactly that. The initial comment period on the full NPRM closed October 6, 2025. By its own account, roughly 3,100 comments discussed the right-of-way proposal in some capacity, more than half of everything it received. That's not a stray objection. That's the rule's center of gravity.

So in January 2026, the FAA reopened the docket, but only for seven narrow technical questions about electronic conspicuity: which alternate devices to ADS-B Out actually exist today, who makes them, whether they can tell a pilot when they've failed, and whether an existing industry standard could work instead of writing a new one from scratch. That reopened window closed February 11, 2026. A separate notice the day before formally denied requests to extend it further. Reading the FAA's own account of what it heard, the split is real. Some commenters want mandatory broadcast equipment on manned aircraft as the only workable answer. Others want the burden to stay on the drone side through onboard detect-and-avoid technology instead. The FAA hasn't picked a side yet, at least not publicly.

The mass-comment mirage

Quick note on numbers, because this docket has the exact same trap that tripped up coverage of a different FAA rule a few months back. If you pull up this rule's public docket today, the display shows over a million comments logged under a single entry. That is almost certainly one mass-comment campaign bundled into one docket item, not a million individually written submissions. The FAA's own count, stated plainly in its January reopening notice, is roughly 3,100 comments that discussed the right-of-way proposal. If you see a headline treating the larger number as the real count of individual voices on this rule, it's reading the docket display the wrong way.

Where the rule actually sits right now

The final rule reached the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office that reviews significant regulations before they are published, on July 10, 2026. OIRA gets a standard 90 days under Executive Order 12866 for a rule like this, which runs to October 8 and can be extended once by 30 days to November 7. The FAA has said, most recently at a September industry conference, that it hopes to see the rule published by the end of the calendar year. Read that against the clock. Using the full 90-day window plus the extension gets you to early November. "End of the year" implies the agency expects to use most or all of that time, not that it's sitting on a rule that's ready to go tomorrow.

Separately, the TSA published its own notice in early September asking operators who want a seat at closed technical roundtables on Part 108 security requirements to apply by October 19. Those roundtables are explicitly scheduled to happen after both the FAA and TSA final rules are published, which tells you the TSA doesn't expect imminent publication either. The FAA also opened a second phase of its BEYOND test program in late August, adding up to eight more government-led test teams. That program generates useful safety data, but it's not Part 108 and doesn't grant anyone BVLOS authority on its own.

The industry isn't waiting on Washington

While the rule sits at OIRA, the drone economy is scaling anyway, almost entirely on the waiver system that Part 108 is supposed to replace. A fleet management platform that tracks flight data across a large share of the commercial drone market passed 65 million logged flights in August 2026, across more than 850,000 aircraft and 470,000 pilots. That's up from 50 million flights in May 2025, which works out to roughly a million new flights a month. A meaningful share of that growth is organizations running drones as routine infrastructure rather than as pilot programs, exactly the kind of operator Part 108 is built for.

There's a competitive angle too. India's civil aviation ministry said in August 2026 that it's targeting BVLOS certification by the end of this year. The EU adopted its own cooperative airspace framework, U-space, in 2021. From a founder's perspective, the US wrote the waiver playbook and has more BVLOS operational data than any other aviation regulator on earth. Every month this rule sits at OIRA is a month that advantage narrows, not because the technology is behind, but because the certification path is.

What operators should do while this sits at OIRA

You can't plan around a publication date that doesn't exist yet, but you can plan around what's already fixed.

• Keep your Part 107 waiver strategy current. It remains the only legal BVLOS path, and it will stay that way until a final rule actually takes effect, which is still months away at the earliest.
• If your operation would be affected by the right-of-way provision, particularly if you fly near uncontrolled fields or areas with a lot of older general aviation traffic, start tracking whether your aircraft or the manned traffic you share airspace with carries ADS-B Out or an approved alternate device. That equipage question won't go away, regardless of how the final rule resolves it.
• Don't build a compliance program around the specific numbers in the NPRM. The final rule can and likely will differ from the proposed text, especially on the provision that triggered the reopened comment period.
• Watch the OIRA clock, not FAA conference remarks, for the most concrete signal of timing. October 8 and November 7 are real dates tied to a real review process. "End of the year" is a hope.
• If you want a voice in how the security side of this rule gets implemented, the TSA's roundtable application window closes October 19.

Where I think this goes

I'll flag this section as forecast, since nothing is decided. As a founder in the drone economy, my read is that the FAA keeps some version of presumptive right of way rather than scrapping it entirely, because walking it back to universal electronic conspicuity for manned aircraft would mean writing an entirely new equipage mandate outside the scope of this rulemaking, and that's a much bigger fight than the one already underway. What's more likely to move is the list of exceptions, probably widening to cover more airspace or aircraft types than the current draft does, as a way to address general aviation's objections without abandoning the core mechanism. If that's the shape of the final rule, I'd expect publication closer to the November end of the OIRA window than the October start, given how much technical detail still has to be nailed down on the electronic conspicuity side.

Conclusion

Part 108 is stuck because the FAA is trying to rewrite a rule of the sky that's been in place since flight began, and it's taking the pushback seriously enough to reopen its own comment period and then hold the line by refusing to extend it. That's a defensible reason for a rule to run five months past its executive order deadline. It's also a reason operators shouldn't plan around a publication date the agency itself hasn't committed to. The waiver system isn't going anywhere until the final rule actually takes effect, and the industry's own flight numbers show it isn't waiting around to find out when that is.