Part 108 Nears Publication, FAA Says

The FAA's Part 108 rulemaking for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone operations has cleared internal review and is now at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the final administrative step before publication. Robert Reckert of the FAA told an audience at Commercial UAV Expo 2026 that the agency hopes to publish the rule by the end of 2026, capping a rulemaking process that has processed roughly 4,000 public comments. Reckert shared the stage with EASA's Daan Dousi, in a session that offered a rare side-by-side view of how the two largest Western regulators are approaching the same problem — and how far apart their frameworks remain.

Part 108: the last step before publication

The FAA's Part 108 rule has been the single most consequential open item in US drone regulation for several years. BVLOS operation — flying a drone beyond the operator's visual line of sight, whether for linear infrastructure inspection, agricultural surveying, cargo delivery, or wide-area mapping — is the capability that separates a drone industry from a drone hobby. Under the current Part 91 framework and the operating rules in Part 107, routine BVLOS requires a waiver that is slow, individually negotiated, and rarely granted at scale. Part 108 replaces that waiver regime with a rule: published requirements that an operator can meet, with defined categories and processes, and then fly.

Clearing the FAA's internal review and reaching OIRA review is a meaningful procedural milestone. OIRA, part of the Office of Management and Budget, reviews significant rulemakings for cost-benefit analysis and interagency consistency, and its review is the last gate before a rule is published in the Federal Register. Reckert's end-of-2026 target reflects a standard OIRA timeline: review typically runs weeks to a few months, and agencies generally try to land major rules before the regulatory freeze that accompanies a change in administration or the close of a calendar year.

The 4,000 public comments the FAA processed on the notice of proposed rulemaking indicate the scale of stakeholder interest. Commenters ranged from major logistics operators planning large delivery networks to small aerial survey firms, and the substance of those comments will have shaped how the final rule treats operational risk categories, visual observer requirements, and the automation of the authorisation process.

EASA's parallel track: SORA 2.5 and standard scenarios

EASA's Daan Dousi presented the European approach, which is structured around the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) framework rather than a dedicated BVLOS operating rule. The SORA process has been Europe's answer to operations that do not fit the standard scenarios: an operator and a national aviation authority work through a structured risk assessment to derive operational limitations, mitigations, and safety objectives tailored to the specific mission.

Dousi discussed SORA 2.5, the revision that brings simplification through standard scenarios. The logic is that many BVLOS missions fall into repeatable patterns — the same airspace characteristics, the same risk drivers, the same mitigations — and a pre-built scenario that an operator can declare against is faster for everyone than a bespoke assessment. Standard scenarios shift the workload: instead of proving the risk case each time, the operator demonstrates conformance with an approved template, and the authority's role becomes verification rather than co-development.

The structural difference between the two systems is real. The FAA's approach is a federal operating rule with national scope; EASA's is a risk assessment methodology executed through national authorities. But the direction of travel, both regulators agreed, is toward operators being able to fly routine BVLOS missions under published, predictable requirements rather than bespoke permissions.

Drone Squad: joint standards, industry reservations

The session also covered the Drone Squad initiative — a joint standards effort between the FAA, EASA, Transport Canada, and Brazil's ANAC. The concept is to harmonise technical and operational standards across the four authorities so that equipment and procedures developed for one market can be used in the others, reducing fragmentation in a sector that has otherwise been regulated jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

The initiative drew industry criticism at the expo, with operators and manufacturers raising a familiar objection to any multi-authority harmonisation effort: the tendency toward the highest common denominator. When several regulators set a joint standard, the argument runs, the standard tends to converge on the most conservative requirement among the participants, meaning operators in the least restrictive jurisdiction today would see their requirements tighten to match. For an industry where operational cost per flight hour determines whether a business case exists at all, the difference between a standard written to the FAA's data and one written to accommodate all four authorities is not academic.

The regulators' counter-argument — that without harmonisation, manufacturers face quadruple certification costs and markets stay fragmented — is equally familiar, and it is the same debate that shaped earlier harmonisation work in crewed aviation under ICAO frameworks. It is unresolved, and the Drone Squad work programme will show which way the balance tips as draft outputs appear.

What this means for operators

For US operators, the publication of Part 108 is the event to plan around. The practical steps are worth beginning before publication:

• Mission profiling — identifying which operations are BVLOS today and which Part 107 waivers currently cover them, so the transition path to Part 108 authorisations is clear on day one.
• Aircraft qualification — understanding whether the rule creates airworthiness-type requirements for the aircraft itself, as distinct from the operational rule, since this affects fleet procurement decisions.
• Detect-and-avoid — most BVLOS frameworks hinge on the operator's ability to manage the risk of encountering crewed aircraft, and the detect-and-avoid solution an operator selects will drive both compliance and insurance conversations.
• Pilot qualification — how the rule treats the remote pilot's licence and whether BVLOS privileges attach to the existing Part 107 certificate or require additional endorsement, which affects recruitment and training budgets.

For readers tracking the wider advanced air mobility regulatory picture, our coverage of the DOT and FAA's eight AAM pilot projects and the eVTOL certification roundup from August 2026 cover the adjacent workstreams running in parallel with the drone rulemaking.

The timeline

Both regulators face versions of the same deadline pressure: an industry that has been promised a workable BVLOS framework for the better part of a decade, and capital that has funded drone operations on the assumption of eventual regulatory clarity. The FAA's OIRA review is the most concrete near-term milestone — once the rule clears OIRA, publication follows, and the shape of the final rule stops being a subject for speculation and becomes an operational planning input. EASA's SORA 2.5 standard scenarios are on a comparable track, with implementation through national authorities to follow.

The end of 2026 is the target. Whether it is met will depend on OIRA's review calendar, and on how far the final rule moved from the proposed text across 4,000 comments. The Flight Brief will cover the rule's publication and its practical requirements when it appears in the Federal Register.