The FAA has missed, for the second time, a legally significant deadline to finalize its Part 108 beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone rule — and this time the deadline came directly from the White House. President Trump’s June 2025 executive order “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” directed the agency to publish a final Part 108 rule by February 1, 2026. That date passed without a final rule. As of mid-June 2026, the regulation remains in limbo, and the core reason is a single contested provision: a proposed inversion of aviation’s foundational right-of-way hierarchy.

Two Deadlines, Two Misses

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 set a September 16, 2024 deadline for the agency to publish a Part 108 NPRM — that too was missed. The executive order deadline represented a second, harder political push, carrying explicit political weight from an administration that made drone deregulation a stated economic priority. Neither deadline produced a final rule, and the agency has not announced a revised publication date.

The stakes behind the deadlines are not abstract. Under the current regime, any commercial BVLOS operation requires an individual FAA waiver under Part 107. The volume of those waivers has exploded — from 1,229 in 2020 to 26,870 in 2023, according to a June 2025 DOT Office of Inspector General report. The case-by-case process that was designed for rare exceptions is now processing tens of thousands of applications annually, a structural mismatch Part 108 was designed to resolve.

Part 108 would replace the waiver system with a certification framework applicable to unmanned aircraft up to 1,320 pounds, legalizing routine BVLOS operations without individual agency approval. For drone delivery operators, infrastructure inspectors, and public safety agencies that have spent years operating under the waiver patchwork, the regulation represents the difference between a scalable business model and a permanent compliance ceiling.

The Right-of-Way Inversion at the Center of the Stalemate

The provision blocking forward progress is buried in the proposed regulatory text but has outsized practical consequences. Proposed § 108.195(a)(2), read alongside amendments to § 91.113, would grant BVLOS drone operators presumptive right-of-way over manned aircraft in certain airspace — a direct reversal of the crewed-aircraft priority that has governed aviation since the first air traffic rules were written.

The specific trigger: a crewed aircraft not broadcasting via ADS-B Out or an approved electronic conspicuity (EC) device would be required to yield to a BVLOS drone. The exceptions are meaningfully scoped — the drone does not get priority in Class B or C airspace, during manned aircraft takeoff and landing, over Category 5 (most densely populated) areas, or when the manned aircraft is actively broadcasting ADS-B Out — but the carve-outs did little to calm general aviation. Detect-and-avoid requirements under §§ 108.180(b) and 108.185(d)(5)(ii) apply separately for drone operations in Class B/C airspace and Category 5 areas.

The FAA received more than 3,100 substantive comments on the NPRM overall. By industry tracking of the docket, more than half addressed the right-of-way question alone. General aviation groups and pilot associations objected sharply to the proposed inversion, arguing that requiring crewed aircraft to yield to drones — even conditionally — introduces collision risk and fundamentally undermines pilot-in-command authority.

The FAA reopened its comment period twice. The second reopening, published January 28, 2026, in Federal Register docket 2026-01644, was targeted specifically at the right-of-way and electronic conspicuity provisions. That window ran just 14 days, closing February 11, 2026 — ten days after the Trump executive order’s missed deadline. The narrow reopening scope signaled the FAA understands which provisions are holding up finalization; narrowing the comment invitation to two sections is a procedural move agencies use when they intend to revise specific language rather than relitigate the full rulemaking record.

The EC Equipment Signal

Legal analysts tracking the rulemaking note a secondary implication in how the FAA has framed the EC conspicuity discussion. The rule’s carve-out structure means that manned aircraft broadcasting ADS-B Out or an approved EC device are exempted from the yield requirement — which effectively conditions crewed-aircraft priority on carriage of specific equipment. Analysts have flagged that the FAA’s attention to EC availability and costs in its supporting materials “could signal” a push for universal EC equipment mandates for manned aircraft in the final rule. For general aviation, where much of the fleet predates ADS-B Out requirements and retrofits carry real cost, that implication is a second axis of opposition layered beneath the right-of-way fight itself.

Why It Matters

For the commercial drone industry, the delay compounds in two directions. The industry cannot scale BVLOS operations without a stable regulatory pathway, but Part 107 waiver holders also face a specific transition risk: depending on final rule language, the Part 108 framework could eliminate the Part 107 BVLOS waiver pathway entirely. Operators holding active waivers could find themselves in a gap between waiver expiration and Part 108 certificate availability. Drone delivery companies, utility and pipeline inspectors, and public safety agencies have all organized business models around BVLOS capability — none of them can absorb an involuntary grounding window while the FAA resolves its rulemaking calendar. News media drone operations in urban areas face a separate layer of uncertainty: depending on how the final rule draws the boundaries of Category 5 zones and detect-and-avoid requirements, urban journalism workflows could be substantially constrained.

Bryan Bedford, confirmed as FAA Administrator in early July 2025 after leaving Republic Airlines, was greeted by industry as a stabilizing figure for drone policy. But the right-of-way impasse predates his tenure, and the forces stalling Part 108 are structural: a politically mandated timeline colliding with a genuinely contested aviation safety question that the comment record has not resolved.

The FAA has not published a revised target date for the final rule. Congress set one deadline the agency ignored; the White House set a second and received the same result. Until the agency resolves the right-of-way dispute and publishes a final rule, BVLOS at scale in the United States remains governed by a waiver process that was never designed to handle 27,000 applications a year — and every month of delay is another month that figure keeps climbing.

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