Brazil has rewritten the rulebook that has governed its drones since 2017. On June 16, 2026, the national civil aviation authority ANAC published Resolution No. 805 in the Official Gazette, approving RBAC 100 and formally revoking RBAC-E No. 94 — the regulation, first adopted through Resolution 419 of May 2, 2017, that had classified drones almost entirely by weight (legismap.com.br). Two weeks later, on July 1, 2026, companion rules from DECEA, the air navigation authority — ICA 100-40 governing airspace access and ICA 100-48 launching the BR-UTM traffic-management system — took effect, closing the loop between certification and real-time flight clearance (MundoGEO).
From weight classes to risk scores
The old regime's logic was blunt: heavier drones faced more paperwork, lighter ones faced less, regardless of what the flight actually did. RBAC 100 replaces that with three categories — Open, Specific, and Certified — sorted by operational risk rather than mass. A flight under 25 kg, within visual line of sight, below 120 meters, and 30 meters from bystanders needs no prior ANAC authorization. Anything riskier — flights beyond visual line of sight, over crowds, or above those thresholds — falls into the Specific category and requires a formal risk assessment, typically using the SORA methodology now being phased in at versions 2.0 and 2.5 (Unmanned Airspace). The most demanding operations — dangerous-goods transport, dense urban BVLOS — sit in a Certified tier that mirrors manned-aviation type certification. ANAC itself frames the shift as trading prescriptive procedure for stated safety objectives, giving operators "greater freedom to innovate" (ANAC).
The steelman for caution
Regulators who resisted a faster overhaul had a real point. Brazil's airspace is not empty: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro sit among the busiest terminal areas in the Southern Hemisphere, and a poorly risk-scored BVLOS flight sharing airspace with manned traffic is a genuine hazard, not a hypothetical one. A cautious, incremental approach — keep weight caps, require case-by-case authorization, expand slowly — reduces the chance that a novel failure mode gets discovered mid-flight over a populated area. ANAC's own comment period on the RBAC-100 proposal ran into mid-2025, and DECEA revoked and consolidated two separate operational manuals into ICA 100-40 rather than layering new rules atop old ones — a sign the agencies were trying to avoid exactly the kind of regulatory patchwork that produces gaps.
Why the risk-based model is still the right call
That caution, though, was addressed by making the rules proportionate rather than by keeping them slow. The clearest evidence is BR-UTM itself: ICA 100-48 builds a live data-sharing environment between operators and DECEA that, for the first time, allows BVLOS authorization to be issued instantaneously rather than through a multi-day manual review (MundoGEO). ICA 100-40 separately cuts the minimum notice period for segregated-airspace requests from twelve calendar days to eight — a real reduction in dead time for commercial operators, achieved without loosening the underlying safety analysis (MundoGEO). That is the proportionate-regulation case in miniature: the flights that pose more risk get more scrutiny (mandatory SORA analysis, ANAC sign-off); the flights that pose little risk get out of the queue almost entirely.
Where it matters most: agriculture
Brazil's drone fleet is dominated by agricultural use, and that sector illustrates the stakes. Drone adoption in Brazilian farming grew from roughly 3,000 units in operation in 2021 to about 35,000 by 2025, as precision spraying scaled across soy, corn, and sugarcane operations (Global Agriculture). Most of that growth happened under the old RBAC-E 94 framework's rigid weight tiers; a risk-based, BVLOS-friendly regime that clears large-field spraying flights faster removes a structural bottleneck on further scaling, without asking regulators to certify every drone as if it were a passenger aircraft.
The transition risk worth watching
The genuine open question isn't the framework — it's execution capacity. ANAC has waived the new mandatory theoretical pilot exam until it becomes compulsory, and operators licensed under RBAC-E 94 can keep flying under the old rules until June 16, 2028, provided they maintain an equivalent safety level. That two-year overlap is sensible transition design, but it also means DECEA's BR-UTM data-sharing system needs to prove it can handle real-time authorization at scale — including for the sub-250g drones that ICA 100-40 now newly requires to request airspace access through the SARPAS system, a category that was previously largely exempt. If BR-UTM's real-time clearance holds up under commercial load, Brazil will have shown that risk-based, software-mediated airspace management can replace slow manual review without a safety trade-off. If it buckles, the next fight will be over BR-UTM's reliability — not over whether risk-based regulation was the right direction, which the aviation and agriculture data already suggest it was.