A Deadline Everyone Saw Coming — and Missed Anyway
Congress did not leave much room for ambiguity. Section 930 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 ordered the FAA to publish a proposed rule for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) drone operations, then finalize it on a fixed clock. The agency got the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking out on August 7, 2025 — "Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations," docketed as Part 108 — but the statutory deadline for a final rule, January 16, 2026, came and went with nothing published. A second, White House-imposed deadline lapsed too: President Trump's June 6, 2025 executive order "Unleashing American Drone Dominance" (EO 14307) gave the FAA 240 days — until roughly February 1, 2026 — to finalize routine BVLOS authorization. Both deadlines are now about six months in the rearview mirror.
The rule finally reached the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for interagency review on July 10, 2026, according to the unified regulatory agenda entry for RIN 2120-AL82. That starts a review that Executive Order 12866 caps at 90 days for "significant" rules — pushing a plausible publication date into October 2026 at the earliest, nearly two years after Congress's original deadline and a decade after Part 107 first opened limited commercial drone use in 2016.
What Part 108 Would Actually Change
The substance is not a footnote. Part 108 would replace the FAA's current approach — one-off BVLOS waivers and exemptions granted case by case — with a standing regulatory pathway. Operators would choose between two tracks: a lighter-touch "permitted operations" tier for lower-risk flights, and a certificated tier for more complex missions like package delivery, agricultural spraying, and aerial survey work. Risk is scaled across population-density categories, and per-flight waivers give way to area-based operational approvals. For companies that have spent a decade proving out drone delivery and inspection under narrow, geographically limited exemptions, this is the difference between a permanent business model and a permanent pilot program.
The Fight That's Actually Holding This Up
The delay is not simply bureaucratic drag. The NPRM drew roughly 3,100 public comments before its October 2025 deadline, and more than half of them zeroed in on one provision: the proposal would give Part 108 drones presumptive right-of-way over manned aircraft in most low-altitude airspace, unless the crewed aircraft broadcasts its position via ADS-B Out or an approved electronic-conspicuity device.
General aviation's objection deserves to be taken seriously, not waved off as incumbent protectionism. Crop dusters, banner-tow pilots, medevac helicopters, and other aircraft that routinely operate below 400 feet often fly without transponders — some by design, in airspace where none has ever been required. Asking them to either equip at their own expense or yield right-of-way to unmanned traffic is a real cost shift, and detect-and-avoid technology for small UAS is still maturing. The concern was serious enough that the FAA reopened the comment docket on January 28, 2026 for a focused two-week window on electronic-conspicuity standards, after industry listening sessions in early January surfaced how far apart manned and unmanned operators still are on the basic question of who watches for whom.
Why Further Delay Is the Wrong Fix
But a legitimate safety question is not the same as a reason to keep missing deadlines Congress set deliberately, twice, with bipartisan support. The FAA has now had two comment periods, thousands of pages of input, and listening sessions specifically targeted at the right-of-way dispute. EO 14307 designated this a deregulatory action under the administration's own regulatory-review framework — a signal that the substantive policy fight was supposed to be over speed, not scope. Every additional month without a standing rule pushes drone delivery, agricultural spraying, and infrastructure inspection back into the waiver queue, which by definition cannot scale the way a codified pathway can.
The fix for the equipage dispute is calibration, not delay: a phased compliance timeline that gives low-altitude GA operators a realistic runway to adopt low-cost portable conspicuity devices, paired with a firm sunset on the interim right-of-way ambiguity. That is exactly the kind of narrow, technical adjustment OIRA review exists to make — tightening a rule's edges without reopening its architecture from scratch.
The Off-Ramp Closes in October
OIRA's 90-day window is the last formal checkpoint before Part 108 either publishes or gets sent back. Given how much of the substantive debate has already played out across two public comment rounds, a further remand would mostly reward the FAA's own delay rather than resolve any genuinely open question. The agency, the White House, and Congress all agreed BVLOS regulation was overdue before this NPRM was even drafted. The honest test of that consensus is whether OIRA closes this review on schedule — or lets a rule that's already a year late slip into a third missed deadline.