Indonesia's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced on August 31, 2026 that it is drafting new rules to govern commercial cargo and passenger drone operations — a deliberate break from the recreational-quadcopter framework the country has relied on since 2020. "Drones are no longer just for recreational use. They are now being used for cargo and even passengers," DGCA Director General Lukman F. Laisa said at a Jakarta press briefing. "We need to align this by creating new regulations."
The timing is not incidental. The announcement lands weeks before Indonesia's bid for a seat on the International Civil Aviation Organization's governing Council, to be decided at ICAO's 43rd Extraordinary Assembly Session in Montreal on November 19–20, 2026. That election exists because a 2016 Protocol amending Article 50(a) of the Chicago Convention entered into force on June 12, 2026, expanding the Council from 36 to 40 member states — the first enlargement in decades. Indonesia, an ICAO member since 1950 that held a Council seat for twelve consecutive terms from 1962 to 2001, is running to end a 25-year absence, and has told ICAO that drone-technology development sits alongside sustainable aviation fuel and workforce training as a plank of its candidacy.
Steelmanning the caution
There is a real case for moving deliberately here, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than waved off. Indonesia is a 17,000-island archipelago with 257 airports and, in the first half of 2026 alone, roughly 43 million domestic and international passengers moving through its airspace. A cargo drone or air taxi that fails over a populated strait or a congested approach corridor is a different risk category than a photography quadcopter drifting near a rice paddy. Aviation regulators everywhere — the FAA with its slow, multi-year path to BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) rulemaking, EASA with its phased U-space framework — have concluded that rushing certification for autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft sharing controlled airspace with passenger jets is the wrong kind of speed. Indonesia's existing framework, Permenhub No. 37/2020, and the SIPUDI and SIDOPI-GO digital permitting systems its civil aviation directorate launched in 2022, were built for registration, pilot certification, and hobbyist-scale operations. They were never designed to certify an aircraft carrying freight or people, and pretending otherwise would be the more dangerous shortcut.
Why the ICAO bid actually helps the argument for speed
But the steelman only justifies rigor, not delay — and the ICAO bid is precisely why Jakarta should not let this drag. Laisa's own framing was that regulation must track "every change in an Annex issued by ICAO," which is the right instinct: align to a global standard rather than invent a bespoke Indonesian rulebook that foreign operators and manufacturers then have to reverse-engineer. Indonesia's Ministry of Transportation says it is already guiding two domestic companies developing drone technology while separately vetting two foreign firms seeking to operate in Indonesian airspace — a live queue of applicants who need a rulebook, not a talking point. A government that wants a Council seat partly on the strength of its drone-regulation experience has every incentive to actually finish that regulation on a public timeline, rather than let "drafting new regulations" become a standing press-conference line that outlives the election it was timed to support.
The proportionality test
The honest middle path is a tiered framework, which is what Laisa's own list of gaps — human resources, infrastructure, airport-utilization protocols — implies is coming. Weight- and risk-based categories (as Indonesia's 2020 rule already partially does) let low-risk logistics drones in uncongested regional airspace move faster than passenger-carrying eVTOL aircraft near Jakarta's or Bali's primary airports. What regulators should resist is a single, maximally cautious standard applied uniformly to a delivery drone over a plantation and an air taxi over Soekarno-Hatta's approach path — that flattening is what turns "proportionate regulation" into a de facto moratorium, and it is the failure mode Indonesia's own aviation safety score (which the ministry says already tops the global average) suggests it doesn't need to default to.
What to watch
Three things will tell us whether this is a genuine regulatory build-out or diplomatic staging: whether DGCA publishes a draft rule with a public comment period before the November vote, whether the two foreign operators "under monitoring" actually receive operating certificates or permits within a defined window, and whether the categories that emerge track ICAO's own Annex updates rather than inventing parallel Indonesian-specific hurdles. If Jakarta wins its Council seat and then quietly shelves the passenger-drone rulemaking, that will be the clearest signal that the November announcement was foreign-policy theater. If it instead ships a workable, risk-tiered rule on a fixed clock, Indonesia will have done something more useful than winning a vote: given the rest of the Asia-Pacific a template for regulating advanced air mobility without either recklessness or paralysis.