The FAA, the US Federal Aviation Administration, missed its spring 2026 deadline for the Part 108 final rule, confirmed unmet as of 18 June 2026 with no new date set1. Part 108 would authorise routine beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, flight: drones operating out of the pilot's direct sight, the regime that delivery, inspection and emergency-response operators need to scale. The specific blocker is a contested right-of-way provision under which a crewed aircraft that does not broadcast its electronic position must yield to a BVLOS drone. More than 50% of the 3,100-plus public comments fought over that single point.
Pilots' organisations resist ceding presumptive priority to an unmanned system, so a procedural rule has stalled on one clause about who has precedence in shared airspace. The dispute turns on doctrine, not on any technical safety case. The rule is held up by precedence, not by any safety case against the drones themselves.
The supply side is suspended in parallel. The Section 232 UAS Investigation, the US Commerce Department inquiry into drone imports as a national-security threat, is roughly 90 days past its statutory deadline with no report2. Importers cannot price the Chinese-drone tariff they have been bracing for, the same unresolved Chinese-import question that has driven Autel's Covered List challenge. A commercial operator cannot plan a BVLOS fleet and an importer cannot price a tariff, both at once, during the period of highest global demand the sector has seen.
