The rule that would let American commercial drones fly routinely beyond a pilot's line of sight reached the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on July 10, 2026. It has not come out. As of this week, the FAA's Part 108 rulemaking has sat in review for 93 days, past the 90-day window that Executive Order 12866 treats as standard, and eight months behind the February 1 deadline President Donald Trump's own June 2025 executive order set for a final rule.
That gap is not administrative trivia. It is the difference between a drone delivery industry that grows one negotiated permission at a time and one that grows on published requirements. Jessica Jones, the FAA's executive director of the Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, put the agency's own frustration on record at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas on September 2: "Getting Part 108 solves a major problem for the FAA: it gets away from one-off approvals to a more scalable, predictable NAS."
The operators have stopped waiting quietly. DoorDash Air holds a Part 135 air carrier certificate, the eighth US operator to get one, and is developing custom aircraft with a delivery launch targeted for this fall. Amazon's Prime Air runs 11 sites across 10 metro areas in seven states, and the company has said it wants to reach close to 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026. Zipline counts more than 2.7 million completed deliveries and over 135 million autonomous miles flown, and it has a joint target with Uber of one million deliveries a day by the end of 2029. Joby Aviation expects eVTOL passenger flights in the Dallas-Fort Worth area this month. Each of those programs runs today on waivers, exemptions and air carrier certificates that predate the rule. Each one scales faster if the rule lands.
A rule nobody outside government has read
Part 108, formally titled "Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations" and tracked as RIN 2120-AL82, would swap case-by-case Part 107 waivers for permits and certificates. An operator would meet published requirements and then fly, rather than asking the FAA to approve one mission at a time.
The FAA published the proposal in August 2025 and drew more than 3,000 comments. It reopened a narrower comment window in late January 2026 on right-of-way and electronic conspicuity, then sent the final text to OIRA on July 10. Nobody outside government knows how far the published version moved from the proposed one.
That uncertainty sits on top of a fight the industry has not settled. Drone operators pursuing Part 108 approvals have backed the FAA's proposal to give equipped, BVLOS-certified aircraft priority over unequipped ones in shared airspace, because it would cut the need for costly onboard detect-and-avoid hardware. The Air Line Pilots Association has objected to any framework that shifts collision-avoidance responsibility toward pilots of crewed aircraft. AUVSI, the largest drone trade group, has urged the FAA to adopt a layered detect-and-avoid approach that mixes technical and procedural fixes instead of picking a winner.
Robert Reckert of the FAA told Commercial UAV Expo that the agency hopes to publish the rule by the end of 2026. A separate FAA official told the same audience the rule was at the "10-yard line." Ten-yard lines are where drives stall.
The $12 million that arrived instead
Five days past the 90-day mark, on October 5, the FAA announced $12 million for 19 research projects paired with its nine designated UAS test sites. The work covers detect-and-avoid, command and control, traffic management and drone identification. The money is not new funding: the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act set aside $6 million a year through fiscal 2028, and awardees have to match it at least one to one.
Two of the nine test sites were added in January 2026, run by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. They are the first new federal test sites in nearly a decade. Congress standing up sites while the rule that would use them sits unreviewed tells you how this has gone.
The FAA says the research results will inform Part 108. Work that informs a rule already written is a strange kind of work.
Delivery's environmental shield goes to court
A second clock is running, and it does not depend on Part 108 at all. On July 28 the FAA signed a programmatic environmental assessment and a formal finding clearing commercial drone package delivery under Part 135 across the entire country, including Alaska, Hawaii and the territories.
The assessment models delivery hubs running between 100 and 1,150 average daily deliveries. To control noise, the FAA requires hubs to sit at least 600 feet from homes and other noise-sensitive land. Before this, the agency wrote a separate environmental study for each market, and Amazon's operations in Tolleson, College Station, Kansas City and Detroit each got their own. A new site that falls inside the national analysis limits can now lean on that single finding.
Fifteen states and Harris County, Texas, petitioned the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on September 28 to review and set the approval aside. The petition has not stopped deliveries. Wing began serving Lowe's customers in Charlotte that same week, and Amazon opened its first Ohio site in North Randall. What it does is keep the legal foundation of national drone delivery contested through a launch year that several operators have already budgeted for.
October 29: the spectrum vote
The FAA is not the only agency holding a date. The FCC votes on October 29 on opening the 800 MHz cellular band to drones. For BVLOS operators, network capacity is not a convenience. It is how a command-and-control link stays alive past the horizon, and more spectrum means more aircraft over the same coverage area at once.
The FCC's component rule for drones takes effect on October 13, two days from now. That one hits consumer hardware, and it will show up on retail shelves before most buyers understand what changed.
On October 19 the TSA closes registration for closed-door roundtables with BVLOS operators on model security programs. Those meetings only start after Part 108 publishes. Until the TSA's compliance guidance exists, operators subject to the security requirements will not know exactly what they are being asked to meet.
What the delay actually costs
Zipline's numbers show what the patchwork has produced so far: 2.7 million deliveries and 135 million autonomous miles, all flown under exemptions and certificates negotiated one at a time. Amazon's target of nearly 500 cities is reachable under Part 135. What Part 108 changes is who gets to try.
Police drone-as-first-responder programs fly under expedited waivers, and DroneXL counts more than 1,000 public-safety agencies using them. Inspection and mapping operators each negotiate their own approvals, and medical delivery operators do the same. The FAA's own estimate is that package delivery under Part 108 could begin one to two years after the rule is issued. Any operator planning around a spring 2027 start is already planning around a rule that does not exist in final form.
Reckert's warning at the Expo is the most honest read of where this lands. "Just because the rule is done doesn't mean that the work is done," he said, asked how the agency plans to communicate the new policies. Asked how to manage low-altitude airspace as it fills, he answered with one word: "Collaboration." He added that the agency cannot write enough rules to make the congestion manageable on its own.
Europe is not waiting on either of them. EASA's Daan Dousi described SORA 2.5, which replaces bespoke risk assessments with pre-built standard scenarios an operator can declare against and a national authority verifies. Both regulators now point at the same destination. Neither has arrived, and the FAA's own briefing materials concede the TSA work will not even begin until the rule is public.
The next dates are concrete. October 13 for the FCC component rule. October 19 for TSA roundtable registration. October 29 for the spectrum vote. The OIRA dashboard is the last item on the list, where RIN 2120-AL82 will flip from pending review to concluded at a date no FAA official has committed to. Earlier reporting on the agency's Beyond Phase 2 solicitation is in our Robotics & Drones coverage, and the FAA's own BVLOS briefing is here.