First Thoughts on the Part 108 BVLOS Rule
Seven days ago the FAA published the Part 108 BVLOS Proposed Rule. ADI has spent the last week reviewing the 150 page preamble and the text of the rule. We will be publishing more in-depth articles over the coming weeks but, for now, wanted to share our top-level thoughts on the impact the proposed rule will have for agricultural drones.
This proposed rule represents the first step towards a safer NAS - where BVLOS rules for drones are in place and, critically, realistically scoped, so small operators can reach compliance while focusing on their small businesses. ADI is especially grateful to the FAA for explicitly structuring the rule to separately address different operational categories - by creating an agriculture-specific regulations, the FAA helps ensure that American agricultural airspace is regulated in a manner that reflects the differentiated risks and use-cases from other forms of BVLOS operations.
The FAA’s Permitted and Certificated Operations (P&CO) framework is a great step towards a more dynamic accountability model - where individual operators can get on the first rung of the compliance ladder, while large companies are held accountable up the corporate ladder. We look forward to engaging with the FAA on how the P&CO framework should be applied to Part 108 in detail, and hope to take this momentum and apply it in a future Part 137 rulemaking.
The FAA’s openness to expanding shielded operations, if applied to agricultural land, will be a tremendous step in the right direction. By shielding American agricultural land, we would make compliance faster and simpler, allowing all of America’s agricultural drone operators to engage with the FAA and integrate into the NAS safely instead of being forced underground by the complexities of Part 137 waivers, which even the FAA acknowledges contains “provisions [that] cannot be met by UA operators.”
ADI is concerned to see the FAA state that the 1,700 Part 137 licenses for agricultural drones represents the totality of operators points to huge underreporting problem, as well as an “unknown unknowns” issue. ADI will continue to engage with the FAA to ensure they take steps to make regulations that are better suited to the realities of America’s farmers.
We will be publishing more detailed articles on these reports and more in the coming weeks. If you would like to get in touch and discuss this further with our team, please email Info@AgDroneInitiative.org.