FAA Air Traffic COO Tells XPONENTIAL: ‘We See Drones As Aircraft, Operators As Pilots’

The drone industry has spent two decades arguing that uncrewed aircraft are aircraft and that commercial operators belong in the National Airspace System on equal terms with crewed aviation. On Tuesday morning at XPONENTIAL Detroit, the senior FAA official who runs day-to-day air traffic operations across U.S. airspace told the room the agency has come around to that view, and a new FAA test program on radar data sharing could land within two weeks.

Franklin McIntosh, Chief Operating Officer of the FAA‘s Air Traffic Organization (ATO), was joined onstage by Jessica Jones, Executive Director of the agency’s new Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, in a fireside discussion moderated by AUVSI President and CEO Michael Robbins. The conversation followed Robbins’s opening community address and the Pentagon fireside with Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy Michael Cadenazzi that DroneXL covered earlier today.

McIntosh, named permanent ATO COO on January 26, 2026 after eight months in the acting role, delivered the line of the panel when describing how the ATO workforce now thinks about uncrewed aircraft.

“We don’t see drones as drones, we see drones as aircraft,” McIntosh told the audience. “We don’t see drone operators as drone operators. We see them as pilots.” He added: “Everyone has equal rights and usage to the National Airspace System.”

A Cultural Shift At ATO

McIntosh, a 25-year FAA veteran who started as an air traffic controller and rose through the operational management ranks to Deputy COO before being confirmed as permanent COO this January, said an integration conversation a decade ago would have hit a wall.

“If we would have had a conversation on how we’re going to integrate drones, the most common answer from air traffic controllers and management was, ‘Oh, we’re going to have to. We’re not doing that,'” McIntosh said. He called the shift “monumental” and said it has translated into workforce buy-in for the integration agenda and for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking on beyond visual line of sight operations.

That airspace is moving 45,000 to 46,000 flights per day during normal periods, climbing to 54,000 to 55,000 in summer. McIntosh said scaling that volume while integrating drones and eVTOLs is the challenge the agency is now organizing around.

Radar Data Sharing Program Coming In Two Weeks

McIntosh closed his portion of the discussion with a news tease: an FAA test program on radar data sharing is imminent.

“I’m very excited about the new FAA test program on radar data sharing that we learned from the [test sites],” McIntosh said. “I think that’s going to be coming out here in the next few days, two weeks.”

The program builds on FAA work in North Dakota on shared situational awareness, which McIntosh referenced earlier in the panel. He said he and Robbins had both visited North Dakota earlier this year.

“What we need [is] shared situational awareness from the radar scope to the other side of the user to make sure that everybody is on the same page,” he said, calling the underlying work “a huge step forward.”

For BVLOS operators waiting on the FAA’s final Part 108 rule and the broader detect-and-avoid framework, a formal FAA test program on shared radar data would be a step toward operational scaling that has been talked about for years but has not been productized for commercial use. The Part 108 NPRM was published in August 2025, with the original comment period closing October 6 and a limited reopening for right-of-way and electronic conspicuity issues running through February 11, 2026.

McIntosh said the final rule, “scalable, risk-based, performance-based,” is coming “in the near future.”

eIPP: OTAs Signed, Year-End Operations Target

Jones, whose office was created in the January 2026 FAA reorganization announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Administrator Bryan Bedford, used her time on stage to update the audience on the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP). The DOT and FAA selected eight projects across 26 states on March 9, 2026, drawing from more than 30 proposals submitted in response to a September 2025 request. DroneXL covered the eIPP participant selection in March.

Jones confirmed that the Other Transaction Agreements with the eight participants have been signed, and her office is now building out the project appendices.

“We’ve got the basic work done, but we’re really working towards doing our appendices,” Jones said. “That’s where it’s going to get to the grit of what we want to learn from these demonstrations.” Asked about timing, she set a year-end target: “Our goal will be to have administration related to eIPP by the end of this calendar year.”

She referenced the April 28 Joby Aviation demonstration in New York, where she spoke at a Downtown Skyport news conference, as evidence that program participants are operationally ready. The other eIPP operators include Archer Aviation, BETA Technologies, Wisk Aero, Electra, Elroy Air, and Reliable Robotics. The program runs for three years after the first project becomes operational, with first operations targeted for summer 2026.

Jones cited internal FAA statistics to argue the industry has moved past the proof-of-concept phase: as early as 2024, she said, the U.S. logged 38 million drone flights and 16 million commercial Part 107 operations, with more than 500,000 FAA-certified remote pilots in the system today. Public FAA data puts the certified pilot count closer to 400,000, but the agency does not publish a current real-time figure.

“These aren’t hobbyist numbers,” she said. “This is real work.”

Counter-UAS: Batch Criteria Replace Individual Reviews

McIntosh and Jones devoted significant time to the FAA’s evolving counter-UAS posture, including how the agency will handle the expansion of mitigation authorities under the SAFER SKIES Act, signed into law on December 18, 2025 as Title LXXXVI of the FY 2026 NDAA.

McIntosh said the ATO has been reviewing Section 124 and Section 139 packages for counter-UAS deployments individually, and is now working on developing batch criteria so vendors and end users can move faster.

“The goal [is], instead of an individual 124 or 139 packages, can we develop criteria parameters that’s going to allow for their use once you have assurances that it’s not going to hurt the equities in the National Airspace System,” he said.

He framed counter-UAS deployment as primarily an air traffic management problem rather than a safety one:

“I don’t think it’s really a safety issue when it’s done correctly. It’s more about an air traffic issue and ensuring that when it’s used, how does it interact with the rest of everyone using the NAS?”

Jones added that the FAA is coordinating closely with the Department of War on directed energy systems under NDAA Section 1089, which established a pilot program to accelerate protection of critical defense facilities from UAS threats. Joint Interagency Task Force 401 announced five base selections on May 7, 2026: Fort Huachuca AZ, Fort Bliss TX, Naval Base Kitsap WA, Grand Forks AFB ND, and Whiteman AFB MO. A first-of-its-kind FAA-DoW directed energy demonstration at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on March 7, 2026 validated the systems against passenger aircraft safety risk, clearing the path for the base pilot.

NextGen Phase 2: An $18 Billion Ask Coming

McIntosh previewed the FAA’s next air traffic control modernization request. The $12.5 billion appropriated in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill covers NextGen Phase 1, what McIntosh called foundational infrastructure: new radars, voice switches, and communications. The next ask, he confirmed, will be $18 billion for “common automation platforms”, the digital, data-driven traffic management layer where shared situational awareness and integration of new entrants actually happen. He cited a historical budget pattern that frames the modernization debt: “93 percent of our budget years past was spent purely on sustainment, while 7 percent was only on advancing the National Airspace System.” UAS Traffic Management work, McIntosh said, has been the operational precursor for the digital, data-sharing layer Phase 2 is meant to fund.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve watched ATO speakers at this conference for years read prepared remarks that hedged on integration. McIntosh’s delivery on Tuesday felt different. The “we don’t see drones as drones” line was not slotted into a prepared talking point, and it came across as something he believes rather than a phrase a communications team handed him.

That matters because the ATO has historically been the part of the FAA that says no. Aviation Safety writes the rules, but the ATO is the operational unit that decides whether new entrants actually fly in the airspace those rules cover. A senior ATO official describing drone operators as pilots is a signal to controllers and managers throughout the system about how to think about every Part 107 waiver, eIPP demonstration, and BVLOS application on their desks.

The radar data sharing program is the practical test. If the FAA can formalize what the test sites have demonstrated, that primary radar data from FAA facilities can be made available to drone operators in near real time, the detect-and-avoid problem becomes meaningfully more tractable for everyone working below 122 meters (400 feet). The harder question is whether the program opens a path for commercial drone service providers to access shared radar data at scale, or whether it stays inside the test site framework.

If McIntosh’s two-week window holds, the announcement should land before the end of May 2026. If it slips past Memorial Day, that is a signal it got hung up in policy review at FAA headquarters or DOT, and worth asking about.

Sources: Panel observed live at XPONENTIAL 2026, Huntington Place, Detroit, May 12, 2026. McIntosh FAA bio at faa.gov; FAA reorganization announcement, January 26, 2026; eIPP participant announcement, March 9, 2026; Joint Interagency Task Force 401 directed energy pilot announcement, May 7, 2026.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.