The Department of Transportation slowed its Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) rule down on purpose. Pete Meachum, chief of staff to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, told a Commercial Drone Alliance audience in Washington, D.C. on Friday that the department held the draft while Duffy pushed for a full internal debate about one risk: writing today’s technology into a rule the industry has to live with for decades.
The admission lands six months past the rule’s deadline. President Trump’s June 2025 executive order gave the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 240 days to publish a final Part 108, a clock that ran out on February 1. The text now sits at the White House regulations office, three weeks into its final review.
DroneXL has tracked this rulemaking since the proposed rule dropped in August 2025, and Friday’s remarks reframe the slip as strategy rather than backlog. The industry executives who spoke before Meachum made clear they see it differently.
Duffy Held the Rule to Avoid Locking In Today’s Technology
Meachum said the department slowed the BVLOS rulemaking because Duffy wanted assurance that the final text would not hard-code current technology, leaving the FAA stuck within a few years with a rule it cannot bend when better detection or navigation tools arrive. He acknowledged the pressure to move faster, both in the department’s meetings with industry and from the room he was standing in, and said BVLOS is the one rulemaking DOT chose to take extra time on while, by his account, its other rules shipped on schedule or ahead of it, in remarks reported by FedScoop.
The department also weighed a second failure mode: a rule that entrenches whoever is biggest today. “The secretary certainly doesn’t want lock-in protection for incumbents,” Meachum said, adding that Duffy wants a crowded, competitive field.
That sentence deserves scrutiny, because the docket tells a different story about the draft as written. Pilot Institute’s 28-page comment warned last October that the proposal favors large, well-funded companies and could shut out thousands of operators already flying BVLOS safely under waivers. An anti-incumbent rule and the draft those commenters read are not yet the same document.
Meachum offered one reassurance on both timing and content: the wait is nearly over, he said, and the published rule will closely track the draft the public has already read. That draft sets standards for aircraft manufacturing, operational approvals, separation distances, security, and record-keeping.
Zipline’s CEO Says Certainty, Not Speed, Decides Where Capital Goes
A panel of drone chief executives, scheduled just before Meachum spoke, pressed the opposite case: that every month without a final rule makes the American market harder to underwrite, because investors price regulatory certainty before they price anything a drone company actually builds. “Convincing investors relies on certainty of regulatory approach and framework,” said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, who argued that making the regulatory environment unknowable is the fastest way to freeze private capital out of the sector.
Cliffton is not pleading poverty. Zipline closed a $600 million round in January at a $7.6 billion valuation and already holds federal BVLOS approvals, earned one exemption at a time. When the operator with that kind of head start says uncertainty is the problem, the warning lands hardest on everyone smaller.
The 240-Day Clock Ran Out in February, and the Rule Sits in White House Review
Executive Order 14307, signed June 6, 2025, gave the FAA 240 days to publish a final BVLOS rule, a deadline that expired February 1, and the six months since have been consumed by a record government shutdown, a reopened comment file, and White House review. DroneXL covered the order the day it was signed, when Commercial Drone Alliance CEO Lisa Ellman praised its focus on safety and innovation.
The 43-day federal shutdown froze the docket through the fall. In late January the FAA reopened the Part 108 comment file for 14 days on ADS-B Out, electronic conspicuity, and detect-and-avoid requirements, the equipage questions tangled up with the proposal’s contested right-of-way rules. That window closed February 11. Roughly 3,100 comments were filed against the original proposal, an unusually heavy response for a specialized aviation rule.
The rule finally moved on July 10, when the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs received it for final review, the last stop before publication. Review of major rules there can run up to 90 days. Meachum told the room the industry will not wait much longer.
DroneXL’s Take
Meachum handed this industry one sentence worth engraving: no lock-in protection for incumbents. I intend to hold DOT to it. As proposed, Part 108 reads like a rule built for operators who can afford certification departments, and the small commercial pilots who have flown BVLOS safely under waivers for years told the FAA exactly that during the comment period. If the final rule opens a lane for them, the delay bought something real. If it publishes the draft with a new date on it, the anti-incumbent talk was just talk, and the department burned six months to deliver the lock-in it says it fears.
On the merits, I will take slow over prescriptive. This industry already lived through Remote ID, a rule written around assumptions that the hardware and the databases took years to catch up with, and pilots paid for that gap in retrofit modules and confusion. Duffy is right on the principle. A rule you cannot bend is worse than a rule that is late.
Cliffton’s warning still stands, and it compounds weekly. While Part 108 has sat in the queue, the UK Civil Aviation Authority logged 1,672 BVLOS trial flights and cycled that evidence into named policy concepts, as Rafael Suárez reported for DroneXL in June. The country that wrote the book on aviation is now the one asking investors to wait for the rulebook.
The test has a date and a venue. The rule went to OIRA on July 10, and Meachum said in public that what publishes will closely track what everyone has already read. Publication day grades that claim. Watch whether the conspicuity and right-of-way sections moved after the January reopening, and watch whether anything in the final text opens the door the draft closed on small operators. Duffy’s anti-incumbent principle either describes this rule or indicts it.
Sources: FedScoop, The White House, Commercial UAV News.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
