The FCC has told HOVERAir that importing, marketing or selling its VERSA flying camera in the United States is “a violation of U.S. law” and directed the company to stop immediately. The part of that statement with the longer reach was aimed at nobody in particular.

An FCC spokesperson told DroneXL the agency is “sending guidance to all Telecommunications Certification Bodies to strengthen their due diligence of applications” so they comply with their legal obligation not to certify equipment on the Covered List. That instruction goes to every body the Commission accredits.

The trigger was one bad grant. A certification body approved the VERSA, a Chinese-built camera that snaps into a propeller module and flies. The FCC says that authorization “was granted erroneously” and has since been set aside and pulled from the public database. By then the product had been announced as US-legal, covered as US-legal, and funded by American backers.

The FCC Outsources Nearly All Equipment Authorization

A Telecommunications Certification Body is a private firm the FCC accredits to review applications and issue grants of equipment authorization in its name. Manufacturers choose their TCB and pay it. The agency sets the rules, but the decision to approve a device sits with a contractor.

This is not an accident of the system. In an October 2025 order the Commission described TCBs as private third-party organizations to which it has delegated particular responsibilities, tasked with certifying that equipment complies with requirements both technical and non-technical, the latter category expressly including the rules prohibiting authorization of covered equipment. Screening the Covered List is their job, in writing.

The scale is the part worth absorbing. Compliance consultancy MarkReady counted 591 FCC-accredited test labs worldwide in April 2026, of which 67 also hold TCB status and can therefore both test a device and certify it. Fewer than a quarter of those labs sit in the United States.

The judgment they were handed is not an engineering one. Per the FCC, the VERSA camera on its own is “a prohibited UAS critical component produced in a foreign country” and, once the Flight Kit is attached, the whole thing “falls under the ban on UAS produced in a foreign country.” Reaching that conclusion means parsing a category, not measuring an emission.

The category is wider than it looks. The December 22 public notice defines UAS critical components as including, but not limited to, data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground control stations, navigation systems, batteries, motors, and sensors and cameras. A camera sits on that list by name, which is how a handheld gimbal ends up prohibited with no propeller anywhere near it.

Where the category stops is a live question. The FCC’s own Covered List FAQ states that the nationality of the producing entity is not relevant, because the test is whether the item was produced in a foreign country. An open-ended component list combined with a country-of-manufacture test leaves an obvious boundary problem: at what point does a foreign-built camera that could be mounted to an aircraft become a UAS critical component rather than a camera.

For now that call starts with the manufacturer. The same FAQ places responsibility on applicants to certify in good faith that a device was not produced in a foreign country, with the certification body reviewing the claim. The screen the FCC now wants tightened begins as a company’s own assertion about its own product.

Bad Grants Have Reached The Market Before

This is not the first failure of the screen. On June 9, the FCC announced that its Office of Engineering and Technology had found 33 separate FCC IDs relying on identical test reports from a single lab, SLG-CPC. Confronted, the lab conceded it had submitted falsified reports.

Some of those reports covered entirely different products, and the lab blamed its own review procedures.

The agency has also been removing labs wholesale. Under the Bad Labs order adopted in May 2025, the FCC had withdrawn or denied recognition to 23 laboratories by April 2026, all tied to foreign adversary ownership or control. In April it voted to go further and restrict labs in countries without reciprocal recognition agreements.

Those actions targeted who owns the lab. The VERSA grant, where the FCC gave DroneXL its full statement, raises a different question, because nobody has suggested the certification body involved was compromised. It appears to have read a Covered List category and reached the wrong answer.

The FCC could pull the grant at all because it voted itself the power to revoke previously approved equipment in October 2025. That authority was built for hardware hiding Covered List components. It is now being used on a certification body’s reasoning.

The Drone Rules Have Been A Moving Target Since December

The FCC added all foreign-produced drones and UAS critical components to the Covered List on December 22, 2025. Since then it has carved out Blue UAS hardware, Buy American products, devices holding Conditional Approvals, and in June a category of toy drones capped at 150 grams.

It has also spent the year chasing evasion, proposing $25,000 forfeitures against eight alleged DJI front companies in July and later reaching additional DJI-linked brands. DroneXL has been documenting the gaps between the rule and its enforcement since January.

Every carve-out is another judgment call handed to a contractor with a paying client on the other side of the desk.

The Guidance Itself Has Not Been Published

The FCC has not released the guidance itself. There is no docket number attached to it, no public notice, and no indication whether it will appear as a formal document or an internal advisory. The agency has also not named the certification body that issued the VERSA grant.

The Commission’s own Covered List page logs every related document it has issued, running through a power inverter notice on August 20. Nothing about TCB due diligence appears there.

That gap matters for a practical reason. A manufacturer with a pending application cannot comply with guidance it has not seen, and a TCB weighing a borderline drone-adjacent device this week has the same Covered List text it had last week. DroneXL has asked the FCC whether the guidance will be made public.

DroneXL’s Take

I have spent eight months arguing the Covered List is bad policy for American operators. This story is about something narrower and, in its way, more troubling. The rule is not actually being enforced by the government that wrote it, and the VERSA grant is how we found out.

The FCC wrote a categorical ban on an entire class of hardware, then delegated the call to roughly 67 private certification bodies scattered across the globe, most of them outside the United States, all of them paid by the applicants whose products they judge. It discovered this bad grant not through an audit but after a company had banked crowdfunding money and the tech press had told readers the thing was legal. The remedy is a memo.

I want to be fair about the difficulty, and about one fact that cuts against me. The Commission did not quietly assume TCBs would handle Covered List screening. It wrote the duty into an order in October 2025, in plain language. A regulator with a few hundred engineers also cannot personally examine tens of thousands of devices a year, and delegation is how every modern conformity assessment system works.

But a duty on paper is not a screen in practice. If a category is written so that a competent, uncompromised lab can look at a camera with detachable propellers and approve it in good faith, the category is the problem, not the lab. The agency now says HOVERAir was “apparently willfully violating” the rules, which may be true, and which also raises the question of how a willful violation cleared a body whose stated job was to catch it. My read is that the VERSA is not an outlier but the first one caught, and that the same ambiguity is sitting inside other grants issued since December.

The test is whether the guidance ever becomes a public document with a docket number. Guidance you can read is a rule. Guidance you cannot is a press statement, and this industry has had plenty of those.

Sources: FCC spokesperson statement provided to DroneXL, FCC Public Notice DA 25-1086, FCC Covered List FAQ, FCC Order FCC 25-71, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, MarkReady

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.