The Federal Aviation Administration will double its BEYOND drone testing program, adding up to eight new lead participants to fly larger drones, longer distances, and altitudes above 400 feet (122 meters). The Transportation Department announced the Phase 2 expansion on Thursday.

Phase 1 tested small drones dropping food and light packages on doorsteps. Phase 2 goes after harder problems, an FAA official told Bloomberg: larger drones hauling cargo to remote and rural areas, and flights above the 400-foot ceiling that could collect weather data along the way.

DroneXL has covered BEYOND since October 2020, when the FAA built it on the remains of the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Six years and more than 70,000 flights later, the program is growing again. The rule it was created to inform still isn’t finished.

FAA Opens BEYOND Phase 2 to Larger Drones and Higher Flights

The FAA will select up to eight new state, local, tribal, and territorial lead participants for BEYOND Phase 2, doubling the program under Section 920 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. Applications run through SAM.gov, with selections to be made at a future date.

The Transportation Department’s announcement frames the expansion around beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, public safety missions, on-airport operations, and complex airspace environments. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, confirmed to the job in July 2025, said Phase 2 “will expand the partnerships and operations needed to address remaining challenges” in those environments.

The specifics came out through Bloomberg, where an FAA official said the agency wants to move past the doorstep deliveries of Phase 1 and examine larger drones moving cargo to places trucks struggle to reach. The official also pointed to flights over greater distances and above 400 feet, territory useful for gathering weather data. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy cast the expansion as a way to keep next-generation aviation developed, tested, and built in the United States.

Phase 1 Logged 70,563 Flights Across Eight Lead Participants

BEYOND launched on October 26, 2020, as the successor to the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Its eight lead participants flew 70,563 flights, 48,383 of them beyond visual line of sight. That flight data now underpins the FAA’s proposed Part 108 rule.

The original eight are the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the transportation departments of Kansas, North Carolina, and North Dakota, the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, the city of Reno, Nevada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, according to the FAA’s program page. All of them stay on for Phase 2, per Bloomberg. DroneXL covered the program’s launch when the Integration Pilot Program wound down, and has followed its participants since, including the Choctaw Nation’s medical supply flights earlier this year.

The work spans package delivery, police support, and pipeline and power line inspection, and the FAA also uses the program to gather community feedback on noise and privacy. Those complaints shape rulemaking as much as the flight logs do.

The Waiver System BEYOND Was Meant to Replace Still Stands

Commercial operators still need visual observers or a case-by-case waiver to fly beyond line of sight, six years after BEYOND began collecting the data meant to replace that system. The FAA proposed Part 108 in August 2025 and has not finalized it.

The agency unveiled the proposed BVLOS rule on August 5, 2025, promising a common set of standards in place of one-off approvals. Amazon Prime Air and Alphabet’s Wing have both said the waiver system stifles industry growth, per Bloomberg. Since then the process has crawled: the FAA reopened the comment period in January with a two-week deadline, then blew past its own deadline for the final rule in June. Earlier this month, the DOT called the delay deliberate, while Zipline warned the uncertainty is freezing drone investment.

The FAA says Phase 1 data helped write the forthcoming rule. Phase 2 data will presumably help write whatever comes after it.

DroneXL’s Take

Doubling BEYOND is the right call, and it is also the easy one. The hard call is finishing Part 108, the rule all this flying was supposed to produce. The FAA has spent over a year not making it, and eight more test sites won’t make it for the agency.

Credit where due: BEYOND is a real program, and the caution behind it is defensible. Big cargo drones above 400 feet share air with crop dusters, medevac helicopters, and general aviation, and testing that in Oklahoma and Alaska before writing it into national rules is exactly how this should work.

But the industry has all the evidence it needs. What it’s waiting on is a signature. Six years of flight logs, 48,383 BVLOS flights, a published proposal, and a reopened-and-closed comment docket already sit on the FAA’s desk. When the DOT said this month that the delay was deliberate, Zipline’s warning about frozen investment stopped being a hypothetical and became the cost of the schedule.

Thursday’s announcement puts a date on nothing. Participants will be selected “at a future date,” and the final rule gets no timeline at all. Watch which lands first: if the FAA names its new data collectors before it publishes the rule six years of data were gathered for, every operator stuck in the waiver line will draw the obvious conclusion. My read is that the expansion is worth applauding exactly once, and then the only question that matters is the one the announcement didn’t answer.

Sources: Bloomberg, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration

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