A survey of 885 drone professionals presented on the opening day of Commercial UAV Expo found that 45.8% of them have answered the FCC’s Covered List decision by waiting. Only 13.8% have started moving to NDAA-compliant hardware, and 8.6% have a plan to do it inside two years.
Matt Collins, content manager at Commercial UAV News, walked through the findings at the 12:30 p.m. keynote at Caesars Forum on Tuesday. His publication ran the survey with Pilot Institute earlier this year. I was in the room, hours after sitting through the morning panel where three operators described what the same decision is already doing to their repair queues.
The date on the fieldwork matters as much as any percentage on the slides. It closed before the FCC opened the proceeding that would pull import clearance from drones the agency has already approved, and before Section 232 tariffs on imported drones were signed. Every frozen number below is the optimistic version.
Foreign Hardware Fills Three Quarters Or More Of Most Fleets
Nearly two thirds of respondents, 62.8%, said that 76% to 100% of their active fleet is DJI or other foreign-manufactured hardware. Just 13.1% fly an all-domestic fleet. The middle of the distribution is thin: 6.7% sit in the 1% to 25% band and 6.5% in the 26% to 50% band.
That shape says something the headline number does not. There is barely any partial adoption. Operators are either almost entirely on foreign hardware or entirely off it, which means the transition the Covered List assumes has not been happening gradually in the background. It squares with the Associated Builders and Contractors survey that found DJI is the primary drone for 97.1% of its members who fly, fielded in May, more than four months after the December designation.
The sample skews toward the operators with the least room to absorb a fleet replacement. Solo operators and independents made up 56.6% of the 885 respondents Commercial UAV News and Pilot Institute collected, small businesses of two to 10 people another 22.8%. Companies with more than 50 employees accounted for 8.5%.
That composition is a limit on the findings as much as a finding. This is a survey of a trade publication’s readership rather than a revenue-weighted picture of the industry, and it over-represents exactly the operators for whom a price increase is fatal.
Cost Of The Alternatives Beat Every Other Reason To Stay Put
Asked to name the biggest obstacle to transitioning away from foreign-manufactured drones, 46.5% picked the cost of the alternatives. Capability gaps came second at 24.1%. Everything else finished in single digits: 8.8% reported no obstacle at all, availability and regulatory uncertainty tied at 7.1%, workflow disruption drew 3.9%, and software lock-in 2.6%.
Add the first two and just over 70% of the industry is describing a product problem rather than a policy problem. The replacement either costs too much or cannot do the job. Collins made the point that the other barriers are real and get disproportionate airtime among people who cover this beat, then put the emphasis back where the data put it.
He was careful not to grade the wait-and-see group, and he was direct about the stakes. “It’s the most important conversation happening in this industry right now,” he told the room.
Clients Have Not Started Requiring NDAA Compliance
Only 7.1% of respondents said most or all of their clients require NDAA-compliant platforms as a condition of contract today. A third, 33.8%, said clients have not raised it at all. Another 20% expect the question soon without having fielded it yet, and 16.6% have some clients asking.
This is the pressure valve that explains the wait-and-see figure. An operator whose customers have never mentioned the Covered List has no commercial reason to spend on replacement hardware ahead of a rule that has not taken effect. The market signal that would normally force the change is not arriving, so the regulatory clock is running alone.
Collins noted that the operators whose clients are asking tend to work in verticals where the question has been live for years, and those firms started preparing well before December.
Part 108 Preparation Has Not Started At 43% Of Organizations
On the FAA’s pending beyond visual line of sight rule, 43% said their organization has not begun preparing. Another 21.5% called themselves somewhat prepared and 14.3% said they are worried they will not be able to comply. Just 3.5% described themselves as very prepared.
The most revealing number is the sentiment one. Asked what Part 108 will mean for them, 39.9% answered neutral or unclear, the single largest response in the set. The rule that is supposed to open routine BVLOS operations to American industry has not yet registered as either an opportunity or a threat for four in 10 respondents.
Some of that is reasonable. The final rule was due in February 2026 under an executive order and has not appeared, and preparing for a document nobody has read has limits. Plenty of the work respondents do today will never need Part 108 at all.
On workforce, 34.6% reported no meaningful challenge. Among those who did, the top answer at 31.6% was skill gaps in data and software handling rather than a shortage of bodies. Regulatory fluency followed at 25.8%, Part 108 organizational preparation at 19.1%, and recruiting qualified pilots at 18%. Pilot Institute sells training into that first gap, which is worth knowing when reading a survey it co-designed.
The 2025 Growth Went To The Largest Companies
Across all size tiers, 28.7% of businesses reported higher drone revenue or contract volume in 2025 than in 2024. Split by size, the number stops looking like an industry average. Large companies with 50 or more employees reported growth at 70.6%. Mid-size firms hit 45.4%, small businesses 30.5%, and solo operators 20.9%.
Growth is running better than three to one in favor of the largest firms over the smallest. The segment that makes up 56.6% of this sample is the segment least likely to have grown, and it is the same segment that named cost as the reason it cannot replace its fleet.
Optimism survived all of it. Two-year outlook came back 68.5% optimistic against 15.3% pessimistic, with 43% choosing cautiously optimistic and 25.5% very optimistic. Collins said Commercial UAV News and Pilot Institute will publish the full report later this year.
DroneXL’s Take
Wait and see is not a strategy. It is what people call it when there is nothing on the shelf to buy.
Give the 45.8% their due first, because the data defends them. Just over 70% of respondents named cost or capability as the blocker, and they are describing something I cannot argue with from the floor of this show. There is no American DJI Air 3S. There is no American Mavic 4 Pro. I have been looking for one since the Covered List landed in December, and the component gap DroneXL documented in August explains why: the motors, the gimbals and the flight controllers are not sitting in a US warehouse waiting for someone to assemble them. Telling a sole proprietor to replace a $1,100 aircraft with a $12,000 one is not a transition plan.
That is exactly what makes the number so bad. Everyone is being individually rational and the collective result is an industry standing still while the deadline walks toward it. Nobody outside the United States is waiting for us to work this out. Chinese manufacturers ship on their own schedule and Ukrainian builders iterate in weeks. Two years from now the gap this policy was meant to close will be wider, not narrower, and the people who paid for it will be the drone service providers whose survival I wrote about last month.
The client-demand number is the one that should worry anyone selling American hardware. At 7.1%, buyers are not asking for NDAA compliance. That is not a market pulling domestic manufacturers forward, it is a regulator pushing operators toward products their customers have not requested and cannot yet get. Regulation can outrun a supply chain. It cannot conjure one. The operators on stage this morning were living the same arithmetic from the maintenance end, watching repair turnaround stretch from days to three months while they waited.
Two dates decide how much worse this gets before the full report lands. Comments in PS Docket 26-189 close Wednesday, September 2, the middle day of this show, and Section 232 tariffs on imported drones and components take effect Thursday, the day the expo closes. If Collins runs this survey again in twelve months, the cost-of-alternatives bar will be taller, not shorter. The tariffs guarantee it.
Anyone in that 45.8% has one night left to put their own numbers on the record. The agency asked what this costs. Answer it.
Sources: Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote presentation by Matt Collins, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; Commercial UAV News / Pilot Institute industry survey, 885 responses; FCC Public Notice DA 26-758; Federal Register 91 FR 48870
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
