The people who will staff American drone companies in three years are supposed to be buying their first aircraft right now, and Greg Reverdiau does not think they can. The Pilot Institute co-founder spent the second half of the Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote on Tuesday, in conversation with Commercial UAV News content manager Matt Collins, arguing that restricting cheap foreign drones has quietly closed the door that every working pilot in the room walked through.
He put the question to the audience directly. Anyone planning to hire in the next two or three years should ask where those candidates are going to come from, because the affordable aircraft that produced the current generation is getting harder to buy and the parts to build one are getting harder to find.
Reverdiau spent 17 years managing flight schools before drones, part of 24 years in aviation. He has watched a regulator constrict a training pipeline once already.
Availability Is The Barrier Nobody Ranked High Enough
Asked which obstacle the industry is underrating, Reverdiau went straight past cost to supply. His reading of the policy history is that the move away from foreign-made drones was supposed to come with a ramp-up period for domestic manufacturing. That ramp never really happened, and the schedule has since accelerated. What follows, in his view, is a stretch where the aircraft are not there at all, or are there in quantities too small for the people who need them.
The scale is the part that gets lost. Roughly half a million people hold remote pilot certificates in the United States, a figure in line with the FAA’s own forecast of 472,269 by 2028. Part 107 turned 10 last week. A large share of the aircraft those pilots bought in the early years are reaching the end of their service lives at the same moment replacements are hardest to source, and the domestic component gap DroneXL documented in August explains why a fast substitution is not available.
He does not expect the policy to reverse, and said anyone waiting for that should look harder at the data.
The Wait-And-See Group Is Caught In A Loop With No Exit
The survey Commercial UAV News presented earlier in the same hour found 45.8% of respondents taking a wait-and-see approach to fleet procurement. Reverdiau declined to call that a mistake, and instead described the trap it sits inside.
Take what he calls the 95% of users, the individual Part 107 operators flying relatively affordable aircraft precisely because they are affordable and available. Tell them to wait, and they risk being caught without a working platform. Tell them to buy now, and the compliant option may cost several times more while doing less of the job. Meanwhile the manufacturers who would build the cheaper replacement cannot justify the production line until the orders exist.
“It’s a snake eating its tail,” he said, and then admitted he does not know the answer. An industry figure with a training company to sell could have offered a tidy five-step plan. He said instead that the loop is real and nobody has broken it.
More Than 80% Of Today’s Pilots Started On A Cheap Foreign Drone
Reverdiau cited a Pilot Institute survey from last year in which more than 80% of respondents said they entered the field on an affordable foreign-made drone. Most of the rest built their own. Both of those doors are narrowing at once, since the components for a home build are now as hard to source as a finished aircraft.
The organization has surveyed this ground before. Its survey of 8,056 operators, first reported in December, found 70% running fleets that were entirely DJI, with 23.8% saying they would shut down their drone business outright if the restrictions held.
This is the part of the policy debate that gets almost no airtime. Argument over the Covered List has centered on the operators working today, which is where the immediate damage lands. Reverdiau’s point is that the same action removes the cheap first purchase that turns a curious teenager into a repair technician a decade later. States now building drone programs into their schools are training people who will need something to fly.
Aviation Already Ran This Experiment With The 1,500-Hour Rule
The comparison Reverdiau reached for comes from his own career. After the 2009 Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, Congress mandated higher qualification standards, and in August 2013 the minimum flight time for an airline first officer rose from 250 hours to 1,500. Regional carriers that had hired at 250 to 500 hours lost their intake overnight.
He watched the result from inside the flight schools. By his account it took roughly a decade for the pipeline to refill, and the shortage that followed reshaped hiring across the industry.
The causation is contested. The Air Line Pilots Association has argued for years that the rule made flying measurably safer and that talk of a lasting shortage was overstated by carriers who wanted the standard lowered. What nobody disputes is the mechanism Reverdiau is pointing at: raise the cost of entry and the effect surfaces years later, in who is available to hire.
A Part 107 Certificate Is Only The Starting Line
Reverdiau was blunt about what the certificate is worth on its own. He called Part 107 the license to be dangerous, a regulatory minimum rather than a qualification, and said educators including his own company have to teach well past it.
The gap is data. He pointed to Jared Janacek, president of Texas Drone Company, who teaches Pilot Institute’s mapping and surveying course and sat on the Covered List panel earlier the same morning, and described how Janacek runs two teams, one capturing data and one processing it, each trained in the other’s work. That cross-training is what the survey’s skills gap actually looks like when somebody solves it.
Part 108 Asks The Industry To Run Before It Can Walk
Reverdiau’s skepticism about autonomy is not about the technology, which he thinks largely exists. He pointed to a rail operator he saw present at this show a few years back, flying a drone from a dock over a closed yard to locate rolling stock, as the shape of the job where autonomy fits cleanly. The obstacle he named is the FAA, and specifically a risk management case nobody has finished building.
Under the proposed rule the work itself changes more than most operators realize. The person on shift is not a pilot but a supervisor of software, expected to stay alert through long stretches where nothing happens. He compared it to airport screening, where an operator spends nearly all of a shift finding nothing and the brain stops registering what it sees. Screeners rotate on short cycles for that reason, and nobody has designed the equivalent for a drone operations center.
His structural objection is that the rule skips a step. The agency’s own history moved incrementally, from waivers for every flight to Part 107, then night operations by waiver and later by regulation, then flights over people the same way. Beyond visual line of sight should follow that path, starting with manual BVLOS with a human in the loop rather than jumping to full autonomy.
That position is on the record. Pilot Institute filed a 28-page comment on the Part 108 proposal in October, opposing the elimination of non-autonomous BVLOS under Part 107 and recommending that flight coordinators hold a remote pilot certificate with an added autonomous BVLOS rating, backed by a certification standard and a written exam. Reverdiau expects the final rule in the first quarter of 2027, and said he is not frustrated by the delay because it suggests the comments are being read. The Department of Transportation has said the wait is deliberate rather than backlog.
DroneXL’s Take
The strongest argument against the Covered List got made on stage today, and it had nothing to do with DJI.
Every version of this debate I have covered since December has been about the operators flying now. That is the visible damage and it deserves the coverage. Reverdiau put his finger on the invisible part: this policy is dismantling the on-ramp. Almost everyone I know in this industry started with a cheap camera drone and a bad idea about what to do with it. Take that away and the loss shows up in 2031, when somebody is trying to staff a program and the applicants are not there.
I want to be careful with the aviation parallel, because ALPA has a real case that the 1,500-hour rule made flying safer and that the shortage was talked up by airlines who wanted cheaper labor. Fine. The safety benefit and the pipeline damage are separate accounts, and the second one came due about a decade later. Nobody in Washington in 2013 was thinking about 2023 hiring, and nobody writing drone policy now appears to be thinking about 2036.
What I keep coming back to is that the loop Reverdiau described has an obvious exit and nobody is walking through it. Somebody has to build an affordable American drone. Not a $12,000 enterprise platform with a Blue UAS listing, an actual sub-$1,000 aircraft that a 17-year-old can buy with summer job money. Until that exists, every argument about transition timelines is theater. I have been to enough of these shows to know what is on the floor, and I did not see it this morning.
Reverdiau’s Q1 2027 estimate for Part 108 is the most concrete forecast anyone gave today, and it is worth holding him to. The rule was due as a final in February 2026 under an executive order and never arrived. If it slips past March 2027, the agency will have missed its own deadline by more than a year on the rule the entire American BVLOS industry is waiting on. His walk-before-you-run argument looks better every month that happens.
Sources: Commercial UAV Expo opening keynote, Greg Reverdiau and Matt Collins, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; Pilot Institute; FAA Aerospace Forecast; Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
