The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is recruiting drone operators for a series of closed-door technical roundtables on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) security, and the meetings will not happen until after the Part 108 final rule publishes. The notice appeared in the Federal Register on September 4. Requests to participate are due October 19.

TSA wants the sessions to shape model language for the TSA-approved security programs that Part 108 operators will need. In plain terms, the security half of the rule does not yet come with instructions for complying with it, and TSA plans to write those instructions after the rule is final, in rooms it fills and closes itself.

DroneXL has covered the TSA piece of Part 108 since the joint proposal dropped in August 2025, and this is the first public signal of how TSA intends to turn its proposed security program requirement into something an operator can actually submit. Vic Moss of the Drone Service Providers Alliance posted the notice to LinkedIn on Thursday evening with one line: “expect another Part 108 delay.” The document supports a narrower reading, and a more useful one.

TSA Picks the Participants and Closes the Door

TSA will validate every participant as a representative of a BVLOS operator or an industry association, cap attendance at two people per organization, and require a non-disclosure agreement before anyone enters. Each roundtable is closed to the public under Sensitive Security Information rules, and TSA may trim the list further.

The notice, signed September 1 by Scott C. Gorton, TSA’s acting assistant administrator for strategy, policy, and engagement, says TSA will invite “relevant associations and corporate representatives known to TSA through its regular stakeholder engagements.” Operators flying BVLOS today under FAA waivers or exemptions, and those planning to seek a Part 108 permit or certificate, may also ask in. Kristine Adams at [email protected] is the contact, and TSA may hold the sessions in person with a virtual option or virtually only.

TSA closes the meetings under 49 U.S.C. 114(r) and 49 CFR part 1520, the statute and regulation that protect Sensitive Security Information. Participants must qualify as covered persons under 49 CFR 1520.7 or be designated as such by TSA for the event, and their duty to protect what they hear survives the meetings. The sessions are not a deliberative body: TSA wants individual views rather than group recommendations, and the notice draws an explicit line between this format and a federal advisory committee. There is no public comment period attached.

The Security Program Language Does Not Exist Yet

TSA proposed two security requirements in the August 2025 joint notice with the FAA: vetting of certain covered personnel and a TSA-approved security program for certain operators. TSA is still finalizing both, and the model approaches for meeting them will be built from what participants bring to the roundtables.

That sequencing is the news. The roundtables are meant to surface the organizational, structural, technological, and physical methods operators already use to secure BVLOS flights, so TSA can turn them into model approaches other operators can copy. TSA says outright that some procedures operators already follow under FAA waivers may adequately satisfy parts of its security program requirements. An operator reading that sentence in October 2025 would have found it hard to believe.

The proposal that sentence softens was the most contested security text in the rulemaking. As DroneXL reported when the comment period closed, the TSA provisions drew formal opposition from Amazon, Walmart, DoorDash, Wing, and Zipline, with Wing warning that every package handler in a drone delivery chain could face TSA enrollment, and two leaders of the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus asking TSA to withdraw and start over. Whether the final text narrows that scope is unknown until it publishes. What the roundtable notice shows is that even a narrowed version will arrive without a compliance template.

The FAA Rule Sits at OIRA With Meetings Booked Through September 16

The FAA’s final Part 108 rule has been under White House review since July 10, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs still listed it as pending on September 4. OIRA’s calendar shows stakeholder meetings on the rule booked through September 16, which makes publication before mid-month unlikely.

OIRA’s entry for the rule flags a statutory legal deadline the FAA has already missed, on top of the 240-day clock in Executive Order 14307 that expired February 1. The meeting log for the rulemaking runs to 51 sessions across both stages, with final-rule meetings held August 28, September 1 and September 3, and more booked for September 8, 14, 15 and 16. OIRA cancels pending meetings if a review wraps up first, so the calendar can shorten, but as booked it points to no clearance before mid-September. Day 90 of the standard review window falls on October 8. TSA’s October 19 deadline for roundtable requests lands 11 days after that, and TSA says it may adjust the registration period once its own final rule publishes.

The slip has a documented history. The FAA reopened the comment file for two weeks in January on electronic conspicuity and right-of-way, blew through its February deadline over the same right-of-way fight, and in August the Department of Transportation’s chief of staff told the Commercial Drone Alliance the delay was deliberate, to avoid hard-coding today’s technology into the rule. Roughly 3,100 comments were filed against the original proposal, which DroneXL broke down section by section when it published.

One gap in the record matters here. TSA’s companion rule, RIN 1652-AA80, does not appear as a separate entry on OIRA’s pending-review list as of September 4, and TSA’s notice describes its own final rule only as forthcoming, with no date. Whether the TSA text travels inside the FAA package or has not been submitted at all, TSA has not said.

DroneXL’s Take

Moss is right that this notice is bad news for anyone waiting to fly BVLOS at scale, and he is pointing at the wrong calendar. The FAA rule can publish in October and still leave operators unable to comply with its security half, because the model program does not exist.

It will be drafted after publication, from a room TSA picks, under NDA. The delay is real. It moves from the Federal Register to TSA’s approval queue, where nobody can see it.

I will give TSA the statute. Security-vulnerability discussions belong under SSI, and 49 U.S.C. 114(r) does not leave the agency much choice about closing the room. What the statute does not require is an invitation list built from the regulator’s existing contacts, or a two-seat cap that a national retailer fills as easily as a two-person mapping shop and benefits from far more. Pete Meachum stood in front of the Commercial Drone Alliance five weeks ago and said Secretary Duffy wants no lock-in protection for incumbents. A closed roundtable seeded from TSA’s own contact list is how lock-in gets written without anyone deciding to write it.

The most useful sentence in the notice is TSA’s own concession that what waiver holders already do may satisfy parts of the security program. That is what Wing and Zipline argued last fall, and it is the door small operators should walk through: the operators with years of waiver-based BVLOS logs hold exactly the evidence TSA says it is looking for. Request a seat before October 19, bring the procedures you already fly by, and make TSA say on the record why they fall short.

Three dates now govern the security half of Part 108. September 16 is the last OIRA meeting on the books. October 8 is day 90. October 19 is TSA’s cutoff. If the FAA rule clears OIRA before October 8, the roundtables can convene this fall; if it does not, the FAA rule slips into a 30-day extension and TSA’s process slips with it. My read is that the second outcome is the one this notice is quietly built for.

Sources: Federal Register, Reginfo.gov, Federal Register (NPRM, 90 FR 38212), Vic Moss via LinkedIn.

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