The Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday it has awarded $12 million to 19 drone research and testing projects, each paired with one of the agency’s nine designated UAS test sites. The money comes through the UAS Broad Agency Announcement program, which pays companies to demonstrate detect-and-avoid, command-and-control, traffic management and identification technology under real-world conditions so the FAA can use the data in rulemaking.

Fourteen organizations share the 19 awards. ANRA Technologies took four, SPS Aerial Remote Sensing three, and General Atomics, Skydweller and DroneUp one each. The FAA framed the awards as advancing the Unleashing American Drone Dominance executive order of June 2025.

The $12 million is not new money: Congress ordered it in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, at $6 million a year starting in fiscal 2025. And the rule the test-site data is supposed to inform, Part 108, has sat at the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) since July 10.

ANRA Technologies Took Four of the 19 Awards

ANRA Technologies won four of the 19 projects in the FAA’s October 5 announcement: air taxi and vertiport connections, a common altitude reference for drones, a link between drone traffic systems and airport air traffic control, and AI tools that identify drone types. No other recipient won more than three.

SPS Aerial Remote Sensing took three awards covering drone visibility testing, a sensor system for drone traffic management and counter-drone operations, and tools to measure sensor performance. General Atomics will work on ground-based systems to help drones avoid other aircraft, the same company whose YFQ-42A collaborative combat aircraft DroneXL covered in September 2025. NAVMAR will test systems to help large drones fly safely, and Skydweller, whose solar aircraft flew 73 hours for the Navy last year, will test onboard systems to help large drones avoid other aircraft.

The rest of the list is single awards: Censys Technologies on satellite communications for long-range flights, OneRadio Corporation on passive radar for detect-and-avoid, DroneUp on a secure way to verify a drone’s identity and its approval to fly, Aerial Vantage on managing reserved drone airspace in cities, Lighthouse Avionics on surveillance for long-range drone routes, ResilienX on software to coordinate drone missions, Devorto Corporation on a long-range cargo drone service, Frequentis USA on a drone technology demonstration, and Oklahoma State University on drone visibility under its Aero Aware project. The FAA’s announcement lists the projects by name but gives no dollar figure per award and no schedule.

Several names are repeat customers. The FAA’s BAA final reports page lists ANRA under Call 003, General Atomics under Call 002, and both Lighthouse Avionics and ResilienX under Call 004. DroneUp is the odd one out: the company lost its Walmart delivery business in January 2025 and now shows up with an identity-verification project rather than a delivery one.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the program gives the agency another way to work directly with industry and the test sites. “The research supported through this program will give us better data,” he said in the release.

Congress Wrote the $12 Million Into Law in 2024

Section 925 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 set aside $6 million a year for matching funds at the UAS test ranges. The appropriation runs from fiscal 2025 through 2028, split evenly among the sites. Two fiscal years of it is exactly the $12 million announced on Monday.

The FAA quotes the section on its own BAA program page.

The FAA posted the solicitation on SAM.gov on September 30, 2025 and issued Call 001-2026 under it days later, with white papers due November 14. The FAA pushed that deadline to December 12 because of the government shutdown, then to January 9, 2026. A fourth amendment in March opened a separate call for the two test sites the FAA added in January, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, with white papers due April 9. The solicitation requires a one-to-one minimum cost share, with the FAA paying no more than half of any project’s cost, and the FAA’s own questions-and-answers document set the agency’s maximum share per test site at $1,333,333 once a ninth site was designated.

So each test site had about $1.3 million of FAA money to place, and the companies put up at least as much again. The executive order’s contribution is a paragraph instructing the FAA to make sure its test ranges are fully used for BVLOS, autonomy and advanced air mobility work. The appropriation that pays for Monday’s awards predates the order by more than a year.

The Rule the Data Is Meant to Inform Is Still Under White House Review

Part 108, the rule that would make routine beyond visual line of sight flight standard instead of waiver by waiver, has sat at OIRA since July 10. The executive order gave it 240 days, a deadline that passed in February.

The FAA’s Robert Reckert told Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas last month that the rule is at the “10-yard line” and that he hopes it publishes before the end of the year, as DroneXL reported when Zipline went looking for a $20 billion valuation on the strength of a rule that does not yet exist. Bedford’s own release says the BAA data will inform how the FAA integrates drones into the airspace. The rule that would do the integrating was written before any of Monday’s 19 projects flew.

DroneXL’s Take

I like this program, and I think the press release oversells it. Companies putting their own money alongside the FAA’s to generate detect-and-avoid and traffic-management data at nine test sites is exactly the kind of merit-based support for American drone technology that DroneXL has argued for, as opposed to tariffs and blacklists that punish operators to protect incumbents. The 1:1 match is the right design. ANRA, General Atomics, Lighthouse and ResilienX coming back for another round says the earlier reports were worth something to the agency.

But $12 million is what Congress ordered in 2024, delivered on schedule, dressed up as a drone dominance initiative. It works out to less than $1.5 million per test site and roughly $630,000 per project before the company match, which buys a demonstration, not a fleet. The administration’s actual lever on drone integration is a signature on Part 108, and that document has been sitting at OIRA for 87 days while the FAA announces research to inform a rule it already wrote. The test-site data will matter for the Part 108 amendments that follow the first rule, and nobody serious expects the final rule to be the last word. My read is that the sequence is backwards anyway. Publish the rule, then fund the data that shows where it needs fixing. Until the rule is out, every one of these 19 projects is testing against a final rule nobody has seen.

Sources: Federal Aviation Administration, FAA UAS Broad Agency Announcement Program, SAM.gov solicitation 697DCK-25-R-00278, The White House.

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