BVLOS Rules: FAA and EASA Compare Notes at Vegas Expo

Senior regulators from the FAA and EASA shared a stage for the first time to compare their approaches to BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) drone flight, at the closing keynote of Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas on September 3, 2026. Robert Reckert of the FAA and Dan Dousi of EASA agreed their frameworks look different on paper but are converging on the same safety outcome, and both said no single rule will finish the job of scaling routine BVLOS operations.

Background

BVLOS is drone flight beyond what the remote pilot can see with the naked eye, the operation mode needed for long-range infrastructure inspection, agriculture, and package delivery. Under current rules, both the United States and the European Union treat it as higher-risk than standard visual-line-of-sight flying, and operators on both sides of the Atlantic have spent years working through waivers and case-by-case exemptions to fly it commercially.

That is changing on two different tracks. The FAA has proposed Part 108, a rule meant to replace individual BVLOS waivers with a standard certification path; as of early September 2026 it remains a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, with the FAA reopening comments on right-of-way and electronic-conspicuity requirements through February 11, 2026, and a final rule unlikely before late 2026 or 2027. The EU took a different route already in force: the U-space framework, adopted in 2021 and applicable since 2023, layered on top of SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment), a risk-based methodology now at version 2.5, adopted in 2025.

What Reckert and Dousi Said

The panel, titled "Two Skies, One Conversation: Comparing FAA and EASA Approaches to BVLOS Drone Operations," was moderated by Avtrain CEO Julie Garland and closed out the three-day expo at Caesars Forum.

Reckert, the FAA's acting division manager for emerging technologies within Flight Standards, was direct about the similarity underneath the different paperwork: "I don't think that our methodology and outcomes are that different – the framework is different," he said, adding that "although EASA and FAA take a different approach, the safety outcome that we're looking for is the same."

Dousi, EASA's head of department for Innovative Air Mobility, defended the EU's risk-based model, calling the current version of the standard "a good compromise" between rigor and usability for operators applying for Specific-category approvals.

Both regulators pushed back on the idea that a finished rulebook solves airspace scaling on its own. Reckert cautioned that "publishing a rule will not resolve every challenge," framing Part 108 as a transition rather than an endpoint, and pointed to airspace congestion as a problem regulation alone cannot fix: "We as a regulator can't do it alone. We can't write enough rules to make the congestion manageable." He also flagged data as the current bottleneck for both agencies: "The big lesson learned is the need to gather the data."

Part 108 vs. SORA: Where They Align and Differ

The two frameworks start from different legal traditions, the FAA has historically certified aircraft and pilots, while EASA's SORA scores the risk of each specific operation, but both now converge on the same practical questions: how does an operator prove the drone can detect and avoid other traffic, and how much airspace data does a regulator need before approving routine flight over people and infrastructure.

What This Means for Drone Pilots

For operators flying only inside one jurisdiction, the near-term picture is unchanged: US commercial BVLOS still requires a Part 107 waiver until Part 108 is finalized, and EU operators still work through SORA under their national aviation authority. The practical signal from this keynote is direction, not a deadline. Regulators on both sides are now talking to each other openly about aligning risk-assessment concepts, which increases the odds that a BVLOS approval built for one market translates faster into the other over the next few years.

For operators running fleets across both regions, drone delivery networks, infrastructure inspection contractors, and agricultural operators, the comparison is worth tracking closely: a company that designs its detect-and-avoid and data-logging systems to satisfy the stricter of the two frameworks today is less likely to need a costly redesign once Part 108 lands. Reckert's comment about data collection is the clearest hint of what regulators will ask for next: operators who already log detailed flight and conflict data will have an easier time qualifying under whichever rule applies to them.

Sources: DRONELIFE | Commercial UAV News