The FAA Is Doubling the Program It Uses to Test Routine Drone Flights

The Federal Aviation Administration is expanding the program it uses to test routine drone flights over American communities. On August 27, 2026, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced a second phase of the agency’s BEYOND program that will add up to eight new state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as lead participants, roughly doubling its size.

BEYOND pairs the FAA with local partners that run real drone operations, then feeds the safety and performance data back into federal rulemaking. Phase 1 participants logged more than 70,000 flights, the FAA said, including over 48,000 beyond visual line of sight, the category that matters most for commercial use.

What the expansion covers

Phase 2 was authorized by Section 920 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which extended the program through 2029. The FAA says the new partners will concentrate on the operations that are still hard to scale: flights beyond the operator’s sight, public safety flights, and drone activity on and around airports.

“America leads the world in aviation, and this expansion will help keep it that way,” Duffy said in the announcement. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford described the goal as “a regulatory framework that is safe, scalable and grounded in real-world data.” Bloomberg reported that the new phase is aimed at larger aircraft and longer-range routes than Phase 1 tested.

The FAA also pointed to public opinion where the flights already happen. In communities with existing drone delivery, the agency said 87 percent of residents like the idea and 89 percent would use the service, well above national polling.

Why “beyond visual line of sight” is the sticking point

Most of the commercial value in delivery drones, from dropping packages to inspecting pipelines and power lines, depends on flying past the point where a person on the ground can see the aircraft. Under current rules, each of those operations needs its own FAA waiver, granted case by case.

The intended fix is a rule known as Part 108, which would replace the waiver system with a standing set of performance requirements for detect-and-avoid equipment, remote identification, and operator certification. Congress set a January 2026 deadline for it, which the FAA missed.

That rule is now in final review. The FAA sent the completed version to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on July 10, 2026, the last significant step before publication, as Commercial UAV News reported.

Two questions remain contested: whether drones get right of way over crewed aircraft at low altitude, and how they must detect aircraft that are not broadcasting a position.

The BEYOND expansion sits inside a wider federal push on new airspace users. The FAA’s MOSAIC rules opened a certification path for personal electric aircraft this summer, and Boeing recently agreed to sell its drone and air-taxi units to Archer Aviation.