BVLOS at Scale Needs Aircraft That Can Talk to Each Other

What the

FAA said out loud in Las Vegas On September 2, at Commercial UAV Expo, two FAA officials described what happens after the BVLOS rule lands. Neither of them treated the rule as the finish line. Jessica Jones, who runs the FAA's office for advanced aviation technologies, framed Part 108 as the exit from one-off approvals, with a scalable and predictable national airspace system as the goal. Ben Supko, the agency's associate administrator for security and intelligence, described what changes on the security side when routine drone operations become common rather than exceptional. Read together, the two sets of remarks describe a gap that anyone flying long linear routes will eventually have to close. The aircraft has to be findable, identifiable and able to give way, and the operator has to be able to prove all three.

Regulation is only one input Jones placed Part 108 inside a wider airspace modernization programme, and argued that the enabling condition is shared information. Her description of an information centric national airspace system is essentially a database model in which each participant pulls what it needs to operate safely, rather than one agency holding everything. She also put a figure on traffic management: 1.5 million BVLOS flights already deconflicted through UTM systems, with more expected.

For operators, that is the useful part of the message: the deconfliction layer is not theoretical. Supko's version of the same idea is pattern recognition. More routine flights generate more data about what normal looks like, which makes abnormal activity easier to spot. He was explicit that the preferred response to an unidentified aircraft near a sensitive site is not jamming or kinetic action: mitigate with ground resources where possible. He also suggested authorities may want an operator's history, not just its live position, which quietly turns recordkeeping into a security input.

The technical gap GAO flagged

None of that works if drones and crewed aircraft cannot exchange information. A GAO report delivered to congressional committees in February 2026 found that the FAA's planning did not yet name clear roles for federal and non-federal players, or technical milestones, for a two way link between drones and crewed aircraft. The FAA's own position, as reported by GAO, is that existing technology is not enough: something beyond ADS-B is needed to allow the exchange in both directions. The FAA told GAO it intends to develop performance based standards for industry to build against. The report carries one recommendation: the FAA should define concrete actions, including roles, cost estimates and technical milestones, and get started on them. The Department of Transportation concurred. The same report notes an FAA forecast of a commercial drone fleet above one million aircraft by the end of 2025, rising to 1.18 million by 2029, which is why detect and avoid keeps returning to the front of every conversation about scale. One detail from the report is worth carrying into procurement: ADS-B has carried most approved waivers to date, and the stakeholders GAO interviewed rated it above camera, acoustic and radar options, while noting that stacking those sensors on top of ADS-B adds weight.

What this means for inspection programmes

If your work is transmission lines, pipelines, rail or long highway corridors, the consequences are already visible. Your aircraft's identity and position broadcast is not a fleet configuration detail. It is the piece that lets other airspace users, and authorities, see you. Detect and avoid capability matters most against traffic that is not broadcasting, which is the expensive half of the problem and the half that GAO says is not yet planned. Flight records become an external artefact. Expect to produce them for a client, an insurer, or an authority asking what an aircraft was doing over a specific site on a specific day. For teams already keeping flight logs inside a fleet platform (tools like Aerosyne's are one option in that category), the question worth asking is whether the record can be exported in a form another party can read without your software in front of them.

The takeaway Do not wait for Part 108 to solve the information problem, because the rule does not cover it. Inventory what your aircraft transmits, what your ground control station logs, how long you retain it, and who can produce a clean flight record on request.

That file is what you will need the first time an airspace question arrives, whether it comes from the FAA, a client, or the owner of the asset you were inspecting.