The Federal Aviation Administration has opened the next stage of one of the most important drone-integration programmes in the United States. On 27 August 2026, the agency announced that it will add up to eight state, local, tribal and territorial lead participants to BEYOND Phase 2, effectively doubling the programme’s current size. Applications are due at 3:00 p.m. ET on 10 September 2026 under the FAA’s new Screening Information Request.

At first glance, that can sound like another government test programme. The scale and timing make it more significant. The FAA’s August 27 announcement says Phase 2 will tackle remaining barriers around beyond visual line of sight operations, public safety, on-airport missions and other complex airspace. It arrives while the long-awaited Part 108 BVLOS rule is in final regulatory review, so the flights conducted through BEYOND can sit very close to the rules that commercial operators may soon use every day.

You can also see the scale of the wider market around it. The FAA’s current national figures list 837,513 registered drones and 481,760 certificated remote pilots. Advanced commercial operations are already established in delivery, energy, public safety, construction and infrastructure inspection. The question facing regulators has moved beyond whether a drone can complete a difficult mission. The harder question is how thousands of those missions can run repeatedly, safely and predictably in shared airspace.

Widening The Test Bed For Advanced Drone Operations

BEYOND Phase 2 is a competitive expansion of the FAA’s existing partnership programme. The agency is looking for up to eight additional state, local, tribal or territorial entities to serve as lead participants. With eight Phase 1 lead participants already forming the programme’s base, the new selection could bring the total to as many as 16 lead entities.

The official solicitation on SAM.gov was posted on 27 August 2026.

This is not a normal equipment purchase where a vendor sells the FAA a drone. Lead applicants are public-sector entities, and commercial drone operators, aircraft manufacturers, command-and-control providers, detect-and-avoid companies, UAS traffic management providers and other technology firms can join their teams as industry partners.

That structure is deliberate. A state transportation department can bring roads, bridges and public infrastructure. An airport authority can provide real airport operations.

A tribal government may bring long rural routes, public-safety needs and medical logistics. Industry partners bring aircraft, software, sensors, communications and operating experience.

The FAA then gets operational data from real environments rather than a narrow laboratory test.

Recent analysis of the solicitation by DLA Piper notes that proposals need clear partner roles and defined positions on the operational, maintenance and anomaly data that can be shared with the FAA. That detail is easy to overlook. Data is one of the main outputs of BEYOND, so the value of a test is tied to what the agency can actually learn from it.

How BEYOND Reached This Point

From The Integration Pilot Program To BEYOND

The programme has a longer history than the Phase 2 announcement suggests. A presidential memorandum created the UAS Integration Pilot Program in October 2017 with nine lead participants. When that programme ended in October 2020, the FAA created BEYOND to continue the partnerships and work through problems that were still blocking routine drone operations.

According to the FAA’s BEYOND programme page, BEYOND launched on 26 October 2020 with a focus on operating under established rules rather than relying indefinitely on one-off waivers. It also set out to collect data for performance-based standards, capture community feedback, study social and economic effects and make approval processes more practical.

Phase 1 eventually recorded 70,563 flights. Of those, 48,383 were beyond visual line of sight. That means about 68.6 percent of all Phase 1 flights were BVLOS, a useful indication of how central long-range and remotely supervised operations became to the programme.

Congress Gave The Programme A Longer Mandate

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 turned BEYOND from a time-limited experiment into a longer federal integration tool. Section 920 of the Act directs the FAA to extend BEYOND and its existing agreements until the Administrator decides the programme is no longer necessary or useful. It also tells the agency to consider adding more state, local and tribal governments.

Congress was specific about the subjects the expanded programme should cover. Section 920 names increasing automation in civil aircraft, BVLOS operations and the societal and economic effects of those operations. It also gives the FAA added authority to waive certain certification-related requirements within a BEYOND agreement when that relief is consistent with aviation safety.

Phase 2 began in 2025 under that authority and is scheduled to run through 2029. The August 2026 competition is the mechanism for broadening participation and bringing more demanding operations into the programme.

What Phase 2 Is Designed To Test

Four Programme Priorities

The new solicitation is organised around four programme priorities: safety, infrastructure, automation and scalability. Those four words tell you where the FAA sees the remaining work.

Safety covers collision risk, failure modes, operating procedures and the evidence needed to show that increasingly automated aircraft can share airspace with crewed aviation. Infrastructure includes the communications, surveillance, positioning and data services that allow an aircraft to operate far from the person supervising it. Automation looks at how much work can move from direct human control to reliable aircraft and network systems. Scalability asks whether the concept still works when you move from a handful of carefully managed flights to regular service across larger areas.

The agency is also interested in operations involving larger UAS, longer distances and higher altitudes. That broadens the technical problem considerably. A small quadcopter inspecting a structure at 150 feet faces a different communications, traffic and energy profile from a larger aircraft travelling many miles across multiple jurisdictions.

Five Operational Challenges

The FAA has identified five operational areas where it wants stronger evidence: public safety, controlled airspace, remote and rural areas with weak infrastructure, on-airport operations and flights across international borders.

Public safety is a good example of the gap between technical capability and routine approval. Police, fire and emergency teams may need a drone in the air within minutes, sometimes beyond the operator’s sight and in busy airspace. Yet the FAA Public Safety Toolkit notes that only about 13 percent of departments typically invest in an FCC-approved aviation detection system capable of detecting non-cooperative aircraft. That leaves many agencies dependent on other risk mitigations, such as shielded operations close to structures or specific waiver conditions.

Controlled airspace and airports create a different test. Drones may need to work near runways, taxiways, terminals, cargo areas or other locations where crewed aircraft have priority and where airport operations cannot simply stop. Cross-border operations add legal coordination, communications continuity and differences between national regulatory systems. Rural routes may appear simpler because there are fewer people on the ground, yet they can have weak cellular coverage, limited surveillance infrastructure and long emergency-response times.

Phase 2 therefore puts the FAA in places where the assumptions behind a simple drone mission start to break down. That is exactly where useful standards tend to emerge.

The Six KPIs And What FAA Wants To Learn

The solicitation does something valuable for anyone trying to understand the FAA’s direction: it sets six programme-level key performance indicators. These are more informative than broad statements about innovation because they show how progress will be judged.

  • Milestone completion. The programme targets at least 60 percent cumulative milestone completion after one year and 90 percent over the life of the programme.
  • Increased automation. Participants need to show progress toward operations that require less direct human intervention.
  • Drone safety. The FAA wants a stable or decreasing trend in incidents and near-mid-air collisions as operations expand.
  • Progress includes FAA acceptance and expansion of UAS Traffic Management services and the ability of different systems to exchange the information needed for safe operations.
  • Consensus standards. Phase 2 will examine how industry-developed technical standards can support repeatable regulatory acceptance rather than bespoke approval for every aircraft or service.
  • Societal and economic impact. The FAA wants data that can inform policy on the public value, costs and effects of drone operations.

For you as an operator or technology supplier, those KPIs are a useful signal. Flight endurance alone will not define a strong system. The FAA is looking for evidence that the aircraft, supporting services, operating organisation and surrounding infrastructure can work together consistently and produce data regulators can trust.

What Phase 1 Already Showed In Real Operations

Phase 1 produced far more than a large flight count. Several projects show how the FAA has been using operational approvals to test specific pieces of a future national framework.

Long-Range And Public-Safety Operations

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma used thermal-equipped drones during controlled burns in March 2022. According to the FAA, the aircraft identified at least three backfires that forestry personnel had missed, allowing teams to extinguish them without incident. By October 2023, the Choctaw Nation had also conducted BVLOS flights without visual observers covering more than 28 miles round trip under a single waiver.

Its longer-term medical logistics concept planned a corridor extending 45 miles toward the Oklahoma-Texas state line. In July 2024, the programme received a waiver associated with package-delivery operations up to 3,500 feet above ground level. Those are very different operating conditions from the basic Part 107 model of keeping a small aircraft nearby and in sight.

Airports Became A Real Test Environment

At Memphis International Airport, FedEx and the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority progressively moved from off-airport BVLOS testing to on-airport operations. FedEx completed its first BVLOS flight with visual observers on airport property in October 2022, then its first BVLOS flight without visual observers at the airport in August 2023. By February 2024 it had completed eight operational flight requirements demonstrating repeatable BVLOS operations without visual observers on airport.

That progression is relevant to Phase 2 because on-airport operations are now one of the FAA’s five named challenge areas. Airports bring strict movement rules, crewed traffic and operational continuity requirements. Evidence collected there can influence how future drone systems interact with air traffic and airport procedures.

Infrastructure Inspection Moved Toward Remote Operations

Dominion Energy received an April 2022 waiver permitting BVLOS inspections at more than 40 power-generation facilities across seven states. In 2023 it received another approval for close-proximity, low-altitude drone-in-a-box inspections at generation facilities in six states.

Then, in August 2024, Dominion received approval for BVLOS inspection of an 835-acre solar farm surrounding the departure end of Runway 30 at Washington Dulles International Airport.

Taken together, those approvals show the direction enterprise inspection is moving: fixed sites, repeat missions, remote supervision and flights close to infrastructure where the drone can use the structure itself as part of the risk-management strategy.

Delivery Added Certification And Larger Operating Areas

BEYOND also supported the regulatory progression of drone delivery. Zipline became the first company to complete Part 135 air-carrier certification through BEYOND in June 2022 and the first fixed-wing UAS operator to receive that certification.

The FAA’s package-delivery page, updated 3 September 2026, now lists seven U.S. drone operators that have received Part 135 air-carrier authority for UAS package delivery.

Current FAA environmental-review examples show the size of operations that regulators are already assessing. A UPS Flight Forward proposal in Winston-Salem covers about 40.4 square miles using the 29-pound Matternet M2, while a Zipline proposal in the Salt Lake City region covers about 1,675 square miles using a 46-pound aircraft. Those operating areas make the need for predictable BVLOS rules much easier to see.

How Phase 2 Connects To The Part 108 BVLOS Rule

BEYOND Phase 2 is arriving at a critical point in the Part 108 process. The FAA and Transportation Security Administration published the proposed BVLOS framework in the Federal Register on 7 August 2025. The proposal would create performance-based rules for low-altitude BVLOS flight and supporting third-party services such as UAS Traffic Management.

The Federal Register proposal places Part 108 between the relatively simple Part 107 small-drone framework and the more intensive certification used for conventional aircraft. The FAA explicitly links the higher risk to possible conflicts with other airspace users, larger aircraft, operations over densely populated areas and use cases such as package delivery.

As of 4 September 2026, Part 108 is still not a final rule. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs listing shows that the final rule package was received for review on 10 July 2026 under RIN 2120-AL82. The stage is listed as “Final Rule,” yet publication has not occurred. That distinction is important if you are planning current operations: the proposed requirements are not yet the law.

For now, BVLOS work still relies on existing regulatory routes. The FAA continues to process Part 107 waivers and exemptions, and in April 2026 it introduced an additional Section 927 waiver process for certain UAS operations. Section 927 can provide relief without the full Part 11 exemption process when the proposed operation meets the FAA’s eligibility and safety tests.

BEYOND therefore serves two roles at once. It gives participants a way to test advanced operations under today’s system, and it generates evidence for the more repeatable system the FAA is trying to establish through Part 108 and related rules.

What The Expansion Means For Drone Companies

If you build or operate drones, Phase 2 creates opportunities that go well beyond getting your aircraft into a federal test. The programme is asking for integrated operating systems, and that changes what a credible industry partner needs to bring.

An aircraft manufacturer needs reliable command-and-control links, failure responses and maintenance data. A detect-and-avoid supplier needs to show performance against real traffic, not a controlled demonstration. A UTM provider needs to exchange flight-intent and airspace information with other services and, increasingly, with traditional air traffic systems. Operators need procedures that can handle abnormal events, lost communications, weather, maintenance and operational handovers across many flights.

The data-sharing requirement deserves equal attention. A technically strong operation can still be a weak research partner if incident, anomaly or maintenance information cannot be provided in a form the FAA can use. Companies entering a Phase 2 team should decide early which data they can share, what needs protection and how that data will be recorded throughout the programme.

You should also watch the move toward consensus standards. The FAA has been shifting toward performance-based regulation, where the regulator defines the safety outcome and accepted standards can provide a route for showing compliance. Companies that participate in standards development may find themselves influencing the technical baseline that future customers and regulators expect.

What The Expansion Means For Public Agencies

State and local governments are not being asked to provide a test field and step aside. The Phase 2 structure gives them a central role in choosing use cases, building partnerships and showing whether the operation creates measurable public value.

That can include faster emergency response, medical logistics, inspection of roads and bridges, airport security, disaster assessment or service to remote communities. Yet public agencies also bring issues that technology companies cannot solve on their own: privacy policy, procurement, public communication, community acceptance, coordination with police and fire services, and access to public infrastructure.

The societal and economic KPI puts those questions into the formal programme. A flight can be technically successful and still fail to justify routine deployment if the cost per mission is too high, residents strongly oppose the operating model or the service creates little improvement over existing methods. Phase 2 gives the FAA a way to capture those effects alongside aircraft safety data.

What You Should Watch Next

The first near-term date is 10 September 2026, when responses to the Phase 2 solicitation are due. The eventual selection of up to eight new lead participants will show which regions and use cases the FAA believes can add the most useful evidence to the existing programme.

After that, watch the type of industry teams attached to those public entities.

Strong participation from DAA, C2, UTM, autonomous-docking, larger-aircraft and public-safety specialists would confirm that Phase 2 is being used to test the full operating system around the drone, not simply the aircraft.

Part 108 is the other major marker. Its final text may change elements of the 2025 proposal, so operators should avoid treating the NPRM as settled regulation.

Once the OIRA review is complete and the rule is published, you will be able to compare the final requirements with the problems Phase 2 is designed to test.

The bigger issue is the relationship between testing and regulation. Phase 1 produced more than 48,000 BVLOS flights and fed operational evidence into the FAA’s rulemaking. Phase 2 now widens that evidence base into harder environments and more automated operations.

If the programme works as intended, the next phase of U.S. drone growth will rely less on exceptional permissions and more on repeatable rules that can support regular commercial and public-service missions.

FAQs

What Is FAA BEYOND Phase 2?

FAA BEYOND Phase 2 is the expanded federal programme for testing and evaluating advanced drone operations in real operating environments. It builds on the first BEYOND phase and focuses on safety, infrastructure, automation and scalability, with particular attention to BVLOS, public safety, controlled airspace, rural infrastructure, airports and cross-border flights.

How Many New Participants Will Join BEYOND Phase 2?

The FAA plans to select up to eight additional state, local, tribal or territorial lead participants. Adding all eight would approximately double the current programme size and could bring the lead-participant total to as many as 16.

How Much BVLOS Flying Took Place During BEYOND Phase 1?

BEYOND Phase 1 recorded 48,383 BVLOS flights out of 70,563 total flights. That works out to about 68.6 percent of all Phase 1 operations, showing that BVLOS was a central part of the programme rather than a small side experiment.

Is FAA Part 108 In Effect Yet?

No, FAA Part 108 is not in effect as of 4 September 2026. The final rule package entered OIRA review on 10 July 2026, and no final Part 108 rule has yet been published in the Federal Register. Current BVLOS operations still need to use existing waiver, exemption, certification or other authorised pathways.

Can A Drone Company Apply Directly As The Phase 2 Lead?

No, the lead applicants are state, local, tribal or territorial public entities. Drone companies can participate as industry partners on those teams, which creates openings for operators, manufacturers, DAA providers, C2 companies, UTM services and other aviation-technology firms.

What Will The FAA Measure During Phase 2?

The FAA will measure six programme-level areas: milestone completion, increased automation, drone safety, interoperability, consensus-standard implementation and societal and economic effects. The milestone targets call for at least 60 percent cumulative completion after one year and 90 percent across the programme.

How Does The BEYOND Expansion Impact Commercial Drone Operators?

The expansion gives commercial operators a clearer view of the capabilities the FAA wants to see before advanced drone operations become routine. You should expect greater attention on automation, system reliability, shared-airspace data, DAA, UTM, maintenance records and evidence that your operation can repeat safely at scale rather than succeeding only under tightly managed test conditions.