NAAA Continues Pressing for Ag Pilot Safety as Final BVLOS Rule Nears

FAA’s Final Rule for Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Operations, a.k.a. Part 108, has yet to see the light of day, but the regulatory wheels are still turning. On July 10th, FAA submitted its Final Rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). As of the writing of this article, nearly three months later, it is still under OIRA’s regulatory review.

Note: OIRA is a Federal office that is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is an agency within the Executive Office of the President. OIRA reviews draft proposed and final regulations under Executive Order 12866, among other duties.

This week, NAAA met with OIRA and DOT/FAA rulemaking officials to re-emphasize its deep concerns with certain aspects of the 2025 proposed BVLOS rule. It is the hope that if the association’s prior extensive comments (Oct-2025, Feb-2026) did not affect the needed changes in the Final Rule, this meeting would be one last shot at bending the ear of those holding the levers of regulatory power.

A reality check is needed

A major goal of the meeting, and where significant time was dedicated, was helping these career civil servants understand the unique nature of manned Part 137 operations. Put simply, our industry recognizes and feels deeply the safety threat posed by UAS that may not reliably detect and avoid manned aircraft; the well-meaning folks writing these new UAS rules have no concept of this because they have neither experienced it firsthand nor had someone take the time to educate them appropriately. They are further hindered by highly-resourced UAS interests demanding all of the proverbial oxygen in the room.

NAAA provided an accompanying Read-Ahead document as a visual aid for the meeting, which also laid out both the extent of aerial applications in the United States and the typical flight profile, altitudes and obstacle clearance distances.

The primary OIRA official noted total surprise at the data showing that aerial applicators routinely clear power lines by less than ten feet, and NAAA’s estimate that ag pilots collectively clear a wire before, in or after a pass over 29 million times per year.

Two asks were reiterated from our earlier comments:

Remove the shielded-area right-of-way carve-out.

Strike § 108.205 and the § 108.195(a) exception for shielded operations. Manned aerial application aircraft routinely operate within the proposed shielded envelope, and those pilots typically cannot see a UAS in time to avoid it.

If ADS-B or Electronic Conspicuity (EC) is to carry the detect-and-avoid burden, require that the UA receive the signal itself, in the air.

Proposed Part 108 contains no explicit ADS-B In requirement and no specification of where reception occurs. Reception by ground-based infrastructure must not be accepted as compliance. NAAA’s position remains that ADS-B and EC alone are insufficient as a sole detect-and-avoid method at aerial application altitudes, and that comprehensive detect and avoid, effective against both cooperative aircraft (those transmitting ADS-B Out or EC) and non-cooperative aircraft (those transmitting neither), should be required in all airspace.

It can help to draw a picture

The Read-Ahead document also provided several representative examples of how ground-based ADS-B is generally an ineffective means of tracking (detecting) agricultural aircraft operations in the low-altitude rural airspace. While this may seem like a very basic concept to you reading this, remember that shielded areas were proposed because they looked at ADS-B data down to 50 feet (at a time when only 10% of the ag fleet had ADS-B Out) and didn’t see anyone there.