The expansion would double the program’s current eight lead participants. The new projects are intended to produce operational and safety data on flights beyond the pilot’s direct line of sight, public-safety missions, airport and controlled airspace, rural and remote operations, infrastructure inspections and automated systems.

For consumers, businesses and communities, the immediate change is not nationwide permission for routine drone delivery or other commercial flights. It is a federal testing and partnership process that could help shape future operating standards.

What Phase 2 is seeking

The FAA says Phase 2 will address remaining challenges involved in safely scaling drone operations in the national airspace system. Proposed work may involve beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, flights; public safety; on-airport operations; controlled airspace; rural or remote missions; infrastructure inspection; and other complex operations.

Those categories could include medical or package delivery, utility and infrastructure inspection, airport work and emergency response. The projects are intended to gather evidence for future regulation, not create a blanket approval for all operators.

The formal solicitation lists September 10, 2026, as the proposal deadline. The FAA has not announced the new participants.

What Phase 1 produced

According to FAA records, BEYOND Phase 1 produced 70,563 total flights, including 48,383 BVLOS flights. Phase 1 concluded in 2024.

The FAA launched BEYOND on October 26, 2020, after the earlier Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program ended. The program is designed to help move drone operations toward established rules and performance-based standards rather than repeated case-by-case waivers.

The eight Phase 1 lead participants were the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; the Kansas, North Carolina and North Dakota departments of transportation; Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority in Tennessee; the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership in Virginia; the city of Reno, Nevada; and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The FAA’s program overview lists work involving medical delivery, airport surveillance, utility and energy inspections, construction monitoring, public safety and other specialized operations. The agency says the experience and data from those projects informed its work on a broader BVLOS framework.

Oversight questions remain

A June 30, 2025, audit by the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General found that the FAA had made progress but still faced important weaknesses. A majority of BEYOND lead participants did not meet most of the program’s six operational performance metrics, and operators flew only a small percentage of flights without a visual observer.

The inspector general also found that the FAA did not consolidate data across offices, that its data-validation process was vulnerable to errors and that BEYOND data had limited use in informing rulemaking. The audit said the FAA had stopped collecting some information about societal and economic benefits and community engagement.

The inspector general’s recommendations included updating performance indicators for the next phase, adding participants to improve geographic and programmatic diversity, creating a consolidated data repository, improving data validation and establishing a standardized community-engagement approach. The audit page lists all seven recommendations as closed on August 17, 2026.

The national BVLOS rule is not finished

The broader federal framework for BVLOS operations remains a proposed rulemaking, not a final national operating rule. A Transportation Department notice published in 2026 reopened the comment period on the proposal titled Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations.

The reopened comments address electronic conspicuity and right-of-way issues. Those questions matter because drones operating beyond a pilot’s sight must be detected, managed and separated from other aircraft without relying on the same visual monitoring used in conventional operations.

What happens next

The next concrete milestone is the September 10 application deadline, followed by the selection of up to eight new lead participants. The key questions will be whether the expanded program produces reliable safety data, improves performance measurement, includes meaningful community input and gives regulators information they can use in a final BVLOS framework.

Until that work and the broader rulemaking are complete, the FAA’s announcement means expanded testing and data collection—not an immediate nationwide change in where or how drones may fly.

Sources

• FAA BEYOND program overview
• DOT Office of Inspector General BEYOND audit
• DOT BVLOS rulemaking notice
• Aviation Week report on BEYOND Phase 2