For a decade, one rule has quietly capped what commercial drones could do in this country: you had to keep the aircraft within your own line of sight. Everything more ambitious — a drone that patrols a refinery perimeter on its own, inspects miles of pipeline, or launches from a box to investigate an alarm across a 300-acre logistics yard — required a special, case-by-case FAA waiver that took months to secure and applied to one operation at a time. That is about to change. The FAA's proposed Part 108 rule would make routine beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flight legal under a standing framework, and it is the most significant development in commercial drone regulation since Part 107 arrived in 2016. Here is what it is, where it stands, and — just as important — what it does and does not change for the industrial facilities we work with across the Gulf Coast.
What Part 108 Actually Does
Today, most commercial drone flight happens under Part 107, which requires a certificated remote pilot to keep the aircraft within visual line of sight and caps operations at aircraft under 55 pounds. That is fine for a single operator flying a rooftop inspection. It is the wrong model for autonomous, always-on operations, because a person standing in the eyeline of the drone defeats the entire point of automating the patrol.
Part 108 replaces the one-off waiver process with a repeatable set of requirements. Under the proposed rule, drones weighing up to roughly 1,320 pounds could operate beyond visual line of sight at or below 400 feet in FAA-approved areas, provided they carry the right safety technology: detect-and-avoid systems, Remote ID, continuous position reporting, and the ability to integrate with UTM traffic-management services. In plain terms, the FAA is trading "prove it's safe, one waiver at a time" for "meet this standard and you may operate routinely." For any facility that wants drones working around the clock without a pilot tethered to each flight, that is the difference between a pilot project and an operating program.
Where It Stands as of Mid-2026
This is a proposed rule moving through the pipeline, not yet law, so precision matters. The FAA published the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in August 2025 and the public comment period closed in October 2025, drawing more than 3,000 responses from industry. As of the summer of 2026, the final rule is under review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) — the last major checkpoint before a rule is published. Reviews at that stage can run for weeks, so the exact publication date is still unsettled, but the direction of travel is clear and the momentum is real. Facilities that start building a compliant program now will be positioned to move the day the framework is final rather than starting from a standstill.
A note before we go further: this article is an operational briefing, not legal or regulatory advice. Airspace authorizations are specific to your site, your equipment, and the final rule text. Treat any BVLOS program as something to be engineered and permitted for your facility — which is exactly the work an integrator handles.
What Changes for Outdoor Security and Inspection
The real winners here are outdoor, autonomous drone programs — and that is where the news matters most for critical-infrastructure operators. Consider the two workhorses of industrial drone security. An aerial Asylon Guardian drone that launches from a weatherproof base to patrol a perimeter, respond to an alarm, or run a scheduled overwatch loop is inherently a beyond-line-of-sight operation across a large site. A ground robot like the Asylon DroneDog handles the walking patrol; the aerial drone covers the ground no guard can reach quickly. Under the current regime, expanding that coverage means stacking waivers. Under Part 108, it becomes a standard, permittable capability.
The same logic applies to robotic inspection. Flare stacks, tank roofs, elevated piping, transmission structures, and solar arrays are exactly the assets that are dangerous and slow to inspect on foot, and exactly the ones a drone should cover autonomously over distance. BVLOS is what turns drone inspection from a scheduled, escorted event into a repeatable program that documents an asset the same way every time. For Gulf Coast operators — refineries and petrochemical plants, ports and terminals, utility-scale solar, and sprawling distribution yards — this is the regulatory unlock that makes large-footprint autonomous coverage practical rather than exceptional.
What Does Not Change: Your Indoor Inventory Drones
This is the point I most want operations leaders to hear clearly, because the headlines blur it. The FAA regulates the National Airspace System, and that airspace is outdoors. A drone flying inside the four walls of your distribution center is not operating in the NAS, which is why indoor inventory drones have never needed a Part 107 pilot certificate and will not need anything under Part 108 either.
So if you are running — or evaluating — autonomous warehouse inventory counting with a platform like the Corvus One, none of this regulatory news gates your deployment. Those drones fly your rack aisles lights-out today, no waiver required, and Part 108 neither helps nor hinders them. If you want the mechanics of how that indoor flight works, we cover it in how autonomous inventory drones work. The clean way to think about it: Part 108 is about the sky over your site; it has nothing to do with the air inside your building. Knowing which side of that line a given application falls on is the first thing a serious integrator will tell you.
How to Get Ready
You do not need to wait for the final rule to prepare — and the operators who move first will have working programs while others are still reading the Federal Register. A few practical steps:
- Separate your indoor and outdoor drone plans. Indoor inventory can proceed now on its own timeline; outdoor security and inspection is where the regulatory framework applies.
- Deploy outdoor programs under a compliant operator today. Reputable industrial drone-security providers already fly under current FAA authorizations. A program built to today's standard by an experienced operator is designed to carry forward, not be rebuilt, when Part 108 lands.
- Design for the Part 108 technology stack. Detect-and-avoid, Remote ID, and position reporting are the price of admission — building them in from the start avoids a costly retrofit later.
- Integrate, don't isolate. A patrol drone that feeds a monitoring center, ties into your access control and CCTV, and routes alarms to the right people is a security program; a drone that flies pretty loops is a gadget. The integration is the value.
The Takeaway
Part 108 is poised to move autonomous outdoor drones from the exception column to the standard column, and for facilities that need to secure a large perimeter or inspect assets over distance, that is a genuine turning point worth preparing for now. The nuance that matters is knowing exactly where the rule applies: it governs the airspace over your site, not the inventory drones flying inside your building. Actel Robotics runs the full lifecycle on both sides of that line — assessment, solution design, deployment, integration with your existing systems, operator training, and ongoing optimization — as an authorized integrator for Corvus, Locus, Boston Dynamics, Ghost Robotics, and Asylon, serving Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. See our approach to security and surveillance and robotic inspection, weigh the platforms on our compare robots page, and when you want to map a program to your own site, request a free facility assessment.