What Can the FAA Learn From Transport Canada’s New BVLOS Regulations?

May 15, 2025 | Aaron Karp

While drone operators and manufacturers in the US eagerly await the FAA’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, Canada will actually implement new BVLOS regulations on Nov. 4. In addition to the BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) advisory final report issued in 2022, the FAA can look north of the border for an example of an already finalized rule.

Transport Canada issued its final BVLOS rules in March 2025, setting Nov. 4 as the implementation date. The FAA issued Part 107 regulations that govern drone operations in the US in 2016, but a follow-up Part 108 covering BVLOS operations has proved elusive—even after Congress in May 2024 mandated that an NPRM be issued by September 2024. When an NPRM is put forward by the FAA, a comment period to be followed by revising the NPRM into a final rule will take some time. There will also likely be a months-long gap between the promulgation of a final BVLOS rule and actual implementation—Transport Canada, for example, is implementing its new regulations eight months after the final rules were issued.

“Part 107 was the first drone regulation in the world,” American Robotics CEO Timothy Tenne, a former FAA official who helped draft Part 107, told Commercial UAV News. “The FAA was at the front, and then the rest of the world copied, and then they kept going. The FAA did not. Unfortunately, we stopped and we paused. Some of that I blame on the FAA, some of that on the industry.”

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Source: Commercial UAV News