The drone rules that matter count the crew

The FAA's By the Numbers page lists 481,760 certificated remote pilots. The rule those pilots fly under, Part 107, says someone on the crew has to be able to "see the unmanned aircraft throughout the entire flight." Section 107.35 says one person can't fly, command or keep watch for more than one unmanned aircraft at the same time.

Read those two lines together and the basic unit of commercial drone work is one person standing within sight of one aircraft. A longer battery or a better camera changes what that person brings back from a trip. It doesn't change how many people have to make the trip.

So if you want to know what drone work will cost, watch the rules on how many aircraft one person may oversee and on flying beyond the pilot's sight. Anyone who follows this industry through hardware launches is watching the wrong announcements. The Federal Register is where the staffing rules change.

The waiver process counts heads

The FAA can waive both sections. Its waiver page lists a category to "fly multiple small UAS with only one remote pilot," and its guidance for the application asks "how many personnel (including the Remote PIC) will you use for operations under this waiver." The agency says it tries to decide requests within 90 days.

Approvals have grown. The Department of Transportation's inspector general found that FAA approvals for beyond line of sight operations rose from 1,229 in 2020 to 26,870 in 2023. That count includes certificates and exemptions as well as waivers. In the FAA's BEYOND program, the same report found, operators flew "only a small percentage of flights without a visual observer."

Skydio wrote in March that as organizations scale their drone programs, "the number one hurdle quickly becomes staffing." It says FAA approvals now let a single remote pilot oversee up to four of its X10 drones for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the New York Power Authority. DroneXL noted that the conditions of those waivers weren't published. Ondas said in 2022 that without FAA approval, pilots and visual observers "are required to be present on-site."

In a McKinsey model that DroneDJ reported in 2023, labor accounted for 95% of the cost of drone delivery. That figure is about packages, and I wouldn't stretch it to a roof inspection or a listing shoot. What carries over is the direction. Skydio's post and the Ondas release both pitch a way to take a person off the site.

Part 108 still starts at one to one

Part 108, the FAA's proposed rule for flights beyond visual line of sight, was published on August 7, 2025. Its text sets no specific staffing requirements and leaves operators to identify the people they need. It does set a default ratio of one aircraft to one flight coordinator, "except in accordance with a method acceptable to the Administrator."

The FAA acknowledged that industry wants to fly one to many at scale. It said the ratio would depend on the aircraft's design and the FAA's review of the operation. How many aircraft one person can oversee was left to industry consensus standards that the FAA said had yet to be written and expects to accept later, and to case-by-case FAA review of operator proposals.

"FAA has not quantified the benefits of the rule," the proposal says. The inspector general reported that the FAA's rulemaking team "decided they no longer needed societal and economic benefits data" from its BEYOND program. The final rule went to the White House regulatory office on July 10, 2026, and is still listed as pending there.

In the FAA's partnership programs, most of the beyond sight flying in 2024 was delivery. Of the 86,181 such flights that year, the proposal's own table puts 80,955 under package delivery. Its two infrastructure inspection lines add up to 780, and the table has no line for construction or real estate at all. Inspection and documentation work is barely on the board.

The hardware bill went up too

The strongest objection is that hardware got more expensive to import this fall, and it did. Since September 3, Proclamation 11055 has put a 25% duty on most imported drones of 25 kilograms or less and a 100% duty on docks, drones with thermal imagers and certain components. Allied countries get lower caps, and some approved vendors start later. The FCC's Covered List has barred new authorizations for foreign-made drones and their key components since December 22, 2025. I wrote about what that means for fleet planning earlier this week. An operator buying a thermal aircraft this year has a real hardware problem.

A dock exists so that, in Skydio's words, an operator "no longer needs to drive to the operating area." Docks, the equipment built to take people off the site, carry the tariff's steepest duty. That makes the labor question harder to solve.

And an aircraft is bought once. Under Part 107 as written, the person who has to keep it in sight goes out on every job.

Vantera Aerial sells drone work in Northeast Florida, so it has an interest in how this comes out. For people who hire drone work in Florida, the useful question about a quote is how many people the job needs on site, and why. When the final Part 108 is published, read the section on flight coordinator ratios before anything about aircraft.