On the final morning of Commercial UAV Expo, the drone industry got something rare: the FAA and EASA in the same room, on the same stage, answering the same questions in real time. The session, “Two Skies, One Conversation: Comparing FAA and EASA Approaches to BVLOS Drone Operations,” pulled back the curtain on how the world’s two most influential aviation regulators are racing toward the same destination on very different roads.
Moderator Julie Garland, CEO of Avtrain and chair of the JARUS Instructor Standardization Body, framed the stakes early. The commercial drone sector has spent a decade proving that beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight works. Now it needs regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to make that routine, not remarkable. Joining her were Daan Dousi, who leads EASA’s Innovative Air Mobility department, and Robert Reckert, acting manager of the FAA’s emerging technologies division within Flight Standards.
Normalizing Drones In The Sky
Reckert opened by naming the real goal behind years of pilot programs and rulemaking. “How do we normalize UAVs,” he asked, describing the effort to get drones “accepted into the regulatory system, acceptance within society, not everything having to be a special one time case.” That shift, from novelty to normal, threaded together everything else discussed on stage.
Reckert used his first public appearance in his new role at the FAA to deliver genuine news. The FAA’s long-awaited Part 108 rule, which will govern routine BVLOS operations in the United States, has cleared internal review and is sitting with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the last stop before publication. The agency processed roughly 4,000 public comments and made changes as a result. “It feels like we’re on the 10 yard line,” Reckert said. He added that the FAA hopes to see the rule published by the end of the calendar year.
Dousi welcomed the update with visible anticipation. “We are eagerly awaiting what is in it,” he said. EASA wants to compare notes once the rule lands to map where the two systems align and where they diverge.
SORA Versus Part 108: Two Paths, One Target
The panel’s most substantive exchange centered on philosophy. Europe built its regulatory framework around the Specific Operations Risk Assessment, or SORA, a methodology developed through the international JARUS working group and now sitting at version 2.5, with 3.0 in development. SORA sorts operations into open, specific, and certified categories based on risk, and Dousi described the ongoing work to simplify it through predefined risk assessments and standard scenarios that let operators declare their operation rather than wait for case-by-case authority review.
“The first thing that comes to many people’s minds that are not familiar with SORA is complexity,” Dousi admitted. But data gathered since the framework launched in 2019 let EASA identify recurring, lower-risk use cases, particularly in agriculture and forestry, and convert them into standard scenarios operators can simply declare. “The workload of the authorities is reduced, the time to market the drone operators is greatly reduced,” he said. That efficiency now frees regulators to focus on the harder problem of scaling BVLOS more broadly.
The FAA has taken the opposite approach. Whereas Europe regulated first and is simplifying now, the United States has enabled operations through waivers and exemptions and is using the resulting data to write the rule. Garland put the contrast directly to Reckert, pointing out that Europe has watched the American approach with real interest.
Reckert agreed the two systems reach for the same outcome by different routes. “The safety outcome that we’re looking for at the end is the same,” he said. But he was candid about the difficulty of governing by data before the rule exists. Everything from telemetry and manufacturing data to pilot training methods feeds the FAA’s decisions, he explained, because the real challenge lies “not just about telemetry data and a drone and its operation in the airspace” but the full picture of “the man-machine environment.”
Dousi pointed out that Europe is only now catching up on that front. A regulatory sandbox provision was recently written into EASA’s basic regulation, something the agency had sought for years. Until that changed, EASA simply could not run FAA-style enabling programs like BEYOND or the current eVTOL Integrated Program Plan, known as eIPP. Dousi also noted a structural reason Europe leaned on SORA instead. With 31 member states, more than 40 air navigation service providers, and each one a potential regulatory variable, letting every jurisdiction experiment independently risked chaos. SORA became, in his words, a workable compromise that still let the agency collect data without sacrificing consistency across the bloc.
Ground Risk, Air Risk, And Who Owns The Outcome
Garland pushed both panelists on how their frameworks weigh ground risk against air risk, the two variables that determine how much scrutiny an operation receives.
Dousi described SORA’s proportional design, where ground risk scales with drone size, operation type, and population density, and air risk is managed differently depending on how much traffic shares that airspace. He introduced the idea of dynamic population density, the recognition that a stadium parking lot is empty on a Tuesday morning and packed on a Saturday night, as a refinement EASA is still developing.
Reckert argued that despite different mechanics, the two systems land in similar places. Absent a finished rule, the FAA leans on exemptions and waivers, evaluated against a bar of equivalent level of safety, and increasingly on the operator’s own safety risk analysis. “We may be talking about it differently,” he said. “It’s just an outcome.” That outcome, he added, rests on a principle consistent across every sector of American aviation: the operator holds responsibility for the safety of their own operation.
Sharing The Sky With Helicopters And Skeptics
Low altitude airspace, where drones increasingly operate alongside helicopters, agricultural aircraft, and general aviation, drew much attention. Reckert, who spent years as a helicopter EMS pilot before joining the FAA, said no regulator can write enough rules to manage the coming congestion. “We are not going to be able to do it all alone as a regulator,” he said. He called instead for grassroots collaboration between drone operators and the rotorcraft and general aviation communities that already share that airspace. He described real scenarios, drones assisting a law enforcement scene before a medevac helicopter arrives, where the two worlds already intersect daily and simply need to talk to each other.
Dousi described a similar cultural shift underway in Europe, where general aviation was long told it would never need to worry about drone traffic. EASA’s proposed U-space framework now aims to segment that lowest layer, below 400 feet, specifically to let emerging drone traffic and existing low altitude flyers such as Italian microlights, Swiss paragliders, and law enforcement helicopters coexist without disrupting higher altitude general aviation.
Dousi also raised a factor with no equivalent in Reckert’s remarks: security. “We have a war on our doorstep,” he said, referencing airspace incursions that have shut down European airports and intensified public pressure for drone detection and conspicuity solutions.
On public acceptance, the panel found genuine transatlantic differences. Reckert distinguished sharply between use cases. “There’s a very strong difference between delivering somebody’s medication and delivering somebody’s burrito,” he said, predicting that society will sort out its tolerance for convenience deliveries over time even as lifesaving and public safety missions face little resistance.
Dousi described Europe’s comparatively higher tolerance for medical logistics, including drone transport of blood samples between hospitals, a use case that has not gained similar traction in the United States, while acknowledging that even approved operators often underestimate the work required to win over a skeptical neighborhood. “Having an authorization approval alone will not get you there,” he said. “You have to engage.”
Building Toward A Harmonized Sky
The conversation closed on convergence, and here both regulators pushed back gently on an initiative meant to unite them. The Drone Squad, a joint standards effort involving the FAA, EASA, Transport Canada and Brazil’s ANAC, has drawn industry criticism for tending toward the highest common denominator across jurisdictions rather than a shared safety baseline. Garland voiced that concern directly, and Reckert did not dismiss it. “I agree with you that I think a better conversation isn’t about finding the highest standard and then combining them,” he said. “It’s about focusing on the safety outcome and making sure that we have acceptance of each other’s processes.”
Dousi pointed to the FAA’s MOSAIC rule for general aviation as a template EASA is watching closely for its own future work, evidence that borrowing good ideas across the Atlantic is already routine practice, Drone Squad debates aside.
As the session wrapped, Garland reflected on what it meant to sit between the world’s two largest aviation regulators as an industry representative rather than a bystander. The conversation, she said, marked “a really important industry first step” toward genuine convergence.
For operators watching Part 108 near the finish line in Washington while SORA keeps simplifying in Brussels, the message from both sides of the stage was that while they require different paperwork, they both are moving in the same destination, with a shared bet that a scalable, safe, and genuinely global BVLOS industry is closer than it has ever been.