By: Dawn Zoldi
The FAA took the stage at XPONENTIAL 2026 to signal a cultural shift. Franklin McIntosh, Chief Operating Officer of the FAA Air Traffic Organization, and Jessica Jones, newly appointed Executive Director of the FAA Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, offered the industry a detailed account of where the agency stands, what it has built and what it still needs to fix before autonomy can scale across the National Airspace System (NAS).
A Cultural Change Inside the FAA
McIntosh opened with a confession rooted in institutional memory. When he started as an air traffic controller in 1996, the idea of integrating drones into the NAS would have been met with a hard no from controllers and management alike. That resistance, he said, is gone. “We don’t see drones as drones anymore. We see them as aircraft. We don’t see drone operators as drone operators. We see them as pilots.”
That cultural shift, he argued, provides the operational foundation on which everything else depends. Getting buy-in from the air traffic workforce, from safety offices and from management makes integration possible at scale. Without it, rules and rulemaking don’t move. McIntosh pointed to the BVLOS proposed rulemaking and the recent decision to share FAA radar surveillance data, demonstrated earlier this year in North Dakota as the concrete products of that cultural change. McIntosh flagged both as meaningful wins.
38 Million Flights and Half a Million Pilots
Jones brought numbers that reframed the conversation. In 2024 alone, 38 million drone flights operated in U.S. airspace. More than 16 million of those were commercial Part 107 operations. The FAA now has over 500,000 certified remote pilots on the books, a figure that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. “These aren’t hobbyist numbers,” Jones said. “This is real work. We have done integration.”
Her primary pain point, however, was not regulatory, it was reputational. Public acceptance, she said, remains one of the most stubborn obstacles to scaling drone operations. Years of “no drone zone” messaging have shaped community perceptions in ways that safety data alone cannot easily reverse. The FAA’s answer to that problem, in part, is the e-IPP: real-world advanced air mobility (AAM) demonstrations across more than 26 states, designed to show rural cargo delivery, public safety missions and urban operations in a context communities can observe and trust. “Flying taxis for the rich” is not the story, she said, and the e-IPP is how the FAA plans to tell a different one.
The e-IPP Is Live: Building Trust Through Demonstration
Jones walked through the current state of the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. With eight lead participants, over 26 states represented, all major U.S. OEMs engaged, and Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs) now signed, the FAA has put the structural groundwork in place. The work now moves to appendices, the detailed, operational-level questions about what aircraft certification requires, what flight standards need, what air traffic management must accommodate and where the infrastructure gaps actually are. The target is a live demonstration by the end of this calendar year.
McIntosh pointed to the FAA’s recent organizational restructuring as an enabler of that timeline. For years, the agency’s siloed lines of business slowed information sharing and coordination to a crawl. The reorganization, driven by the FAA Administrator, was designed specifically to knock those walls down by aligning airports, aviation safety, air traffic and the new safety management team under a common operational picture (COP). “When we start proposing rulemaking, the intent is to ensure it’s done in a timeframe that stakeholders would expect,” McIntosh said, “versus some of the longer timelines we’ve witnessed in the past.”
Two Phases, $30 Billion and the Promise of a Modern NAS
McIntosh offered a detailed and candid breakdown on the question of air traffic infrastructure modernization, the NEXTGEN successor program now referred to as BNAX. Phase one carries a $12.5 billion price tag and covers what he called “the nuts and bolts”: new radars, new telecommunications, new voice switches and the baseline reliability the system has lacked for too long. He acknowledged the number sounds large and then explained why it isn’t, given that 93 percent of the FAA’s budget over the past decade went purely to sustaining aging systems. That left just 7 percent for advancement.
Phase two, the piece the autonomy industry is watching, carries an estimated $18 billion ask. This is where the real transformation lives: common automation platforms, shared situational awareness, digital data exchange and the infrastructure that will allow new entrants to integrate into the NAS with the speed the market now requires. “That’s the sexy stuff,” McIntosh said, not apologetically. “That is where we will see true modernization and optimization of the airspace.” UTM, he and Jones agreed, was the proof of concept. It will demonstrate data-sharing architectures and collaborative airspace coordination in ways that will inform phase two design.
Counter-UAS: An Air Traffic Problem, Not Just a Security One
Both officials pushed back on the tendency to frame counter-UAS purely through a security lens. McIntosh explained that deploying C-UAS technology incorrectly is not primarily a safety issue. It’s an air traffic management issue. The question is not whether to authorize counter-UAS systems, but how to ensure their use doesn’t degrade NAS operations for every other user in the airspace simultaneously. The FAA is working with the DOW, DHS, DOJ and FCC to develop criteria and parameters that move beyond case-by-case authorization packages toward a scalable framework.
Jones added that the FAA is conducting safety risk assessments and expanded testing on new C-UAS technologies, including coordination on directed energy under Section 1089 of the NDAA, with the goal of building the evidentiary base needed to inform sound policy. “Sometimes you have to do the tests and the research to really figure out what you need in the policy space,” she said. The FAA is not a gatekeeper trying to slow C-UAS deployment, but a systems manager trying to ensure it doesn’t create new hazards in the process of solving existing ones.
An Open Door and a Pledge
Both officials closed with direct commitments to the room. Jones framed the Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies as an open-door resource, a single point of contact where industry can bring questions, concerns and problems and receive consistent, coordinated answers rather than the fragmented responses that have historically frustrated operators and manufacturers navigating multiple FAA offices simultaneously. The office reports directly to Deputy Administrator Rushlow, who she described as fully invested in innovation and emerging technologies.
McIntosh went further, offering a direct pledge that the Air Traffic Organization will remain engaged, present and accountable. “You can count on our continued participation,” he told the audience. “I pledge to you that you will have our continuing support.” For an industry that has spent years navigating regulatory uncertainty, hearing that kind of commitment on the record, on a keynote stage, in front of a thousand peers, was itself worth the price of admission.