Regulation continues to lose the race against the technology it is meant to govern, but writing faster rules is only half the fix. The harder, less visible problem is that public understanding and trust may be lagging even further behind than the policy itself. A recent Full Crew newscast exposed that double bind. Hosted by Rex Alexander, Infrastructure Ambassador for Autonomy Global, three aviation attorneys steeped in different corners of the policy landscape, Erika Carrasco of MLT Aikins, Courtney Freeman of Adams and Reese, and Chris Senn of Greenberg Traurig, dissected three seemingly unrelated stories that turned out to share a single theme. Governments can eventually catch up to the technology on paper, but catching up in the public’s mind is proving to be the far tougher problem.
The Strategy vs. Legislation Dilemma
Carrasco opened the conversation with Canada’s newly unveiled AI strategy, “AI for All.” This six-pillar roadmap aims to position the country as a global AI leader while safeguarding democracy and building sovereign technological capacity. But her real interests lay in what the strategy is not and in what it cannot fix.
It carries no legal force. Canada’s attempt at binding AI legislation was halted when Parliament formally ended in 2025, terminating the Bill. This leaves companies to navigate what she called a “patchwork of provincial and federal rules” rather than one coherent framework, creating genuine uncertainty for the very industries the strategy claims to champion.
Alexander tied that uncertainty to a pattern he has watched play out across advanced air mobility (AAM) for a decade. “Technology is outpacing policy every day of the week,” he said, adding that AI may be moving even faster than the electric aviation sector.
That gap in law, Carrasco argued, is only the more visible half of the problem. The deeper issue is that public literacy has not caught up to technology. She pointed to nations where children now learn to identify deepfakes and understand chatbot risk starting in primary school and called that kind of curriculum a model other governments should adopt immediately. Her concern was that most adults, including the parents and policymakers shaping AI’s future, never received that same grounding and are now left playing catch-up on technology already embedded in daily life. “Governments cannot legislate their way to public confidence if citizens do not yet understand what the technology actually does,” she said. Education, not regulation alone, may be the more urgent lever for building trust in AI and other emerging technologies.
That same gap in public awareness, she added, extends to how governments talk about AI’s successes rather than just its risks. Researching the strategy left her surprised to learn how many foundational AI researchers, including the co-founder of OpenAI, trace their roots to Canada, a fact she felt should have been common knowledge long before now. Governments need to promote homegrown success stories proactively rather than let public perception be shaped entirely by AI’s worst-case headlines.
That same tension, between what technology can already do and what the public is prepared to accept, resurfaced in the next segment on aviation policy.
Rewriting a Fifty-Year-Old Rule at Altitude
Freeman’s contribution shifted the conversation from abstract strategy to concrete rulemaking with real economic stakes, the FAA’s proposal to lift its 53-year ban on civil supersonic flight over the continental United States. Signed into motion by an executive order in June 2025, the proposed rule would replace the old speed-based restriction, which barred aircraft from exceeding Mach 1 without special authorization since 1973, with a noise-based standard that measures sonic boom overpressure at ground level rather than aircraft speed in the sky.
The new threshold under consideration, 0.11 pounds per square foot, was informed by demonstrated “quiet Mach cutoff” flights from Colorado-based Boom Supersonic, whose XB-1 aircraft proved that flying at specific altitudes and speeds can refract sonic shockwaves upward before they ever reach the ground.
Freeman, a former FAA regulatory attorney, considers the rule change less as a technical achievement and more of a test of whether public trust has caught up to what the technology can now do. The original 1973 ban existed because communities disliked sonic booms and regulators had no reliable way to guarantee a safe exposure threshold. Now that the physics allows companies to prove their booms will not reach the ground, the harder question becomes whether the public will accept supersonic flight over their neighborhoods regardless of what the data shows. Get the threshold wrong, and the fallout could be more than complaints. It could mean cracked windows and property damage.
“If people don’t want this operating over their house or in their communities, then you’re going to have a whole different set of problems,” Freeman said, drawing a distinction between regulatory clearance and social license that recurs constantly across emerging aviation technology.
That distinction surfaced again when Senn raised the political clock ticking against the rule. Because the FAA’s action stems from an executive order rather than statute, a change in administration could unravel the entire effort before it reaches a final rule, a timeline the agency itself has set for mid-2027.
Freeman drew a parallel to the FAA’s Special Federal Aviation Regulation (SFAR) for powered-lift aircraft, better known as eVTOLs, where the agency built what it considered the safest possible rule only to find manufacturers struggling to meet its operational requirements. Regulation and technological readiness, she suggested, do not always arrive on the same schedule, and when they diverge, someone has to wait.
Alexander closed the segment by underscoring how much public education still has to happen even after a rule clears legal hurdles. He recalled his own struggle explaining logarithmic decibel scales as it relates to heliport noise studies to local planning commissions. Industry claims of cutting helicopter noise signatures in half, he noted, does not translate to cutting the actual sound in half. A nuance that will matter enormously once communities start hearing sonic booms again for the first time in half a century.
The World Cup as a Live Enforcement Experiment
Public tolerance for risk, it turns out, looks very different when the threat comes from the ground rather than the sky, as evidenced by Senn’s article about how drone and counter-drone rules actually functioned during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a tournament he helped prepare for during his tenure as assistant administrator for government and industry affairs at the FAA.
Every U.S. venue, along with practice facilities and team hotels, became a no-drone zone enforced through temporary flight restrictions stretching three nautical miles and up to 3,000 feet on match days. Violations carried real weight, criminal exposure up to a year in prison, civil fines in the tens of thousands of dollars and the outright seizure of aircraft. The restrictions shifted daily by venue, meaning operators could not rely on memory or assumption.
The results offer the clearest data point yet on how expanded counter-drone authority actually performs under pressure. Federal agencies logged more than 600 violations and over 100 arrests during the tournament, providing an early stress test for authorities that Congress recently extended from federal agencies down to state and local law enforcement.
Industry advocates have pushed for exactly this kind of expanded detection and mitigation authority, arguing that state and local police need real-time tools to counter drone threats at major public gatherings rather than waiting on federal intervention.
Senn treated the World Cup numbers as a preview of what happens when that authority reaches every police department in the country. “I’m curious to see how it’s going to be when it gets expanded out to all 50 states, the hundreds of thousands of police departments and public safety organizations,” he said, questioning how many of the 600-plus violations reflected genuine threats versus operators who simply did not know the airspace had changed that day.
That distinction, between malicious intent and honest confusion, ran through the entire discussion as a kind of unifying warning. Carrasco connected it directly back to critical infrastructure protection, arguing that the same misunderstanding that led ordinary drone hobbyists into World Cup violations extends to public perception of data centers, power grids and other sensitive sites that increasingly need airspace protection of their own.
Senn acknowledged the enforcement numbers arrive against a darker backdrop. The recent loss of service members to drone strikes overseas has sharpened the fear factor driving faster policy action, even as regulators simultaneously worry about overcorrecting against a technology industry actively trying to demonstrate good-faith compliance.
Three Stories, One Pattern
Taken together, the AI strategy, the supersonic rulemaking and the World Cup enforcement data describe the same underlying dynamic from three different altitudes: regulators are structurally unable to move as fast as the technology they oversee, and every attempt to close that gap runs into the same wall. Carrasco, Freeman and Senn each arrived at that conclusion from their different professional vantage points of litigation, federal rulemaking and hands-on enforcement policy. Yet all three pointed to the same unfinished business. Rules can be written, executive orders can be signed and enforcement authority can be expanded, but none of it closes the distance between what the technology can now do and what the public has been told or taught about it. Alexander said it best. Keeping pace with the machines is only half the job. Closing the gap in public understanding is the other half. And right now neither side of that ledger is caught up.
Watch the Full Crew Tech Policy episode.