New arrivals to the world of commercial drones may trace its start to the August 2016 effective date of the FAA’s Part 107 regulation for commercial small unmanned aircraft systems or perhaps to the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which expedited their entry into the national airspace system. The industry’s old salts know, however, that Part 107 has a history dating back a decade or more to the early 2000s.
Even the FAA, in a preamble to Part 107, stated that its effort to introduce drones into the airspace began in 2008—the year that acting FAA Administrator Robert Sturgell signed an order to create a small Unmanned Aircraft Systems aviation rulemaking committee. But former agency executives I interviewed for my book, Enter the Drones: The FAA and UAVs in America (Schiffer, July 2016), remember it differently; they say there were multiple attempts to draft a regulation dating to around 2003. A variety of factors—indifferent leadership, bureaucracy, interagency differences, outside pressure, the inherent complexity of the regulation—delayed its release for more than a decade.
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