If the FAA granted your operation BVLOS authority tomorrow, your insurance policy would not change. The approval letter and the insuring agreement are written by different institutions, answer different questions, and fail in different ways. A piece of legal commentary that surfaced this week is a useful prompt to close that gap now, while it is still a planning exercise rather than a claims dispute.
What was actually published this week
On September 10, the law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson posted a news item highlighting an article by two of its attorneys, Nicholas Ajello and Gregory Emry, published in the Winter 2026 edition of the ABA's TortSource newsletter. Per the firm's summary, the pair analyze the FAA's proposed Part 108 as a scalable alternative to today's individualized waivers, and anticipate scrutiny of operator training, maintenance, and compliance; potential disputes among manufacturers, operators, and automation providers; and insurance coverage questions touching aircraft exclusions, professional services exclusions, and cyber risk, alongside nuisance, privacy, and trespass exposure.
Be clear about what this is and is not. It is a firm summarizing its own authors' analysis. It is not a new FAA rule, a court decision, a denied claim, or a newly effective obligation. We are working from the firm's published summary, not the full ABA article. The attorneys' predictions about litigation are informed analysis, not established outcomes. The reason it is worth your time anyway is that the coverage questions they raise are ones an operator can act on today.
Where Part 108 actually stands
Part 108 remains a proposal. The notice of proposed rulemaking published August 7, 2025. As of September 10 checks of the Federal Register docket, no final rule was found. A September 4 TSA notice offers a recent primary-source status check: it solicits participants for technical roundtables on UAS security, describes the FAA and TSA final rules as forthcoming, and schedules the roundtables for after those rules publish.
Until a final rule exists, your operating authority is whatever waiver, exemption, or Part 107 conditions you actually hold, and those specific conditions are what you should verify before any scaled mission. Nothing in the proposal grants anyone new authority today.
Approval and coverage answer different questions
An FAA authorization defines the operations you are permitted to conduct under its conditions; whether an operation is otherwise lawful can also depend on other applicable law. An insurance policy tells you which losses someone else will pay for. The FAA's own fact sheet on the proposal describes permits for lower-risk operations, certificates for higher-risk ones, geographic-area approvals, communications coverage and lost-link procedures, and safety management systems and training programs for certificated operations. The proposal itself does not amend the wording of any insurance policy, and it does not itself establish a current universal requirement that operators purchase insurance. Coverage turns on the policy wording, the endorsements attached to it, and the facts of the loss.
Questions worth putting in writing
These are UAVHQ planning recommendations to take to your broker and counsel, not regulatory requirements. The goal is written answers you can file, not verbal comfort.
Mission scope disclosure
Give your broker the actual operation: aircraft types, mission profiles, routes and geography, degree of autonomy, payloads, and how vendors and subcontractors fit in. Then ask directly whether the policy application and schedules reflect that operation and whether BVLOS flight is specifically contemplated. An underwriter who priced a visual-line-of-sight inspection business has not necessarily priced a networked BVLOS operation, and the time to find out is before a loss.
Aircraft exclusions versus CGL and professional services
Ask which policy responds to bodily injury or property damage arising from flight, and whether any aircraft exclusion in your commercial general liability policy has been modified by endorsement. Separately, ask what responds when the harm is an error in your deliverable rather than the flight itself, such as a flawed inspection report, and whether a professional services exclusion applies. The Hinshaw summary flags both exclusion types as coverage questions worth raising with your broker in writing.
Cyber, privacy, and vendor contracts
BVLOS operations lean on command-and-control links, third-party service providers, and data collection over people and property. Ask how cyber and privacy exposures are handled across your policies, which vendor contracts require indemnification or additional-insured status, and whether the certificates of insurance you hold from vendors are current. Treat those certificates as a starting point, not a substitute for reviewing the underlying policy endorsements and contract terms; a certificate does not by itself guarantee coverage.
Configuration and incident evidence
The FAA's proposal describes recordkeeping spanning flight records, maintenance and inspections, personnel training, operations manuals, manufacturer configuration and safety records, and software revision records for Automated Data Service Providers (ADSPs). Those descriptions are proposal text and have not taken effect, but that is not a claim that you have no record duties today: obligations under your existing operating authority, other applicable law, your contracts, and your own policies still apply. Beyond those, our recommendation is to keep configuration and incident records you could actually produce, because a coverage dispute or tort claim will ask what the aircraft, software, and crew were configured to do at the moment things went wrong.
In practice, that means retaining event logs, the software and firmware versions in use, the crew assigned to each mission, and timestamps that tie those records together. Confirm that you can export logs held by vendors, and settle in writing who is responsible for notifying whom after an incident. Review your retention schedule with counsel rather than accumulating data indefinitely; holding unnecessary private data is its own exposure.
Get the answers in writing
Ask your broker and counsel for a written review covering the policy wording itself, every applicable endorsement, and your notification triggers, meaning which events you must report and how quickly. Understand that an email to your broker does not itself create coverage; the policy and its endorsements are what bind. A written record of what you disclosed and what you were told helps establish those disclosures and the chronology if a dispute arises, though it does not ensure any particular outcome.
The next step is one page
Build a one-page description of your missions, aircraft, autonomy, and vendor arrangements. Sit down with your broker and counsel and compare it line by line against your policy and your actual operating authority. If you want a structured starting point, the UAVHQ BVLOS Playbook includes planning templates and a ConOps outline you can use to organize that page and the readiness file behind it. It is a planning aid; it does not and cannot promise FAA approval or insurance coverage.
This article is operator analysis, not legal advice. Talk to your own counsel and broker about your specific operation.
Sources
- Hinshaw & Culbertson, "Nicholas Ajello and Gregory Emry Analyze FAA's Proposed BVLOS Drone Regulations," September 10, 2026
- FAA, "Fact Sheet: Normalizing UAS Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations" (proposed rule)
- TSA, "Notice Soliciting Representatives for Technical Roundtables on Security of Unmanned Aircraft Systems," Federal Register, September 4, 2026
- FAA, "Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations," NPRM, Federal Register, August 7, 2025