By Wesley Alexander • September 2, 2026 • 9 min read

Tactical Summary

The FAA has formally opened the competition for BEYOND Phase 2. Screening Information Request 697DCK-26-R-00423, posted to SAM.gov on August 27, will award up to eight Other Transaction Agreements to state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments, doubling the size of the FAA's flagship drone-integration partnership program. Written questions are due by 1:00 p.m. Eastern on September 3. Full proposals are due by 3:00 p.m. Eastern on September 10, via email to the contracting officer, with an active SAM.gov registration required by the offer date.

If you run a public-sector drone program, this is your window to become one of the entities that shapes how routine BVLOS actually gets implemented in the United States. If you are a commercial operator or vendor, the play is different but just as time-sensitive: the FAA explicitly expects proposing governments to name their industry partners and third-party vendors. The teams are being assembled right now.

What BEYOND Phase 2 Actually Is

BEYOND is the FAA's long-running data partnership for advanced drone operations, the successor to the UAS Integration Pilot Program. Phase 1 wrapped in 2024 with eight lead participants and a substantial operational record: the FAA credits the program with 70,563 total flights, 48,383 of them beyond visual line of sight. That flight data fed directly into the safety case underpinning the Part 108 rulemaking.

Phase 2 was authorized by Section 920 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 and runs through 2029. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the expansion alongside FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who framed the goal plainly: address the remaining challenges in BVLOS operations, public safety missions, on-airport operations, and other complex airspace environments with real-world data.

Two structural details in the solicitation matter more than the press release:

It is an OTA, not a contract or a grant. The FAA is using its Other Transaction authority under 49 U.S.C. § 106(l) and (m). This is not a procurement under the FAA's acquisition system, and the SIR states that directly. OTAs are flexible instruments: fewer FAR-style compliance burdens, more room to negotiate scope, and no expectation that the government funds your operations. Phase 1 participants largely brought their own resources and industry partnerships. Plan for the same.

It is SLTT-only at the prime level. Only state, local, tribal, and territorial entities can hold the agreement. Companies do not apply directly. They ride on a government team, which is why the teaming conversation is the real action item this week.

The Focus Areas Tell You What the FAA Wants

The SIR names four programmatic focus areas: infrastructure, scalability, safety, and automation. It then identifies five operational challenge areas where the FAA says progress is most needed: public safety, controlled airspace, remote and rural areas with inadequate infrastructure, on-airport operations, and operations across international borders.

Read those ten items as a shopping list. The FAA is not looking for another photogenic delivery demo. It is looking for participants who can generate data against the problems that are still blocking rule-based, repeatable operations at scale. A few observations from someone who has spent a career building operational safety cases:

Controlled airspace and on-airport operations are the underserved lanes. Most Phase 1 work happened in low-risk, low-density environments because that is where approvals were achievable. An SLTT applicant with a towered airport, an aviation department willing to host drone operations on the field, and a credible surface-operations concept will stand out, precisely because almost nobody has produced good data there.

Cross-border operations are a genuinely new invitation. Border states and territories with international frontage have an angle no inland applicant can match. C2 link coordination, spectrum handoff, and customs process integration across a border is hard, unglamorous work, which is exactly why the FAA needs a partner willing to do it.

Automation means the safety case, not the marketing deck. If your team's concept relies on one-to-many operations, automated deconfliction, or dock-based remote operations, the value to the FAA is the documented performance of those systems: detect-and-avoid effectiveness, link reliability statistics, lost-link behavior in the wild. Proposals should describe the data product, not just the mission.

Who Should Be Moving This Week

State DOTs and aviation offices are the natural primes. Phase 1's most productive participants (North Carolina, Virginia, and the Choctaw Nation among them) paired a motivated government sponsor with a stable of operators. If your state sat out Phase 1, this is the second and probably final boarding call for this program cycle.

Public-safety agencies should approach their state or city as the sponsoring entity. Drone-as-first-responder programs generate exactly the repeatable, high-volume BVLOS data the FAA wants, and public safety is named as an operational focus area. The documentation and airspace groundwork we covered in the Fort Worth citywide DFR brief is the same groundwork a BEYOND proposal needs on paper.

Commercial operators and vendors cannot prime, but a winning proposal must identify its industry partners, the specific operations to be conducted, and the resources each party brings. If you operate in a candidate state, the highest-leverage move available before September 10 is a one-page capability statement to your state aviation office or a known applicant team: aircraft, waivers and exemptions held, operational history, and the focus areas you can generate data against. Teams are being finalized in days, not weeks.

The Part 108 Context Nobody Should Ignore

The uncomfortable backdrop is that BEYOND Phase 2 is launching while the rule it was meant to inform is still not final. The Part 108 NPRM drew roughly 3,100 comments after its August 2025 publication, and the final rule remains in interagency review as of this writing. Industry expectations for publication have slipped toward late 2026 or beyond, with phased compliance dates after that.

Practically, that means new BEYOND participants will operate their first year or more under the existing patchwork: Part 107 waivers, Part 91 exemptions, and case-by-case approvals. That is not a reason to sit out. It is the reason to get in. Participants get direct FAA engagement on approvals while everyone else waits in the general queue, and the operational record they build becomes the on-ramp when Part 108 arrives. Our Part 108 complete guide covers where the rule stands, and the approval-versus-readiness distinction is the core argument of the BVLOS compliance checklist: an approval names you; readiness is the documented system that survives an audit, an incident, or an FAA site visit.

One more planning input for any team writing a concept of operations this week: spectrum. C2 link strategy is now a first-order proposal question, not an appendix. The FCC's licensing reform for drone C2 changes what a scalable link architecture looks like, and we broke that down in the drone spectrum licensing analysis.

The Operator Takeaway

Deadlines first: written questions by 1:00 p.m. ET September 3, referencing the SIR number. Proposals by 3:00 p.m. ET September 10, by email, with SAM.gov registration active. The FAA says it intends eight awards and reserves the right to make more if resources permit.

If you are an SLTT entity: the discriminators are a concrete operational concept tied to the named focus areas, identified industry partners with real operational history, and a credible description of the data you will hand the FAA. Vague innovation language loses to a specific, boring, achievable operation flown many times.

If you are a commercial operator: you have about a week to get yourself named in somebody's proposal. After September 10, the teams are set until 2029.

If your organization is building the BVLOS safety case either way, inside BEYOND or outside it, the BVLOS Operations Playbook is the readiness framework we built for exactly this: waiver strategy, C2 and lost-link documentation, and the operational evidence structure that FAA engagement rewards.

Sources

Wesley Alexander is a former Insitu/Boeing ScanEagle Commercial Chief Test Pilot and former UAS DPE for Insitu ScanEagle pilots and instructors. UAVHQ provides operator-focused intelligence on regulatory and safety developments in the commercial UAV industry.