Wing told the FCC on 8 September that the agency’s next set of Covered List rules “risks inadvertently grounding Wing and other trusted domestic drone industry companies” unless the Alphabet subsidiary and operators like it are written out of them. It is one of the drone industry’s filings on a proposal that would define a drone as foreign-produced unless it is built in the United States with more than 65 percent domestic content by cost.
The proposal sits in a further notice the FCC adopted on 22 July alongside its component-ban order. It would codify “produced in a foreign country”, the phrase that put every foreign-made drone on the Covered List on 22 December 2025, as anything that fails the Buy American “domestic end product” test. It would also require full certification rather than a supplier’s declaration for every drone and drone component, a hardware and software bill of materials from every applicant, updated within 30 days of any change, a ten-year expiry on equipment authorisations, and a cut in the number of covered units a company may import for testing from 4,000 to 40.
What Wing asked for
Wing’s case is that its aircraft have already been vetted. Chris Delgado, its associate general counsel, wrote that a Part 135 air carrier certificate carries US-ownership conditions of its own, with a president and two-thirds of the board required to be citizens and 75 percent of voting interest US-held, and that this should count as the security review the FCC is looking for. Wing asked that drones “designed, manufactured, operated and controlled by American Part 135 certified air carriers” be excluded from the production-location entry altogether.
It went further for vertically integrated operators that never sell their aircraft to anyone. Those drones, Wing said, should be exempt “even if the UAS are assembled and manufactured outside the U.S.”, because the operator controls the software and the update path. Wing’s own factory in Fort Worth has been able to build “thousands of aircraft each year” since January, by the company’s account, and Wing said any change of supplier in a safety-regulated aircraft takes “at a minimum 12+ months” to flow through airworthiness approvals.
Wing wants to keep filing supplier’s declarations without a bill of materials, and wants “UAS critical components” confined to “RF-emitting components designed and intended primarily for use in UAS”, so that a generic camera or chip does not become covered equipment by being bolted to a drone.
Where the industry disagrees
The Commercial Drone Alliance, whose chief executive Lisa Ellman signed its filing, supports the 65 percent test. It called the Buy American standard “a clear compliance benchmark” that manufacturers are already investing against, and asked the FCC to make the Blue UAS, Buy American and conditional-approval exemptions permanent rather than letting them lapse on 1 January 2028.
AUVSI, through Scott Shtofman, its vice president and counsel for regulatory affairs, asked for the opposite: a trade-law rules-of-origin test that looks at where a product was last substantially transformed. A drone “finally assembled, tested, and quality-controlled in the United States by a U.S.-based company”, it wrote, should not become foreign-produced because it relies on allied suppliers or “globally available semiconductors”. One AUVSI member put the cost of the bill-of-materials requirement at “millions of dollars in yearly costs”; the association opposed the ten-year term limit outright and said the 40-unit import cap does not reflect the scale of a real field trial.
The Agricultural Drone Initiative, representing US sprayer makers, backed the FCC and asked it to go after parents rather than shells. It pointed to Lyno Dynamics and Skyhigh Tech, which the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau proposed fining $25,000 each in July for not answering its questions about whether they had sold rebadged DJI equipment, and wrote that DJI “faced none” of the penalty.
The component ban that takes effect on 13 October is settled; these filings are aimed at the round after it. Reply comments were due on 21 September until ten trade associations asked for 30 more days; the Office of Engineering and Technology gave them seven, and the record closes on 28 September.
