The drone industry has spent the better part of two decades making a single argument to regulators: uncrewed aircraft deserve the same standing in the National Airspace System as their crewed counterparts. At XPONENTIAL 2026 in Detroit, that argument was answered from the most consequential podium it could have come from — the head of day-to-day U.S. air traffic operations.
Franklin McIntosh, Chief Operating Officer of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO), addressed the conference on Tuesday morning with a statement that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. “We don’t see drones as drones,” McIntosh told the audience. “We see drones as aircraft. We don’t see drone operators as drone operators. We see them as pilots. Everyone has equal rights and usage to the National Airspace System.”
For those tracking the long arc of FAA-industry relations, the significance of that statement is hard to overstate.
A Cultural Shift Inside the ATO
McIntosh, a 25-year FAA veteran who began his career as an air traffic controller before rising to Deputy COO and ultimately being confirmed as permanent ATO COO in January 2026, didn’t frame the agency’s new posture as a policy adjustment. He described it as a cultural transformation within the organisation itself.
“If we would have had a conversation on how we are going to integrate drones, the most common answer from air traffic controllers and management was, ‘Oh, we are going to have to. We are not doing that,'” McIntosh said. He called the shift “monumental” and credited it with generating genuine workforce buy-in for the integration agenda — including the FAA’s notice of proposed rulemaking on beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.
That buy-in matters enormously. The ATO is the part of the FAA that actually runs the airspace — 45,000 to 46,000 flights per day during normal periods, climbing to 54,000 to 55,000 in summer. When controllers and operational managers believe that drones belong in the system, waivers get processed differently, integration gets prioritised rather than deferred, and the practical path to commercial BVLOS operations becomes meaningfully shorter.
Radar Data Sharing: A Program Coming Within Two Weeks
The cultural declaration alone would have made McIntosh’s appearance newsworthy. But he added a concrete near-term announcement that is likely to have an even more direct impact on commercial drone operators: an imminent FAA test program on radar data sharing.
“I am very excited about the new FAA test program on radar data sharing that we learned from the test sites,” McIntosh said. “I think that is going to be coming out here in the next few days, two weeks.”
The program builds on FAA work conducted at test sites in North Dakota focused on shared situational awareness between air traffic controllers and drone operators. The core concept is straightforward but transformative: primary radar data from FAA facilities would be made available to drone operators in near real time, dramatically improving their ability to detect and avoid conventional aircraft operating in shared airspace below 400 feet (approximately 122 metres).
“What we need is shared situational awareness from the radar scope to the other side of the user to make sure that everybody is on the same page,” McIntosh said, calling the underlying test work “a huge step forward.”
Why This Matters for BVLOS Operations
The detect-and-avoid challenge has been one of the most persistent technical and regulatory obstacles to large-scale commercial BVLOS operations. Current solutions require operators to either fly in designated airspace with no conventional traffic, coordinate directly with air traffic control on a case-by-case basis, or equip their aircraft with onboard sensors capable of independently detecting other aircraft.
Access to shared radar data would change that equation significantly. If drone operators can receive near-real-time information about conventional aircraft in their vicinity through the same data infrastructure that controllers use, the burden of airspace deconfliction becomes far more manageable — both technically and economically.
For commercial operators waiting on the FAA’s final Part 108 BVLOS rule, a formalised radar data sharing program represents a meaningful step toward the kind of operational infrastructure that scalable drone services will require. The Part 108 notice of proposed rulemaking was published in August 2025, with McIntosh indicating the final rule — described as “scalable, risk-based, performance-based” — is coming “in the near future.”
eVTOL Integration: Operations Targeted for This Year
McIntosh was joined onstage by Jessica Jones, Executive Director of the FAA’s new Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies — an office established as part of a January 2026 FAA reorganisation aimed at accelerating integration of drones and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft into the national airspace.
Jones provided updates on the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which selected eight projects across 26 states in March 2026. She confirmed that Other Transaction Agreements with all eight participants have been signed and that initial operations are targeted for this year, with first-of-kind air taxi and cargo services expected from participants including Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, BETA Technologies, and Wisk Aero.
Jones also offered a data point that reframes the narrative around where the drone industry currently sits. “These aren’t hobbyist numbers,” she said, referencing FAA internal statistics showing 38 million drone flights and 16 million commercial Part 107 operations logged in 2024 alone, with more than 400,000 FAA-certified remote pilots active in the system. The drone industry is not an emerging technology sector. It is an operational one.
Counter-UAS: Moving From Case-By-Case to Batch Criteria
Both McIntosh and Jones devoted significant attention to counter-UAS (C-UAS) policy, reflecting how rapidly that part of the regulatory agenda has evolved. McIntosh described the ATO’s current process of reviewing individual Section 124 and 139 packages for counter-drone deployments as a bottleneck, and said the agency is now developing batch criteria that would allow faster approval for systems that meet predefined parameters.
He was careful to frame C-UAS deployment primarily as an air traffic management challenge rather than a safety one, noting that the concern is not whether these systems work, but how their use interacts with legitimate drone operations already authorised in the national airspace.
What This Means for the Drone Industry
The statements from McIntosh and Jones at XPONENTIAL 2026 are significant not simply because of what was announced, but because of who was saying it and from where. The ATO has historically been the operational gatekeeper that determined, in practice, whether new entrants actually flew in the airspace the rules were designed to cover. A permanent ATO COO describing drone operators as pilots sends a signal through the entire system — to controllers, managers, and waivers officers — about how to approach every application on their desks.
Combined with the imminent radar data sharing program and the clear timeline on Part 108 rulemaking, the picture emerging from Detroit is one of an agency that has made a genuine institutional commitment to drone integration — not as a future priority, but as a present operational reality. For the commercial UAV industry, that shift may ultimately prove to be more consequential than any single rule or waiver decision.
