The Part 108 Endgame Is This Week, in a Room Most People Don't Know Exists

Bottom Line Up Front: Before any significant federal rule publishes, it passes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), and anyone can request a meeting to argue for changes. Those meetings are logged publicly at reginfo.gov, and almost nobody reads the log. For the Part 108 BVLOS final rule (RIN 2120-AL82), ten meetings are on the calendar this week and next: mostly drone delivery companies, bracketed by helicopter and air-medical operators, plus exactly one drone-detection radar vendor. No police organization, no DHS component, no privacy group, and no airport authority booked a seat.

How the quiet room works

Executive Order 12866 requires OIRA to review significant rules before publication. The Part 108 final rule arrived there in July, per trade reporting. During review, outside parties can request meetings; the requests, dates, and (after each meeting) attendee lists post to the public docket at reginfo.gov.

This is where final-text fights actually happen. The comment period built the record; the OIRA calendar shows who's spending effort to shape what the record becomes.

Who booked the room

The schedule for August 18 through 25, from the public meeting log:

• Aug 18: Vertical Aviation International (the helicopter industry)
• Aug 19: Echodyne (radar maker whose sensors serve both aviation safety and drone detection), then SAFE (an energy-security organization)
• Aug 20: Wing (Alphabet's delivery arm, via outside counsel), then DoorDash
• Aug 21: Amazon Prime Air, then Zipline
• Aug 24: Skydio (via outside counsel)
• Aug 25: the Air Medical Operators Association (via outside counsel), then Manna Drone Delivery

Read the shape of it. Six of ten meetings are delivery and drone-industry players pushing for a rule they can scale under. The first and last slots belong to the low-altitude manned operators (helicopters and air ambulances) whose filed comments attacked the rule's assumption that the airspace below 400 feet is empty. And one detection-sensor company bought a seat at the aviation table, which tells you something about where that industry thinks its next market is.

Who didn't book the room

Just as informative:

• No public-safety organization. Police drone programs (the drone-as-first-responder movement) filed extensive comments and met with OIRA during the proposal stage in 2024 and 2025. For the final-rule round, as of this writing, none are scheduled.
• No DHS, no security agency, by name. The National Security Council staff sat in on at least nine proposal-stage meetings (that's in the public attendee lists), but no security agency appears as a participant in the current round.
• No airports, no airlines, no privacy groups, no recreational-flyer representation. The Academy of Model Aeronautics and the FPV community fought loudly in the comment period. The final-text room is quieter and more expensive, and they're not in it.

Why this matters beyond aviation

The rule being finalized in these meetings decides how legible the low-altitude airspace becomes: which aircraft must broadcast their position, what counts as a cooperative track, and what sensing infrastructure gets regulatory standing. Every one of those choices lands directly on the desk of anyone responsible for securing a stadium, a prison, a utility yard, or a border-adjacent jurisdiction. The security world mostly isn't watching this docket. It should be.

One mechanical note: attendee rosters for each meeting post only after the meeting happens. We'll pull the complete lists the week of August 25 and report who actually walked in, and with whom.

(Where DELALLi sits in this: we educate and prepare agencies for the regulatory environment these rules create. We do not certify anyone. Certification of counter-UAS mitigation authority runs through the FBI's National Counter-UAS Training Center (NCUTC), and nowhere else.)