Drone Industry Faces Talent Crunch Ahead of BVLOS Launch

Within two to three years of the FAA finalizing its long-awaited Part 108 rules for routine beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) drone operations, the U.S. aviation industry could need hundreds of thousands of additional workers.

Qualified technicians, fleet operations managers, and domestic manufacturers are all in short supply, according to James McDanolds, director of the School of Uncrewed Technology at Sonoran Desert Institute, and the training programs to produce them are still catching up.

For an industry already grappling with widely reported shortages of pilots and mechanics, the drone sector’s workforce challenge adds a new dimension to a familiar problem.

“Today, you have more registered remote pilots with a Part 107 than you do general aviation and commercial airline pilots,” McDanolds told AIN. Under Part 108, he said, that pool will need to do far more: “Instead of one aircraft to one pilot, you have one pilot to tens, if not hundreds, of aircraft at once, acting more like an air traffic controller rather than a pilot.”

Pilots are only part of the equation. The deeper shortage is in technicians and operations managers—the people needed to keep large fleets running and the missions flowing.

The drone industry doesn’t have a pilot shortage. It has a talent bottleneck.

After years of delays, the FAA published the Part 108 NPRM on Aug. 7, 2025. A June 2025 executive order directed the agency to finalize the rule within 240 days, but a 43-day government shutdown pushed that target to March 16, 2026. More than 900,000 public comments were submitted after the FAA reopened the comment period in January. Implementation is expected six to 12 months after publication, meaning real-world impact could begin in late 2026 or early 2027.

Technicians Wanted

For all the attention paid to drone pilots, McDanolds argues the more acute shortage is in maintenance. There is no regulatory baseline for drone technician qualifications. Nothing analogous to the FAA’s airframe and powerplant certificate required of aircraft mechanics has been established for the drone industry.

What the job demands is broad: electrical hardware troubleshooting; systems-level knowledge of how flight controllers, electronic speed controllers, and motors interact; the ability to interpret autopilot flight data to diagnose system faults; and familiarity with airframe materials, including composites and 3D-printed structures.

Technicians who also hold a Part 107 remote pilot certificate are especially sought-after, because they can conduct functional check flights after maintenance without pulling a pilot from an operating team, McDanolds explained.

Running a BVLOS operation under an FAA waiver today might mean managing a handful of simultaneous drone flights. Under the proposed Part 108 rules, that could grow to 100 or 200 aircraft. Without enough technicians to keep them all airworthy, the operational promise of Part 108 stalls on the ground.

Part 108 would shift the human role in drone operations from active control to oversight, with automation handling routine flight tasks while a coordinator monitors and intervenes when necessary. Proposed rule language describes coordinators issuing high-level commands through automated systems rather than directly controlling individual aircraft. Groups including AOPA and ALPA have raised concerns that this approach removes the safety backstop of human intervention.

McDanolds experienced an early version of this transition at Flirtey, a drone delivery company in Reno, Nevada, where his team operated under a waiver to fly up to 10 aircraft BVLOS at night. “We could no longer think of being an active command and controller of one aircraft,” he said. “We had to think like air traffic controllers instead.”

Sequencing aircraft, managing emergencies across a fleet, and maintaining situational awareness across multiple simultaneous missions are skills Part 107 training does not address, and no formalized training path for the flight coordinator role currently exists, according to McDanolds. For now, operators and universities are building toward requirements that have yet to be fully defined.

Building the Pipeline

Drones offer a far cheaper entry into aviation than crewed aircraft: a Part 107 remote pilot certificate costs $150 to $275 in test fees, compared to building flight hours at $100 to $400 per hour for a commercial pilot certificate. Part 107 holders now outnumber private and airline transport pilots combined, according to McDanolds.

Remote pilots are relatively easy to find. The harder-to-find workers are those who can develop systems and manage complex operations at scale. “It’s a lot harder to find leaders in the drone space,” McDanolds said.

Training programs are trying to get ahead of requirements that haven’t been defined yet. SDI is part of the FAA’s UAS Collegiate Training Initiative, a network of more than 100 schools preparing students for Part 108’s workforce demands. Unlike Part 107, which places training responsibility on the individual remote pilot, Part 108 would place it on the certified operating organization.

McDanolds describes a two-stage model in which universities train students to a baseline—Part 107 certification, ground control station operations, multi-UAS sequencing, and human-machine interface training—before Part 108-certified operators finish the job with application-specific instruction.

Costs vary by path. Self-directed learners can get started for roughly $4,000 to $5,000. SDI’s accelerated certificate program runs about $6,600; its 80-week associate’s degree, which includes hardware and drone kits, costs about $24,000.

What no program can fully anticipate is what Part 108 operators will actually need once they begin scaling up, a feedback loop McDanolds expects to reshape curricula continuously.

“Even what I state now may change in the next two to three years,” he said. “We’re in a constant game of keep up.”

Workforce development isn’t the only constraint on Part 108 operations. Foreign equipment restrictions are tightening the supply chain even as U.S. demand surges, and domestic manufacturers have not yet filled the gap. “We’ve shrunk one side and grown another,” McDanolds said.

McDanolds estimates tens of thousands of people are currently employed across the U.S. drone industry. Once Part 108 takes effect, he projects that figure growing to the hundreds of thousands within two to three years.

Pay scales reflect a still-developing industry. Whereas commercial Part 107 pilots earn roughly $50,000 to $68,000 annually, according to McDanolds, flight test engineers earn $75,000 to $92,000, and flight operations managers can earn up to six figures. Maintenance technicians with basic skills start around $60,000 to $70,000, while those combining diagnostic expertise, composite airframe knowledge, and a Part 107 remote pilot certificate can command up to $90,000. 

Defense and counter-UAS applications are pulling experienced personnel in a second direction, adding further pressure to the pipeline, he said.

Operators, training programs, and manufacturers will all need to iterate in real time once the rule takes effect, McDanolds said. “Now’s the time to adapt. Now’s the time to learn. Now’s the time to grow fast.”