Air Advocacy

A Unified Voice in the Air

The Air Advocacy Committee (AAC) is where AUVSI’s air domain advocacy strategy is shaped, aligned, and turned into action.

It exists for one simple reason: no single company can shape the policy environment for uncrewed and advanced air systems alone — but together, industry can.

Guided by member priorities, the AAC drives AUVSI’s legislative and regulatory agenda for uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). The Committee works hand-in-hand with federal agencies, lawmakers, and state, local, and tribal leaders to ensure policies enable safe, scalable, and secure integration of autonomous aviation into the national airspace.

Measurable Impact Across Policy and Operations

In 2025, that work delivered real, measurable results: executive action elevating uncrewed systems as national infrastructure, long-awaited progress on BVLOS operations, strengthened counter-UAS authorities, and a decisive shift toward supply chain security and industrial resilience. These outcomes didn’t happen by accident; they were the result of sustained, coordinated engagement between AUVSI, its members, and policymakers at every level of government.

Get Involved

The AAC brings together a uniquely broad coalition of stakeholders including UAS operators and manufacturers, software and autonomy companies, defense and counter-UAS firms, Advanced Air Mobility developers, Drone as First Responder leaders, and public safety experts, united by a shared understanding: the future of uncrewed flight will be shaped as much by policy as by technology.

By participating in the AAC, members don’t just react to regulation,  they help write the playbook. They gain early insight into emerging policy, help define industry positions before decisions are made, and ensure real-world operational experience informs how rules are written and implemented.

This is the essential work of air domain advocacy: building credibility, maintaining presence, and earning trust long before decisions are made.

If your company cares about how, where, and at what scale uncrewed and autonomous air systems are deployed, this is where you belong.

To get involved, contact Alexander Laska at alaska@auvsi.org.

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• Chairperson: Benjamin Ivers, Boeing
• Vice-Chairperson: Amanda Armistead, Amazon
• Vice-Chairperson: Scott O’Brien, Reliable Robotics
• Subcommittees: Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS)

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Our current policy priorities

Members meet monthly—and often more frequently—to develop advocacy goals and policy positions. The AAC also has two subcommittees – a UAS Subcommittee and an AAM Subcommittee – who meet bimonthly to discuss pressing issues in those spaces.

Here are a few of the priorities we’re currently working on:

1. Establishing the AAC as the preeminent industry voice influencing UAS and AAM regulations and legislation and positioning the AAC, and AUVSI, positively to influence the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 and its implementation and the implementation of the two recent Trump Administration Executive Orders on drones – Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty and Unleashing American Drone Dominance.
2. Establishing a clear pathway for advanced UAS operations Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and ensuring the rulemakings associated with the BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) recommendations are issued as quickly as possible.
3. Ensuring domestic UAS and AAM companies have the resources they need to globally compete with companies that are heavily subsidized by their respective governments (see AUVSI Partnership for Drone Competitiveness).
4. Ensuring a favorable National Airspace System (NAS) for key UAS operations, including drone deliveries, routine public safety operations, critical infrastructure inspections, defense operations, cUAS operations, agriculture applications, and other high-value, low-risk use cases.
5. Fostering an inclusive airspace for AAM, Urban Air Mobility (UAM), and Regional Air Mobility (RAM) aircraft and operations, notably by ensuring the FAA releases a powered-lift Special Federal Aviation Regulation (SFAR) as soon as possible that takes into consideration industry’s concerns and extensive feedback.
6. Working with federal, state, local, and tribal officials on vertiports and other key AAM-related infrastructure.
7. Creating a new regulatory framework that shifts away from the traditional aviation safety continuum, which does not work well for advanced aviation, and looks forward to establish rules that unlock the full potential of UAS and AAM technologies.
8. Developing next steps for the integration of UAS Traffic Management (UTM), and AAM Traffic Management (ATM) to work alongside the current air traffic management system.
9. Ensuring that the FAA retains exclusive sovereignty of airspace of the United States in order to maintain safety and operational consistency across all users of the NAS.
10. Providing law enforcement with the proper authority to address errant or potentially malicious UAS and ensuring Preventing Emerging Threats Act compliance and consistent reauthorization.
11. Developing strong public-private partnerships to foster voluntary, risk-based approaches to data security and operations management, the development of industry-driven initiatives on data management best practices and security standards that ensure critical mission information is accessed by authorized parties, and the development of industry-driven security standards.
12. Ensuring UAS and AAM have access to spectrum to conduct operations, including the use of command-and-control technologies at higher altitudes, use of detect-and-avoid systems, ability to transmit payload data, and to conduct operations that ultimately strengthen the operation of UAS in the NAS. AUVSI continues to look for regulatory efforts we can comment on, after filing comments to the Federal Communications Commission’s C-Band Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and National Spectrum Strategy.
13. Opening markets, reducing barriers and regulations, and injecting more certainty and predictability into the marketplace, trade, and investment agreements, which are key catalysts for the innovation progress that drive our global economies and markets.
14. Promoting technology transfer and international harmonization of standards to realize the full potential benefits of uncrewed systems.