Free analysis · FCC PS Docket 26-189
Free analysis · FCC PS Docket 26-189
The drone ban docket · Public Notice DA 26-758
The FCC proposed to bar the import and marketing of foreign-made military-grade drones. The definition sweeps in any covered aircraft with a thermal camera, a LiDAR sensor, a docking station, spray gear, or 55 lbs of takeoff weight. We analyzed every filing and every attachment, scored them against the eleven questions the Commission asked, and put the whole record in one place.
Interactive, sortable, and sourced to the docket. Free.
Why this exists
A comment docket is the closest thing the drone industry gets to a census of itself, but it is almost unreadable. Docket 26-189 collected more than 3,800 filings in six weeks, and more than a quarter of them landed in the last three days. Most are a paragraph long. Several hundred are PDFs and Word files buried behind attachment links, including scans of hand-signed letters.
So the coverage you have seen leans on the same handful of quotable filings. Nobody has told you how the 298 public safety agencies that filed answered the scope question, what the 175 agricultural filings said about the spray criterion, or which of the eleven questions the record barely touched.
This is where we come in. Every filing was analyzed and coded against the same rubric: position, sector, an answer to each of the FCC's five question clusters, and the arguments raised. Quotes were string-matched against the filed documents, and any that did not match exactly were dropped rather than paraphrased.
What you get
Not a PDF summary. A live page you can filter, sort and search, plus the raw coded dataset if you would rather run your own numbers.
The complete ECFS export: 3,824 of the 3,829 unique filings carried readable text and were coded, 3,157 of them express comments and 667 arriving as attachments. All 686 attachment files converted to text, 22 scans run through OCR.
All eleven of the Commission's questions in its five clusters, each with the distribution of answers and the denominator stated.
Thirteen filer types counted and ranked, from the 1,217 individual remote pilots down to the 19 government bodies, with public safety the third-largest bloc at 298.
Filterable and searchable, each string-matched against the filed document and tagged with its ECFS docket ID so you can pull the original.
A sortable table of every filer that filed under an organizational name, and where each one landed.
Sixteen filings support the prohibition as proposed. Their arguments are laid out on their own terms, including the fullest defense and the one trade group on that side.
406 filings put a number on what the rule would cost them. The distribution by size, the $16,464 median firm-level figure, and the largest institutional estimates.
Filings per day across the comment window, plus what happened to the three motions to extend the deadline.
Every filing coded against a closed list of 45 arguments. Filter by who is making them and watch the ranking shift between an agricultural applicator and a police UAS unit.
What the analysis can and cannot support: the coding judgment calls, which figures are robust and which are soft, the share of the record that reuses template language, and why a docket is not a survey.
A look inside
“Thermal imaging, LiDAR, autonomous flight, and docking capabilities are dual-use technologies employed every day for lawful, lifesaving, and distinctly nonmilitary purposes.”
Ohio Chapter, Law Enforcement Drone Association · 26110070932
“Replacing my fleet with the domestic alternatives I have priced would cost me roughly $200,000, which is 200 percent of my annual revenue.”
Phoenix Drone Pros · 26110073229
Yes. There is no upsell attached to it. We built this because we needed to understand the record ourselves.
The FCC's own Electronic Comment Filing System. Every filing in PS Docket 26-189 was pulled directly from ECFS, along with all 686 attachment files. Each filing carries its ECFS ID so you can open the original.
No, and the report is explicit about that. A docket measures who showed up. What the number does show is that among those motivated enough to file, opposition was close to unanimous, and only 5.7% of filings reuse template language.
Please do, with attribution. If you are citing a specific filing rather than our analysis of it, use the ECFS ID and go to the source.
Neither. It is a description of what people filed. Nothing here tells you how the Commission will rule or what to do about your own fleet.
Pilot Institute. We train drone and airplane pilots, and we filed in this docket ourselves, so we have a stake in the outcome. That is why the method, the coding rubric and the known weaknesses are published alongside the conclusions, and every filing carries its ECFS ID. You can check the work.
Free, instant, and sourced to the docket line by line.
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