Clearing the Runway for New Aircraft
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration says it is working to help industry deploy air taxis and supersonic airplanes, boost space launches and expand drone operations. Deputy FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau laid out the approach in an interview at the Farnborough Airshow, and the framing was unusually unexpected for a safety regulator.
Key Takeaways
- An FAA pilot program launched last year covers eight partner companies across 26 states, and its data will inform eVTOL certification.
- The agency proposed the first of two rules in June to lift the 1973 ban on supersonic transport over land, with both rules due to be finalized by mid-2027.
- Aircraft certification for supersonic designs comes only after those rules are in place.
Letting industry set the pace
Rocheleau described a deliberate step back from writing detailed technical requirements. “We want to make sure that we’re not being too prescriptive in those standards, and that we’re letting the industry drive the innovation,” he said.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing pilot program is where that philosophy gets tested. Eight partners across 26 states are flying under it, and the resulting data feeds directly into how the agency writes certification rules. “The whole idea behind this is to take this new technology, these new aircraft, and put them into the national airstream in a safe and efficient manner,” Rocheleau said.
The Waymo comparison
Air taxi companies are chasing approvals to commercialize aircraft that take off and land vertically, ferrying passengers to airports or across congested cities. Archer Aviation CEO Adam Goldstein reached for a ground-transport analogy to explain how the rollout should work.
“I think the world has learned a lot in how the autonomous vehicles have launched,” Goldstein said, pointing to the city-by-city expansion of Google’s Waymo self-driving unit.
The FAA program gives the industry room to “roll this out to a couple cities in a confined area that we can kind of work through the kinks in the system,” Goldstein said. Contained deployment beats a national launch when the failure modes are still unknown.
Supersonic returns to the agenda
The overland supersonic ban dates to 1973 and has outlasted the aircraft it was written for. Commercial supersonic service ended in 2003 when Concorde retired after 27 years with Air France and British Airways.
In June the FAA proposed the first of two rules needed to lift the prohibition. A second rule will define acceptable noise thresholds for takeoff, landing and supersonic cruise. Both are due to be finalized by mid-2027, after which the FAA and other regulators still need to certify actual aircraft.
“We think the rules are old and outdated,” Rocheleau said.
The policy groundwork has been laid over several years rather than months. Executive action replaced the blanket overland prohibition with a performance-standards approach in mid-2025, and the FAA is now converting that direction into enforceable rules. On the electric side, the agency had already created a new powered-lift aircraft category, the first in nearly 80 years, covering pilot certification and operating rules for machines that switch between helicopter and airplane modes. Aerospace bodies covering the Farnborough remarks note the agency is pushing on certification, supersonic rulemaking and commercial spaceflight in parallel.
Manufacturers are further along than the rulebook. One US operator flew its first production electric air taxi in March and is working toward commercial service, while in China a 10-passenger eVTOL completed a public demonstration near Shanghai with type certification targeted for 2027. The bottleneck in both markets is the same and it is not aerodynamics. Landing pads, charging infrastructure and air traffic systems capable of handling dense low-altitude traffic do not yet exist at scale, and the eVTOL pilot programme is explicitly designed to gather the operating data those systems will be built on.
Written by Alius Noreika
