The FCC's drone docket closed with 3,847 filings and a brief from a former Solicitor General

The comment record in PS Docket 26-189 closed on September 2, and the FCC's docket page now reports 3,847 total filings, split into 3,173 express filings and 674 standard filings. Drone Authority's earlier report put the figure at more than 2,250, which was as far as a walk of the FCC's public API could get before its rate limit stopped the count. The docket page is authoritative and 3,847 is the number.

Almost all of it is public comment. The FCC's breakdown lists 3,799 filings typed as comments, 11 as oppositions, six as replies to comments, and single-digit counts of complaints, letters, statements, ex parte notices and extension motions, plus one appeal. Individual pilots and small operators supplied the volume, but the record also drew a joint filing from seven energy and utility trade groups, among them the Edison Electric Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the American Chemistry Council, whose members fly thermal and LiDAR payloads on pipeline and transmission inspections.

DJI filed on the last day. The ECFS record shows the comment was authored by Travis LeBlanc, a former chief of the FCC's own Enforcement Bureau, and Elizabeth Prelogar, the 48th Solicitor General of the United States. DroneXL and DRONELIFE, which both read the 26-page filing, report that it argues the seven military-grade categories appear nowhere in the December 2025 national security determination the notice rests on, that the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act requires a specific determination about particular equipment from a particular entity rather than a category drawn by country of origin, and that a drone is not equipment essential to the provision of advanced communications service. It asks the bureaus to rescind the notice. Failing that, it asks for an 18-month transition in place of 180 days, continued access for state and local public safety agencies, and measurable technical thresholds for any capability test.

That is a different kind of document from the rest of the docket. Most filings tell the FCC the proposal will hurt. This one tells the FCC it lacks the power, in the vocabulary appellate courts use when they vacate an agency action. It matters because the same argument is already running in the Ninth Circuit, where DJI's challenge to the underlying December 2025 Covered List action is docketed as No. 26-1029, alongside a petition for reconsideration DJI filed in January. If either one narrows or vacates that listing, the military-grade proposal loses the predicate it was built on.