Compliance
What NDAA compliance means for a build
A drone is not compliant because a supplier says so. It is compliant because what is inside it, and who built it, can be shown.
Why it comes up
Why anyone is asking
Federal buyers cannot buy drones tied to the suppliers these rules name, and the tests reach both who built the aircraft and what is inside it (the flight controller, the radio, the camera, the ground station). A growing number of enterprise buyers now ask for the same, by their own policy or through a clause passed down to them. Either way the answer is about the whole aircraft, so one part chosen for price can take a program out of the running after it is designed.
What we do about it
- Keep a compliance matrix that maps every requirement to the part that satisfies it
- Hold an approved vendor list, so a substitution is a decision and not an accident
- Design in second sources for the parts most likely to be ruled out later
- Assemble the packet a customer's contracts team asks for, rather than a claim
This describes how we work. It is not legal advice, and what a rule requires of you depends on your customer and your contract.
What this covers in the package
- NDAA compliance matrix
- Approved vendor list
- Customer compliance packet checklist
The other subjects
Country of origin and the bill of materials
The claim that matters is not where a drone was assembled. It is where each part in it came from.
What an FCC certification plan covers
A commercial product that transmits generally has to be authorized before it can be marketed, and that is a hardware decision, not a late one.
SBOM, secure boot and signed updates
A software bill of materials is a list of what is inside the software, and it is becoming as ordinary a request as the hardware one.