Francisco E. Castillo – Amazon Prime Air

In second grade, Francisco Castillo stood before his class with an announcement most seven-year-olds would never dream of making. While his classmates declared ambitions to fight fires or travel to space, Castillo had a different vision: he wanted to own an airline. Not any airline—a small carrier based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopping between islands on Islander and Trislander aircraft. He had no idea what an operating certificate was or what airworthiness meant. But he knew planes connected islands to the world—and that aviation could turn distance into possibility. That was enough.

Francisco E. Castillo | Amazon Prime Air | Senior Corporate Counsel, Lead Global Regulatory Counsel

That second-grade declaration was not a childhood fantasy that faded with time. It was a compass and, eventually, a calling. Decades later, Castillo serves as senior corporate counsel for Amazon Prime Air, the company’s commercial drone package delivery operation, where he leads global regulatory legal strategy for one of the most consequential aviation programs in the world. The route from a San Juan classroom to the frontier of drone law was long and deliberate, shaped by Jesuit education, dual legal traditions, government service, and an uncommon ability to translate law, technology, safety, and business need into action—all guided by a hunger for aviation that never left him.

Few attorneys occupy the intersection Castillo has lived from every side: private practice founder, FAA rulemaker, and operator-side strategist for one of the most advanced drone delivery programs in the world. At each stop, his role has been less about saying no and more about building a lawful, safe, and commercially practical path forward.

A foundation built to travel

Castillo’s educational journey moved across jurisdictions and continents, each institution leaving a different mark. His Jesuit high school in Puerto Rico planted a principle he still carries: whatever you build must serve something beyond yourself. That service orientation continues to shape how he leads, how he advises the business, and how he thinks about aviation’s responsibility to the communities it touches. The University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business taught him discipline and preparation. He studied finance and minored in Portuguese and Brazilian studies, an early sign of the cross-cultural instinct that now shapes his international work. The University of Puerto Rico School of Law, where generations of his family had studied, gave him something rarer—fluency in both civil and common law traditions, a dual foundation most U.S.-trained attorneys simply do not have. He graduated magna cum laude. More importantly, it trained him to be precise without becoming rigid, a skill that has become essential in a field where the rulebook often trails the technology.

McGill University’s Institute of Air and Space Law in Montreal made the career specific. There, Castillo trained across civil aviation law, common law traditions, and international treaty frameworks. He also published one of the early academic articles on drone integration into U.S. airspace, examining property and privacy questions in 2015—before Part 107 existed and before most of the industry had started asking those questions. In other words, he was studying the legal architecture of drone integration before the field had fully announced itself.

“McGill forced me to think across jurisdictions and legal systems,” Castillo says. “That training is directly relevant today because drone delivery is a global regulatory challenge. What works in the U.S. does not automatically translate to Europe, the UK, or anywhere else.”

After McGill, Castillo founded and co-chaired the Aviation and Aerospace Practice Group at McConnell Valdés, Puerto Rico’s largest law firm. He then spent more than five years as a senior attorney in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of the Chief Counsel, serving as lead attorney on the agency’s most significant drone policies—Remote ID, Operations Over People, and Safety Management Systems—and leading the commercial aviation portfolio. He was not advising from the sidelines; he was helping craft the legal framework that now governs a rapidly maturing industry.

That perspective is rare. Castillo helped build the framework from inside the government, then moved to the operator side to help prove that the framework could support real-world commercial aviation operations.

Navigating the regulatory frontier

Amazon Prime Air is among the most advanced commercial drone delivery programs in the world. The company designs, builds, and operates its own aircraft—including the MK30, which features onboard detect-and-avoid technology and integrates with Amazon’s fulfillment network to deliver packages in under an hour. Prime Air holds Part 135 air carrier authority, airworthiness exemptions, Beyond Visual Line of Sight authorization, and the first-ever dangerous goods approval for commercial drone package delivery in the United States.

Castillo led the legal strategy behind each of those milestones, working closely with Prime Air’s regulatory affairs, engineering, operations, and safety teams. The Part 135 certificate transformed Prime Air from an experimental concept into a certified aviation operation with trained personnel, maintenance controls, and documented safety oversight. It gave Prime Air the legal architecture of an aviation company, not a technology pilot. The BVLOS authorization removed one of the biggest constraints on where and how the program could scale to better serve Amazon customers.

“BVLOS is what makes this a real delivery business instead of a demonstration,” Castillo says. “Getting there required years of building the safety case, the evidence base, the operational procedures, and the regulatory confidence. It was hard, and it was worth it.”

The dangerous goods authorization may be the most historically significant. Castillo drove the legal strategy securing Prime Air’s approval to transport hazardous materials by drone—a first for the entire commercial drone delivery industry. Drones can now carry tablets, mobile phones, and other items that trigger hazmat requirements, making drone delivery viable as a true logistics channel. For Castillo, that is where regulatory work becomes business-building work: removing legal barriers in a way that expands what the service can actually do for customers while preserving the safety discipline aviation demands. He is also quick to note that these approvals do not only serve Amazon. Each one establishes a precedent that the broader industry can build on, which is why the work has to be rigorous enough to earn trust for the operating model itself, not just for one operator. His philosophy throughout has been consistent: navigate, don’t block.

“My job is not to tell the business what it cannot do,” he says. “My job is to find the lawful path forward.”

That means separating binding law from guidance and proposed rules, understanding the safety concern beneath each regulation, and building evidence that earns trust from regulators and communities alike. He is at his best in the gray space—where the law is still catching up, the technology is still evolving, and the business needs a lawyer with the judgment to move forward without cutting corners. To Castillo, the aviation lawyer of the future is not just a rule interpreter. The role is part regulatory strategist, part safety thinker, part business partner, and part technology translator. That is the model he has worked to embody.

Building a global operation

Prime Air’s ambitions extend well beyond the United States, and international expansion—including into Europe—is where Castillo’s background converges most fully. He speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. He trained across legal systems at McGill. He spent years at the FAA understanding how regulators think from the inside. Each of those experiences now applies directly to scaling a drone delivery operation across jurisdictions with vastly different aviation, telecom, privacy, land-use, labor, and community-acceptance frameworks.

“No two countries approach drone regulation the same way,” Castillo says. “Each has its own framework, its own operational authorization processes, its own spectrum rules, privacy regimes, and regulator culture. That challenge forces the company to get better.”

International preparation also strengthens domestic operations: building for multiple jurisdictions forces clearer governance, better documentation, and more repeatable approval processes. For Castillo, the complexity itself is the draw, not despite his background but because of it. Complexity forces rigor, and rigor is what turns an innovative program into a trusted aviation operation. His approach is simple but demanding: understand the local system, respect the competent authority, build the right relationships, and keep the global strategy coherent. The goal is not merely to expand. It is to help prove that commercial drone delivery can become a credible and safe aviation model across borders.

The weight of representation

To his knowledge, Castillo is one of the very few Latino attorneys in the United States working at the frontier of drone regulatory law. He carries that distinction with purpose. Growing up in Puerto Rico, he never saw anyone from his community doing this kind of work. He wants young attorneys—from the island, from Latin America, from any background told certain paths were not built for them—to see that those paths are real.

What he wants them to see is not merely that they can enter rarefied rooms, but that they can help shape what happens inside them. Lead. Not assist. Not supported from the margins. Lead.

“I want to be known as a leading aviation and drone regulatory attorney in this country, who also happens to have been born and raised in Puerto Rico and is proudly Hispanic and American,” he says. “Those are not qualifiers. They are facts.”

He is clear-eyed about what his journey required. His family—his parents Paco and Purin, his sister Diana, his brother-in-law Dave, and his cousin Alberto—provided an unconditional foundation. But when Castillo left Puerto Rico to build a career on the mainland, he had no professional network, no aviation contacts and no one to open a door. Every relationship, every credential, every ounce of standing in the industry was built from scratch. He speaks about that not as hardship but as proof: preparation, persistence, and refusing to be outworked are enough. Credentials get you into the room. Ethics keep you there. He also makes a practical case, not only a personal one. Drone delivery operates in real communities, so community trust and public acceptance are design inputs, not afterthoughts. People with different backgrounds ask different questions and see different risks, which he believes makes companies, regulators, and the whole system more trustworthy.

His message to young lawyers is direct: know your field so deeply that when you speak, people have no choice but to listen because your judgment earns trust before your title does. Ask for the opportunity. Take the hard assignment. Do not confuse a closed door with a final verdict. And once you earn your place, open the door wider for the people coming behind you.

Outside the regulatory work, Castillo paints under the pseudonym “Ruccart,” working in acrylics. He inherited the impulse from his grandmother, a painter and art educator whose work surrounded him growing up. Earlier this year, one of his pieces was selected among 33 finalists in the Fairfax Spotlight on the Arts exhibition, chosen from nearly 400 entries. He is now building a growing body of original work and is actively looking for opportunities to exhibit and share it more widely. For him, painting is not a résumé footnote; it is a counterweight to a professional life built on precision, risk analysis, and control. The canvas asks him to trust the process, accept surprise, and create without a regulatory framework. That freedom makes him more grounded, more creative, and more whole. He plays pickleball, skis, travels to eat, and reads European history with the same curiosity that once sent a seven-year-old dreaming past the shores of an island. Those pursuits are not separate from his professional life. They make him more present, more empathetic, and better able to connect with people across teams, cultures, and disciplines. The childhood excitement, he says, is still there. He just gets to use it on harder problems now.

Looking back, the seven-year-old who wanted to own an island airline was not wrong; he simply underestimated the scale of the mission. Today, Castillo is helping define how drones can safely connect people, businesses, and communities. The aircraft have changed. The operating model has changed. But the impulse is the same: build something useful, trustworthy, and worthy of the future.