The center of every waiver is the safety case. § 107.200(b) requires the request to contain a justification that establishes the operation can safely be conducted under the terms of the waiver — and that word, establishes, is the whole game. The FAA does not grant a waiver because a rule is inconvenient or because the applicant means well; it grants one because the applicant has shown the operation is safe without the rule in place. So the real work of getting a waiver is the work of building that demonstration.

AC 107-2A describes what the demonstration contains. The application must include a complete description of the proposed operation and a justification supported by data and documentation as necessary — not a sentence of intent, but a documented argument that the specific hazards the rule guards against are addressed another way in your operation. To help applicants build it, the FAA publishes Waiver Safety Explanation Guidelines that lay out what a proposal and justification should cover; the guidance points applicants to them precisely because a strong case is structured, not improvised.

How much you must show scales with what you are asking for. The FAA’s guidance is that the amount of data and analysis is proportional to the relief requested. Its own illustration: a request to waive several sections for an operation in a congested metropolitan area with heavy air traffic will require significantly more data and analysis than a request to waive a single section in a sparsely-populated area with minimal traffic. The practical rule for an applicant is to match the rigor of the case to the risk of the operation — a large deviation over a busy, crowded area needs a correspondingly large safety case.