Earlier this month, the FAA convened a task force to work out a proposal for drone registrations. As expected, the task force published its report today and it looks like you will indeed soon have to register your drone before you’re allowed to fly it.
Here are the basics of the recommendations (which the FAA is likely to follow):
The idea here, of course, is to be able to identify drone owners who fly in restricted airspace (or who crash their drones).
These rules don’t come as a surprise. The FAA task force ran a three-day meeting to discuss work on these recommendations earlier this month. The work group included a number of drone manufacturers (3DR, Parrot, DJI, etc.), as well as representatives of various aviation organizations and companies like GoPro, Walmart, Best Buy, Google and Amazon.
In opening the meeting, FAA administrator Michael Huerta noted that the rising popularity of drones also led to growing safety concerns.
“Registration will give us an opportunity to educate new operators about airspace rules so they can use their unmanned aircraft safely,” Huerta said at the time. “It will also help us more easily identify and take enforcement action against people who intentionally violate the rules or operate unsafely. A perfect example of this occurred last week, when a drone carrying mobile phones, drugs and hacksaw blades crashed into a prison yard in Oklahoma. Perhaps registration would have helped authorities quickly identify the owner.”
I doubt that somebody using a drone to smuggle a hacksaw into a prison would register that drone, but Huerta’s overall point stands. There is no doubt that drones interfered with firefighting efforts in California this summer, for example, and there have been far too many reports of drones getting too close to commercial airliners.
Because the registration markings aren’t likely to be visible from any meaningful distance, I doubt that these rules will be all that easy to enforce, though.
The DOT and FAA will now review these recommendations and turn them into rules. That process is supposed to finish before Christmas. Meeting deadlines isn’t the FAA’s strong suit, but the idea here is clearly to have these rules out before the next wave of drone owners ends up crashing their Christmas gifts into their neighbors’ trees.
