US Drone Registration Rules Likely by Christmas

A mandatory consumer drone registration system could be in place in the United States by Christmas after an industry task force delivered its proposals for the new rules to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) owners should be required to register their name and physical address with FAA, a task force has recommended.

Drone owners would submit their names and street addresses, at minimum, to an FAA database, and receive an electronic certificate (or a paper copy, if requested), which they could produce if necessary.

The task force’s report is full of recommendations; we’re not being forced to register drones (yet).

Their report is only a recommendation, so it’s unclear how much the final registration rules will mirror it. The FAA and Department of Transportation say they are using these recommendations and 4,500 public comments to draft a proposed registration rule.

“There is no finding or indication that any AMA member was involved in the incidents and sightings that led to the decision to require… registration”, Mathewson said.

The task force was made up of a variety of stakeholders, including drone makers, businesses and trade groups representing law enforcement, pilots and other aviation experts.

Separate rules governing commercial flight of drones are also being formulated by the FAA under a longer process that isn’t expected to be complete until 2017.

Google’s Vos explains: “What we’re are recommending at this point is that each owner has a registration number and if that owner owns one airplane or a hundred airplanes the same registration number can be used on all the airplanes that that owner owns”. “Any registration steps more burdensome than these three simple steps may jeopardize the likelihood of widespread adoption and would undermine the overall registration philosophy that enabled the Task Force to come to consensus”. But the recommendations from this task force are likely to carry a lot of weight with the regulators, who are leaning on the private sector for guidance in dealing with a rapidly growing and changing new industry.

“As written, these recommendations would make the registration process an unnecessary and unjustified burden to our 185,000 members”, Dave Mathewson, executive director of the group, said in a statement. Operators can preset waypoints to fly a drone beyond their line of sight.

“By a few estimates, as many as 700,000 new unmanned aircraft will be sold during the holiday season”, FAA head Michael Huerta said last week ahead of the report. According to the FAA website, topics discussed included: “how an operator might prove a UAS [the FAA’s term for a UAV] is registered, how the aircraft would be marked, and how to use the registration process to encourage or require UAS operators to become educated on basic safety rules”.