USA wants to make all consumers register their drone purchases with DoT

The US Transportation Department will announce as soon as next week that a task force of government and industry officials will craft a plan to create a registry, said the person, who asked for anonymity and wasn’t authorised to disclose the information.

If you get a new drone this holiday season, you might have to register it with the USA government. One FAA official said last month that a few officials expect more than 1 million drones to be sold around Christmas this year. Also, it’s unclear if this new plan will affect past drone purchases or all new ones going forward. While the FAA has issued almost 1,900 approvals to companies for commercial-drone flights in the US, industry officials estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of recreational drones in the country.

Similar to the Federal Aviation Administration, the DoT is a government agency.

As CBS News reported, at least 650 drone sightings have been reported by pilots so far this year as compared to 238 in all of 2014.

Like other federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, FAA is also testing new technology that could be used to detect and track rogue drone flights that could pose a safety or security risk. I’m sure, in typical regulator-think, the bureaucrats assume this is no big deal, because “it’s just a registration”, but it’s still a form of friction that makes it more hard and annoying to own drones, at a time when the market and the uses of the devices is still growing.