NBC News is reporting that the federal government will soon announce new requirements for drones, the most severe of which is that consumer drones will need to be registered with the Department of Transportation. Also, it’s unclear if this new plan will affect past drone purchases or all new ones going forward.
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Requiring people to register their drone at the point of sale would provide “at least a few ability to track it back if we find that they are violating a few FAA rule”, Foxx told CBS News in August.
The government is hoping to work with the drone industry in order to designate a system for registering the drones – and you can reportedly expect these regulations to be put in place by Christmas.
The growth in sightings, and forecasts for more than 1m drone sales in the United States next year, have raised concerns about drones colliding with commercial aircraft during landing or take-off, or being used as a weapon in a deliberate attack.
Officials say efforts to track down the owners of rogue drones have been frustrated in part by a 2012 congressional decision to bar the FAA from regulating recreational drones.
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The sources said a new advisory and rule making committee, to be announced by administration officials next week, is expected to include representatives from the drone industry, the model aircraft community and airline unions. 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. In September, one of the drones also crash landed at the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
