More than Half Million Drones –  Challenge to Authorities

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At a recent conference at the White House on the future uses of drones in US airspace, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) director told the gathered crowd that more than consumer 500,000 drones had been registered with the agency since December.

At the end of last year, the FAA mandated—arguably as a stopgap against potentially stricter regulations from Congress about how citizens can use drones—that anyone wishing to fly a consumer drone weighing more than 0.5 lbs needed to get a registration number from the FAA for $5. While there was a roughly month-long grace period where the FAA was refunding people that registered, if the agency had collected its fee for every person that registered, it would’ve brought in over $2.5 million.

In June, the agency announced that its long-overdue regulations on commercial drones—how businesses can safely and legally operate them—would go into effect Aug. 29. According to QZ.com, although the rules were comprehensive, they still outlawed the use of drones beyond the line of sight of the person flying them, meaning that a company—like Amazon, Alphabet, or Wal-Mart—that wants to operate a drone delivery service could not, unless they had their pilot walking along the ground alongside the drone, rendering the whole point of quick drone deliveries useless.

But at the recent conference, speakers discussed the potential for drone operations beyond the line of sight in the future. And the FAA is already testing out the feasibility of delivery services like this. Last month it approved a test by the drone delivery service Flirtey and 7-Eleven to deliver some snacks to a household in Arizona.

In the future, a system will need to be in place to manage the massive influx of flying machines in US airspace. The FAA is working with NASA to develop such a system, and the White House committed at the conference to helping integrate drones into US airspace as quickly as possible.