One of the most important players in the booming drone industry isn’t a hardware manufacturer; it’s the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. So attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday flocked to hear a policy update from the FAA, which has begun to regulate drone use more aggressively.
In the two weeks or so since the agency started requiring hobbyists to register drones larger than 0.55 pounds, 181,061 drones had been registered as of Wednesday morning, said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. The FAA is working to support third-party apps that would allow people to scan a code located on a drone to register it immediately, said Huerta, who’s attending CES for the first time.
The organizers of CES, the world’s largest annual technology conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, estimated that Americans bought 400,000 drones during the past holiday season, so less than half of them were registered with the FAA. The trade group forecasts more than 2.8 million U.S. drone sales in 2016, with about 1 million of those above the 0.55 pound limit.
