New Small UAS Registration ICR

As part of last week’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), the DOT’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that as part of that proposed rule on remote identification of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) it would be required to submit a new information collection request (ICR) to the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for the required revision to the small UAS registration process.

Current Small UAS Registration ICR

The FAA currently has an approved ICR for the registration of small UAS as currently required under 14 CFR 48.100. It covers the registration requirements for both commercial and hobby small UAS owners. The supporting document [.DOCX download link] for the latest update to that ICR (approval is still pending) provides the following data about the estimated three years-worth of data collections under this ICR:

	Number of sUAS Owners (Thousands)
	Commercial		Hobbyist
Year	Register	De-Register	Register	De-Register
2019	200	-	873	-
2020	273	200	900	873
2021	356	273	913	900
Average	276	237	895	887

The numbers in the registration estimates are derived from the FAA’s estimates on the sales of small UAS in the listed years. The numbers in the de-registration estimates are derived from the assumption that a registered UAS only has a service life of one-year and thus needs to be deregistered in the following year. (Commentary: I would assume that this service life assumption is why the FAA did not address the grandfathering issue that I noted in my previous blog post.)

The FAA also notes in that ICR supporting document that the average ‘fleet size’ for the hobbyist registrant is 1.5 small UAS, so the actual numbers of UAS covered by the registration numbers listed above are 1,309,500; 1,350,000; 1,369,500; and 1,342,500 respectively.

New ICR Proposal

In the NPRM, the FAA, instead of proposing to revise the current small UAS registration ICR is proposing to submit a new ICR that would allow for the changes in the registration process proposed in the new rule.

For small UAS previously registering under §48.100(a) (commercial) there would only be two ‘new’ data elements that would need to be reported: telephone number and serial number. The serial number was previously only required ‘if available’. The new rule would have the FAA provide a serial number for registrants that did not have a serial number available. All new small UAS manufactured would be required to have a serial number.

The big change comes for small UAS users previously registered under §48.100(b) (hobby). Users would no longer be registered, each small UAS would be. For users with a single UAS this would require modification of the current registration. For users with multiple UAS, a new registration would be required for all but one of the currently covered UAS. The single updated registration would have to add manufacturer name, model name, serial number, and telephone number to the current registration.

The NPRM proposes the following potential burden information for the proposed ICR:

Year	Registrations	Hourly burden	Total cost ($Mil.)
1	442,623	12,082	$0.17
2	335,236	8,040	0.11
3	372,127	8,899	0.13

Commentary

There are two problems with this proposal. First, while it does not specifically say so, it would appear that the FAA is proposing to only require UAS users already registered on the effective of the rule to update their registration when their current registration expires (at the end of three years unless otherwise de-registered), that can be the only reason that I would see for having three year’s data listed in the table.

Using the data from the latest ICR update describe above there would be a total of 1,269,000 registrations (based upon the 2021 estimate) currently in the small UAS registration program that would have to be updated in the new ICR; and the number would be even higher in 2024 (the earliest practical effective date given the proposed 3 year delay in the NPRM). The totals given in the NPRM would only be 1,149,986. That is about 10% low and the NPRM gives no information on how their number was obtained.

On the other hand, given the FAA’s assumption that most small UAS would be go out of service within a year of registration, the numbers seem way too high. In fact, that assumption would seem to obviate the need for a separate ICR for the reregistration.

It would seem to me that a modification to the current small UAS registration ICR would be an easier way to proceed. In order to prevent too much front loading of the year 1 collection data, the FAA could require that registrants would immediately begin providing the new telephone number information at their next reregistration instead of waiting for the effective date for the bulk of the rulemaking. This could be justified under the current versions of both §48.100 (a) and (b) since they both contain provisions for “Other information as required by the Administrator.”