Over 45,000 drone pilots have registered with the FAA

Now that the FAA's mandatory drone registrations are open, how many people are rushing to sign up? Quite a few, actually. The administration reports taking over 45,000 registrations since the program opened up two days ago, on December 21st. In fact, the demand was sufficiently "overwhelming" that the FAA's site has occasionally buckled under the load. It's temporarily shutting down the site overnight (between the 23rd and 24th) to make sure that it can cope with the likely flood of registrations from people getting robotic flyers as gifts.

It's too soon to say how effective the registry will be, since it's likely that a lot of early sign-ups came from people who were well-aware of the requirement and eager to get it out of the way before the February 19th deadline. The real challenge is to catch both newcomers as well as existing drone owners who don't yet realize that they need to register -- unless awareness spreads, the FAA could still see a lot of pilots slipping through the cracks.

[Image credit: Phyo Hein Kyaw/AFP/Getty Images]