Drone Pilots August 2018

Here are some statistics on drone pilot activity in the US. I obtained all the data from publicly available sources on faa.gov. If this is interesting or you want more information, get in touch.

Remote Pilot Certifications

As of August 28 2018, there are at least 61,613 pilots with a part 107 UAS (drone) certificate. I say at least because the FAA allows pilots to exclude themselves from the public database, in which case they do not show up in the data set.

Per this press release, the FAA hit 100,000 certificates about a month ago, so a first order estimate puts the number of pilots who don't exclude themselves around 60%.

The FAA publishes new data every month, so in a couple days there will be more available. This is the first month I have obtained data, so I don't have anything to compare to yet.

Part 107 Waivers

As of today, there have been 1,999 waivers granted to 1,854 individuals at 1,544 companies.

The first waiver to expire does so November of this year. Breakdown of waivers granted by type:

Regulation Type Count
107.29 Daylight operation 1829
107.41 Operation in controlled airspace 106
107.35 Operation of multiple small unmanned aircraft 37
107.31 Visual line of sight aircraft operation 22
107.51(b) Altitude 17
107.39 Operation over human beings 12
107.33(b) Visual observer 12
107.51(d) Minimum distance from clouds 10
107.51(c) Minimum visibility 10
107.33(c)(2) Visual observer 6
107.25(b) Operation from a moving vehicle or aircraft 4
107.51(a) Maximum groundspeed 1
107.39(a) Operation over human beings 1
107.33(c) Visual observer 1

The number of total waivers granted over time: number of part 107 waivers granted