Market data · 2 min read
A million registrations: who flies drones in the U.S.
FAA registration records are public, messy and underused. Cleaned and matched to aircraft specs, they map the country's drone fleet.
Drone owners register their aircraft with the FAA, which makes the registration records one of the most complete pictures of the U.S. fleet there is. It also makes them hard to use: the same operator shows up under several spellings, the same aircraft under several model names, and nothing in a registration says what the aircraft can do.
What we did to the data
We took the full set of commercial and recreational registrations and:
- cleaned and standardized operator and equipment names,
- de-duplicated the records so each operator and aircraft counts once,
- matched each aircraft to its USRD profile, adding the design, propulsion and performance data a registration never had.
The result covers more than 1 million drones and 46,000+ operator organizations.
Questions it answers
- Which industries fly drones, and how big are their fleets?
- Where are commercial operators concentrated, by state and by city?
- What share of the fleet does each manufacturer hold, and which countries do those manufacturers come from?
- How much of the fleet meets Remote ID requirements, and how much is NDAA-compliant?
Each answer is a count of real registrations, not a survey or a model.
Four dashboards
The data comes as an interactive workbook with four views: the market as a whole, operator organizations, industry detail, and a deep dive by manufacturer. It's refreshed quarterly as new registrations come in, and every subscription starts with a walkthrough from one of our analysts.