According to the FAA’s recently released forecast for the coming decades, the world of aviation is anticipating some major changes, especially when it concerns the commercial drone market. In the past, the drone industry has been growing at a pretty rapid rate. However, based on their forecast, the commercial drone industry is expected to not just grow but explode on the marketplace with their numbers tripling between now and the year 2023. But that number doesn’t include all drones, though. The same report also points out that they are expecting that non-commercial drones will begin to slow down.
The scope of the report gives us a pretty broad view of aviation both on the domestic US front and in the international markets. It takes a close look at drone activity, cargo air traffic, and space traffic and anticipates what we can expect from them in the future. When examining the growth of the drone industry, it points out that over the last five years, unmanned aircraft has not only seen a healthy growth here in the United States but globally as well.
FAA Concerns
Still, the FAA report does point out some issues that do concern them. While this growth looks to be quite promising, it also means that the future of airspace is definitely going to change. It will have to be shared by a vast number of people and industries ranging from amateur pilots to professional rigs. For example, as of December 31st of last year, the agency says that more than 900,000 owners of model drones have already registered, and they anticipate that number will reach 1.25 million in the skies within the next five years. This does not include the number of individual model drones that presently do not have a registration requirement.
Another report comments on the concerns of the number of non-model drones that are required to be registered with the FAA. Currently, the rate of registration is around 15,000 per month. On its own, this figure does not say much, but when you consider that it is three times higher than the rate of non-model aircraft owners who are also registering, you can see that drone use is poised to surpass traditional aircraft very soon.
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To put it simply, the market for model drones seems to be slowing down, but the commercial aircraft market is taking over and accelerating at a very rapid rate, and the FAA is expecting the trend to continue for at least another five years.
What Can We Expect?
With that kind of growth, there will obviously be new challenges that will have to be faced. There are many more major companies that are seriously considering using drones as an affordable and faster means of meeting customer needs. Already one hospital has used a drone to deliver a transplant organ to a patient just in the past few weeks. As more and more businesses realize the value of using drones to simplify their work load, we can only hope to see more innovations in the future.
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