Greg Warren, a Limestone County drone builder and operations manager of Advanced Concepts Media Production Services, displays a camera-equipped drone he built in this 2014 file photo. Warren agrees with a government decision this week that would require some drone operators to register their drones with the Federal Aviation Administration.

If projections from the Consumer Electronics Association are correct, as many as 700,000 unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, will be sold this Christmas season.

The increasing prevalence of drones, combined with reported close calls from pilots, led the government this week to announce it would require operators to register the aircraft. Drone builder and operator Greg Warren of Athens, Alabama said he believes it’s a good idea.

“I definitely support it,” he said. “It’s a new technology and we’re trying to get people to accept it. There are a ton of good uses, and the possibilities are limitless, but there’s always going to be that fringe group that makes it bad for everybody.”

At a Monday news conference, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx was vague when asked about the FAA’s authority to require registrations, especially on an expedited basis that will provide little if any opportunity for public comment first. It typically takes the agency years to put new regulations in place. Also, a 2012 aviation law includes a provision exempting the model academy’s 180,000 members from drone regulations.

In August of last year, Gov. Robert Bentley announced the creation of the Alabama Drone Task Force, created to further the state’s potential use of drones in areas of agriculture, conservation and law enforcement. Warren, who has served as a consultant to the task force, said there has been no activity from the group since the first of the year.

The task force was supposed to make recommendations to the governor by Jan. 15, but decided it needed more time to continue studying the issue.

Warren said the FAA’s rules related to drone operation are difficult to understand, and added they were somewhat overreaching.

“The FAA regulates the Wal-Mart drones you can fly around inside your house,” he said. “Right now, a paper airplane is classified as a drone because it’s an unmanned aerial vehicle.”

Close calls

Pilot sightings of drones have doubled since last year, including near manned airplanes and at major sporting events, and there are reports of interference with wildfire-fighting operations, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said at a news conference.

The FAA now receives about 100 reports a month from pilots who say they’ve seen drones flying near planes and airports, compared with only a few sightings per month last year. So far there have been no accidents, but agency officials have said they’re concerned that a drone weighing only a few pounds might cause serious damage if it is sucked into an engine or smashes into an airliner’s windshield.

The Air Line Pilots Association and members of Congress have been calling for drone registration.

“This is a simple and necessary tactic to immediately identify the owner and drive home” the importance of safety rules, said Tim Canoll, president of the pilots union.

Said Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts: “We have rules of the road, but in this brave new world, now we need rules of the sky.”

Warren said he believes the FAA’s numbers are inflated, and cited an investigation by the Aeronautical Modeling Association, which regulates remote-controlled aircraft. He said the AMA report found there were 642 drone reports made by pilots, though only 12 were legitimate.

“That’s not to say there aren’t lunatics out there flying near airports and above the stated altitude,” he said.

There’s no official count of how many drones have been sold in the U.S., but industry officials say it is in the hundreds of thousands and will easily pass a million by the end of the year.

Foxx said he has directed the task force to deliver its report by Nov. 20 and hopes to have registration requirements in place by mid-December. The timeline is tight, but the urgency of the problem demands swift action, he said.

Jim Williams, a principal at the law firm Dentons who formerly headed the FAA’s drone office, said he believes the agency can get around having to go through the cumbersome rule-making process by formally determining small drones are a new type of aircraft and therefore fall under existing FAA regulations that say all aircraft must be registered.

“I don’t think there is any way they could realistically get through the rule-making process by Christmas,” Williams said.

Smith writes for the Athens, Alabama News Courier. The Associated Press contributed to this report.