13% of Seattle’s registered hobby drones call Capitol Hill, CD homeport

Seattle Police still haven’t tracked down the pilot of the drone that crashed into a Capitol Hill earlier this month but newly released records from the Federal Aviation Administration show that there are plenty more quadcopters ready to take flight in the neighborhood.

According to the records, 171 of the 1,355 hobby class drones registered with the FAA in Seattle are listed at address in ZIP codes covering Capitol Hill and the Central District. That’s around 13% of the Seattle fleet.

In all, the feds report more than 460,000 hobby registrations in the United States and its territories. Seattle ranks 18th in the nation for the number of hobby drones — right between New York and Tucson. Houston’s more than 3,000 registrations take the top slot. On the non-hobby end of things, Seattle only ranks 28th with a paltry 27 registered industrial drones. Menlo Park is the working drone capital with 176 just outpacing the 138 industrial drones registered at Alabama’s Maxwell Air Force Base.

The laws and regulations around the use of quadcopters and drones are continuing to take shape. Late last year, a FAA Small Unmanned Aircraft Registration system began that requires even recreational drones to be registered. Police did not say if the drone involved in the Capitol Hill house crash displayed the required registration information. The FAA has mandated a five-mile no-fly zone around airports — drone pilots should stay north of Madison if they want to avoid that entanglement. There are not currently any City of Seattle laws the prohibit the devices from being used but regulations prohibit their use on parks lands.

We’ve mapped the FAA hobby registrations, below.
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