IT seems as if drones are on everyone’s wish list this holiday season. Type in “I want to buy a...” and Google’s autofill feature offers “drone” as the third most likely choice. So with hundreds of thousands of drones expected to take flight in the coming months, what’s to keep them from colliding with airplanes, crashing into buildings or bonking bystanders on the head?

That’s what the Federal Aviation Administration is trying to figure out. The agency that manages the busiest and most complicated airspace in the world, with more than 68,000 manned flights per day, is dealing with the regulatory nightmare of integrating a swarm of unmanned aircraft that can be as small as a sparrow or as large as the pterodactyls in “Jurassic Park.”

“It’s kind of like the early days of the automobile, with people speeding and not knowing what they were doing,” said Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. “Everyone is holding their breath that there won’t be a horrendous incident like a drone getting sucked into the engine of a passenger jet.”

Reports of drones flying dangerously close to passenger aircraft are becoming a daily occurrence, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. The incursions have been mostly at low altitudes as planes were on final approach to landing, but some have occurred at cruising altitudes as high as 10,000 feet.