Drones and sports

“Aeromodelling culture has a long history going back 100 years,” explained Rich Hanson, president of the Academy of Model Aeronautics. “I was introduced to aeromodelling by a teacher, and it led me on to a 50-year career in aviation.”

Aviation back then was in a “romantic” era, he said, when looking up a plane evoked a passion that has long since passed by. “But the new technology is bringing with it a perfect storm of robotics and aeronautics,” he said. “That’s a perfect storm of science, technology and maths.”

Drones and drone sports is most exciting, “because of the young people involved,” he said. “Drone racing has brought in the next generation.”

Douglas Burnet from the Aerial Sports League in the USA agreed. “Our most successful pilot is 16 years old,” he said. “We have realized that we can use drones and create educational programmes for kids to learn engineering.”

The big driver behind the rapid rise of drone sports, which includes racing drones around a track and “drone wars” with dedicated combat drones, is FPV – first-person view. That’s the headset you see drone pilots wearing when they race each other.

“FPV is really what took people by storm a few years ago,” Burnet explained. “The pilot flies as if they are in the cockpit of the drone. The goggles black out everything around, and create flow state. Time seems to slow down, reflexes are heightened, it creates a cascade of feel-good chemicals inside the brain, and this is what is driving the rapid adoption of FPV racing.”

Drone racing is growing he said, with the US consumer drone industry worth $1 billon this year, and projected to rise to $4.5 billion by 2024. “Drone sports is going to drive that growth,” Burnet said.

Pilots from both the traditional world of aero modelling and the new world of drone racing echoed what Burnet said. Kevin Dodd and Neil Tank from the Model Aeronautical Association of Australia showed how the many new drone users in Australia had been welcomed into the air sports world. “We have a longstanding relationship with the aviation authorities in Australia, we have opened up our airfields to drone use and we are also working well on social media to engage drone pilots,” Dodd said.

And Anthony Cake, co-founder of ImmersionRC, said the progress that drone sports had made in the last three years “has been absolutely mind blowing.”

Now he wanted to break out of the indoor arenas and “soccer fields” and fly off into the wider world, he said. Flashing up a slide of glaciated mountains in Canada he said, “I want to race here. I want my first gate to be on top of that mountain, the next one down on the lake.”

He added: “This sport is still young enough to do innovative things. Lets do them.”