Strange and high-speed world of racing on drones: continued
Translation of an article from The New Yorker dedicated to FPV quadcopter competitions and their participants. This is the second part, the first part is available by reference .
Zach and Jordan travel freely around the world because a company called DRL pays for them: “The Driving Racing League”. Over a dozen young pilots work for her. Champion racing drone get six-figure contracts; the rest of the racers are content with less. Although the DRL is called a league, it does not belong to any other organizations. It's just a company that shoots drones TV shows and then sells them to ESPN and similar cable channels in seventy-five countries. The audience of its programs has 50 million viewers.
DRL deals with the technical side of all races. For starters, pilots compete on their own drones. These drones are completely identical, which eliminates the possibility of unfair advantage. League engineers construct all race tracks and provide their own radio control technologies. Company innovations in this area allow drones to fly out of sight. As a rule, if an obstacle such as a wall is between the drone and the radio source, the connection is interrupted and the drone falls to the ground. But on the DRL tracks, the drones fly into adjacent zones from the pilot's field of view, and then return and continue the race on the main ring, where spectators sit behind a protective net. Also solved the problem of radio frequency interference due to spectator gadgets, which almost broke the championship on Governors Island. How the DRL engineers managed to accomplish such a feat is the company's secret.
On the race track. Photos from Instagram DRL.
At the beginning of each year, pilots participate in activities sponsored by the League in the United States and sometimes outside the country. The finalists go to the quarterfinals and semifinals. The winners of these competitions or those who qualify in any other way compete for the title of champion in an event that is both a real race and a well-produced TV show. In 2016, this championship was held at the former stamping plant in Detroit. Then Jordan became the winner, and in 2017 he defended the title at the race at the Alexander Palace, a spacious Victorian showroom in London.
The race took place in June, and ESPN showed it after six weeks. Like most sports television events, the DRL championship combined the event itself with entertaining snippets; but the pilot skill level itself was incredibly high. A pair of commentators in short-sleeved shirts said the usual things for sports commentators, a young blonde interviewed on the track between the races. The six finalists were Jordan / Jet on a red drone; Zack / A_Nub on white; Gab707 from Montreal on yellow; Wild Willy from Atlanta on pink; French pilot Duncan on green; and FPVProvo from Utah on blue. The 39-year-old FPVProvo was the oldest among six pilots. Each drone carried on itself two hundred LEDs in the colors of the pilot, so that it was easy to distinguish, where is whose drone. The event included seven consecutive races; for the first place ten points were awarded, for the second-sixth - significantly less. Won the most points in the seventh round and became the winner.
Alexandra Palace, 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
Each obstacle and gate on the track outlined the shining lights. Inside the darkened Alexander Palace, the rays of searchlights were playing, and under them a psychedelic track flickered. A row of three gates on a vertical loop under the high vaulted ceiling of the hall forced the pilots to sharply turn over the drones on the fly and exit vertically from the bottom. After such a tediously complex move, there was a final spurt to the finish line, on which drones crashed into the barrier network.
Having remembered the color of each pilot, it was possible to follow them throughout each race. Breaking from the small platform at the start, each drone left a bright trace at a speed of 128 km / h. Jordan / Jet won the first race, Gab707 won the second. During the breaks biographical video vignettes were played, like those shown at the Olympics. In one video, Jordan ate sushi with his beaming parents. In another, Gab707, a young man with a narrow face and a ponytail, stood in a snowy forest and talked about his light flying style, which did not include abrupt maneuvers. In the third run, the drone, which was run by Gab707, ran into the gate and flew out.
Alexandra Palace, 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
The same thing happened to Jordan during the fourth race. He won the fifth round, but fell again in the sixth, taking off from the back loop, and then hit the gate.
Meanwhile, the other four pilots fought for third place. Zack / A_Nub was the second after two races, but his drone fell three times. The pilot looked upset and furious when he took off his glasses between the races.
Winners of the 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
Most of the decisive arrival was led by Gab707. Then Jordan / Jet caught up with him, beating the rest of the pilots, when all six were approaching a difficult loop. Gab707 was the first, but Jordan laid a tougher turn at departure from the third gate, overtook the opponent before the last jerk and crossed the finish line almost half a second earlier. The rider pulled off his glasses in a daze, not sure of his victory. Then he learned that he won, and threw his hands into the air. As a result, Gab707 took second place, and Wild Willy - third. All the competition, including advertising, took an hour of television time.
DRL CEO Nicholas Horbachevsky. Photo: Baltimore Sun
Nicholas Horbachevsky, a thirty-year-old DRL general manager, is reminiscent of a Western star of the 50s: he has long sideburns and combed back brown hair. He founded the DRL in 2015, and later opened the company's headquarters in West 27th Street in Manhattan. Investors liked the concept of the drones TV show, so the project attracted tens of millions of dollars. To deal with technical difficulties, Horbachevsky acquired the company Ryan Guri, who is now his main employee. Guri is a slim, young designer with glasses and rolled up sleeves. He also looks like a character transferred from the 50s, but more like a scientist from the early days of NASA.
Route Ohio Crash Site. Photos from Facebook DRL.
I visited the DRL office, returning from Colorado. When you exit the elevator on the right floor, the large and difficult to identify object on the right is the scenery, part of the broken alien ship that was used on the track during previous races. The working area is located in a spacious studio with high ceilings. Along the walls are lined tables, plastic buckets and crates filled with things like the ones I saw in the basement of the guys at Fort Collins. On the desktops were drones that DRL uses in races. They resembled insects and were more than homemade drones that I saw. The DRL employs about twenty people in New York and in the city of Santa Cruz, California. Everyone I saw seemed no older than forty years.
Horbachevsky and Guri described to me how they assemble their drones, design and construct tracks (which they call lines), and look for pilots. According to them, at the moment there are about fifty professional drone pilots in the world. Potential riders can download the simulator and try to show the time at the professional level. The best among them compete in the computer race, the winner of which receives a contract for 75 thousand dollars. The company also checks video of flights with GoPro, which are sent by pilots. Network activity provides a constant influx of potential new stars.
Preparing for the race. Photos from Instagram DRL.
“(The organizers) of the early drone races did not understand the presentability problem,” says Horbachevsky. - Racing drone - not a new "Nazkar". You do not adapt an existing sport by inserting drones into it. This is a sport from the future. People have long seen such futuristic races in cyberspace and in movies. ”
Personnel from the Star Wars. Episode I: The Phantom Menace
“The audience that comes to see drones thinks in terms of video games and classic science fiction races,” Guri says. “They are thinking about racing the hides from the Hidden Threat.” They think about the pursuit of speeders through the forest on the planet Endor from the Return of the Jedi. ”
Personnel from the Star Wars. Episode VI Return of the Jedi "
“When you create the drones race, you compete with science fiction,” Horbachevsky notes. “While the DRL did not start racing, the children came to the drone races and complained,“ This is not Star Wars, as I was promised, ”adds Guri.
“I came to this sport from the position of a top manager at Tough Mudder, which organizes survival races,” said Horbachevsky. - So I had the experience of developing a new sport. But if I knew about all the technical innovations that we eventually had to create on our own, I would never do it. ”
“For the first time, we made a coherently working line, which was both difficult and very interesting, in 2016 at the Miami Dolphins club stadium,” says Guri. “There we made the drones fly through the stands, and then beneath them, through tunnels and rooms inside the stadium.” We looked at each other then and said, "Nobody has ever done such a thing before."
“Guri is a real da Vinci when it comes to drones,” says Horbachevsky. - And in the process we came across a lot of new patent-pending inventions. Well, sort of how the Le Mans Series raced the brake discs. ”
“And work is pure pleasure,” Guri says. - Last summer, in order to show that this is in principle possible, we set the Guinness world record for the speed of a radio-controlled quadcopter on batteries. It was at Cunningham Park in Queens. The people from Guinness are very scrupulous, they came and checked everything, they brought their own speed measurement expert. We built a new quadcopter - specifically to deal with the problems that we faced before when the drone caught fire in flight. This time everything worked perfectly. The drone traveled the 100-meter distance so quickly that it was almost impossible to see, and developed an average speed of 263 km / h. At his best moment, he accelerated to almost 290 km / h. ”
“It was comparable to the moment in the first Star Wars, when the cruiser jumps at light speed,” says Horbachevsky. “This is what we are trying to achieve - to reproduce sci-fi effects in real life, and create incredibly high-level, high-performance flying robots to show them to the whole world.”
Broken window in Kate Spade boutique. Photo: New York Daily News
Last year, the drone punched a window in designer Kate Spade’s store on the corner of Mercer and Broome Street in Manhattan. The incident occurred on the fourth of July, at about 8:30 pm. The police did not find out who did this, and the employees of the shop selling luxury bags refused to discuss what had happened. It was then that I first saw the news of the drone crash, but soon others followed. In September, the drone crashed into a Black Hawk army helicopter, which patrolled the area around Staten Island. The helicopter landed safely, after which the National Transportation Safety Board conducted the first investigation of an air collision involving a drone. In October, the drone crashed into the wing of a Skyjet passenger aircraft, which had landed at the Jean Lesage International Airport near Quebec. It was the first confirmed collision between a drone and a commercial aircraft in North America. There were no serious injuries or injuries. There were no suspects either.
A piece of drone stuck in a Black Hawk helicopter. Photo: National Transportation Safety Board
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required all pilots of drones weighing from 250 grams to 25 kilograms to be registered without fail. The rule is rarely observed in practice. If a drone accident caused material damage, the pilot must report the incident. Such a requirement is also often ignored. Fallen drones leave little evidence, because a drone without a pilot's registration number is difficult to track. Often there are reports of drones flying above the crowds, or near the airport, or near the houses, or above 120 meters above the ground. All these actions violate the prohibitions of the FAA. Sales of entertainment and commercial drones are growing every year. Aviation officials predict that by 2020, 7 million drones will be sold annually, of which 4.3 million for amateur flights and 2.7 million for commercial flights.
Agricultural drone Ag Eagle its software.
Farmers use drones to inspect the fields. So they keep track of what crops and water look like in difficult-to-reach corners. With the help of unmanned aerial vehicles, roofers examine rooftops of buildings, repairmen carry out inspections of power lines and cell towers, and real estate agents take pictures of beautiful houses. Copters work a lot on television and when making films. In 2017, for the first time in history, the fire departments of New York and Los Angeles used drones to extinguish the fire. In the 2017 Super Bowl, three hundred drones performed a synchronous flight during the Lady Gaga performance. In a park in the west of the state of New York, the drone helped save the dog that fell in the gorge. Dron tracked down juvenile prisoners who escaped from prison for juveniles in Louisiana. Police arrested a couple in California and accused them of organizing the supply of drugs on drones. One Denver donut shop also delivered its goods by air. And in March 2017, Amazone made its first delivery to the United States, using the Prime Air drone system.
Amazon Prime Air 2015 ad
At key points in American history, pilots of various kinds turned out to be the most interesting people. For about twenty years, the “pilots” of the ferrymen on Mississippi, who skillfully guided ships along the ever-changing river, were of particular importance. Their ranks gave us the greatest American writer . The fighter pilots who turned into astronauts personified the highest degree of superiority during the Cold War.
Nicholas Horbachevsky described high-level riders as "the best nerds." Perhaps the pilots of drones will become the new advanced historical type. Already now, due to budget cuts, government pilots with real flight experience are less and less trained by the government, due to which commercial airlines have to choose from a smaller pool of potential pilots. Someday we will all fly on airplanes driven by calm, professional, reliable pilots staying on the ground.
Software development startup DroneSAR. The program, along with DJI drones, allows you to perform search and rescue operations.
In the future, there will be more jobs that require the skill of managing drones. Now friends of Zack and Jordan fly on drones over avocado plantations, or work in film crews and search groups. Millions of children hone their piloting skills by playing video games. Children and just love to fly on the drones. Many people in the US are looking for an exciting and fun way to make a living. So why not teach children the art of safe piloting at school or in other educational programs? We should follow the example of South Korea. It makes sense to prepare, because in the future around will fly a lot more UAVs.
The glowing screen always seemed limitless to me. You can fall into it forever and never get out. It seemed to me that this is not good, because I am a fan of reality and would not want to be neglected. I sympathized with the children lost in their screens. It seems they never played outside. It did not occur to me that the unreality of the burning screen would lead us back to the real world, which is what happened with the drones. It's fun to command a gin in a fantasy world, but piloting a drone is akin to having gin opportunities in real life. Thanks to the widely available drones, reality has become attractive again.
When I returned home after flying with Jordan and Travis in the canyon of the Cache-la-Poudre river, the sun went down to the west, flooding the mountains and prairies with a reddish sunset light. Jordan looked at the landscape around us through the windshield. “Flying on a copter allows me to be a part of it all,” he said, gesturing. We drove to the intersection. “Even a traffic light,” the pilot continued as we waited for the green signal. - I mean, think about how it would be to fly around this traffic light on a drone, to see it close from every angle, even from above. At first I dreamed of becoming an artist and doing photography. Now I shoot things like I never expected. With my copter, I see things that nobody has ever seen before. ”
Zach and Jordan travel freely around the world because a company called DRL pays for them: “The Driving Racing League”. Over a dozen young pilots work for her. Champion racing drone get six-figure contracts; the rest of the racers are content with less. Although the DRL is called a league, it does not belong to any other organizations. It's just a company that shoots drones TV shows and then sells them to ESPN and similar cable channels in seventy-five countries. The audience of its programs has 50 million viewers.
DRL deals with the technical side of all races. For starters, pilots compete on their own drones. These drones are completely identical, which eliminates the possibility of unfair advantage. League engineers construct all race tracks and provide their own radio control technologies. Company innovations in this area allow drones to fly out of sight. As a rule, if an obstacle such as a wall is between the drone and the radio source, the connection is interrupted and the drone falls to the ground. But on the DRL tracks, the drones fly into adjacent zones from the pilot's field of view, and then return and continue the race on the main ring, where spectators sit behind a protective net. Also solved the problem of radio frequency interference due to spectator gadgets, which almost broke the championship on Governors Island. How the DRL engineers managed to accomplish such a feat is the company's secret.
On the race track. Photos from Instagram DRL.
At the beginning of each year, pilots participate in activities sponsored by the League in the United States and sometimes outside the country. The finalists go to the quarterfinals and semifinals. The winners of these competitions or those who qualify in any other way compete for the title of champion in an event that is both a real race and a well-produced TV show. In 2016, this championship was held at the former stamping plant in Detroit. Then Jordan became the winner, and in 2017 he defended the title at the race at the Alexander Palace, a spacious Victorian showroom in London.
The race took place in June, and ESPN showed it after six weeks. Like most sports television events, the DRL championship combined the event itself with entertaining snippets; but the pilot skill level itself was incredibly high. A pair of commentators in short-sleeved shirts said the usual things for sports commentators, a young blonde interviewed on the track between the races. The six finalists were Jordan / Jet on a red drone; Zack / A_Nub on white; Gab707 from Montreal on yellow; Wild Willy from Atlanta on pink; French pilot Duncan on green; and FPVProvo from Utah on blue. The 39-year-old FPVProvo was the oldest among six pilots. Each drone carried on itself two hundred LEDs in the colors of the pilot, so that it was easy to distinguish, where is whose drone. The event included seven consecutive races; for the first place ten points were awarded, for the second-sixth - significantly less. Won the most points in the seventh round and became the winner.
Alexandra Palace, 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
Each obstacle and gate on the track outlined the shining lights. Inside the darkened Alexander Palace, the rays of searchlights were playing, and under them a psychedelic track flickered. A row of three gates on a vertical loop under the high vaulted ceiling of the hall forced the pilots to sharply turn over the drones on the fly and exit vertically from the bottom. After such a tediously complex move, there was a final spurt to the finish line, on which drones crashed into the barrier network.
Having remembered the color of each pilot, it was possible to follow them throughout each race. Breaking from the small platform at the start, each drone left a bright trace at a speed of 128 km / h. Jordan / Jet won the first race, Gab707 won the second. During the breaks biographical video vignettes were played, like those shown at the Olympics. In one video, Jordan ate sushi with his beaming parents. In another, Gab707, a young man with a narrow face and a ponytail, stood in a snowy forest and talked about his light flying style, which did not include abrupt maneuvers. In the third run, the drone, which was run by Gab707, ran into the gate and flew out.
Alexandra Palace, 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
The same thing happened to Jordan during the fourth race. He won the fifth round, but fell again in the sixth, taking off from the back loop, and then hit the gate.
Meanwhile, the other four pilots fought for third place. Zack / A_Nub was the second after two races, but his drone fell three times. The pilot looked upset and furious when he took off his glasses between the races.
Winners of the 2017 DRL Championship. Photos from Instagram DRL.
Most of the decisive arrival was led by Gab707. Then Jordan / Jet caught up with him, beating the rest of the pilots, when all six were approaching a difficult loop. Gab707 was the first, but Jordan laid a tougher turn at departure from the third gate, overtook the opponent before the last jerk and crossed the finish line almost half a second earlier. The rider pulled off his glasses in a daze, not sure of his victory. Then he learned that he won, and threw his hands into the air. As a result, Gab707 took second place, and Wild Willy - third. All the competition, including advertising, took an hour of television time.
DRL CEO Nicholas Horbachevsky. Photo: Baltimore Sun
Nicholas Horbachevsky, a thirty-year-old DRL general manager, is reminiscent of a Western star of the 50s: he has long sideburns and combed back brown hair. He founded the DRL in 2015, and later opened the company's headquarters in West 27th Street in Manhattan. Investors liked the concept of the drones TV show, so the project attracted tens of millions of dollars. To deal with technical difficulties, Horbachevsky acquired the company Ryan Guri, who is now his main employee. Guri is a slim, young designer with glasses and rolled up sleeves. He also looks like a character transferred from the 50s, but more like a scientist from the early days of NASA.
Route Ohio Crash Site. Photos from Facebook DRL.
I visited the DRL office, returning from Colorado. When you exit the elevator on the right floor, the large and difficult to identify object on the right is the scenery, part of the broken alien ship that was used on the track during previous races. The working area is located in a spacious studio with high ceilings. Along the walls are lined tables, plastic buckets and crates filled with things like the ones I saw in the basement of the guys at Fort Collins. On the desktops were drones that DRL uses in races. They resembled insects and were more than homemade drones that I saw. The DRL employs about twenty people in New York and in the city of Santa Cruz, California. Everyone I saw seemed no older than forty years.
Horbachevsky and Guri described to me how they assemble their drones, design and construct tracks (which they call lines), and look for pilots. According to them, at the moment there are about fifty professional drone pilots in the world. Potential riders can download the simulator and try to show the time at the professional level. The best among them compete in the computer race, the winner of which receives a contract for 75 thousand dollars. The company also checks video of flights with GoPro, which are sent by pilots. Network activity provides a constant influx of potential new stars.
Preparing for the race. Photos from Instagram DRL.
“(The organizers) of the early drone races did not understand the presentability problem,” says Horbachevsky. - Racing drone - not a new "Nazkar". You do not adapt an existing sport by inserting drones into it. This is a sport from the future. People have long seen such futuristic races in cyberspace and in movies. ”
Personnel from the Star Wars. Episode I: The Phantom Menace
“The audience that comes to see drones thinks in terms of video games and classic science fiction races,” Guri says. “They are thinking about racing the hides from the Hidden Threat.” They think about the pursuit of speeders through the forest on the planet Endor from the Return of the Jedi. ”
Personnel from the Star Wars. Episode VI Return of the Jedi "
“When you create the drones race, you compete with science fiction,” Horbachevsky notes. “While the DRL did not start racing, the children came to the drone races and complained,“ This is not Star Wars, as I was promised, ”adds Guri.
“I came to this sport from the position of a top manager at Tough Mudder, which organizes survival races,” said Horbachevsky. - So I had the experience of developing a new sport. But if I knew about all the technical innovations that we eventually had to create on our own, I would never do it. ”
“For the first time, we made a coherently working line, which was both difficult and very interesting, in 2016 at the Miami Dolphins club stadium,” says Guri. “There we made the drones fly through the stands, and then beneath them, through tunnels and rooms inside the stadium.” We looked at each other then and said, "Nobody has ever done such a thing before."
“Guri is a real da Vinci when it comes to drones,” says Horbachevsky. - And in the process we came across a lot of new patent-pending inventions. Well, sort of how the Le Mans Series raced the brake discs. ”
“And work is pure pleasure,” Guri says. - Last summer, in order to show that this is in principle possible, we set the Guinness world record for the speed of a radio-controlled quadcopter on batteries. It was at Cunningham Park in Queens. The people from Guinness are very scrupulous, they came and checked everything, they brought their own speed measurement expert. We built a new quadcopter - specifically to deal with the problems that we faced before when the drone caught fire in flight. This time everything worked perfectly. The drone traveled the 100-meter distance so quickly that it was almost impossible to see, and developed an average speed of 263 km / h. At his best moment, he accelerated to almost 290 km / h. ”
“It was comparable to the moment in the first Star Wars, when the cruiser jumps at light speed,” says Horbachevsky. “This is what we are trying to achieve - to reproduce sci-fi effects in real life, and create incredibly high-level, high-performance flying robots to show them to the whole world.”
Broken window in Kate Spade boutique. Photo: New York Daily News
Last year, the drone punched a window in designer Kate Spade’s store on the corner of Mercer and Broome Street in Manhattan. The incident occurred on the fourth of July, at about 8:30 pm. The police did not find out who did this, and the employees of the shop selling luxury bags refused to discuss what had happened. It was then that I first saw the news of the drone crash, but soon others followed. In September, the drone crashed into a Black Hawk army helicopter, which patrolled the area around Staten Island. The helicopter landed safely, after which the National Transportation Safety Board conducted the first investigation of an air collision involving a drone. In October, the drone crashed into the wing of a Skyjet passenger aircraft, which had landed at the Jean Lesage International Airport near Quebec. It was the first confirmed collision between a drone and a commercial aircraft in North America. There were no serious injuries or injuries. There were no suspects either.
A piece of drone stuck in a Black Hawk helicopter. Photo: National Transportation Safety Board
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required all pilots of drones weighing from 250 grams to 25 kilograms to be registered without fail. The rule is rarely observed in practice. If a drone accident caused material damage, the pilot must report the incident. Such a requirement is also often ignored. Fallen drones leave little evidence, because a drone without a pilot's registration number is difficult to track. Often there are reports of drones flying above the crowds, or near the airport, or near the houses, or above 120 meters above the ground. All these actions violate the prohibitions of the FAA. Sales of entertainment and commercial drones are growing every year. Aviation officials predict that by 2020, 7 million drones will be sold annually, of which 4.3 million for amateur flights and 2.7 million for commercial flights.
Agricultural drone Ag Eagle its software.
Farmers use drones to inspect the fields. So they keep track of what crops and water look like in difficult-to-reach corners. With the help of unmanned aerial vehicles, roofers examine rooftops of buildings, repairmen carry out inspections of power lines and cell towers, and real estate agents take pictures of beautiful houses. Copters work a lot on television and when making films. In 2017, for the first time in history, the fire departments of New York and Los Angeles used drones to extinguish the fire. In the 2017 Super Bowl, three hundred drones performed a synchronous flight during the Lady Gaga performance. In a park in the west of the state of New York, the drone helped save the dog that fell in the gorge. Dron tracked down juvenile prisoners who escaped from prison for juveniles in Louisiana. Police arrested a couple in California and accused them of organizing the supply of drugs on drones. One Denver donut shop also delivered its goods by air. And in March 2017, Amazone made its first delivery to the United States, using the Prime Air drone system.
Amazon Prime Air 2015 ad
At key points in American history, pilots of various kinds turned out to be the most interesting people. For about twenty years, the “pilots” of the ferrymen on Mississippi, who skillfully guided ships along the ever-changing river, were of particular importance. Their ranks gave us the greatest American writer . The fighter pilots who turned into astronauts personified the highest degree of superiority during the Cold War.
Nicholas Horbachevsky described high-level riders as "the best nerds." Perhaps the pilots of drones will become the new advanced historical type. Already now, due to budget cuts, government pilots with real flight experience are less and less trained by the government, due to which commercial airlines have to choose from a smaller pool of potential pilots. Someday we will all fly on airplanes driven by calm, professional, reliable pilots staying on the ground.
Software development startup DroneSAR. The program, along with DJI drones, allows you to perform search and rescue operations.
In the future, there will be more jobs that require the skill of managing drones. Now friends of Zack and Jordan fly on drones over avocado plantations, or work in film crews and search groups. Millions of children hone their piloting skills by playing video games. Children and just love to fly on the drones. Many people in the US are looking for an exciting and fun way to make a living. So why not teach children the art of safe piloting at school or in other educational programs? We should follow the example of South Korea. It makes sense to prepare, because in the future around will fly a lot more UAVs.
The glowing screen always seemed limitless to me. You can fall into it forever and never get out. It seemed to me that this is not good, because I am a fan of reality and would not want to be neglected. I sympathized with the children lost in their screens. It seems they never played outside. It did not occur to me that the unreality of the burning screen would lead us back to the real world, which is what happened with the drones. It's fun to command a gin in a fantasy world, but piloting a drone is akin to having gin opportunities in real life. Thanks to the widely available drones, reality has become attractive again.
When I returned home after flying with Jordan and Travis in the canyon of the Cache-la-Poudre river, the sun went down to the west, flooding the mountains and prairies with a reddish sunset light. Jordan looked at the landscape around us through the windshield. “Flying on a copter allows me to be a part of it all,” he said, gesturing. We drove to the intersection. “Even a traffic light,” the pilot continued as we waited for the green signal. - I mean, think about how it would be to fly around this traffic light on a drone, to see it close from every angle, even from above. At first I dreamed of becoming an artist and doing photography. Now I shoot things like I never expected. With my copter, I see things that nobody has ever seen before. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/410643/