Skip to main content

Is professional drone racing about to take off, or is it just a hobby?

Being able to race other people while soaring in the sky seems fun, but is it a sport? Digital Trends attended Mountain Dew and DR1 Racing’s Day of Drones event at the warehouse turned art studio, The 1896 earlier this month to get a look into the increasingly popular and legally vague world of drone racing to find out if it has a future or if it’s just a fantasy.

At the event, three drone racers from drone racing Team Big Whoop competed against each other with Tiny Whoop drones, a brand of miniature drones created by one of the racers, Jesse Perkins. Those mini drones were hard to keep an eye on as they zipped around guests and performers in the dimly lit warehouse, so the first-person view from the drone cameras was projected on the exposed brick walls behind the stage, helping spectators follow the action. The crowd alternated between watching the projected video and trying to spot the drones whenever they passed by.

This hobby is fast on its way to becoming a sport.

The first-person view from the drone cameras helped heighten to enjoyment, but that was the only convenient way to keep an eye on the race. The race at Day of Drones was also as quick as a horse race, taking up roughly 10 minutes of the three hour event. Because the drones did not have a visible course path, many gave up on watching the video projection and went back to enjoying their drinks, occasionally reengaging with the race whenever one of the quadcopters flew by.

Day of Drones had the general framework of a drone race, but may not be a fair representation of the burgeoning sport. A few days after Day of Drones, The second annual National Drone Racing Championships (NDRC) were held on Governors Island in New York City from August 5 – 7. At NDRC, 150 pilots — those that qualified from a pool of 1,400 — raced [small drones] on a clear course path involving those drones going through colorful hoops. The vast space and unobstructed viewing that Governor’s Island gives was vastly different than the race we saw. Zachry Thayer, a drone pilot from the same Team Big Whoop at Day of Drones, won the race and the $50,000 cash prize.

“Here we have a sport that nerds can now play,” said Chris Thomas, founder of MultiGP Drone Racing League, in an interview with Digital Trends. Team Big Whoop drone racer Jordan Temkin was not as enthusiastic and explained the biggest barrier preventing drone racing from becoming an actual sport is money. He claimed to “only know about two out of the hundreds of thousands of [drone] pilots that get paid,” during a panel discussion at the event.

“Right now, because there is no income for most people, you can’t dedicate your life to becoming the best at whatever that sport is,” Temkin said before mentioning how other professional sports athletes are paid to work to be the best.

This is a growing sentiment in the world of drone racing. At NDRC, Dr. Scot Refsland, the co-founder and chairman of the Drone Sports Association (DSA) told ESPN that drone racing is “not in an environment where we can support a pro racing system right now, so there are no professionals. beginning stages of the sport.” According to Refsland, all of DSA races will be professional by January.

Under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulations, drone racing is classified as a recreational use of unmanned aerial system (UAS), since most drone racing competitions do not involve in any monetary compensation. Under that distinction, anyone 13 years of age or older who wishes to fly a drone just needs to adhere to safety measures, but no certificate is needed. Once people start getting paid for racing drones, the recreation becomes commercial, requiring drone racers to pass an aeronautics test every 24 months for a certificate and undergo a background check by the Transportation Security Administration (TAA). These stipulations may deter casual drone users from racing, but could also help cultivate a consortium of dedicated drone racers who have dedicated their lives to flying glorified toys.

The drone racing at Day of Drones was a bare bones look into a fast paced sport still being fleshed out. With a 15 year old winning $250,000 at the first ever World Drone Prix in Dubai in March, this hobby is fast on its way to becoming a sport.

Check out our video recap of the event let me know how my drone racing skills are.

Keith Nelson Jr.
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Keith Nelson Jr is a music/tech journalist making big pictures by connecting dots. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY he…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more