Drone Racing League Wants To Be the Next NASCAR (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Drone Racing League has secured a series of significant investments that it hopes will be enough to turn drone races into a spectator sport. The quadcopter drone racing scene has only exists for a few years, so it's still fairly disjointed. Rules and standards vary between organizers, so it can be hard to have fair races. The DRL aims to fix that. In doing so, it hopes to take lessons from NASCAR and the growing e-sports leagues to find an audience. "Often, pilots wear virtual reality goggles that receive a feed from the camera embedded on the drone and maneuver as if they were in the craft itself. That first-person feed is also recorded and used as raw material for the content produced by the Drone Racing League." The high speeds combined with the ability to make interesting (and photogenic) courses may appeal to people who find car racing too boring.

Comments

Going to be hard to find competitors

[ScentCone]

Won't be many participants unless this is all done inside. Because if they're flying outdoor courses, the operators have to be actual certified pilots (because this is a commercial activity). If they're doing it for fun, that's different. But the FAA considers the fact that flying the exact same RC aircraft in the exact same way in the exact same place while following the exact same safety procedures to be so much more dangerous if you're paid $5 to do so, that you must stop what you're doing and go learn how to fly a Cessna, first. Then you can go back to flying your 250g plastic quad copter legally, because that general aviation certificate definitely will make that $5 safer to earn (unless you want to fly, say, an ultra-light with an actual human being aboard, then there's no need for certification). But if you don't make any money at it, well, then there's no need to know any of that stuff. Because, FAA.