The New Yorker Radio Hour - Ian Frazier Among the Drone Racers

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre are three of perhaps only fifty professional drone racers in the world, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had an enormous impact on military strategy, and the commercial applications seem limitless, but, for these pilots, drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, here's a litmus test of a certain kind. If I just say the word drone, do you imagine an unmanned plane-dropping bombs on a remote village, a little Amazon robot delivering your packages within hours, or Christmas present that was lost or broken well before New Year's Eve? Drones, in fact, are proliferating at an incredible rate. And one sign of that is a new class of drone pilots. They're not amateurs and they're not military either. They're drone racers, flying specialty vehicles designed for speed. And I do mean speed.

One of those little drones with four propellers reached about 180 miles an hour in a trial. And so we asked staff writer Ian Frazier to take a look at the sport, and one of his first stops was something billed as the drone national champion. ships. This was back in 2016. It was 2016 U.S.S. drone nationals. Thank you to all over local group and national partners. It was one of those things that happened early on in the development of a sport, I guess, in that it was not really very well thought out.

Pilots goggles down. Arm your copters. We are on the tone in less than five. You couldn't really tell who was in first and who was in second because drones are small and drones can go really fast. 80 miles an hour is a kind of regular speed. When maneuvering gets complicated, they may go down to 60 miles an hour. It was hard to follow.

But in the course of it, there were two pilots who I knew about. A-Nube is Zachary Thayer. that was his racing name, and Jet is Jordan Tempkin. Zach won both the race and also the freestyle competition. So he came away with $12,000. I did follow them starting at that point because they were really exciting and really good racers. And then I found out that they shared a house

out in Fort Collins, Colorado. And they were also, there was a third drone guy named Trachman. Travis, so I went out and visited them. Jordan. And I have Travis. How's it going? All right. Yeah, welcome.

I am Travis McIntyre. And I'm Zachary there. So, yeah, we live just outside of Fort Collins on a little one-acre property. It's pretty much just a house that us three live in, and all we do is drone things. Has sweet lacy curtains, too. They're not really our style, but. No, they're our style now, man. Jordan and Zach are both 26.

Travis is 31. He does not race competitively very often, although he does sometimes. And this is just a, you know, I think maybe two, three bedroom ranch house in a suburban development. They moved there, they said, in order to become better drone pilots. And they succeeded, which is kind of great. But yeah, first thing that you pretty much see when you walk in the door is this giant wall of trophies. Yeah, California, Arizona, Dubai. New York, man, lots of places. Well, they do travel a lot, and these trophies are from all these different places where they've raced and placed.

And then there's more drones in the kitchen. Oh, yeah. And more drone chargers and... Laptops and more controllers and more batteries. And there's the basement, and the basement is... It was a workshop. So our drone basement is a bit of chaos. This is just amazing

This is really incredible This is like a drone fleet This is just This is mostly stuff That doesn't really ever fly anymore So these are like Relative Still fly anymore

So these work We just never fly them We went through a lot of crap I thought You know the Wright brothers Would have recognized this This would have been like Their bicycle shop

You know They're doing all kinds of different things in this rather familiar place. I mean, what's more familiar than a basement of a ranch house? They have all kinds of equipment for soldering, cables, and plastic milk crates

with all kinds of stuff in them, I have 15 or 20 along one wall that are mostly propellers. Imagine an entire Amazon truck just rolled over in your house and they're all full of props. They have a lot of different drones, but there's one,

drone frame that they have manufactured themselves. So basically this is a foot square. Yeah. But the shape is, it's like a cross. It's like, and this is a quad. I mean, that would be the term. So quad for motors. We don't necessarily design for everyone else.

We design for what we need. A recent goal we've been working on for a while is we want something that's better for mountains, something that's a little bit faster and maybe can fly a little longer because mountains are deceivingly large. They're going to go be a 2,000-foot cliff over there, and we'll be up to the top, you know, no matter of seconds. That requires a lot of energy and different stuff. So we've been trying to perfect the mountain cruiser formula for a while.

I think usually that's the one that they're flying when they're just out practicing. They practice up in the Kashelapudra Canyon northwest of Fort Collins. It's a drive, a short drive. from Fort Collins. Yeah, it's in the front range of the Rocky Mountains. And so they go up this road up into the canyon, and there are a lot of pull-outs along the road.

So there's what we do. We pull off on the side of the road. Great. The first place we stopped, we were against a cliff wall, and the road is next to us, and then the river's on the other side. And you have the drone at your feet, and then the drone just goes right straight up out of sight.

The pilot is wearing goggles, which are exclusively the feed from the camera on the drone. So you lose yourself in it. So like Travis right now, he's just an empty carcass of a body standing there. And his consciousness is somewhere flying around this mountain. You can set yourself challenges, like how close can you fly to the Kash Lepouda River? I mean, they're dodging rocks in the river. and it trains them and it's good for reflexes

and it's good for a sense of, you know, the drone's capabilities and how close you can get to something and what you have to look out for. The wind was off here on a real good up there. Yeah. You want to go for a ride? Okay. They brought along extra goggles

so I could just watch the feed. You might want to sit here. You better to sit than to stand, you think? Yes. But I'm already feeling a little nervous about this. And take the goggles off at any time you feel nauseous. Okay, okay. You don't think you're going to react, but it's impossible.

Okay, but I just saw that car go by. Yes, you did. The car did go by. Okay. So it's not virtual reality. It is streaming reality, right? You are just transplanted somewhere else. Okay.

Oh, my gosh. Whoa. So I'm now right. right on top of that ridge that's on the other side. And I'm looking down on all these spires and things. Okay. Okay. Now I'm going along the river.

And I went by that big spire that's sticking out there. And I go right down by that spire, and now I'm coming down the road. And I'm going over the river. Man, I'm going over the river. Okay. And this is the fastest I've ever gone over a river. It's exhilarating, huh? It's exhilarating.

I mean, it just absolutely gets your entire, body wired. It's just everything. Everything. I mean, you feel it, I mean, you feel it in your toes and your knees and everything. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Was that, did you just flip it over there? Yeah. Whoa. You feel like you're about to die. I found it necessary to hold on to the car tightly so that I did have some tactile grounding in actual physical reality. Whoa. Yourself sitting there? Yeah. It is really strange.

Yeah, it feels like you're flying. And you're so engulfed in just being that drone. Right. There's no feeling of your own self. It's mostly like what flying in a dream feels like. Only, I've never had a dream in which I did a loop to loop or anything, you know, like spun around. And we can't stop. A lot of the people who fly are ex-adrenaline junkies.

So like skateboarder, I'm a skier, Zach came from a motocross background. We know a lot of people from motorcycle. You know, they had a bad motorcycle accident. And this is their outlet to getting this sensation of I'm going 100 miles an hour an inch from the ground. And it's thrilling. And worst case, I crash and I'd break a $20 motor. So if you meet somebody just at a party or on the street and they ask you what you do,

what do you say you do? So that's actually this question that I've been struggling with myself. I sort of chuckle and say I'm a professional drone racer because it doesn't seem like I should be able to say that or that it's real. That's cool. That's still something that's really hard for me to say to somebody. Like, for example, when I bought my car a month ago, and I was looking for car insurance, right? They're like, what is your profession?

And I went, well, I don't know. And one guy put down artist and one guy put down entertainer. And I said, all right, entertainer, because I'm on TV, you know, that works. Eight of the best from the whole year. The best pilots in the world. I'm here to win. the best and that's why I'm here to prove it. This is drone racing.

This is DRL. The drone racing league. Jordan and Zach are pilots who have contracts with a company called DRL, which stands for Drone Racing League, and it packages these races as programs that are shown on ESPN and on other sports networks in 75 countries in fact. The main event, heat seven.

Jordan races under the name of Jet. Zach races under the name of A. Nube. The race courses are in places where there are opportunities for obstacles, for complicated courses. Miami Dolphin Stadium, for example. They've raced in an abandoned mall. And last year's finals were in Alexandra Palace in London. It isn't just a race on one plane.

You have to go on this side of a gate. You have to go through that gate. You have to go over to that side of that obstacle. You then go up. And the one race that they had at the Alexander Palace, there was a loop-de-loop going right straight up. And I think that the fact that Jordan and Zach spent so much time in the mountains,

made them particularly able to deal with that type of a course and helped Jordan to win. I've always wondered what happened to these giant checks. Giant checks. You have a stack of giant checks. Yeah, we got more on the wall. He won a contract for the next year,

and it's a, I guess, six-figure contract. So he's broke. He's almost broke. and then I have some money. That's kind of the way it is right now. But last year I did. It's really weird. You can either make money off prizes, which is almost no one does that, very few people.

I was able to do that last year, which was really nice. This year, it sort of DRL pays us for a time filming with them. Where's the money? There's not much right now. There's a little bit here and there, so you've got to sort of fight for it and scrape by. Zach and Jordan guessed that there are, probably about 50 pro-drone racers in the world.

But a lot of people are taking up the sport. But, you know, now there's a bunch of 16-year-olds and 12-year-olds getting into it. And starting to kick her butts around every now and then. But we're still pretty competitive. I'm starting to fall behind a little bit because there are these guys who live in places like Indiana. And all they do is race practice every single day. And they're getting incredibly fast and incredible. incredibly precise.

And if I want to be competitive, I can't just be flippy, floppy, in the mountains all day long. I mean, it is a life that you get up, you talk about what you want to do, and you go out and do it. It has to be fun, and it has to be disciplined at the same time.

And there's a great part of a poem by Robert Frost, and at the end of it, he's explaining how in his own life he does not like to take the professional and the fun and separate them. He says, but yield who will to their separation, my object in living is to unite my avocation with my vocation as my two eyes are one in sight. only where love and need are one. And the work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sakes. New Yorker staff writer Ian Frazier with a story from 2018. You can find everything that Ian has written for us,

a huge range of subjects that really boggles the mind, all at New Yorker.com. And that's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us. and I hope you'll join us next time. Be sure to keep in touch on Twitter, and you can always find us at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianan and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Callal Leia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Bradley G., Meng Fei-Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.