The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Adrenaline Rush of Racing Drones

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

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 were among the early professional drone racers in the sport, 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 to these pilots drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports.   This piece originally aired on February 9, 2018. 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.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. All over the country this week, from Connecticut to Florida to Washington, qualifying races are being held for a competition in a sport that you may not have heard a lot about. Dron racing. The qualifiers continue through mid-July for the multi-GP championship later this year. So drone racing, what exactly is drone racing? Let's be clear, these aren't the drones you can buy your kid on Amazon, nor are they the military drones you may have read about that are flying over Ukraine.

Racing drones are a specialty item, custom built for that purpose alone. At least one drone was clocked at 180 miles an hour. I first heard about all this from staff writer Ian Frazier, who reported for us on drone racing in the sports early days. Starting in an event, Billed as the Dron National Championships in 2016. Multi-Rotor Racing, the 2016 U.S.S. drone nationals. Thank you to all over local group and a national partners. It was one of those things that happen 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. You're 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 Anub is Zachary Thayer. That was his racing name, and Jet is Jordan Temkin. 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 Travis, so I went out and visited them. Jordan. And I have Travis. How's it going? All right. Yeah, welcome.

I'm 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. 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.

Yeah. 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 more 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. Oh, man, 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... You don't fly anymore? No, 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.

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 Kashlapudra 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. The first place we stopped, against a cliff wall and the road is next to us and then the river's on the other side and it's, you have the drone at your feet and then the drone just goes and 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 knocking me around 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 right now. Okay, okay.

You don't think you're going to react, but it's impossible. Okay, but I just saw that car go by, so... Yes, you did. That car did go by. 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 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. 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. Was that, did you just flip it over there?

Yeah. 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. You see yourself sitting there? Yeah. Yeah.

It is really strange. Yeah, it feels like you're flying. And you're so engulfed in just, being that drone. 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 flying. Yeah. A lot of the people who

fly are ex-adrenaline junkies. So like skateboarder, I'm a ski, Here, Zach came from a motorcross 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 crashed 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 pilot's in the world. I'm here to win. I can be the best, and that's why I'm here to prove it. This is drone racing. This is the R.F. 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. 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 Dauphin Stadium, for example. They've raced in an abandoned mall. And last year's finals were in Alexandra Palace in London. Next is Palmport and the gravity gain of set.

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 spend so much time in the mountains made them particularly able to deal with that type of a course

and helped Jordan to win. Jet 5. He takes it. Jet fits it all. Jack is your 2017 world champion. I'm blown away, Greg. That may have been the greatest pass at drone racing history. 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's sort of a 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 they're probably about 50 pro-drone racers in the world, but a lot of people are taking up the sport. But now there's a bunch of 16-year-olds and 12-year-olds getting into it and starting to kick our 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 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. Staff writer Ian Frazier with a story from 2018. You can find everything Ian has written for us on a huge, range of subjects at new yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. 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 Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Peter Bresnan, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green,

Calalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabwelle, with help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Meng Fei-Chen. Our Regina Spector session was recorded by Louis Mitchell. We had assistance this week from Sarah Lilly, and special thanks to Dorit Strauss for the piano. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.