Drone racing? Winnetka man a star in new sport. 'It's gonna be huge ... - Chicago Tribune
With a piercing whine, the quadcopter drone exploded from the turf of a Glencoe park, scattering leaf fragments in a miniature cyclone.
In a blink, the aircraft sped toward a thick tree trunk, only to swerve clear at the last instant. It then danced through an entire grove, coming ever so close to disaster but remaining unscathed until it settled like an obedient pet at the feet of 21-year-old Johnny Schaer.
Half-artist, half-athlete, Schaer is one of the world's best drone pilots, chosen by a fledgling professional league to participate in a made-for-ESPN racing series. The finale airs at 8 p.m. Sunday, with the winner assured of a six-figure contract and the title of the world's first professional drone racer.
Racing, though is just one branch of Schaer's aerial obsession. He also posts mesmerizing videos to YouTube in which his camera-equipped drone performs almost unfathomable acrobatics over Icelandic fiords, Hawaiian beaches and Colorado mountains.
"Once you master it, that's the best part," he said. "Then you can really do anything. You have full control. You're pretty much Superman. You can fly anywhere."
Schaer, of Winnetka, is the most visible drone pilot in the Chicago area, but he is far from alone. Others zip though park district forests or Christmas tree farms, explore abandoned factories by air or perform stunts for crowds at minor league baseball games.
But racing is where the real action is, with tinkerers assembling carbon fiber dragsters capable of flying at 80 mph and changing direction almost instantaneously. The aircraft rocket through gates and around barriers and the first one to the finish wins — that is, if any are still intact.
"You're not flying if you're not crashing," said Kameron Norwood, a Chicagoan who leads a meet-up group for drone racers. "That's something we say all the time. I've landed them in water. I've run them full speed into light posts going 60 mph and they've exploded into 100 pieces. I went home, bought some parts and was back in the air the next afternoon."
The four-propeller drone has become a familiar presence in America's skies, though the most common models focus on ease of use. Not so for racing drones, whose yaw, pitch and roll are controlled by a pair of super-sensitive joysticks on a remote control.
Pilots usually also wear goggles that allow them to see real-time video captured by their drones' cameras. This first person view — or FPV — can imbue even a pokey flight with the thrill of a video game.
"Flying a drone without FPV is really boring," said Gregg Novosad, of Palatine, who runs the Go Drone X race league and is trying to get schools to take up the sport. "Flying a drone with GPS is extremely boring. That's what schools have tried to do, but we've told them that if you can be an expert after one flight, you'll lose interest after four."
Dan Rezac, of Quest Academy, a private school in Palatine, has begun a racing program, though his school has yet to schedule its first opponent. He sees it primarily as an educational venture, but he thinks it might someday take its place among more traditional pastimes.
"We want to use kids' STEM skills and get them competing and having fun, then we'll work on having Illinois recognize this as an actual sport," he said.
ESPN needed no such coaxing. Earlier this year, it announced a deal with the newly hatched Drone Racing League to televise a series of races set in an empty football stadium, an abandoned mall and other striking locations.
League founder Nicholas Horbaczewski said he saw drone racing's potential as a spectator sport and prospected for competitors in the universe of flying videos posted to YouTube. He discovered that while all of the pilots shared supernatural hand-eye coordination and depth perception, some weren't cut out to race.
"Not all of them were athletes who could perform in a competitive setting," he said. "We found that people who are ex-speed sport participants — skiers, car and motorcycle racers — have real world skills that translate to drone racing."
Schaer, oddly enough, didn't have that background; he got into drones two years ago after watching YouTube videos of "freestyle flying." Years of video gaming allowed him to adapt quickly to the Xbox-like controller, and soon he was posting videos of his own, giving viewers a drone's-eye view of flights over beaches, farm fields and more exotic locales.
He dabbled in racing, too, and got his first big break earlier this year when organizers of a competition in Dubai offered him a spot. He took a leave from the University of Denver and spent two months in the desert emirate, finishing third in the freestyle event (a crash left him out of the money in the racing event).
From there Horbaczewski offered him a place in the Drone Racing League's inaugural season, and he made the most of it, zipping his brick-sized aircraft through buildings tricked out with neon-lit gates as five other pilots gave chase; the spectacle looks like a swarm of vibrant and angry insects.
Under the handle Johnny FPV, he won several races and was ranked second going into the championship round, held at an old Cadillac plant in Detroit. The race was taped last month, but Schaer declined to reveal the result.
"You'll have to tune in on Sunday," he said.
He did say, though, that he plans to keep going in this embryonic sport. He has landed a sponsor — Air Hogs, maker of remote controlled cars and drones — and has more races lined up. This is now his full-time gig, a career even his once-doubting parents have come to support, and he is optimistic the sport will repay his faith.
"It's gonna be huge," he said. "Eventually, it will be bigger drones, more of a spectator-type sport … To get to the real masses, I think they'll get bigger, faster, more crashes, more explosions. A lot of people compare this to Star Wars pod racing. It feels like the same thing."
Twitter @JohnKeilman
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