Mind Blown By Drone At 16 Km/H

It’s the sport that takes you on a 160– kilometer-per-hour journey through the skies without having to leave your armchair. High-speed drone racing is taking offin Africa and has created at least one entrepreneur.

- Jay Caboz

It’s a strange sight. Four men wearing Virtual Reality (VR) goggles with heads bowed and moving up and down and from side to side. They call it a Stevie Wonder – the humor is a bit rough in this business – but this is the modus operandi of a drone racer.

All four sit in a stand at the rugby field at the Cape Academy for Maths, Science and Technology, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. The drones buzz like a swarm of bees over the rugby field. With the help of VR, all four have the view from the cockpit of their small drones as they race through hoops, weave through S-bends and barrel roll though low hanging gates at 160 kilometers an hour.

“The first time you fly it’s one of those eye-opening experiences. It’s like you are floating outside your own body, especially if it’s FPV (first-person view)...When you are using goggles, you are fully immersed in virtual reality. It’s as if you are looking at yourself while flying. You still experience all the vertigo of being up in the air and you feel that on the ground. When you get up you feel dizzy after the flight, it blows your mind,” says six-year veteran drone racer Alan Ball.

This experience captured the imagination of Ball. Four years ago, after he got tired of waiting for parts from overseas, he converted his garage into a thriving drone business.

“I said whatever it costs I’m in. That’s how I started… I was working from my garage at night while doing my day job. I would come home from work and work another eight hours until one in the morning, then go to bed, then it was the same thing again the next day.”

Five months later, Ball quit his job as an iOS game developer at Naspers, Africa’s $74.5-billion media group. With R50,000 ($3,900) out of his own pocket he opened the first drone shop in South Africa, Flying Robot.