Drone Training 3

By: Ethan Cheung

On May 31st, 2025, a small group of teenagers gathered at the Heraschool flight school. We were there to continue learning how to fly drones. Billy, our instructor, led us to the flight area, where we would practice. 

For the first half of our time, we practiced general flight skills by navigating around obstacles and through hoops. We had all done this in previous training sessions, so it wasn’t very difficult. We also practiced circling a fixed point, which was quite a bit more tricky. If you turned too fast, you would go forward into the pole you were orbiting. If you turned too slow, you would spiral outwards and get too far away. 

Next, we tried the NIST flight test. The NIST flight test is a flight test created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It consists of flying around and taking accurate pictures of several targets. We all got over 10 minutes on our first attempts, and the end goal is to aim for 5 minutes. This would require us to complete the 30 instructions in just 10 seconds each. In the future, we hope to improve our skills to that point.