Building a Drone With a Bunch of Eight-Year-Olds Is Way Better Than Just Buying One

Last Sunday, a group of about twenty New Yorkers gathered at the Queens Museum of Art, in Flushing Meadows, the site of the Worlds Fair, to meet Georgi and Nina Tushev, a thirty-something Bulgarian artist duo who were conducting a “Build Your Own Drone Workshop.” This was not a work of performance art. Participants would actually learn “how easy it is to build a drone by yourself,” the couple promised, with good old-fashioned foam core, Stanley knives, and glue. One might wonder whether it’s a good idea to teach residents of one of the most densely populated areas in the world how to build remote control flying machines. It’s right to wonder.

Hobby drones are one of the most powerful and rapidly proliferating DIY technologies. Like any nascent technology, these drones are prone to failure, but most often the error is with the person at the controls. And as some have pointed out after protesters flew a drone towards Angela Merkel at a campaign rally, it doesn’t take much to turn a hobby drone into a nasty weapon.

But the workshop was not, as one might imagine, full of sketchy guys hoping to rain fire on Gotham’s residents. Most of the participants were under the age of ten. They watched wide-eyed as the Tushevs folded, glued and taped a large sheet of foam core into a first-person view (FPV) flying wing (they had already prepared the electronic system, which included a set of goggles to show the pilot what the drone saw, and was made entirely of components purchased on the internet). The main benefit of FPV flying is that you can fly your drone out of eyeshot, since you're visually "inside" it. Thanks to FPV drones, we get to enjoy spectacular videos like this.

But despite the sweet videos, hobby drones have been getting a lot of bad press. Though not technically a drone, an RC helicopter killed its 19-year old operator back in September. Then a musician from Brooklyn crashed a quadcopter in Midtown Manhattan, narrowly missing a businessman and sending trashy news sites into a frenzy. A few days later, another quadcopter crashed into the Sydney Harbor Bridge right before a naval parade passed through. And in an apparent bid to prove that they aren’t messing around, the FAA fined the world’s best known FPV pilot $10,000 for flying a drone, similar to the one that the Tushevs built, over the University of Virginia campus in a “reckless” manner.

The FAA can’t really be blamed for worrying about unregulated drone use. Pressured by an emerging industry that’s itching to get airborne, the agency released their UAS integration roadmap, which explains how they plan to make sure the sky doesn’t become a deathtrap when it starts to fill with drones (in part, they'll be working with law enforcement around the country to help with the thorny matter of how to actually fly these things). And while the FAA's primary concern is meant to be safety, it's also been dragged into the privacy debate that drones have ignited. Brendan Schulman, the lawyer representing Trappy in his dispute with the FAA, predicts that the regulations on drone use will be “very burdensome.” Hobbyists like the Tushevs might even have to coordinate with air traffic controllers whenever they fly.

When it was time the Tushev drone's maiden flight, it wasn’t difficult to see why the FAA might be especially concerned about homemade drones. One couldn’t help but imagine all the ways that flying an untested drone over a crowd of some twenty cute little children could turn very bad. Looking a little pale, Georgi launched the drone into Queens airspace as half the audience gasped and the other half screamed. It was the first day of the harsh winter cold, and it had been raining all afternoon, but right before the flight, the clouds had broken. The aircraft was hardly the Spirit of St. Louis, but it flew. A couple of times it dipped violently, but the Tushevs were skilled enough to make the save each time. Soon enough, Georgi was doing barrel-rolls and Stuka-dives over the Corona Park Hemisphere. The children, all wrapped up in their winter jackets and scarves, were squealing with excitement. Someday they might think that building a drone is as quaint as building your own cell-phone.

After the workshop, I asked the Tushevs whether they thought it was a good idea to teach amateurs with no flying experience how to build these machines. “What’s really dangerous,” said Georgi, “is when people who don’t know anything about flying buy ready-made drones that are very easy to fly.” Off-the-shelf drones are much scarier than home-made drones, since literally anyone can buy one and fly it over Midtown Manhattan.

Whereas, contrary to what the Tushevs advertised, the workshop proved it would be impossible for someone with no experience to easily build a working drone. There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of science and math involved. For much of the workshop, the children had children looked on with increasingly vacant eyes as the Tushevs explained concepts that even left the parents scratching their heads. If your drone hasn’t been balanced properly—which involves calculating things like the center of gravity—it won’t fly. If the electronics haven’t been soldered correctly, it won’t fly. If the weight distribution is wrong, it won’t fly. In theory, you can go online, buy a bunch of components, and build a flying death machine. But in practice, 99.9 percent of people will just go online and buy a plug-and-play quadcopter instead. In a way, that’s much scarier.

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