Through the eyes of a drone

On December 1, the finals of the drone racing championship “Champions Cup” took place in Moscow. For the first time in Russia, the race received wealthy sponsors, and drones transmitted video in HD quality necessary for broadcast to spectators. Natalia Zotova and Evgeniy Feldman, at TJ’s request, looked into how young sports are developing in Russia and who becomes pilots of racing copters.

“I entered the MAI because I learned about the aircraft model circle,” Alexander Kunashuk, a third-year student at the Moscow Aviation Institute, happily reports. A circle of aircraft modellers occupies a windowless room on the ground floor of one of the institute’s buildings: there is a pirate flag on one wall, and an old smartphone is nailed to the other with a screwdriver. Models of airplanes, gliders and individual wings hang in clusters. True, now the circle is no longer working on airplanes, but on drones.

There is one evening left until the drone racing competition. “In the meantime, I’ll stay here overnight,” grumbles student of the aerodynamics department Ruslan Temnov: the copter doesn’t fly, you have to disassemble it down to the nut and put it back together again. Racing copters are prefabricated, you don’t buy a ready-made car, but sets of parts. “Like in Formula 1, the best cars are assembled for a specific driver,” says Kirill Shchukin, MAI employee and curator of the club.

There are three students in the circle: Sasha loves to chat about himself, Gleb Boyarsky is the eldest, already studying for a master’s degree and working on drones with children in the MAI-friendly house of culture - inserting jokes into his friend’s monologues. Quiet Ruslan picks at the drone in the corner.

“But these ones are punished, we don’t like them,” the guys point to the Phantoms, factory copters for panoramic video shooting thrown into the corner: the most popular, “amateurish” models that racers despise. “Even a child can handle them,” Sasha snorts.

Wiring sticks out of racing drones, students poke a soldering iron into them and don’t think at all about the beauty of the lines - only about speed. Such drones are cheaper than Phantoms, but the sport is still not cheap: to start flying, you need to immediately invest about a thousand dollars. In addition, something breaks all the time, and you have to buy new parts.

But this is still better than with model airplanes - since the drone is disassembled down to the nut, it is easier to repair it. “But when my wing crashed into the foundation of the house, I almost swept it into a bag with a broom,” recalls Alexander.

Each drone has a small camera, and the pilot puts on glasses or a virtual reality helmet and literally sees through the “eyes” of the copter. Sasha is going to try out the newly assembled drone and gives me extra points. “I won’t go outside, it’s cold. He’ll go alone,” Kunashuk opens the window, exposes the drone to the cold, closes it so it doesn’t blow, and takes the car out of sight.

I put on my glasses and find that I am rushing through the air through the dark courtyard of the institute: I can see snow, cars, rare luminous windows, and in one of them, far away, Sasha and me. Wearing glasses can cause you to feel seasick, which is why there are seats available for pilots at competitions.

Ruslan, who is new to the group, continues to suffer over his gutted copter. “Your brain is turned incorrectly!” - Sasha swears, referring to the central processor of the copter.

“Sasha is my coach,” Ruslan nods to his friend. And Sasha himself was taught to fly by Vladimir Meshcheryakov, a star of Russian drone racing who goes to international competitions. He also once graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute and was also interested in aircraft modeling - a long time ago, during his school years. Kunashuk speaks about Meshcheryakov with a mixture of respect and envy: “An unfamiliar track, but he flies as if there is no fear at all!”

Meshcheryakov is also participating in the Champions Cup race. Each competition is important for strengthening the young community, and besides, one competition is worth a hundred training sessions: it is a completely different experience, the pilots assure, when the stakes are high and the hands on the control panel are shaking with excitement.

Out of 64 applicants, 24 pilots were selected for qualification: there is a team from Gomel and even one Frenchman. The crowd is exclusively male, all the pilots are dressed in white overalls with the emblems of sponsors - GLONASS, Tricolor-TV, Yota.

This is the first tournament in Russia with rich sponsors and the first where the picture from the drone is not transmitted analogue, like an old TV, but digital, in HD quality. This is necessary to attract spectators to the sport: HD video can be displayed on a screen at the podium and show the audience the race in first person, which is what they did at the Champions Cup. In addition, the broadcast was also broadcast on the Internet.

Moreover, all participants will be able to keep this expensive, recently introduced digital equipment. It will become easier for pilots to train together: analog signals interrupt each other, goggles can “catch” a signal from someone else’s drone, but with digital there are no such problems.

Drone racing is such a young sport that even the best racer in Russia, Vladimir Meshcheryakov, started doing it only two years ago. But the community has already developed its own legends: everyone talks about the underground parking lot of the Aviapark shopping center, where the first drone racing crowd formed. “Twenty people gathered for training twice a week,” recalls Meshcheryakov: “We flew at night, after 11 pm, and the shopping center didn’t know anything.” At night, a competition was held in the parking lot, to which they did not hesitate to bring television crews.

“We laid out the track with plates from Auchan, and cars drove along them and broke the track for us,” recalls Kunashuk with a laugh. The freedom ended when a stranger got scared of the copter and called the police. The security of the shopping center expelled the pilots from there, and now they are training not as a whole company, but in “small groups.”

Training spaces are a sore subject. “Write so that we are not prohibited from flying in parks,” asks Muscovite Vladimir Terentyev, who has been in the sport for just under a year. It is dangerous to train near people and cars: racers understand this very well, but it is not easy to find a deserted place in Moscow.

“All the grandmothers at the entrances look at me as if I’m an enemy spy, they think I’ll film them through the window,” Terentyev sighs: “The dogs run after the copter, I have to explain to the owners that it can cause injury to the animal, and that’s where they start arguing."

A team from Belarus trains in the forest: obstacles are needed to keep things interesting, but flying in the field instantly becomes boring. That's what everyone says here - “fly”. “When I build a drone, I have the complete feeling that I will fly on it myself,” says racer Vladimir Ivanov, known in the crowd as Vova Dubaisky. He was a professional motorcycle racer until he injured his leg in a motorcycle fall, after which he switched to a safer sport. Now he lives in Dubai, and comes to Moscow specifically for racing. “Half a million euros are spent on motorcycles,” he shrugs: “But here you can get as much adrenaline as you want, but you spend pennies.”

Unlike motorcycle racing, it is not yet possible to make money from drone racing in Russia.

“There are a lot of professionals in Europe - they make money from this, that is, they have the opportunity to train all day,” says Meshcheryakov: he himself works as a system administrator, and only trains in the evenings and weekends.

However, drone racing is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, including in Russia. True, it is not yet officially recognized in the country. “While this is a small party, we are just doing what we love and no one bothers us. And if there are ten times more of us, we will become more noticeable, and, naturally, they will try to regulate us,” Vladimir Terentyev gloomily predicts: “Registrations and duties will begin...”

This is how the sport was killed in Sweden: owners of drones there were required to register under the law on video surveillance systems in a time-consuming and complicated manner, on the grounds that they have a camera on them. “Regulation is inevitable, and whoever regulates will earn money,” argues Terentyev: “And if organizations get acquainted with the world of our sport now, perhaps later they will approach regulation more wisely. Let people with common sense at least write bills about us.”

There has already been an attempt to regulate everything: in January 2016, drones weighing more than 250 grams were required to register with the Federal Air Transport Agency. In July, the restriction was lifted, the law was amended, and now only very heavy agricultural or military drones must be registered.

On the third day, the “Champions Cup” ceased to be a festival for pilots, where they could hang out in the company of other racers, share experiences, rush around shouting: “Give me a long bolt!” or “Whose soldering iron is hot?” There were about a hundred spectators, and most importantly, officials who started talking about the regulation of drones in Russia.

“This year, the president decided to add two topics to the topics considered by his commission on aviation and information and navigation technologies: the development of GLONASS and unmanned aircraft systems. This is an understanding of how promising this direction is, interesting and can be useful for the country,” Deputy Head of the Presidential Directorate for Supporting the Activities of the State Council of the Russian Federation Alexander Yurchik confidently told reporters: “First, the appearance of sports, games, and then - serious application in commerce, So it is in other areas of our life.”

“A lot needs to be done to remove barriers to the use of this technology, so that we can receive packages every day using drones and send them with gifts to friends,” said the head of GLONASS, Alexander Gurko. There is essentially no legislation in this area, he added, and promised that the working group will propose reasonable bills within a year.

“When the rules are drawn up, safety should come first, but it will be very difficult not to crush the interests of society and business,” noted Yurchik: “Your caring position will be needed here.”

At the awards ceremony, the teams managed to douse each other with champagne - almost like at Formula 1, only in a boyish way, trying to splash the opposing team more heavily and running away from each other right in front of the cameras.

In third place in the team competition were Vova Dubaisky (dissatisfied) and Vladimir Terentyev (happy: this was his first competition). At the top of the podium, the quiet Ruslan Temnov lifted the cup together with his teammates.

Text: Natalia Zotova Photo: Evgeniy Feldman

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