Ian Frazier Among the Drone Racers

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2018

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, recently travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre are three of perhaps only fifty professional drone racers in the world, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had enormous impact on military strategy and the commercial applications seem limitless, but to these pilots drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports. Plus, the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle grapples with the devastation wreaked by wildfires and mudslides, which took the lives of his neighbors and transformed swaths of his town into mud flats.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.0	I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.0	There's a sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.
0:19.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:28.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:32.6	Now, here's a litmus test of a certain kind. If I just say the word drone, do you imagine an unmanned plane
0:39.1	dropping bombs on a remote village, a little Amazon robot delivering your packages within
0:44.1	hours, or Christmas present that was lost or broken well before New Year's Eve? Drones, in fact,
0:51.8	are proliferating at an incredible rate.
0:57.3	And one sign of that is a new class of drone pilots.
0:59.6	They're not amateurs and they're not military either.
1:04.0	They're drone racers, flying specialty vehicles designed for speed.
1:05.1	And I do mean speed.
1:10.9	One of those little drones with four propellers reached about 180 miles an hour in a trial.
1:15.1	And so we asked staff writer Ian Frazier to take a look at the sport,
1:20.2	and one of his first stops was something billed as the drone national championships.
1:22.1	This was back in 2016. It was...
1:22.6	2016 U.S. drone nationals.
1:25.1	Thank you to all of our local group and national partners. It was one of our local group and national partners. We'll get to in just a little bit as we make a certain...
1:30.3	It was one of those things that happened early on in the development of a sport, I guess,
1:36.3	in that it was not really very well thought out.
	...

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