Origins: first-person-view flying came first, and nobody documents the first race.

This page is about the years before organised racing: how flying a model by a live camera picture came about, and the different stories told about where people first raced. It gives each account with who tells it, because the accounts do not agree and no record of a first race was found.

First-person-view flying is older than racing

The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, in its 2016 explainer on drone racing, separates the two. It describes organised racing as very recent, but, citing a 2011 Air & Space article, it dates radio-controlled aircraft flown by first-person view (FPV) to the late 1990s, when cameras and video transmitters became light enough to carry on small unmanned aircraft. That Air & Space article could not be opened for this site, so the late-1990s date rests on Bard's reading of it.

The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), the US model-aircraft association, gives a later and more specific starting point for its own country. Its magazine, Model Aviation, said in August 2012 that the Pilot View FPV system, on sale through a US hobby retailer from roughly early 2008, was one of the first ready-made FPV systems an ordinary modeller could fit, and that many people regard it as the start of the US FPV era. The same article records that:

• the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began its effort to regulate small unmanned aircraft in April 2008;
• the AMA recognised FPV flying in October 2008, and its first FPV policy was AMA Document 550, still in effect in 2012;
• in 2012 the AMA's leadership began considering a review of that policy, after a member survey in the May 2012 issue of AMA Today.

How the rules for goggle flying developed after that is on US rules history.

The first widely seen fast multirotor flights

Bard credits Raphael "Trappy" Pirker and Team Black Sheep with the first high-profile flights of fast, agile FPV multirotors of the kind raced today, including flights around the Statue of Liberty. Bard gives no date for those flights. The dates appear only in search summaries (the Air & Space article could not be opened), so they are not given here.

Where did drone racing begin? Four accounts

The sources read for this site place the start of racing in different countries and different years. None of them cites a dated, documented race as the first.

Two other sources describe the early scene without naming a first place. Fortune's own writer, in the same August 2016 article that quotes Horbaczewski, says the sport's origins are still unclear. The Conversation (Jonathan Roberts of Queensland University of Technology, 14 February 2016) describes FPV drone racing as beginning underground, with early races held in empty car parks.

Wikipedia adds that France, Australia and the United Kingdom had held national-style events before July 2015. No other source read for this site confirms them.

No documented first race

No source found for this site documents a first drone race anywhere. The research looked for contemporary German, Australian and French records and found none. The Karlsruhe 2011 origin rests on Wikipedia alone, and the article does not agree with itself about the country. The French forest video that Bard describes is not identified by name in Bard's account, so it could not be traced to a club, a date or a place. Bard's 2014 scenes, Horbaczewski's 2012 recollection and Wikipedia's 2011 Karlsruhe races are therefore three accounts of a beginning, not a record of one.

From videos to a sport, 2014 and 2015

By mid 2015 the sport was described as brand new. Make: magazine (Mike Senese, 23 July 2015) said high-speed FPV race videos had drawn worldwide attention for about a year, that until then the only races had been community events, and that the sport was only months old. Between early 2015 and the end of 2016 came the first race sanctioned by the AMA, what Quartz reported as the first US national championship, the founding of MultiGP and the Drone Racing League, and the FAI's first World Cup. Each of those is told, with the disagreements about its dates, on the first races, MultiGP history, Drone Racing League history and the FAI and drone racing.

The equipment that made fast goggle flying practical, from analogue video to the digital systems of 2019 onward, is dated on equipment history, and every date on this page is also in the timeline.