Written by Toby
Today is day three and thus the final day of the US drone nationals 2016. The action kicked off with a second round of wing qualifiers as the day gets off to a fast start These planes reach speeds of 120 mph.
Drone Racing Team qualifiers are next with all 8 teams competing. Due to an absent pilot, a spot opened up on Team Immersion RC/Rotor Riot and they recruited Junebug (Teng Ma) who was here because her husband is Top Multistar pilot NytFury (Shaun Taylor). She did not have a practice lap on the course at all. The team finished strongly showing that girls can fly too!
Next up was Drone Freestyle Qualifiers and Finals. The crowd and other pilots went crazy watching these pilots rip and twist through the sky. As they weave, loop, and roll it is hard to pick a winner because they all were great!
The Team finals followed that and Teams Immersion RC/ Rotor Riot, Lumenier, XDC, went toe to toe as each pilot had to complete 3 laps. There were 5 pilots per team; one pilot per team competed individually against the other teams single-pilot till there was a winner.
Wing finals were next and they sure impressed all but guaranteeing wings to be the next big thing in racing.
The final event - individual freestyle racing was condensed into less than an hour due to a deadline with the ESPN crew. We started with 32 pilots going through eight heats and taking one winner from each heat into a final eight After that two from each of the heats went into the final, leaving the best eight pilots to battle it out for the four-person final. After this, the event was whisked through a very short podium ceremony. It was a frenzied free-for-all because (for some reason) we had to pack up and leave and be on the 7 o'clock ferry back to New York. Not exactly a relaxing end to the event.
Unfortunately, nobody (including the organizers) knows the results of any of the races except for who the winners are. We were told to "stay tuned" to dronenationals.com to see if they post the results tomorrow or sometime in the future. Let's hope they do as most were left feeling slightly dissatisfied with how the event was handled. On this very issue, we stumbled across this Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Multicopter/comments/4wlyxl/drone_nationals/
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