BRONZEVILLE — De La Salle’s Drone Club began with a dilemma.
The South Side high school’s football team wanted a drone to take pictures and videos of plays during games to improve its strategy on the gridiron.
“But they didn’t have anyone to drive it,” said Ian McNair, one of the school’s physics teachers.
With fellow teacher Ron Cunat, McNair started De La Salle’s first Drone Club to find the team a pilot and introduce science students to a piece of modern technology that’s reshaping industries all over the world.
“It was pretty coincidental," McNair said.
At the start of the year, the school bought a Phantom 4, a drone made by DJI, a Chinese company known for its easy-to-fly quadcopters equipped with high quality cameras for aerial photography and video. Considered one of the safest drones on the market and programmed with an obstacle-avoidance system that keeps the craft from crashing into objects that might be in the way, the $999 Phantom 4 is a popular and affordable choice for beginning pilots.
The teachers recruited students like Michael Gallagher, a 14-year-old freshman who loved flying radio-controlled helicopters, to learn how to pilot the drone renamed Meteor One.
“I’ve been flying RC helicopters, and the controls are the same as a drone,” Michael said.
The club meets after school twice a week to fly the drone, learn about safety, discuss flight laws and shoot photos.
“We’re hoping this will be a good introduction,” McNair said.
Michaels’s favorite part of Drone Club is the learning it requires.
“I’ve seen drones in use before for photography and uses in the military," Michael said. "I didn’t know anything about football until I had to research it.”
During football games, the Drone Club flies Meteor One above the field to record video of every play. At halftime, the club sends the video to coaches with a laptop connected to Wi-Fi. The coaches use the video to tweak their game strategy going into the second half of the game.
De La Salle's football field [Submitted Photo.]
Chicago's skyline from the lens of Meteor One. [Submitted Photo]
Cameron White, a 17-year-old junior at De La Salle’s Lourdes campus, started her exploration of modern technology in the school’s Underwater Robotics Club. After she joined the Drone Club, she fell in love with aerial photography and the science powering drones.
“I’m really into photography,” Cameron said, “but also the wiring behind it.”
At football games in the fall, it was Cameron’s task to to tell the drone pilot where to take photos. But filming football games with a drone came with its own challenges — and even some adventures.
Sometimes, students forgot to fully charge the drone. On a full charge, Meteor One can stay in flight for about 28 minutes. But when the drone runs out of juice, a safety mechanism programmed into its computer commands the craft to safely land.
“It landed on the bleachers,” White said. “It was easy to find because there were a lot of students around.”
The Drone Club is a place where students feel they’re keeping up-to-date on technology that's already reshaping many industries and hobbies.
“When you see the drone flying, you realize you’re in the 21st century, and this is really happening,” said Brandy Wayne, a 16-year-old junior at Lourdes. “It’s, like, OMG.”
Being around an easy-to-fly drone — tinkering with it, maintaining it, and piloting it — has made Brandy reconsider the path she’ll take in college. She started the school year wanting to study computer engineering.
Now, she’s not so sure.
“I’m second-guessing computer engineering,” Wayne said. “The drone is totally broadening my horizon.”
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