The World Drone Prix made a spectacular debut in Dubai. The World Drone Prix 2016 is the first edition of that competition, and it already has a champion: a 15-year-old teenager.
Luke Bannister, a 15-year-old British teenager, won the first edition of the World Drone Prix 2016, a drone racing competition held this weekend in Dubai. His team, Tornado X-Blades Banni-UK, took first place and earned $250,000 after defeating Russia and the Netherlands in the final race of twelve laps on a 591-meter track. During the races, which last about ten minutes, pilots are equipped with a radio controller and virtual reality goggles to follow the drones from a first-person perspective.
In the World Drone Prix 2016, thirty-two of the best teams in the world competed for the million-dollar prize on the Aerial Track, the first and only track of its kind, where drones have to fly through a series of illuminated hoops. During the competition, racers had to make at least one pit stop per race so crews could change batteries, while pilots had to carefully decide their paths on the circuit. It's interesting to see how a year ago, at the first national drone racing event in the U.S., the Drone Nationals, the winner took home $25,000, and a year before that, the sport barely existed outside of a few gatherings of small groups of people organizing on internet forums.
During the weekend that the World Drone Prix 2016 took place, more than two thousand people showed up to watch the competition, showing the interest drone racing has generated in people. In fact, the race was organized under the supervision of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, crown prince of Dubai, who heads the state's Supreme Sports Council. It's known that Dubai wants to create a drone racing league, like a Formula 1 league, to try to turn this growing hobby into a real sport. Still, the drone's speed and the skill of its control made Luke deserving of first place, crowning him champion of the World Drone Prix 2016.
