Texarkana Drone Pilot
Today you become a drone pilot. You will fly by hand, run an obstacle course, find people who are lost, build something that gets supplies to them, and write code that flies the drone without you. No experience needed. Half this room has never touched a drone.
When people cannot get somewhere fast enough, or safely enough, what can a drone do instead?
- Fly a real drone with your own hands
- Navigate an obstacle course under time pressure
- Run a search and rescue mission using only the camera feed
- Design, build and fly a delivery system of your own
- Write code that flies the drone with nobody touching the controls
- Find out who gets paid to do this work in Texarkana right now
Texarkana is turning into a drone town, and it is happening while you are in high school.
In April 2026, a $5 million defense grant landed in this region to improve the U.S. military's drone systems. It got split three ways:
- Texarkana College is building courses in drone production
- Texas A&M University-Texarkana is developing and testing drone batteries
- Red River Army Depot is handling the defense side
That means the drone workforce for this region is being built right now, at the college you are sitting in.
Here is what it looks like when this work is real. These drones deliver blood and medical supplies to hospitals that roads cannot reach fast enough.
- Public safety. Fire and police departments fly drones over scenes before anyone walks in. Thermal cameras find people at night.
- Defense and aerospace. The Red River Army Depot corridor. Inspection, testing, security.
- Logistics. Texarkana sits on the I-30 and I-49 crossroads. Warehouses use drones to count inventory and inspect roofs and yards.
- Forestry and land. East Texas timber gets surveyed from the air. One flight replaces a week of walking.
With the person next to you: name one job in Texarkana you would rather send a drone to do than a person. Why that one?
Your drone is a Ryze Tello. It weighs 87 grams, about the same as a deck of cards. Four motors, a camera in the nose, a camera underneath, and a battery good for roughly 13 minutes of flight. It is light enough that the FAA does not make you register it. It is not a toy. NASA and MIT teach with this exact aircraft, and the physics is identical to a drone that costs fifteen thousand dollars.
- Propellers spin fast enough to cut skin. Hands away whenever the props are spinning.
- Never grab a drone out of the air. Tell it to land. Wait for it.
- If you are not flying, you are the spotter. Eyes on the aircraft, calling obstacles.
- No flying at faces. No flying at people. Ever, including as a joke.
- When you hear "PROPS DOWN," every drone lands. No exceptions, no last try.
- Find your partner. One of you is Pilot, one is Spotter.
- You swap every five minutes. All day. The spotter job is not the boring job: real drone crews do not fly without one, and today you are being watched on how well you spot.
- Write your drone number and both your names on the Pilot's Log.
Do this while you still have room WiFi. Both apps are free. Scan the code that matches your phone. If you are flying from a laptop instead, skip this and go straight to Part II.
Read this first. Your drone makes its own WiFi network. Your device has to leave the room's WiFi and join the drone's. You will lose internet. That is correct and expected. Drones do not need internet.
- Slide a battery in. Press power. The light blinks.
- Open WiFi settings. Find the network starting with TELLO- that matches the number on your drone. There will be a lot of them. Get the right one.
- Connect. Ignore the "no internet" warning.
- Open your flight app. You should see live video from the drone's nose camera.
No camera feed? Forget the network, reconnect, reopen the app. That fixes it most of the time.
- Props spin free, no cracks
- Battery clicked in, lights on
- Area clear, nobody within three feet
- Spotter ready, eyes up
- Pilot calls "CLEAR" out loud before takeoff
By the end of this block, every single person in this room will have taken off, hovered, moved in all six directions, and landed on a target. That is real pilot training. You are doing it before the morning is over.
Drone on the floor. Step back four feet. Pre-flight check. Call "CLEAR."
- Takeoff. The drone climbs to about three feet and holds. Do not touch anything. Watch it for ten seconds.
- It is hovering with no GPS. The camera on its belly is watching the floor and correcting a hundred times a second. That is how it holds still indoors. Remember this. It matters later today.
- Land. That is one complete flight.
- Swap roles. Each pilot does three clean takeoffs and landings before moving on.
A drone moves six ways: up, down, left, right, forward, back. Plus it can spin in place, which is called yaw. Left stick handles up, down and yaw. Right stick handles forward, back, left, right.
Run this sequence twice each:
- Takeoff. Hover.
- Up about a meter. Back down.
- Left a meter. Right, back to start.
- Forward a meter. Back to start.
- Yaw 90 left. Yaw 180 right. Yaw 90 left to face front again.
- Land on the target.
You will overshoot. Everyone overshoots. The Tello responds to the tiniest pressure. If your drone is bouncing all over the room, you are squeezing the stick like a game controller. Relax your thumbs. Light touch.
Two targets on the floor at your station, one near, one far.
- Take off from the near target.
- Fly to the far target. Hover over the center.
- Land. Measure how far off center you are. Within six inches is a hit.
- Five tries each. Log your best on the Pilot's Log.
A medical delivery drone dropping blood to a rural hospital has to hit a small circle on the ground, from hundreds of feet up, in wind. The pilots flying those missions started with exactly this drill. Precision is the whole job. You are also going to need it this afternoon.
The course is set up on the floor. Your team flies it, times it, and flies it again better.
- Pre-flight check. Spotter calls "CLEAR."
- Spotter starts the timer at takeoff and calls out obstacles the whole way.
- Touch an obstacle and you keep going. Note it. It costs you on the score, not the run.
- Timer stops when the drone is on the pad and the props stop.
- Swap roles and go again. Both partners fly the full course at least twice.
- Drifting sideways. Land, let it sit still for a few seconds, take off again. It re-reads the floor.
- Sluggish or dropping. Check the battery. Under 20 percent the Tello gets unhappy. Swap it.
- Video freezing or laggy controls. Lots of drones on the same airwaves in here. Move a little further from your neighbors.
- Missing the hoop every time. You are going too fast. Stop, hover, line up, then move.
A storm has come through overnight. Somewhere in the search area there are people who need to be found, and the ground team will not go in until they know where to look. Sending searchers into unstable terrain to find nothing is how you turn one emergency into two.
The drone goes first. You are flying it.
This is not a made up scenario. Watch what it looks like when a real crew does it.
- Markers are hidden around the search area. Each one has a code on it.
- Fly the area and find them. Some are low. Some are high. Some are behind things.
- Log every code you find, in the order you find it, with the time.
- Mark where each one is. You are coming back to these spots this afternoon, and you will need to know exactly where.
The pilot may only look at the screen. Not at the drone. Not at the room. Only the camera feed.
The spotter watches the actual aircraft and keeps it safe, calling out obstacles and distances. The pilot flies blind except for what the camera sends back. Those are two completely different jobs and you need both.
A real search operator sits in a truck, sometimes miles away, and has never laid eyes on the terrain. Everything they know comes down a video link. Flying something you can see is one skill. Flying somewhere you have never been, off a screen, is a much harder one. You are practicing the harder one.
Most teams wander. They fly wherever looks interesting and hope. The teams that finish first pick a search pattern before they take off, sweeping the area in an organized way so no ground gets covered twice and none gets missed. Decide your pattern out loud, as a team, before the props spin. It is worth the thirty seconds.
You spent the morning flying. Before you build anything this afternoon, take five minutes and look at what people actually do with these things for a living. Not someday. Right now.
Pick the one job on this list you would take tomorrow if somebody handed it to you. Hold onto it. We come back to this at the end of the day.
This morning you found them. Now they need supplies, and the ground team still cannot get in.
Your drone did not come with a way to carry anything. So you are going to build one.
This is the part of the day where you stop being only a pilot and start being an engineer. Nobody is handing you a kit with instructions. You get a pile of materials, a set of hard constraints, and a job to do.
Design and build an attachment that mounts on top of or underneath your drone, carries a supply package, flies it to the delivery zone, and releases it there.
Anything that gets the package there counts. A cradle. A hook. A basket. A latch that lets go. There is no single right answer, and the teams that try something weird usually learn the most.
- Nothing goes near the propellers. Not a string, not a corner of tape, not a hanging edge. If it can reach a prop, it will.
- Do not cover the camera on the belly. Remember this morning: that camera watching the floor is the only reason your drone can hover in place. Block it and your drone gets drunk. This is the constraint that catches most teams.
- Do not cover the camera in the nose. You still need to see where you are going.
- Balance it. Weight hanging off one side makes the drone fight itself the whole flight. Centered is better than clever.
- Tape only, no damage. Nothing that scratches, pierces or permanently sticks to the aircraft.
- Rich will give you the weight limit. This drone weighs 87 grams. It does not have much to spare, and the limit is not a suggestion.
- Talk first, build second. Five minutes. Sketch it. Decide who builds what.
- Build it. Weigh it as you go. Every gram you add is a gram of flight time you lose.
- Hover test, empty. Mount it with no package. Take off. Does the drone still hold still? If it wanders, you covered the belly camera or you are off balance. Fix it before you load it.
- Hover test, loaded. Same thing with the package in. Watch how much harder it works.
- Run the delivery. Fly to the zone. Release. Get back.
Whatever happened on your first delivery, you get another run. Change one thing and predict out loud what it will do before you launch. That is not a classroom habit, that is how flight test actually works: engineers who change three things at once never find out which one mattered. Hold onto that rule. You are going to use it again in the last block of the day.
- What did carrying the package change about how the drone flew?
- What broke, slipped, or fell off? Why that part?
- If you had ten more grams to spend, where would you spend them?
- Which team's design would you steal, and what would you change about it?
Last block. Hands off the sticks. You have flown this drone all day, and now you are going to write a program and let it fly itself. You are using DroneBlocks, where every block you drag is a real command the aircraft will execute.
Nobody flies a big commercial survey by hand. An inspection pilot writes the flight path once and the aircraft repeats it exactly, same altitude, same speed, every time. That is the only way to cover thousands of miles of powerline or thousands of acres of timber. You are about to do the junior version.
Take the delivery rig back off, and leave your drone powered off while you build. A drone sitting there connected is burning battery for nothing, and this late in the day you do not have much left to waste.
Open DroneBlocks. Drag these blocks into the workspace in this order:
That is a program. It is five lines long and it flies an L shape.
Your drone will do exactly what you wrote, even if what you wrote is wrong. It will not stop at the wall.
- 100 cm is a little over three feet. Look at your floor space. Does the whole path fit?
- Spotter walks the path on foot first. If you cannot walk it, the drone cannot fly it.
- Pilot's finger on launch. Spotter calls "CLEAR." Then go.
- Power the drone on. Connect to its WiFi. Connect DroneBlocks to the drone.
- Place the drone at your start point, facing the direction your code expects.
- Stand back. Launch. Hands off. Watch what you wrote.
- On the Pilot's Log write down: did it finish, where did it drift, and did it end up where you predicted?
Run it three times. Each run, change one thing only: a distance, or an angle. Same rule you just used on the delivery build, and for the same reason.
A real survey flight covers ground in a shape, not a line. Your mission: fly a complete square and land where you started.
Forward, yaw right 90. Four times. Then land. Build it, check the floor space, run it.
The honest part: almost nobody lands exactly on the start point. Small errors in each turn add up. Find out how far off you are, then figure out what to change.
- Use a loop. Find the repeat block. Wrap it around your forward and yaw pair so it runs four times. Same flight, a quarter of the blocks. That is how real flight programs are written.
- Add altitude. Climb before each leg, hover, then come back down. Now you are surveying at two heights.
- Break it on purpose. Change one distance to 200 cm and predict out loud what happens before you launch. Were you right?
- Code the delivery. Put your rig back on and program the flight to the delivery zone instead of flying it by hand. That is exactly what a real delivery drone does.
Here is the part worth writing down.
Remember the job you picked after lunch? To get paid to fly a drone in the United States, you need one certificate: the FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate. Here is what it takes:
- You must be at least 16 years old. Some of you already are.
- You pass a written exam at an approved testing center. Airspace, weather, regulations, flight safety.
- No four year degree. No flight hours. No pilot's license.
- People study for it in a few weeks and then get hired.
This is one of the few real careers in the country you can legally start before you finish high school.
Texarkana College is not just a place you could transfer out of. It is one of three institutions that just took defense money to build drone programs for this region.
- Drone production coursework is coming to Texarkana College
- Aviation mechanics and flight training already run out of Texarkana Regional Airport
- Drone battery engineering is being developed at Texas A&M University-Texarkana
Ask about it. You are standing in the building.
Answer one of these out loud or on a sticky note:
- What was the hardest part of the day?
- Flying by hand, building the delivery rig, or writing the code. Which one was you at your best?
- Which drone job did you pick, and what is your first step toward it?
You walked in this morning and most of you had never flown anything. You are walking out having flown a real aircraft by hand, run a search mission off a camera feed, designed and built a delivery system that actually worked, and written code that flew the drone without you.
Pilots, engineers, that was a good day. Well flown.