A small quadcopter lifts off a warehouse floor and creeps toward a fake Russian tank. It clears several metal hoops, then drifts into a hanging tire, clips the rubber and crashes onto the dusty concrete. In the Killhouse, that is a lesson. At the front, the same loss of control could cost a drone before it reaches a trench or delivers supplies to soldiers in the kill zone.
“With an FPV drone, you can’t afford to lose control,” said a Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Radio.
The Killhouse Academy, run by Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, trains new pilots and keeps rewriting its courses as the fighting changes. Combat drone pilots in the corps set it up two years ago, when Ukraine was looking for ways to offset Russia’s larger military. Business Insider visited and spoke with brigade personnel, instructors and students.
Who signs up
The academy began as a basic course in flying first-person-view drones. It now also offers an advanced program, a fixed-wing drone engineering course and a school for uncrewed ground vehicles. About 250 students take the basic FPV course each month. It costs roughly $180 for Ukrainians and twice that for foreigners, who make up about 5% of students. Soldiers get a discount, and disabled military personnel and members of the corps attend free.
Some students are 15 and need parental permission. Others are past 60. Soldiers dominate, though civilians and defense industry workers also enroll. Older students usually struggle more, especially if they never played video games, Radio said, while teenagers with that background can master the course in a matter of days.
“People come from all over the world to study here,” Radio said. Moments later an air-raid siren cut the interview short and sent everyone to shelter. Drone schools are priority targets, just as operators are.
One foreign student, a fighter from the Mediterranean with the call sign Sante, had never flown a drone before enrolling. In combat he had received supplies from some drones and hid from others. “It’s like driving a car,” he said. “You need to learn properly, and you need to practice and practice and practice and practice.”
Learning to fly slowly
The daytime session runs six hours a day, six days a week. An evening session lasts three hours a night for 10 days. Classroom lessons cover how FPVs are built and how they work, followed by simulator practice. Students move to the obstacle course of tires and hoops on the second or third day, flying 7-inch quadcopters. To graduate they must show takeoff, hovering, flight through at least three obstacles and landing. Only 80% of students pass; those who fail the final exam can retry later.
The hardest part, Radio said, is hovering. “Ironically, the hardest thing in FPV piloting is flying very slowly or hovering in one place.” These drones lack stabilization, so pilots make constant small corrections to keep them aloft. Instructor Tokyo said slow flight pays off: “because that means you can fly much longer distances because your battery wouldn’t discharge fast.”
A course that keeps changing
Instructors with combat experience feed fresh lessons from the front into the course, sometimes by building harder obstacle courses. “The situation changes constantly,” Radio said. “Fiber optics appeared, the role of ground robotic systems is becoming more visible and more important, and we, of course, adapt to the modern conditions of war.”
Ukraine has signed drone and security deals with NATO and Middle Eastern countries, and Radio said talks are underway with several countries, some of them NATO members, about running Killhouse courses abroad. Ukraine’s push to replace people with drones on logistics runs has made flying skills matter beyond attack missions. “Logistics today can’t be executed without drones,” Sante said. “Without drones, you’re dead.”
Sources
- Ukraine's war drone pilots must first survive the 'Killhouse'
- Ukraine's war drone pilots must first survive the 'Killhouse'
