When Professional Drone Pilots Film the World’s Best Snowboarders and Freeskiers

Drones with stabilized cameras are nice, but capturing serious action shots at close range requires a different type of aircraft with serious piloting skills.

The pilots at Team BlackSheep brought their nimble racing drones to the Audi Nines free-ride competition in Austria. They are all among the best drone pilots in the world, and they’ve won many drone-racing competitions. Their small, one-pound drones were fitted with GoPro cameras, and the challenge consisted of flying as close as possible to the riders while maintaining good framing and smooth trajectory since there are no flight or gimbal stabilization mechanisms on this type of aircraft. As you can see toward the end of the video, there were a few unfortunate encounters between the drones and the riders, but no one was hurt. The pilots and the athletes worked together before each sequence in order to minimize the incidents. In any case, these small drones are not very dangerous to the well-protected riders.

Drone racing is an emerging discipline that can produce stunning videos, but flying these types of machines is much more challenging that the usual DJI aircraft filled with sensors and assisted flight modes.