California JROTC Team Heads to Nevada Drone Battle

Fifty four teams. One competition floor in Reno. And just one squad carrying the Kern County banner, as 23ABC reports.

Arvin High School’s five member JROTC drone team is heading to Nevada for the 8th Brigade Aerial Drone Competition, and they are not going as tourists. They are going as contenders.

Their instructor, Sgt. John Lunsford, describes them as locked in. Focused. Hungry to get inside the room and start flying. These are not students who need reminders. They need access to the field.

Junior Vanessa Hernandez joined to sharpen both her piloting and coding skills, and to help others learn the program. That dual skill set matters in this competition. This is not just about flying through hoops. It is about understanding what makes the drone think.

Freshman Gerardo Ramirez is the team’s pilot. He admits the course is difficult. Especially the second section. But after two months of training on a practice layout designed to mirror the Reno field, he says he can handle it now.

That is how competition works. First it feels impossible. Then it becomes muscle memory.

Four Missions, No Room for Mistakes

The 8th Brigade event is built around four separate challenges, each testing a different dimension of drone mastery.

The Teamwork Mission pairs two teams on the same field, pushing coordination and strategy under pressure.

The Autonomous Flight Mission removes the safety net entirely. Students must program the drone to operate on its own. No joystick. No second chances. Just code and physics.

The Piloting Mission focuses on manual control, navigating an obstacle course for maximum points. This is where steady hands separate contenders from spectators.

Then comes the Communications Mission. Teams sit in front of judges and explain their drone, their programming logic, and their documentation. In other words, they must prove they understand every decision they made.

This structure mirrors real world aviation and robotics. Fly well. Code well. Think well. Explain it clearly.

Why Competitions Like This Matter

The Robotics Education and Competition Foundation built the Aerial Drone Competition to simulate real operational pressure. Students are not just learning to fly. They are learning collaboration, documentation, and disciplined execution.

For Arvin High School, this is more than a weekend trip to Reno. It is proof that a focused public school JROTC program can compete with anyone in the region.

In a drone industry that increasingly demands both pilots and programmers, these students are building both skill sets before they even graduate.

And while DJI dominates the consumer and professional drone headlines, competitions like this are quietly building the next generation of operators who may one day fly Inspire class systems, manage public safety programs, or design autonomous fleets.

DroneXL’s Take

The future drone industry will not be shaped only by product launches and firmware updates. It will be shaped by students like the Arvin team, grinding through obstacle courses and debugging code late after school.

When a freshman pilot says the hardest section used to stop him but now he can handle it, that is growth in real time. If more school districts invested in structured drone programs like this, we would see a deeper pipeline of disciplined, technically fluent pilots entering the workforce.

And do not be surprised if one of these five students ends up running a drone program someday. Reno is just the beginning.

Photo credit: REC Foundation, 23 ABC.