Ukrainian Students Race Combat Drones in Kyiv. The Winner Flew It in 36 Seconds.

There are drone racing tournaments, and then there is this one.

The final of Kyiv Drone Racing took place in a hangar at the National Aviation University Kyiv Aviation Institute, with more than 30 teams and roughly 100 participants competing on drones built by one of Ukraine’s most consequential defense technology companies, as The Defender reported.

The hosts, team KAI DRC-1, won with a course time of 36.41 seconds across more than 10 obstacles. Second place went to PROFPV from Kyiv Polytechnic Lyceum at 41.06 seconds. Third place went to KAI DRC-4, also from the Kyiv Aviation Institute, at 43.96 seconds.

Every team flew the same drone: the SHRIKE FPV, made by SkyFall.

The Drone They Were Racing

The SHRIKE is not a sport drone. It’s a high-speed FPV strike platform that has been one of the most widely used combat UAVs in the Russia-Ukraine war. SkyFall describes it as combining maneuverability and precision, with computer vision capability for target engagement both on the ground and in the air.

The base daytime version costs around $300. The night-vision and fiber-optic variants run up to $1,500. The Ukrainian military used a $500 version to destroy a Russian Mi-8 helicopter worth over $10 million.

In March 2026, the SHRIKE 10 Fiber scored 99.3 out of 100 points in the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program, finishing more than 10 points ahead of the runner-up. The program has a $1.1 billion budget and is selecting FPV drones for the U.S. Army. SkyFall competed through a partnership with UK-based Skycutter.

That’s the drone Ukrainian university students were racing through an obstacle course in a Kyiv hangar.

Who Judged the Race

The technical regulations were developed by SkyFall Academy instructors. The academy is certified by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense and has trained more than 20,000 military drone pilots, technicians, and instructors on the VAMPIRE, SHRIKE, and P1-SUN platforms. Among the judges was an FPV pilot with the callsign “Justin” from the SBS RAROG brigade, an active military unit.

The winners received certificates for an advanced training course on the P1-SUN FPV interceptor at SkyFall Academy. The P1-SUN is a different category of drone entirely: a modular, 3D-printed interceptor built to shoot down Shahed-type loitering munitions. SkyFall produces thousands of them per month. As of early 2026, they have downed more than 700 Shaheds. Each unit costs around $1,000.

Every competing team also received a SHRIKE drone to continue training at their institution.

The SkyFall Platform

SkyFall is one of Ukraine’s largest defense drone manufacturers. Its VAMPIRE hexacopter, sometimes called “Baba Yaga” by Russian forces, has been used in more than 500,000 front-line missions.

The original version cost up to $20,000. The current version costs $8,500, performs better in every measurable category, and SkyFall can produce 100,000 per month. A fully Ukrainian-component version of the Vampire is expected to be in mass production by end of 2026. The SHRIKE already has a fully domestically produced variant.

The company presented at CES 2025 in Las Vegas and the Dubai Airshow in November 2025. It is not a startup.

A Lab, Not Just a Trophy

The Kyiv Aviation Institute rector Kseniia Semenova explained what the tournament is actually building toward. Her university’s strategic goal is for students to engage with defense technology from their first year. The competition was one piece of that.

The other is a joint radio frequency technology lab being developed in partnership with SkyFall, where students will work with oscilloscopes, study signal behavior, and build their own projects.

That matters because Ukraine’s drone program faces a real challenge: it needs engineers, not just pilots. The gap between having a winning drone design and scaling it to battlefield-relevant production volumes is a workforce problem as much as a technology problem. The RF lab is one answer to that.

The tournament was organized by the Kyiv Aviation Institute, SkyFall, and LAB418, with support from Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud: this tournament is a military pipeline wearing a cap and gown.

That’s not a criticism. It’s the reality Ukraine has built, because it had to. SkyFall trained 20,000 people to fly and maintain combat drones. Its academy judges are active FPV pilots. The prizes are combat platform training certificates. The drones the students take home are the same airframes going to the front.

In most countries, a student drone racing event is a hobby competition. In Ukraine right now, it’s a talent identification exercise for an industry that is simultaneously fighting a war and winning Pentagon contracts. The kid who flew that course in 36.41 seconds is exactly who SkyFall and the Ukrainian defense industry need to find.

The RF lab is the part I’d watch closely. Frequency management, signal resilience, and electronic warfare countermeasures are where the next phase of this conflict is being decided. Training engineers to understand those systems at university level is how Ukraine builds the capacity to stay ahead of Russian jamming at scale.

Photo credit: Skyfall