AFA Gabriel Chapter Funds Drone Program at Leesburg CAP

The Air & Space Forces Association’s Gabriel Chapter in Northern Virginia just handed the Leesburg Civil Air Patrol squadron a concrete investment in its future: two professional-grade unmanned aerial systems and the curriculum to put them to work, as the AFA reported.

The donation marks an expansion of how the Leesburg cadet program introduces young airmen to a career field that the Air Force is building out faster than it can train people to fill.

This is what grassroots aerospace education funding looks like.

The Donation and the Mission

Capt. Billy Jensen, commander of the Leesburg Civil Air Patrol Squadron, received the funding from Gabriel Chapter Treasurer Brad Wilkins during a squadron formation on March 17. The donation comes directly from AFA’s Educate pillar — the nonprofit’s commitment to bridging the gap between classroom learning and the real-world operations that the Air Force actually needs young people trained for.

“As we work to create future Aerospace Leaders, Airmen, and Leaders in all of the other services and in industry, sUAS skills are becoming critical,” Jensen said. “We hope to build a program at Leesburg that sets our cadets on a pathway to success. This effort begins with Aerospace Education and AFA’s generous donation is a great start to help us achieve our goal.”

Leesburg Composite Squadron pulls from the greater Northern Virginia region and has over 200 adult and senior members supporting cadet programs, aerospace education, and emergency services operations.

They meet Tuesday evenings at the National Guard Armory in Leesburg and operate out of Leesburg Executive Airport, the same location where the FAA recently deployed a next-generation air traffic control situational awareness system using Civil Air Patrol expertise.

The two drones will go straight into curriculum development: photogrammetry, drone mapping, tower surveys, and the structured pathway toward earning an FAA Remote Pilot Certificate under Part 107 — the federal standard for small unmanned aircraft systems operators.

Civil Air Patrol’s sUAS Fleet and Training Pathway

Civil Air Patrol operates the largest drone fleet in the United States, with more than 3,200 aircraft deployed across all 50 states. The sUAS program is designed to complement CAP’s manned aircraft operations, expanding mission capabilities in search and rescue, disaster relief, and emergency services without the cost and operational constraints of piloting fixed-wing or rotor-wing aircraft.

The organization’s drone training pipeline has two parallel tracks: cadets can begin with foundational flying and tech skills, while senior members work toward specialized mission pilot and technician ratings. Cadets who complete the coursework earn Part 107 certification — the same credential federal agencies and commercial operators hold — and can then deploy drones on real emergency services missions alongside experienced instructors.

CAP’s fleet includes a mix of platforms suited to different mission sets. The DJI Mavic, DJI Phantom 4, and Skydio X2D are the workhorses in many squadrons for search and rescue, disaster assessment, and cadet training.

These platforms offer rapid deployment, multiple sensor options, and the reliability needed for operations across varying weather and terrain conditions. They’re also proven: CAP drones have assisted in hundreds of missing person searches, disaster response operations, and post-storm damage assessments over the past decade.

The trade-off is accessibility. A quality sUAS platform, the gimbal and sensor suite, spare batteries, and the transport case represent a meaningful capital outlay for individual squadrons. Federal and state funding for CAP emergency services work exists, but it doesn’t always cover training aircraft. That’s where donations from chapters like Gabriel come in.

Why This Matters Beyond Leesburg

Civil Air Patrol serves more than 26,000 cadets nationwide, with programs in leadership development, aerospace education, and emergency services. The Air Force treats CAP as a formal pipeline — cadets who complete the program often commission as officers, and those who go enlisted frequently have a head start on technical billets.

The sUAS piece is relatively new. CAP formalized the drone program roughly a decade ago, but it’s accelerated dramatically as drone operations became mission-critical for the Air Force itself. Now every major command from Air Mobility Command to Air Combat Command uses unmanned platforms. Training future officers and enlisted personnel to think in terms of ISR, imagery analysis, and remote operations isn’t optional anymore.

That’s the real leverage of what Gabriel Chapter just funded: not just giving cadets access to technology, but giving them a structured, supervised pathway to develop competency in a field the Air Force is actively recruiting for. It’s cheaper than military aviation training and it produces candidates who already know the basics.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant: this donation isn’t flashy. There’s no press release about a million-dollar facility or a partnership with a major defense contractor. It’s a chapter of volunteers in Northern Virginia writing a check to a local cadet squadron so kids can learn to operate drones and understand how they fit into the military operations ecosystem.

That’s the work that builds the backbone of any technical skill pipeline. It’s not sexy. It’s the opposite of sexy. But it’s exactly what needs to happen if the Air Force wants a generation of drone operators who didn’t learn the job on TikTok or in some garage, but learned it under structured instruction with safety built in from day one.

Leesburg CAP has been operating since 1973. They’ve got the institutional knowledge, the volunteer leadership, and now they’ve got the hardware to turn that knowledge into cadet competency.

The fact that Gabriel Chapter recognized that need and stepped up is the kind of grassroots aerospace advocacy that actually shapes the force five or ten years down the line, when these cadets commission or enlist and bring that training with them.

The AFA–CAP partnership works because it’s been built on the same principle: prepare young people for the careers the military actually needs filled. This donation is proof the partnership is working at the local level.

Photo credit: Leesburg Civil Air Patrol Squadron