Sky Pilot

The desire to make machines move fast started early for Puertolas. As a child in Nuevos Ministerios, a neighborhood of Madrid, he was always taking apart the radio-controlled cars his dad bought him for Christmas. He would rip out the wheels and servomotors and solder them into his own contraptions—like the one he’d use to fetch glasses of water from his mom. “She’d put a drink on it, and then I would just drive it back,” he recalls. Instead of high school, Puertolas went to an art school where he studied animation and spent a lot of time making short films. In 1999, when he was 18, he got a job at a videogame company in England. He used his first paycheck to buy an electronic plane and a radio-controlled helicopter.

Within a few years, Puertolas had gotten the attention of DreamWorks by sending the company an animated short film he’d made. It scored him a job as an animator and took him to San Francisco. But even as he ascended the ranks at the company, he missed the geekery he’d nursed hacking apart RC craft and taking them airborne in England. So he bought a Ladybird, a four-rotored electric drone that fit in the palm of his hand. He’d fly on weekends, after work, and during lunch breaks. Every day, when colleagues heard a faint buzzing overhead, they knew it was Puertolas navigating the Ladybird through the office.

Then, in 2014, Puertolas saw a video posted by a guy named Boris B, among the earliest drone pilots to record and upload footage of his flights. Boris B flew miniquads, the H-shaped, four-rotored drones better known as quadcopters. A mounted digital camera recorded the flight so he could edit and post the footage. A second camera streamed a real-time feed to goggles that he wore so he could see where his miniquad was going. It was as if he were onboard—what people now call first-person-view drone racing. “I thought, ‘Oh man, this is something else,’” Puertolas says. So he ordered a QAV250, the largest of the miniquads that Lumenier sells. The addiction took hold. “First-person view changes everything,” he says.

“People connected with the videos because they felt like I was doing things that not a lot of people were doing.”

He took it for a short flight, turning sharply through the treetops outside the apartment he and his girlfriend shared near San Francisco. (They moved to LA last summer.) He uploaded the footage from that first try, but it’s still private on his Charpu FPV YouTube channel. Unlike his later clips, which tell stories from the sky, this one has no composition, no transitions from one scene to the next. It is, quite simply, Charpu earning his wings.

Puertolas quickly fused his newfound love of FPV racing with his filmmaking talent. By late May of 2014, the masterful flying that FPV racers identify with Charpu started appearing in his videos. “No Time for Blinking,” released that month, is a supercut of Charpu aggressively zipping along a series of paths above rail lines and dirt highways, slaloming through trees, and sailing deftly underneath the chassis of his Fiat 500. A techno beat thumps in the background, and the clip ends with footage of drone crashes and wipeouts that happened during filming.

“I think people connected with the videos because they felt like I was doing things that not a lot of people were doing,” he says. “People stop me at events and say, ‘Oh man, I started because of your video.’”

Puertolas soon caught Lumenier’s attention, and the company began sending him free motors, propellers, electronic parts, and entire drone kits. “Our number one way of marketing is by using sponsored pilots who fly our gear, because it’s such a viral thing,” says Andy Graber, Lumenier’s general manager and cofounder.

By fall, Puertolas had perfected his aerial acrobatics through dozens of flights and was flying regularly for fun with five friends from the Bay Area. They called themselves the Propkillas and spent time knifing through abandoned landmarks such as the old American Flat gold and silver mill in Nevada, seen in a September 2014 Charpu video called “Right Between the Eyes.” Looking online for more people to fly with, he found a small group in Berkeley, California, called the FPV Explorers, formed earlier that year by DSA chair Refsland. In October, Puertolas showed up at an Explorers gathering with his QAV250.

“It was the first time I ever saw a suicide dive,” Refsland says. Puertolas had flown his drone to 100 feet before hurtling it back toward the ground. “When he left at the end of the day, people said, ‘Holy shit, what did we just see?’ The next week everyone came with that same rig and was doing the same trick.”

Refsland, a bespectacled, gray-haired 52-year-old with a doctorate in virtual reality, had gotten into FPV racing after trying it earlier that year. “Took me 30 years and one drone race to experience true virtual reality,” he says. After the Explorers staged a race at a Santa Cruz, California, conference in April 2015, he began imagining something bigger. Then organizers of the California State Fair in Sacramento asked him to put together a race for their July event. Refsland went all out. In two months he designed a competitive course, signed up A-list sponsors from the drone world, and advertised a purse of $25,000 in prize money. He sent Puertolas multiple emails, cajoling him to come.