China is teaching kids to fly drones after school. Is there a bigger reason behind it?

Something I didn’t know until recently: drone flying is becoming a pretty big extracurricular activity in Chinese schools. And we’re not just talking about kids flying a DJI around a football field. There are school clubs and national competitions where students learn FPV flying, obstacle racing, programming, reconnaissance-style missions, transport missions and even how to build and configure the drones themselves. Some schools are introducing this during normal after-school activity hours. On its own, that makes a lot of sense. China has a massive drone industry and these skills are useful in engineering, agriculture, logistics, filmmaking and plenty of other civilian jobs. But there’s another interesting side to it. China also runs youth military education programs where students train with unmanned systems, and it already has dedicated Air Force youth aviation schools whose stated purpose includes developing future military aviation talent. So are ordinary school drone clubs secretly training future military drone pilots? There’s no evidence that this is the purpose of the general extracurricular programs. But considering how important cheap FPV drones have become in modern warfare, having a generation grow up already knowing how to build, program and fly them is a pretty useful pool of skills for a country to have. Civilian education today, potentially dual-use skills tomorrow. And I suspect we’re going to see a lot more countries doing the same thing. /media/assets/c7ab8ca8-4ff8-4909-8422-a90863df585f/media.mp4