How do you fund a drone program with Perkins V?
Money your district already receives, and how to write the pathway in.
Seven things, taken from what drone employers are asking for in job postings open right now. A spec if you are building a program, and an audit if you already run one.
Short answer, before the detail. Build and repair the aircraft. Hand tools and documented work. Reading drawings. Code that moves the machine. A test and troubleshoot loop. Real mission data students actually use. And aviation fundamentals: airspace, weather, aircraft maintenance, airport operations and what weather and airspace do to an aircraft. That list is not a philosophy of education. Six of the seven are lifted line by line out of what drone companies wrote in job postings that were open on September 13, 2026. The seventh is the foundational knowledge the FAA publishes for anyone operating in the airspace.
Each one is followed by the employer language that asks for it, so you can put the source in front of a board rather than the claim.
Not a sealed unit that arrives flying. A student should have had the thing apart, replaced a motor, and put it back together well enough to fly it again.
Zipline, Engineering Technician, Powertrain: the role is to “build, operate, troubleshoot, and improve the hardware and test systems.” BRINC, Production Technician: asks for an “associate degree in avionics, electronics, or a similar field; or equivalent relevant experience.” Equivalent relevant experience is the door a school program can walk a student through.
Torque it correctly. Measure it. Record what you did. This is the least glamorous item on the list and the one that appears most often in postings.
BRINC, Quality Inspector: requires “2+ years of experience using hand tools” and “2+ years of experience using calibrated” instruments, as separate line items, in a posting that names no degree at all.
A student who can read a drawing and follow an inspection plan is employable in aerospace manufacturing whether or not a drone is involved.
BRINC, Quality Inspector: “2+ years of experience reading/interpreting work instructions, engineering drawings, and/or inspection plans.” Its own requirement, listed above any mention of education.
Python that makes an aircraft do something, not Python that prints to a console. The difference is that the physical world tells you immediately whether the logic was right.
Skydio, Test Engineering Technician: names no degree requirement and asks for the ability to run “linux commands and python scripts” along with clear written and verbal communication. A drone manufacturer’s technician role asking for Python is the clearest signal on this page about what belongs in a classroom.
This is also the rung with the most room above it. The open engineering roles at these companies are titled Autonomy Engineer for Navigation, Autonomy Engineer for State Estimation and Control, Autonomy Engineer for Deep Learning, and Applied Science Manager for Computer Vision. Shield AI lists nineteen roles with “pilot” in the title and sixteen of them are Autonomous Pilot Integration software engineers, which is to say people writing the software that flies the aircraft. A program that gets a student from scripted flight toward perception and autonomy is pointed at where the hiring actually is.
Something breaks, the student finds out why, fixes it, and writes down what happened. Run it often enough that failure stops being alarming and becomes procedure.
Zipline, Ground Systems Field Technician: the job is to “install, commission, maintain, and document the electrical, network, and mechanical systems,” and the posting says success means issues are documented, not merely fixed.
A flight that produces nothing is a demonstration. A flight that produces a measurement someone then has to act on is a lesson. The value in this sector sits with the person who works with what comes back.
At Esri and Woolpert, two firms whose work runs on drone-collected data, 565 open roles produced zero operator titles. The roles that mention drones are Marine Geophysical Specialist, Survey Project Manager, GIS Industry Solutions Specialist and Product Manager for Reality Mapping. Every one of them is a job about the data.
How airspace works, what weather does to an aircraft in flight, and what keeps one airworthy. This syllabus is already written, and not by a vendor. The FAA publishes the knowledge areas, in its own words:
Anyone who works around aircraft should understand what the airspace above them is, what the weather is going to do to a flight, and what makes a machine airworthy or not. That holds whether the student ends up flying, building, maintaining or analyzing.
One thing to be clear about. This is foundational knowledge, not the thing that gets a student hired. The six items above it are what employers are asking for in writing. This one is what anyone working in the airspace ought to know, and a program that treats it as the employment lever has the order backwards.
It is also the one item on the list a program can verify against any vendor, since the FAA published the syllabus and anyone can open it.
Run these six against the course you teach now. Every no is a gap worth closing.
Notice what is not on the list. Not one of these asks whether a student can fly well. Stick skill is the part being handed to the algorithm, and the companies building that handover say so on their own homepages. Merlin Labs, one of the ten counted above, leads with “The Future of American Aerospace is Autonomous” and describes its product this way:
Expect fewer jobs each year that need a human on the controls, and build the program around the parts that are growing instead.
Six yeses put a student in range of the roles quoted above. Teach what those jobs are asking for. Part 107 is a separate exam with its own question bank, and whether to sit for it is the student’s choice.
Ten US drone and autonomy companies had 3,413 jobs open on September 13, 2026, counted off their live boards through the public posting APIs. They are hiring people to design the aircraft, build it, source its parts, write its software, keep it airworthy, put it in the field, run the missions and work with the data it brings back.
Anduril 2,293. Shield AI 472. Zipline 347. Skydio 131. Wing 48. Censys Technologies 37. BRINC 32. Merlin Labs 25. Pyka 20. Elroy Air 8. By title, 72 percent of those 3,413 roles are engineering, software, manufacturing or technical, and sixteen of them, less than half of one percent, are flying jobs.
Real titles, open on September 13, 2026, so a student can see something that sounds like them:
DFR means Drone as First Responder, the public safety programs run with police and fire departments.
Amazon Prime Air is worth reading on its own: a search of its board for “drone” returned 201 open roles on 13 September 2026, and its three highest volume titles are Ground Handler, Maintenance Technician and Flight Monitor. None of the 201 has the word pilot in it.
The pattern holds at both ends of the industry. Companies that build drones, companies that fly them for a living, and companies that use them as one tool inside an existing business are all hiring engineers of every kind, plus technicians, field operations, supply chain and data people. The flying job exists. It is one job on the list.
Of 558 open roles at Zipline, Skydio, Wing and BRINC on 13 September 2026, read for what sits under qualifications, 136 name a degree requirement and 422 name none.
“Names none” means the posting does not state a degree requirement. It does not mean a degree is irrelevant, and plenty of those 422 are senior engineering roles that expect a background most people build at a university. What it does mean is that these employers write requirements as skills, tools and years of hands-on work rather than as a credential, and several that do name a bachelor’s add “or equivalent practical experience” in the same sentence. That is the door, and the seven items above are how a student walks through it.
Offer it. Do not build on it.
Of 558 open roles at Zipline, Skydio, Wing and BRINC on 13 September 2026, with full posting text searched, 12 require an FAA Part 107 certificate. That is 2.2 percent, and all twelve are flight operations titles. No engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, data or compliance role among the 558 requires it. Esri and Woolpert, a GIS software company and a geospatial survey firm, had 565 open roles between them on the same date and none required it.
Meanwhile the FAA had issued more than 493,000 remote pilot certificates as of December 2025, up over 70,000 in a single year, and forecasts 628,600 by 2030. Roughly seventy thousand people a year are earning a credential that four of the largest drone companies in the country collectively require for twelve open roles, 2.2 percent of everything they are hiring for.
The FAA publishes that too, in the same document, and it changes what the number means.
That last line is the FAA’s own bar for counting someone as a commercial operator: one flight in a year that was not for fun.
So 493,000 is not a count of working drone pilots. It is the number of people who have passed a test that nine in ten people pass. A quarter of them fly for fun. Most of the rest flew at least once for something other than fun. Some are already airline and charter pilots.
And some are running their own small business. Lucid Bots sells a window and roof cleaning drone as equipment rather than as a service, and reports that “as of February 2026, more than 400 operators use the Sherpa Drone across more than 40 U.S. states.” Those operators are contractors who bought a machine, not employees of a drone company. The company tells them directly what the certificate is and is not:
The same sentence appears in 67 of Skydio’s 131 open listings, in recruiting, accounting, logistics and engineering roles alike:
“Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.”
Encouraged for everyone. Required for the few who fly.
It is a real federal credential, earned rather than awarded, and a student who holds one has done something most adults have not. The exam is $175 at an FAA approved testing center, the minimum age is 16 under 14 CFR 107.61, and the FAA publishes the study material free, so the certificate track opens at sixteen.
Engineering and technology. Not aviation.
When the federal government had to decide what to call a person who works with drones, it did not file them with pilots. It filed them with engineering technicians, and it wrote the job down like this:
Read the verb. Not fly one. Program and calibrate one, for a mission. The only place the classification mentions pilots at all is SOC 53-2012, Commercial Pilots, which carries a single line about operating large uncrewed aircraft commercially. There is no drone pilot occupation in the system, and the federal pilot qualification standard, OPM Series 2181, covers airplanes and helicopters only.
You are not building a flight class. You are building an engineering class that happens to use an aircraft, which is what the government already decided it was.
Practically, career clusters map to SOC codes, so this course belongs in the engineering and technology pathway your district almost certainly already runs. You are adding a course, not standing up a pathway to hold it. And it is a lookup you can do yourself before you walk into the meeting.
End to end, drone technology is not one discipline. These are the ones showing up by name in the postings counted on this page:
That is a wide field, and it is meant to be. A program does not have to reach all of it at once, and a student does not need all of it either. What matters is the direction a program points.
Point toward the work that is growing. The flying itself is going to the algorithm. That handover is deliberate, because a machine holds a heading better than a person, does it the same way every time, and does not get tired on the fourth flight of the day. The person is better used deciding what the mission is and overseeing it while it runs. Leave the sticks to the algorithm.
None of this is really about drones. A student who can build a machine, fix it when it breaks, write the code that moves it and read the sky before it flies has the skills of a person who works with machines that think.
If the worry is what our students are going to do for a living, this is a reasonable place to point them. Working with robots is not a niche anymore, and the ones that fly with sensors hanging off them are the most useful version anyone has built so far. Somebody has to design them, make them, keep them airworthy and decide what they are for. That somebody is sitting in a classroom right now.
It just happens to fit in a pathway you already have.
Every number on this page comes from a primary source open to anyone. Job board counts are a point in time read and will move.
Company counts were taken from the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby public posting APIs on September 13, 2026 and classified by reading the posting text. The method has a ceiling worth stating: utilities, agriculture, construction, county government, broadcast media and most large employers run recruiting systems that are not publicly readable, so their roles are not in these counts.
Build Fly Code is fifteen industry missions across five sectors, on an aircraft students assemble and repair, with a lesson plan, a slide deck and a student workbook behind each one. Three complete lessons are free with no form.
Money your district already receives, and how to write the pathway in.
The hardware number and the ones that appear on no vendor quote.
What is genuinely free, and what none of it replaces.
What to look for, and what to ask before a purchase order goes out.
Hopper Firmware 2.0 is here. A brand new sensor fusion and flight stability algorithm delivers decisively better flight.
Hopper holds position better, responds more precisely, and handles rough landings without drama. Crash detection was rebuilt, so a normal landing no longer leaves the drone unable to take off again.
Every Hopper gets it. Free. It loads onto drones already in the field through the FTW Fly app in a few minutes. Nothing to buy, nothing to ship back, no new hardware.
That is possible because FTW owns its entire flight control and telemetry stack. American built, wholly owned, zero outside dependency. When the software gets better, the drones already in your classroom get better with it.
Watch the walkthrough, then open FTW Fly and update yours.