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, an audit if you already run one, and a heads up on where the work is going.
Short answer: teach what drone employers hire for. Building and repairing the aircraft, hand tools and documented work, reading drawings, code that moves the machine, test and troubleshoot, real mission data, and aviation fundamentals. FTW Robotics built the Build Fly Code curriculum around those seven, on Hopper, a drone students assemble themselves.
Eight US drone companies had 648 jobs open on September 13, 2026. Ten of them were flying jobs. About one and a half percent.
This page is what the other 638 are asking for, taken from the postings themselves.
Zipline 347. Skydio 131. Wing 48. Censys Technologies 37. BRINC 32. Merlin Labs 25. Pyka 20. Elroy Air 8.
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 hires an Engineering Technician to “build, operate, troubleshoot, and improve the hardware and test systems.” BRINC’s Production Technician asks for an “associate degree in avionics, electronics, or a similar field; or equivalent relevant experience.” That last clause 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. BRINC’s Quality Inspector asks for “2+ years of experience using hand tools” and “2+ years of experience using calibrated” instruments, as separate line items. The only degree that posting names sits under preferred skills, below every one of those requirements.
A student who can read a drawing and follow an inspection plan is employable in aerospace manufacturing whether or not a drone is involved. The same BRINC posting asks for “2+ years of experience reading/interpreting work instructions, engineering drawings, and/or inspection plans,” listed above any mention of education.
Python that makes an aircraft do something, not Python that prints to a console. The physical world tells you immediately whether the logic was right. Skydio’s Test Engineering Technician names no degree and asks for the ability to run “linux commands and python scripts.” A drone manufacturer’s technician role asking for Python is the clearest signal here about what belongs in a classroom.
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’s Ground Systems Field Technician is hired to “install, commission, maintain, and document the electrical, network, and mechanical systems.” 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. At Esri and Woolpert, two firms whose work runs on drone-collected data, 561 open roles on 15 September 2026 included not one job flying a drone. The postings that mention drones are Marine Geophysical Specialist, Survey Project Manager, Principal Product Engineer for Imagery and Remote Sensing, and Product Manager for Reality Mapping Capabilities. 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 thirteen aeronautical knowledge areas free to anyone, from airspace and weather to loading, emergency procedures and preflight inspection. Anyone who works around aircraft should understand them, 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, and a program that treats it as the employment lever has the order backwards. It is also the one item a program can verify against any vendor, since the FAA published the syllabus.
Run these seven against the course you teach now, one for each item above. 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.
Offer it.
The same sentence appears in 79 of Skydio’s 133 open listings on 15 September 2026, in recruiting, logistics, inventory 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.
That is the shape of it at a company that builds drones. Worth knowing. Not what gets you in the door. Where it is required, it is required for flying: twelve roles at Zipline, Skydio, Wing and BRINC named it, and all twelve are flight operations titles.
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. It also publishes who holds them.
That 65.5 percent 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. A quarter of them fly for fun. Some are already airline and charter pilots.
And some are running their own business. Lucid Bots sells a window and roof cleaning drone as equipment rather than as a service, and reports more than 400 operators across more than 40 states as of February 2026. Those are people who bought a machine and work for themselves, and every one of them needs the certificate to do it legally.
Part 107 is a business license, not a job qualification. For a student who wants to start something at eighteen, it is what makes that legal. For a student who wants to be hired, it is worth knowing and it is not the thing being asked for.
It is a real federal credential, earned rather than awarded, and a student who holds one has done something most adults have not. Testing centers charge about $175 for the knowledge exam, the minimum age is 16 under 14 CFR 107.61, and the FAA publishes the study material at no cost, 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. 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 and robotics class that happens to use an aircraft, which is what the government already decided it was.
Career clusters map to SOC codes, which places this course in engineering and technology. The lookup is public.
End to end, drone technology is not one discipline. These postings name electrical and RF, embedded and firmware, autonomy and controls, computer vision, mechanical and propulsion, avionics, manufacturing and process, test and quality, systems integration, and data and geospatial. A program does not have to reach all of it at once. What matters is the direction it points.
Point toward the work that is growing fastest. The flying 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. Merlin Labs, one of the eight counted here, says on its own site that “The Future of American Aerospace is Autonomous”, and had 25 roles open that day, none of them putting a person on the controls. 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 today 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, autonomously, are the most useful version so far. Somebody has to design them, make them, keep them airworthy and decide what they are for and what they do. That somebody is sitting in your classroom right now.
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.
The eight companies counted here are Zipline, Skydio, Wing, Censys Technologies, BRINC, Merlin Labs, Pyka and Elroy Air, all of them civil drone companies. Counts were taken from the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby public posting APIs on September 13, 2026 and classified by reading the posting text. A role counts as a flying job only when operating the aircraft is the job. Flight Test Engineer is counted as engineering, because it is. The method has two ceilings worth stating. Defense primes are deliberately excluded, so this is a picture of civil drone hiring rather than of the whole sector. And 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 either.
Build Fly Code is three things because the hiring is three things. Students build the aircraft, fly it, and write the code that moves it.
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.