How do you fund a drone program with Perkins V?
Money your district already receives, and how to write the pathway in.
Teach the crew, not just the pilot. On October 19, 2026, about 3.5 percent of open US drone jobs flew the drone. The rest designed it, coded it, built it, maintained it, deployed it and supported it.
Every job we could find on employer job boards, LinkedIn, GovernmentJobs.com and USAJOBS, at 238 employers plus public agencies, each counted once even when it is listed in several places. Drone makers, delivery, defense, counter-drone, warehouse, inspection, agriculture, schools and labs, police, sheriff and fire departments, and federal agencies. Only roles that touch a drone count. What these numbers assume
130 of the 2,920 open drone jobs require it. About 4.5 percent.
Skydio, in most of its postings: “Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.”
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.
More than 1,400 law enforcement agencies flew drones as of 2023, by the ACLU’s count, which it called a floor. The ones that publish their pilot counts report anywhere from a handful to more than 100: the New York Police Department has more than 110 FAA qualified drone operators, San Francisco about 70, Arlington, Texas about 45, Bensalem, Pennsylvania 22 and Las Vegas Metro 16. A July 2026 survey of Tennessee agencies found an average of four Part 107 pilots per drone program.
These figures describe people already in seats, not open jobs.
Where these agencies publish their requirements, Part 107 is the standard.
The armed services hire for drones through enlistment, so they are not in this count. Every branch has drone specialties, and none asks for Part 107.
Part 108 is the FAA’s proposed rule for routine flight beyond visual line of sight. It was proposed on August 7, 2025, went to White House review on July 10, 2026, and had not been published as final on October 19, 2026.
Amazon Prime Air already hires to that shape. On September 14, 2026 its open drone roles included 56 Ground Handlers, 27 Maintenance Technicians and 25 Flight Monitors, and none had pilot in the title.
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. They are the foundation under Part 107 today, and they carry into the proposed Part 108 rule for scaled and automated drone operations. Anyone who works around aircraft should understand them, whether the student ends up flying, building, maintaining or analyzing.
It is also the one item a program can verify against any vendor, since the FAA published the syllabus.
Notice what is not on the list. Not one of these asks whether a student can fly well.
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 on October 19, 2026, 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.
Open jobs, not jobs held. This counts who employers are hiring on one day, October 19, 2026. A company can employ pilots or technicians it is not recruiting this week, and boards change daily.
Every posting we could find. The full job boards of 35 drone employers, LinkedIn’s public job search for drone, unmanned, UAS and UAV in every state, GovernmentJobs.com and USAJOBS. Employers that post nowhere public, or only on their own sites without a readable board, are missed. LinkedIn search returns at most 1,000 results per query and ranks loosely, so each state was searched separately and stopped once results stopped showing drone roles. The UAV search ran in 21 states, including every large drone state, and stopped there because it was adding very little: 6 of the 2,920 roles came only from that search. The armed services are not in this count.
Each job counted once. Some employers list the same job in many cities. Every job is counted once per employer and title. A job listed in many cities may hire more than one person, so this count is a floor.
Drone employers and everyone else. At employers whose business is drones, such as Skydio, Zipline, Shield AI, AeroVironment and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, every role that is not back office counts. At everyone else, a role counts only if its title, or its posting text where we read it, names drones, UAS, unmanned aircraft or a drone product.
What counts as a drone job. A role counts when the work touches the drone: designing, coding, building, maintaining, deploying, flying, supporting or teaching it, inspecting with it, or keeping it airworthy and compliant. Back office roles, such as accounting, finance, recruiting, legal, facilities and administration, are left out, even at drone companies. Instructors, technical support, technical writers and the people who fly customer demonstrations stay in. At companies that also build other things, a role counts only if its posting names drones or a drone product.
Sorted by title. Each job is placed in a crew row by its title. A few land in a neighboring row.
What required means. Part 107 counts as required when the posting lists it as a requirement at hire or within a set time after hire. Preferred, encouraged and nice to have are not counted, and it is counted only where the posting text could be read.
Named, not required. In the skills view, a posting names a skill when the word appears in the posting after the company’s standard text is removed. Naming a skill and requiring it are not the same thing.
Public safety seats filled from current staff are not counted. Las Vegas Metro and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office posted their 2026 drone pilot jobs to current employees only. The count includes only public postings. Public Safety below uses only figures agencies have published, and makes no estimate of a national total.
Part 108 is a proposal. Everything on this page about Part 108 describes the proposed rule, which had not been published as final on October 19, 2026.
Method. On October 19, 2026 we read the public job boards of 35 drone employers in full (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and BrassRing boards, including Anduril, Shield AI, Skydio, Zipline, Wing, BRINC, AeroVironment, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Neros, AEVEX, Epirus, Axon and DoorDash), ran LinkedIn’s public job search for drone, unmanned, UAS and UAV in each state, read the full text of every LinkedIn drone role we kept, and used the GovernmentJobs.com and USAJOBS reads described under Public Safety. Postings outside the US, internships and back office roles were removed, and a job listed more than once was counted once per employer and title. Each job was sorted into a crew by its title and a sector by its employer. Skills and Part 107 come from the posting text.
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.