In late spring 2016, the Powell High School Drone Club was started by retired robotics teacher Judith Laplante and was made up of a small handful of robotics students.

The drone club was started as an opportunity to teach and introduce students to new technology.

“It’s just a new technology for kids to try and mess around with,” current Drone Club Adviser Mrs. Wendy Smith said. “It’s kinda cool stuff that they get to do with it.”

The club has made many flights including flying over different lands, the high school and the football field. During these flights they were to take pictures and videos from up in the air.

“The purpose of the drone project was to build drones that could fly over fields and survey the crops and look for things like damage from pests, or there wasn’t enough water or other issues,” senior and an original drone club member Alan Merritt said.

But things aren’t always smooth sailing. Like any piece of technology, if anything can go wrong, it will and this almost always leads to challenging consequences.

“We’ve had several crashes,” Merritt said. “Usually we can recover after the crashes, but we’ve had one catastrophic one.”

The drone club has started up again this year with even bigger goals and new ideas for projects.

“Hopefully they’ll have a chance to get it up and flying again,” Mrs. Smith said, “Once they get it figured out, from the last crash and try to do some pictures of the beet piles and do some infrared.”

The club is open to anyone. Meetings are Wednesday after school in Mr. Joel Hayano’s room (1134).