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The First Ever Drone Race Set Against The NYC Skyline
Jersey City, NJ – Give Me Liberty… and give me the best drone pilots in the Northeast! Liberty Science Center and Yeah Drones are partnering to host The Liberty Cup, the first-ever drone race set against the New York City skyline, Saturday and Sunday, July 30 and 31. The Liberty Cup is the final chance for pilots to qualify for the US National Drone Racing Championship.
The Center will be abuzz with high-flying excitement all weekend. LSC guests can step out onto the course to watch the drones as they take on obstacles around the LSC grounds, don First Person View goggles and get a drone’s-eye view of the race and the NYC skyline, test their own drone-flying skills in the indoor Dronesium, and hang out in the Racers Pit area with the region’s most talented drone builders and operators to learn how they harness technology to accomplish these aeronautical feats.
The competition breaks down as follows:
- Saturday, July 30: 100 pilots will compete in time trials with only 24 advancing to day 2.
- Sunday, July 31: Preliminaries – The remaining 24 pilots will compete in additional time trials with only 8 advancing to finals. Finals – The remaining pilots will compete in mixed events with only 3 solo pilots and 1 freestyle pilot advancing to the US Drone Nationals held the following week on NYC’s Governors Island. Day 2 will be a combination of time trails, single elimination, and the traditional 3-lap circuits. The day concludes with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishers based on points accumulated throughout the day.
“Liberty Science Center is thrilled to bring cutting-edge technology to our guests in such a visually stunning and exciting way,” said Paul Hoffman, President and CEO of LSC. “First Person View (FPV) drone racing is a natural extension of STEM education, requiring a confluence of knowledge in the areas of computers, engineering, problem solving and fine motor skills.”
In March of 2016, Liberty Science Center and Yeah Drones partnered to host the third day of the NYC Drone Film Festival at LSC. Dubbed Day of Drones, the event entertained groups of twentysomethings alongside families with tweens – all in awe of the pilots’ aeronautical feats and the technology that made them possible. As a nonprofit institution dedicated to getting learners of all ages excited about the power, promise and pure fun of science and technology, LSC is pleased to be work with Yeah Drones on The Liberty Cup and take that enthusiasm to the next level.
“Drones represent a masterful confluence of science, technology, engineering, math, and art – which are all the things that the Liberty Science Center both stands for and promotes,” Randy Scott Slavin, Founder of the NYC Drone Film Festival and Director of The Liberty Cup drone race. “So we are proud to be able to showcase some of the country’s finest and fastest drones at the Center. And to be able to host this competition with the New York skyline as a backdrop makes having it at the Center even more special.”
For more information, please visit http://lsc.org.
About Liberty Science Center
Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science to people of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, the world’s largest IMAX Dome Theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. More than half a million students, teachers, and parents visit the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participate in the Center’s offsite and online programs. LSC is the most visited cultural institution in New Jersey with 600,000 visitors annually and the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area.