Isaac Foust
When Brookfield schools bought two drones with an Arconic Foundation grant in 2019, student Isaac Foust immediately got ideas for how they could be used.
And, he schooled officials on what they need to do to legally operate them.
“He came to Toby (Gibson), Adam (Lewis) and I and said, ‘Hey, I have these great ideas, what I want to do with this. You need to make sure you’re following FAA protocol,’” said high school Principal Kristen Foster. “He brought a binder in with all the FAA laws and what we need to get certified. He does not play around. He is awesome.”
Isaac, now a senior, has played around with flying machines since he was 12, when he got his first remote control plane.
“I wasn’t very good at flying at the time and most of my flights ended in crashes,” he said. “I kept taping and gluing it back together until that didn’t work, eventually.”
The cadet with the Civil Air Patrol’s Youngstown Air Reserve Station Composite Squadron GLR-OH-051 got much better after attending a CAP summer camp a couple of years later, and has since acquired a couple of drones to “dabble with.”
Drones are steadier in the air than fixed-wing craft and can hover, and many come with cameras that can be monitored through a cellphone and shoot still and/or video images.
“I want to become a pilot myself so I just love being in the sky,” Isaac said. “Obviously, I can’t go up with these aircraft, but to be able to see those pictures and images from that bird’s eye view, from the sky, as if you’re flying, it’s pretty cool.”
Isaac plans to help school staff and possibly some students become commercially licensed to fly drones. The certification process includes a test and a not-inexpensive certification fee.
To fly drones recreationally, the registration fee is only $5, but the school falls under the commercial umbrella.
Isaac said he would like to see a drone club formed for students, and have drones studied in the classroom.
“That really relates a lot in terms of STEM, in terms of engineering, a lot of electrical stuff,” he said, with STEM standing for science, technology, engineering and math.
“You have electronic speed controllers, and you have your radio receiver, you have your motor,” Isaac said. “It’d be really cool to bring that into a STEM class and kind of tear it down and show them how it works.”
Isaac has been using a drone to shoot video of school events, and some of his footage has been posted on the school’s Facebook page.
“I’m first and foremost kind of more an RC pilot than I am a photographer,” he said. “I’m still kind of learning (drone capabilities).”
Isaac plans to study aeronautical engineering in college, and then enlist in the Air Force and become a pilot.
