New Orleans club opens dedicated drone racing course at Avondale field
A new FPV course at Avondale gives New Orleans a fixed race home, backed by a 400-foot runway and a track 20 minutes from downtown.
New Orleans has finally put a permanent pin on the drone-racing map. The New Orleans Model Aviation Club says its dedicated FPV course now sits at Avondale field on the west bank of the Mississippi River, about 20 minutes from the heart of the city, giving Gulf Coast pilots a stable place to line up, practice, and race instead of patching together temporary layouts.
That matters because drone racing lives and dies on repetition. A course with known sightlines, a safe flight zone, and enough room for crews to test gear turns casual flying into a real training path. NOMAC’s setup already has the bones for that kind of use: the club says the field has designated areas for airplanes, helicopters, boats, and FPV multirotor racing, plus a 400-foot paved runway, a covered work area, starting tables, electricity, and water. Those are the details that let a venue support more than one-off fun runs.
The club’s own framing makes the point clear. NOMAC, also known as Kelly Field, says it was established in the 1980s and now presents the airfield as the premier RC field in South Louisiana. Its drone racing page was updated June 12, 2026, and now points newcomers to MultiGP as the broader entry point into the sport. That connection matters, because MultiGP is not just a reference name. It says it is the largest drone racing league and FPV community in the world, with more than 30,000 registered pilots and hundreds of chapters.
Kelly Field already has a racing history that makes this new course feel like an expansion, not a start from zero. On April 6, 2019, the site hosted the Mayhem Dawn to Dusk team race, which MultiGP called the world’s first 12-hour enduro-style relay FPV drone race. Sixty-one pilots on eight teams took part that day, a sign that the venue has already handled the kind of organized competition that can anchor a regional scene.
With a fixed course now tied to a long-running model aviation club, New Orleans has something the sport often lacks: a reliable home base. That can support regular practice, local qualifiers, and eventually recurring races that fit into the MultiGP ecosystem. For a scene that has spent years improvising, the shift to a permanent course is the difference between scattered flying and a real calendar.
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