New Orleans Model Aviation opens local FPV drone racing course

New Orleans FPV racing finally has a fixed home base: New Orleans Model Aviation said its Avondale field now includes a local drone race course, putting the sport about 20 minutes from the heart of the city on the west bank of the Mississippi River. At Kelly Field, that means more than a place to launch quads. It gives pilots a repeatable layout for practice laps, tuning, battery swaps and rookie onboarding, the kind of infrastructure that can turn a scattered hobby into a steady race scene.

NOMAC, also known as Kelly Field, said it was established in the 1980s and has since carved out designated areas for airplanes, helicopters, boats and FPV multirotor racing. The club describes the airfield as the premier RC field in South Louisiana, with a 400-foot paved runway, covered work area, starting tables, electricity and water. The Academy of Model Aeronautics lists Churchill Air Field - Kelly Field as open 24/7 and permits First Person View and Multi-Rotor activity, with asphalt pit area, asphalt runways, electric power, spectator space and startup stands.

That infrastructure matters because drone racing grows through repetition. A permanent course changes how a club schedules events, how new pilots learn the line and how often racers return. It also raises the club’s ambitions: instead of rebuilding a course for each meet, Kelly Field can present itself as a reliable venue with the hardware already in place. For a grassroots FPV program, that stability is often what separates a one-off gathering from a real membership pipeline.

Kelly Field already has racing pedigree. MultiGP, which says it is the largest drone racing league and FPV community in the world, says the site hosted the Mayhem Dawn to Dusk presented by Pop-a-Lock on April 6, 2019. That event drew 61 pilots across eight teams in what MultiGP described as the largest team race of its kind at the time, a world’s first 12-hour enduro-style relay FPV drone race.

The club’s 2025 fly-ins showed the site was still functioning as an organized hub, with spectators welcome and pilots required to hold AMA membership and pay a $30 entry fee that included lunch. The April 25 update does not announce a trophy or a championship run. It does something more lasting: it plants FPV racing inside a long-running Louisiana model aviation field that already has the space, the history and the credibility to keep growing.