Before sunrise Sunday at the US Mid-Am, the players warmed up under the drone light.
Kyle LaFerriere/USGA
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird. It is one. . drone!
They seem to be everywhere in golf these days, offering bird’s-eye views of the top 100 courses, low hum during competitions, driving Jon Rahm crazy to the tee.
This week, they filled another role.
At Independence Golf Club, the public facility outside Richmond, Va. who co-organized the kicking part of the game 43rd US Intermediate Amateur Championshiptwo specialized drones were sent into the pre-dawn darkness to illuminate the movement beam.
A sign of the future?
Randall Bostick sees it that way. Bostick, 52, is a Virginia native and former U.S. Navy admiral who turned his love of all things aviation into a top business. PegaPod, the company he founded in 2020, is built around the bright idea of ​​attaching powerful lights to drones.
Developing a prototype took some time, but two years ago, Bostick secured a patent for his product and business quickly took off. Before long, PegaPod drones were lighting up everything from construction sites to baseball and soccer fields.
“We’re a really small company that’s just moving forward,” Bostick said this week, in an interview with USGA. “We see the potential in many different areas.”
Giff Breed also saw the potential. President of the Independence Golf Club, Breed had worked closely with the USGA in preparation for the US Mid-Am. Wanting to give competitors enough time to warm up by lighting up the practice field an hour before sunrise, Breed went online to look for alternative lighting options when he came across the PegaPod. The race reached Bostick. Immediately, they had a deal, with PegaPod providing drones capable of producing 250,000 lumens each, enough to light a football field. In the weeks leading up to the championship, test flights were conducted. Because the drones flew below 400 feet, no Federal Aviation Administration permission was required. But the bright lights still attracted local attention. A neighbor wondered if they had seen a UFO.
Kyle LaFerriere/USGA
As the practice rounds began earlier this week, the players took notice as well.
“It was really impressive to see them fired up this morning, especially from the back of the club,” said Jerry Maynor Jr., 40, of Nashville, Tenn. for the USGA after his warm-up session Friday. “(Thursday) night, we saw them in the sky and it took us a while to figure out what it was. There is a lot of light on the surface here. You can’t quite see (the balls) come down, which is not a big deal. But you can see the beginning of the ball.”
It may just be the beginning. The PegaPod fleet includes drones that can generate 1 million lumens, enough to illuminate the longest take-off to landing movements and beyond.
