Where to Get Drone Flying Training in Nashville
We often get asked about drone training. Somebody buys a DJI Mini for a weekend trip, falls in love with flying it, and a month later they are emailing us asking where in Nashville they can actually learn to do this the right way. Real estate agents want to shoot their own listings. Construction project managers want to track site progress without hiring someone every week. Wedding photographers want to add aerial shots to their packages. Parents want to film their kid's travel soccer games without crashing into a goalpost. The questions come from every direction, and the honest answer is that good local, hands on drone training in Nashville is harder to find than people expect.
Why Nashville Drone Co Started Offering Hourly Lessons
After enough of these conversations, we started offering hourly private drone lessons directly through Nashville Drone Co. Not a certification program, not a multi week bootcamp, just focused one on one time in the air with someone who flies commercially every week and can answer the questions that actually come up once you leave the parking lot and start flying real jobs. We work through the basics of manual flight, camera settings, how to read airspace on an app like B4UFLY or Aloft, and the kind of situational judgment that only comes from having flown hundreds of real assignments around cranes, power lines, stadiums, and neighborhoods full of curious kids who want to know if your drone has a camera on it.
An hour with us is not going to replace a full education in the drone industry, and we are upfront about that with everyone who books a session. What it will do is get someone comfortable behind the controller, help them understand what commercial flying in Nashville actually looks like day to day, and point them toward the deeper training they need if they want to go further, which for us means one place in particular.
What Actually Happens in an Hourly Lesson
People booking a lesson with us usually want to know what to expect, so here is the honest version. We start on the ground talking through pre-flight checks, battery management, and how to actually read the airspace map for wherever we are flying, since a big chunk of Nashville sits inside controlled airspace tied to BNA. From there it is hands on time with the controller, working through takeoff, basic maneuvers, and framing a shot the way you would for an actual client rather than just flying in circles over a backyard. We adjust the session based on what someone is trying to do with the drone, since a real estate agent wanting clean listing photos needs different skills than someone trying to film a kid's soccer game or map a construction site. By the end of an hour, most people leave with a much clearer sense of what they still need to learn and where the real gaps in their flying are, which is often more valuable than the flight time itself.
After a lesson or two, we then recommend next steps which focuses on where we received our extensive drone training.
Where Nashville Drone Co Learned to Fly
Nashville Drone Co did not figure all of this out on our own. Our training came from The Drone U, and it shaped how we run our drone business business today.
The Drone U is a Colorado based drone school that runs both on demand online courses and live, in person training experiences covering safety, mapping, construction applications, real estate work and more, along with a dedicated course built specifically to prepare students for the FAA Part 107 exam. We have gone through both formats ourselves, sitting through their online modules and also attending live training in person at their Colorado headquarters, and the two complement each other in a way that neither one manages alone. The online courses let you move at your own pace and go back through material as many times as you need. The live sessions put you in a classroom and in the field with working pilots asking the exact questions you are also thinking about, which tends to surface things a self paced course never would.
The Drone U co-founders, Paul Aiken and Rob Burdick, run the show, and calling them good teachers undersells what they actually do. They are patient with beginners without ever talking down to anyone, and they push more experienced pilots to think about their business in ways that go well beyond flying. A typical session with them covers a lot of ground. They walk through current FAA policy, including changes to Part 107 and how new rules like the operations over people categories or Remote ID actually apply in the field, not just on paper. They cover industry trends across the different verticals drone work touches, from mapping and surveying to construction documentation to real estate and event coverage. They get into the specifics of flying different aircraft platforms and how each one behaves differently depending on the job. None of it feels like a lecture. It feels like two people who have actually done this work walking you through what they wish someone had told them earlier.
The Drone U Monthly Coaching Call Changed How We Run Our Business
Somewhere in the middle of all the flying and technical training, The Drone U also runs a monthly coaching call, and that call ended up being one of the most valuable things we get from our relationship with them. It is not about flying at all. It is about running a drone business that actually makes money and scales past one person with a controller.
Paul and Rob teach and push people on pricing, client acquisition, systems, and the kind of operational discipline that separates a hobby from a real company. We have taken more than a few of the practices they talk through on those calls and put them directly into how Nashville Drone Co operates, and we can point to real business growth as a result. It is one thing to learn how to fly a drone well. It is another thing entirely to learn how to build a company around that skill, and that second part is where The Drone U has genuinely set us apart from a lot of other operators in this market.
Our founder, Keith Stancil, has been invited to be a guest on those coaching calls himself and has also appeared as a guest on the Drone U YouTube channel, talking through his own path building Nashville Drone Co. That relationship goes both directions at this point. We learn from them constantly, and they have been generous enough to have Keith share what has worked for us along the way.
Why Paul Aiken and Rob Burdick Stand Out in The Drone Industry
We have spent time around a lot of people in the drone world at this point, and the Drone U co-founders, Paul Aiken and Rob Burdick, genuinely care about this industry more than anyone else we have come across. That is not a small thing to say. It would be easy for a training company to sell courses and move on to the next customer. That is not how they operate. They want the people who go through their programs to actually succeed, and they stay invested in that success long after a course ends, which is exactly what a monthly coaching call and an open door for guest appearances actually represents.
Rob Burdick, co-founder of The Drone U, put it this way about our founder Keith Stancil:
"Keith is a person of solid character. He's professional, driven, and someone we genuinely enjoy working with. We think very highly of both Keith and the work Nashville Drone Co is doing. If you're looking for someone to provide drone services anywhere near the areas Keith serves, we think you'd be crazy not to give him a shout."
That kind of endorsement means something coming from people who have trained thousands of pilots and seen the difference between operators who take this seriously and operators who do not.
Where to Start If You Are Learning to Fly in Nashville
If someone in Nashville is serious about learning to fly, here is how we would point them. Start with a local hourly lesson with Nashville Drone Co if you want hands on time in the air with a working commercial pilot, someone who can answer real world questions about flying around this specific city, its airspace, and its job sites. From there, if you want to go deeper into certification, business building, and the kind of structured education that turns flying into an actual career or business, The Drone U is where we send people, because it is where we went ourselves and where we continue to learn.
Nashville does not have a long list of serious, structured drone training options sitting around waiting to be discovered. Between local, practical stick time and a nationally respected program built by people who genuinely care about this industry's future, there is a real path here for anyone who wants to take flying seriously rather than just owning a drone that sits in a closet after the first few flights.
If you are one of the many people who have reached out to us asking where to learn, that is the honest answer. Come fly with us for an hour to get comfortable and ask questions specific to Nashville, then go build a real foundation with The Drone U the same way we did.
Contact Nashville Drone Co to get your drone flying journey on the right path. info@nashvilledrone.com