FPV drone
A small, agile quadcopter flown via a live video feed worn on the pilot's head, used for reconnaissance or weaponised strike at low cost.
A First-Person-View drone is a small unmanned aerial system flown by an operator wearing goggles that stream a real-time video feed from the drone's onboard camera. The defining feature is the FPV pilot experience: rather than line-of-sight piloting, the operator is, perceptually, inside the aircraft.
FPV drones have become the defining tactical-strike weapon of the Ukraine war, where Ukrainian and Russian forces field tens of thousands per month as weaponised quadcopters carrying improvised payloads. A typical FPV strike drone costs between $200 and $2,000 and can disable armour or kill personnel at ranges from 1 to 15 kilometres.
For the Indian Army, FPV adoption is now a near-certain operational requirement along the LAC, the LoC and in active counter-insurgency theatres. The skill is not aviation — it is infantry. An FPV pilot is a trained soldier with hundreds of hours of stick time, not an aircrew specialist. Building that skill at scale requires synthetic training, because live FPV practice burns airframes faster than the pipeline can supply them.