Drones
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50 free Drones trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A drone looks simple: a few propellers, a battery and a camera. Keeping one steady in the air is anything but. Many times a second, a small computer reads a handful of sensors and adjusts each motor, applying the same physics that lifts a helicopter or an airliner. This quiz covers the science of how drones fly, the parts and sensors inside them, and the long history of pilotless flight, from nineteenth-century balloons and wartime target planes to a machine that has flown on another planet. It also takes in the jobs drones do today, from delivering parcels and lighting up stadium shows to helping firefighters and biologists, plus a few famous mishaps. The questions suit middle school science classes, hobby pilots and anyone curious about the technology overhead. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set for a classroom or quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future film star was discovered by an Army photographer while assembling target drones in a wartime factory?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe, then an assembler called Norma Jeane Dougherty, was photographed on the Radioplane production line, which led to a screen test. The factory's founder, Reginald Denny, was an actor too.
Q 02Which future US president's older brother died in 1944 flying a bomber rigged to become a radio-controlled drone?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy lost his brother Joe when the explosives-packed plane blew up before its two-man crew could bail out. Their father's presidential hopes then passed to the younger son.
Q 03Which 1930s British target plane is credited with inspiring the name 'drone' for pilotless aircraft?
Queen Bee
Queen Bee was a pilotless Tiger Moth biplane that anti-aircraft gunners shot at for practice from 1935. A drone is a male honeybee, so the nickname is said to have followed naturally.
Q 04Zipline's drones became famous from 2016 for parachuting which emergency supply to hospitals in Rwanda?
Blood
Blood came first because transfusions cannot wait, and Rwanda's mountains and poor roads made flying far quicker than driving. Vaccines and other medicines were added to the service in 2018.
Q 05Dutch police trained which birds of prey to snatch rogue drones out of the sky with their talons?
Eagles
Eagles won the job after a year of trials with a raptor-training firm, and the Dutch force then bought young bald eagles of its own. Handlers wear thick gloves because the talons are so sharp.
Q 06Which pop star opened her 2017 Super Bowl halftime show with 300 Intel drones forming the American flag?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga sang from the stadium roof while the LED-lit quadcopters glowed red, white and blue behind her. It was the first time such a drone display had featured in a television broadcast.
Q 07Which small NASA helicopter made the first powered flight on another planet, on Mars in 2021?
Ingenuity
Ingenuity was built for just five test hops but went on to fly 72 times. Fixed beneath its solar panel was a scrap of fabric from the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer.
Q 08Which Spanish singer sliced his hand grabbing a camera drone at a 2015 concert in Tijuana, then played on?
Enrique Iglesias
Enrique Iglesias often grabbed the drone mid-show to give fans a closer look at the stage, but this time it cut him. He performed for another half hour and then needed weeks to recover.
Q 09Which pizza chain partnered with drone firm Flirtey in 2016 to launch a delivery service in New Zealand?
Domino's
Domino's billed it as the first commercial drone delivery service anywhere. Flirtey had already made America's first officially approved drone delivery, flying medical supplies to a Virginia clinic in 2015.
Q 10Which company's founder used a 2013 '60 Minutes' interview to reveal plans for delivering parcels by drone?
Amazon
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos called the project Prime Air. Regular customer deliveries did not begin until 2022, nine years after the announcement.
Q 11A typical quadcopter has no rudder or flaps, so it steers by changing what about each of its four rotors?
Spin speed
Spin speed is all the flight computer adjusts: slowing the front pair tips the nose down and sends the drone forward. Full-size helicopters steer by changing the angle of their blades instead.
Q 12A drone propeller works on the Wright brothers' insight that each blade is a rotating version of which aircraft part?
A wing
A wing and a propeller blade share the same curved cross-section, which turns moving air into lift. The Wrights reused their own wind-tunnel data to design blades with a twist along their length.
Q 13Which Chinese company, begun by Frank Wang in his university dorm room, came to dominate the consumer drone market?
DJI
Q 21Which Japanese motorcycle maker built the R-MAX, a remote-controlled helicopter developed in the 1990s to spray crops?
Yamaha
Yamaha put the R-MAX to work on precise aerial crop spraying years before camera quadcopters reached hobbyists. It has since been used for surveys and disaster response as well.
Q 22Which country builds the Bayraktar TB2, a combat drone celebrated in a 2022 Ukrainian patriotic song?
Turkey
Turkey's Baykar company makes it, and 'Bayraktar' means standard-bearer in Turkish. A Ukrainian soldier wrote the song after the drones were used against invading Russian troops.
Q 23A drone's propellers push air down and the air pushes the drone up, showing which of Newton's principles?
Third law
DJI grew from flight-control parts that Wang built as a student in Hong Kong into a Shenzhen giant. Its first fully assembled drone, the Phantom, went on sale in 2013.
Q 14Which US spy drone, armed with Hellfire missiles from 2001, shares its name with a 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film?
Predator
Predator began as a camera-carrying scout; adding Hellfires made it the main remotely piloted strike aircraft over Afghanistan. The larger Reaper later took over that role.
Q 15Why do two of a quadcopter's four rotors turn clockwise while the other two turn counterclockwise?
To stop the body spinning
To stop the body spinning: each rotor's torque tries to twist the drone the opposite way, so two opposed pairs cancel out. A helicopter needs a tail rotor to do the same job.
Q 16Why must the blades of NASA's Mars helicopter turn about ten times faster than those of a helicopter on Earth?
Thinner atmosphere
Thinner atmosphere is the problem: Mars has only about a hundredth as much air for a blade to push against. The planet's weaker gravity helps, but only partly makes up for it.
Q 17Which action-camera maker recalled its first drone, the Karma, in 2016 after units lost power and fell from the sky?
GoPro
GoPro pulled all 2,500 Karmas it had sold only weeks after the first crash reports. Within a month the firm announced it was laying off about 15% of its staff.
Q 18Which high-altitude American spy drone became the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific nonstop, in 2001?
Global Hawk
Global Hawk flew nonstop from Edwards Air Force Base in California to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Australia. It entered service the same year as a long-endurance surveillance aircraft.
Q 19Which term describes a drone swivelling left or right around its vertical axis, like a head shaking 'no'?
Yaw
Yaw is one of three rotations every aircraft has, alongside pitch (nose up or down) and roll (tipping side to side). On an aeroplane, the rudder on the tail fin does this job.
Q 20A drone's electronic compass works out which way the aircraft is pointing by sensing what?
Earth's magnetic field
Earth's magnetic field gives the compass a fixed reference, just as it swings a hiker's needle north. The sensor is now so small and cheap that it fits inside a single microchip.
Third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Shove enough air downward each second and the upward push beats the drone's weight, so it climbs.
Q 24Which phenomenon lets a helicopter or drone hover on less power when it is very close to the surface below?
Ground effect
Ground effect arises because the surface blocks the air a rotor throws downward, giving more thrust for the same effort. Some early underpowered helicopters could hover only while they stayed low.
Q 25A research drone nicknamed SnotBot hovers over which animals to collect samples that reveal their health?
Whales
Whales blast out a mix of mucus and other material with every breath, and scientists can read a great deal from it. The drone simply flies through the spout to catch some.
Q 26Crews at Creech Air Force Base fly Reaper drones over distant continents from a desert site near which US city?
Las Vegas
Las Vegas is the nearest big city to the Nevada base, whose pilots and sensor operators hunt for targets through the drones' cameras while flying missions across the globe.
Q 27Which sensor, the same kind that tells a phone screen to rotate, lets a drone feel which way is down?
Accelerometer
Accelerometer chips sense the steady pull of gravity, so a drone can tell when it is tilting. Paired with gyroscopes, they keep a hovering drone level without any help from the pilot.
Q 28Which name is given to a drone that has twice as many rotors as a quadcopter?
Octocopter
Octocopter comes from the Greek for eight, the same root that gives an octopus its name. Designs with three and six rotors are called tricopters and hexacopters.
Q 29Updrafts kept helicopters away, so firefighters used camera drones to track the 2019 blaze at which Paris landmark?
Notre-Dame
Notre-Dame was watched from above by drones carrying ordinary and thermal cameras, which showed crews where the fire was spreading. Robots were sent in as well to help direct the water.
Q 30Reported drone sightings closed which London airport's runway before Christmas 2018, disrupting 140,000 passengers?
Gatwick
Gatwick cancelled hundreds of flights over three days, its worst disruption since the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud. Two local people were arrested, then cleared and paid compensation.