FPV Drones Have Changed Skiing—Meet The Best Pilot In The World

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Flying the Line

A lone skier drops into the razor-sharp ridgeline of Priority I, a 1,800-foot spine in Alaska’s Tordrillo Mountains. The pitch averages 40 to 55 degrees, but he’s not hesitating. He flashes a double cliff drop up top, floats a massive corked 360, stomps it clean, and caps it off with a backflip. Unseen to the skier—but felt in the air—a drone follows, weaving between cliffs, rock bands, and fluted spines to provide the audience with a unique viewpoint of Craig Murray winning the first ever Natural Selection Tour (NST) ski championship.

What the skier doesn’t see, viewers do: a floating ride-along that feels as if you’re skiing the line yourself. Behind the goggles, first-person-view (FPV) drone pilot Gabriel Kocher is locked in, anticipating every move. In the air above the athlete, Kocher is rewriting the language of ski films, one high-speed frame at a time.

“Gab,” as his friends call him, is a Swiss-born pilot whose obsession with snow and speed started early. He grew up skiing and hang-gliding with his father in the Alps. That love of flight eventually collided with his technical curiosity, leading him into the fast-paced world of FPV drone racing.

Known for their speed, agility, and immersive feel, FPV drones are piloted with goggles that feed live video from the aircraft—essentially putting you in the cockpit. Kocher wasn’t just good at it—he was elite. He placed 2nd overall in both the 2017 and 2019 Drone Racing League (DRL) Allianz World Championships.

“When I’m flying, I’m riding the line myself,” Kocher says. “I’m trying to match the athlete’s pace, to flow with them. Just like they’re looking for a flow state down a big Alaskan line, I’m reading their emotion, their body language, and trying to magnify the consequences of the terrain with the camera. How do I make this jump feel bigger? How do I show the exposure of this moment?”

His piloting doesn’t just follow—it feels. That’s the difference.

“Gab thinks like a skier,” says Switchback Entertainment’s Mike Douglas, the event director for NST Ski. “He understands terrain and can anticipate what is likely to come from the athlete. At the same time, he knows where the best backdrops are and does what he can to get the best possible shot.”

Kocher’s big break came in 2017 when he dropped a mountain-flying video filmed in the Swiss Alps. Racing drones buzzed over jagged granite peaks and dove through icy couloirs in a way no one had seen before. The edit racked up over a million views—and caught the eye of snowboard legend Torstein Horgmo and his production crew at Shredbots.

That spring, Kocher joined them in Whistler to shoot R3BOOT, a film that would become a milestone in FPV’s integration into winter sports cinematography.

“It was the start of FPV in the backcountry,” Kocher recalls. “I was inexperienced, and no one had really attempted it before. Then the weather broke—bluebird, perfect snow, golden light.”

But on the first test flight, the technological shortcomings of the time revealed themselves. “I couldn’t see anything,” Gab says. “The monitors back then were so bad—all white, no detail, totally unflyable.” Rather than call it, Kocher improvised. He borrowed a neutral-density filter from the crew photographer that blocked the sun’s rays, taped it to the drone lens, and flew the shoot.

The final edit floored riders and filmmakers alike. FPV was a technological game-changer for action sports.

“I feel like my whole career is made of these moments—overcoming things you’re not prepared for,” Kocher says.

Kocher’s not just a pilot—he’s a physicist. He earned a PhD from McGill University in 2018, which gave him a unique edge: he designs and builds many of his own drones. This technical prowess became critical in 2021 during the first-ever NST snowboard competition. There, he helped develop one of the first stabilized live FPV feeds for an action sports broadcast—a tandem rig with a pilot and dedicated camera operator that could chase athletes in real-time, at full speed. They called that drone “Golden Boy.” 

“We worked so hard to get 3 drones working for NST,” Gab says. “Somehow one of them was just better, we kept on using it and called it Golden Boy.”

The result wasn’t just another drone shot. It was a cinematic evolution—one now standard across high-end winter sports productions and a cornerstone of the NST media aesthetic.

Golden Boy evolved into the Magpie, which eliminated the need for a second filmer. “The difference is I used an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on my head, which allows my head movements to be translated to the drone,” Gab says. “The second factor is, I use a gimbal to lock the horizon so we have a continuous horizon line for the viewer.”

These days, Kocher is working with some of the biggest names in snow, such as Travis Rice and Sammy Carlson—alongside major film projects like Flyover Chicago and Transformers 7. But regardless of the project, his mindset remains the same: “Starting from the creative, I tweak the shot, I design the drone for it. And then we go shoot it.”

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Check out Kocher’s work in the Men’s Ski Top 5 Highest Score Runs video from NST Ski below.

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