Kuma Academy's first civil defence drone course is part of a broader civic training surge, with 39,000 registered drones and 30+ volunteer groups now active across the island.
On a Saturday morning in a cramped Taipei classroom, Pan Chien-chin, 48, a food company worker with no prior flight experience, guides a small drone through a rectangle marked by traffic cones. When he lands it clean, the small crowd cheers. It is, his instructor notes, a skill that did not exist as a civic category two years ago.
The class is run by Kuma Academy, a Taipei-based civil defence NGO, and forms part of Taiwan's first civil defence drone training programme, launched in May. Participants learn piloting, the kinds of tasks drones now perform on battlefields, and basic flight skills. Pan, who has never flown a drone before, says he sometimes imagines he is at the controls of a plane.
The war in Ukraine has transformed how drones are used in combat, and Taiwan is drawing that lesson consciously. Behind that lesson sits a longer-feared pressure: China, which claims the island as its territory and has built up the military means to compel unification. Taiwanese defence planners describe the threat as a growing one, and ordinary citizens are responding in their own way.
The scale of that response is measurable. Taiwan's registered drone count passed 39,000 in December, according to the Civil Aviation Administration, and the minimum age for registration was lowered to 14 in 2024. Across the island, more than 30 volunteer-led civil defence groups are now active, running courses in first aid, search and rescue, and now flight. Some Taipei high schools hold summer camps that teach students to assemble drones from scratch and fly them in search-and-rescue drills.
That is the context Pan walked into. He is not a soldier, and the training is not military conscription; it is civilian preparedness, the deliberate decision by ordinary people to acquire skills they hope they will never use. The class, which mixes office workers and retirees, treats piloting the way a first-aid course treats CPR: a public good, available to anyone willing to learn.
Taiwan's defenders have long warned that the first hours of a crisis would be shaped less by uniformed forces than by what neighbours can do before help arrives. Drone piloting, in that frame, sits next to a bandage and a fire extinguisher. Kuma Academy's syllabus reflects that logic: capability, not combat.
What to watch next is whether the movement grows beyond a few thousand curious Taipei residents. Registration data will tell part of the story, and so will the next round of summer camps. For now, on a hot Saturday in a small room full of traffic cones, Pan Chien-chin is already planning his second lesson.