Like any good super-hero story, PJC grew up in a small town in Kansas before heading out into the big world. As a child, he read tons of comic books and dreamed about being able to fly. He could often be found running around the house in his Superman Underoos and dishtowel cape saving anyone who didn't run away.

In 2016 he discovered the crazy world of FPV drones, and ditched the cape (but kept the Underoos), and as the creator of Project Mockingbird, continues to try to save the world, one Whoop at a time.

He lives outside of Portland, Oregon with his wife on 22 acres of forest and a collection of animals they lovingly refer to as the Ark of Clarke.

But Project Mockingbird is a little bigger than just PJC. There are a collection of people who have influenced, helped, and contributed to making these tiny drones fly better.

Scott Allyn - He was the first one I am of aware of to try to do this and got a lot of the basics figured out.

Jesse Perkins - We all know Jesse is the heart and soul of Tiny Whoop culture and Head of Human Resources of Project Mockingbird, and he’s the reason this whole culture started. We all owe a lot to him, and he is THE best Tiny Whoop course designer I know.

Travis ‘NotFastEnuf’ Schrock - Long-time buddy that I ping a lot of ideas off of. I give him feedback on Silverware NFE and he helps decipher what I’m looking for in Betaflight and now I’m helping him test his new Quicksilver firmware.

Kevin Glen Plaizier - Lead Developer of Emuflight. Kevin reached out to me and we started chatting about Angle mode and how to do it better. We continued talking and Kevin continued to code stuff based on my feedback as an “expert” in Angle Whoop tuning and racing and then he started talking to NFE…and the rest is history. He is a genuine guy and has the “Tiny Whoop Culture” mentality where we all just want to have fun, be kind and fly amazing quads that seem like magic.

Charlie Stevenson - He helped gather data for Betaflight to help fix the “crash freakout” issue we dealt with at the first Tiny Whoop Invitational.

Nate Payne, Daniel Sugano, Brendan Guffin and the rest of the 75X tuning group - I think it was Daniel that was the first person I heard of to try 1s on 802 motors in September or October of 2018 and was begging us all to try it.  He was not wrong.

Steven Merrell - All of his pioneering work in brushless 31mm Whoops is awesome and his custom Whoop is still one of my favorites.

Bryce Johnson - Your CrazyBee F3 wouldn’t fly as nice as it does if it weren’t for the work of Bryce.  He’s why we have turtle mode as well.

Joshua Bardwell - He recommended altering “Runaway” so you don’t have inadvertent disarms on bumps.  I personally now turn it off, but please be aware that turning it off could let your quad spin to the moon with no safety cutoff.

Ethan Bayer - suggested TPA to reduce PID oscillation and noise, bringing more power to our motors in Betaflight.  He also was the one that discovered that Pitch and Roll rates didn’t control anything in Angle mode.

ctzsnooze - Betaflight Dev who is working on filtering in 3.5 and suggested new settings to RC Interpolation

Joe Lucid - Betaflight Dev who suggested some new “D” levels and helped with filtering and reviewed my blackbox data to get more power to the motors.

K1nslayer - He discovered the old code for “Throttle Mapping” in Betaflight and did some initial tests with brushed motors

The AlienWhoop Team - Their AlienWhoop F4 is the only Whoop FC to have blackbox data and the PIDs they used on it were derived from Plasmatree.  I used the AlienWhoop blackbox data to share with Joe and Ethan to tweak those settings to get more power from the motors and tweaked the base AlienWhoop F4 PIDs for other F4 Whoop FC’s.

The NewBeeDrone Team - During the development of the BeeBrain LITE they listened to all the feedback from the testers (including me) and it really shows in the BeeBrain LITE FC.  Introducing Active Braking adds a level of precision not found in other brushed Whoop FC’s.

Cornell Herg - Emax is a great company, and when I was having some initial issues with my TinyHawk I reached out to Cornell and he was amazing. I learned a lot about the TinyHawk and what Emax was doing by talking to him.  Like only a few other companies in this business, it’s very refreshing to talk to passionate, smart people who make great products AND fly.