A Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC) approach is proposed to control the simplified decoupled dynamics of a quadrotor UAV. The performance of DNMPC is compared, in terms of tracking and execution time, to that of standard control configurations based on centralized MPC and PID control aiming to show the suitability of each configuration in terms of performance and the practicality of using a particular configuration in real-time applications. The results show the advantage of using DN-MPC in terms of ease of tuning and computational cost over more centralized feedback control approaches.