Sky Elements scores another world record for holiday drone show
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Sky Elements, the largest drone show company in the U.S., has been racking up world records for some time now, but its most recent record comes with a big helping of holiday cheer.
Recently, the company set a new Guinness World Record title for the largest aerial display of a gingerbread village made out of drones. The festive display was part of a combined Thanksgiving/Christmas drone show the company presented on Nov. 27 in the skies over Mansfield, Texas.
The record-setting drone formation far exceeded the minimum number of 1,000 UAVs needed to establish the record, with the display encompassing a total of 4,981 drones, said Tyler Kubicz, Sky Elements production manager
“We wanted to bring in the holidays with a new drone light show. It starts off with a giant 5,000-drone turkey and kind of goes into a giant wintry village, and that turns into this giant gingerbread village,” Kubicz said.
Working with its partner UVify, which manufactures swarm light-show drones, Coppell, Texas-based Sky Elements had worked to produce a display that would “delight viewers and push the boundaries of what’s possible with drone technology,” according to a company press release. The show’s producers partnered with the city of Mansfield to find a large enough open space to serve as a launch site for the massive fleet of drones, and decided on a sports complex with a number of football and soccer fields.
Sky Elements’ graphics team began work several weeks in advance of the show on the preliminary job of designing the complex patterns that would result in the dazzling images in the sky. In order to stage a typical show — involving anywhere from 100 or 150 drones all the way up to 5,000 drones — would usually require the company to put in between 40 and 60 hours of prep work.
“This show, in terms of the design, took significantly longer. We started mockups, I want to say, about a month out. And then, we storyboarded everything,” Kubicz said. “Then we started getting mockups of … what the images would look like in drones.”
Once the mockups for the display were approved, they were handed off to Sky Elements’ in-house team of animators to create the programs to bring the images envisioned in the mockups to life.
The stars of the show were UVify’s high-performance IFO choreography swarm drones, equipped with quad-constellation navigation systems. Performing together, the UAVs are capable of flying the intricate flight patterns necessary to create a high-resolution drone show.
Set-up work began early on the day that the show was scheduled to take place. Beginning around 8 a.m., a crew of about 50 personnel, including drivers, pilots and crew leads began positioning the drones and readying them to perform the evening’s entertainment. The workers were responsible for making sure that each drone had its batteries charged and plugged in properly, checking every propeller and otherwise ensuring that none of the UAVs had any signs of damage or deviation that might interfere with the staging of a spectacular and safe show.
“It definitely takes time to lay everything out and make sure our networking is all proper,” said Kubicz.
Guinness adjudicator confirms world record
A Guinness World Record adjudicator was on hand to physically count every drone that was in the show to ensure that the show resulted in a legitimate world record. “With our software, it’s very easy for him to see what is working, what is not working, what takes off, what doesn’t take off.
The Mansfield show marked the company’s 11th world record performance.
Because of the scale and complexity of the operation, unlike most of the company’s drone shows, the Mansfield show did not provide designated area for public viewing. Yet, once the drones took flight, that hardly seemed to matter to members of the community.
“Once it’s up, everybody in the area can definitely see it for miles,” Kubicz said.
The first drones first took flight about 8 p.m. and following the completion of the performance the Sky Elements’ crews completed their long day’s work by packing up all the drones and other equipment for their next performance. “This show was pretty massive, and I don’t believe they wrapped until about 1:30 in the morning,” he said.
Kubicz said the public’s response to Sky Elements November show has been incredible and has helped the company kick off a busy holiday season of displays across the country. Following the show, the company began posting still images and videos of the performance on social media.
“One of our most recent reels we did, of a 5,000-drone Santa Claus, actually just surpassed 100 million views on Instagram, which has been absolutely insane,” he said. “We’ve been fielding emails and calls and social media messages all week practically.”
The company has a full calendar of holiday drone shows, featuring display across the country, including events near its home base of North Texas, as well as in Jacksonville, Florida, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Chicago, Illinois. Other shows are scheduled in cities in California and New Mexico.
“The idea is to spread holiday cheer in our own way,” Kubicz said,
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
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