Drones are starting to become the new Independence Day and New Years' Eve nighttime tradition. The technology has not only made them more accessible but companies like Sky Elements Drone Shows in North Richland Hills are able to do some pretty impressive things with a whole fleet of them that won't send your pets diving for cover.
Last year on April Fools Day, the company "Rickrolled" the entire city of Dallas by flashing a QR code in the sky that sent their mobile devices to the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." They've also done shows for major league baseball teams and the recent Flash film and The Super Mario Bros. Movie that animates characters and moving images in the sky in three dimensions.
The company's most recent Fourth of July display over its home base has set a Guinness World Record. Sky Elements Drone Shows announced that its Independence Day display wishing viewers a "Happy 4th of July 2023" on Monday holds the world record for the largest sentence formed with the most number of drones in a single display.
An astronaut planting an American flag on the moon is one of the images created by Sky Elements Drone Shows for North Richland Hills' Independence Day celebration on Monday night.
Courtesy of Sky Elements Drone Shows
The display used 1,002 drones to create a "Happy Fourth of July" sign 400 feet tall and 700 feet wide as part of a drone and fireworks display over the nighttime skies of North Richland Hills. The achievement breaks the previous record set in the United Arab Emirates for a New Year's Eve demonstration that used 600 drones at the beginning of the year.
"We knew we wanted to do something big in our community," says Rick Boss, the president of Sky Elements Drone Shows. "We saw this record was broken in the Middle East and we thought we need to bring that home to the States."
The Fourth of July drone show included several images that used a fleet of flying drones to represent the U.S.'s 246-year history. Among them were iconic images like Gen. George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware River and the 1969 moon landing. The 8-minute show ended with the record-breaking sign wishing watchers a happy Fourth of July.
"The programming for this particular show is 150 hours of programming," Boss says. "That's a lot of time for our folks to build the show. In terms of logistics, it takes about 30 people to lay out all those drones for the show and make sure it's running as smooth as it can be."
The Sky Elements team has been working on its Independence Day show since since the beginning of the year. Designers plot paths for each drone on a computer to create the moving, three-dimensional images. Using global positioning systems they can triangulate each drone's position using up to 35 satellites to within a centimeter, Boss says.
"The drones have no idea there's another drone in the sky," he adds. "They are all flying their own individual mission and it's the designer's job to make sure they're in the right place at the right time and with the right color."
The results can produce some impressive images, like a three-dimensional eagle over a waving U.S. flag with a wingspan that can move just like the real thing, or a locomotive with moving wheels that can also spin on an axis toward a viewing crowd.
"It's not new technology," Boss says. "It's the same technology a surveyor uses on the street. This is just a novel application of that technology that's been around for several years. The big innovation for this is the GPS chips that have become less expensive over the years so our drones can have GPS."
Viewers took pictures and videos of the drone show and shared them on social media. News of the drone company's impressive display went viral.
Boss says the Guinness record they achieved on Monday night has already got them working on something even bigger and possibly for more world records, but he's not ready to announce them just yet.
"We don't want to share them so someone can grab them before we do," Boss says, "but we've got a couple of records we're looking to break."
