Guest Post — Drone Show Crew Diary
100 Drones, One Thunderstorm: Crewing a Canada Day Drone Show
A first-hand account of what it actually takes to put a 100-aircraft light show in the sky — the setup, the storm that cost us our test flight, the two drones that did not make it, and the crew procedures I would want in place next time.
I had the opportunity to crew on a drone show for the Canada Day celebration in Waterloo, Ontario. A fleet of 100 aircraft, a crew of four, and one pilot. I heard about the job through Shanta at Coastal Drone, who was on the crew with me.
Most drone work I had seen up to that point was one pilot, one aircraft, one task. A light show is a different animal. The flying is choreographed in software long before anyone arrives on site, and the crew’s job is to get a hundred aircraft staged, powered, healthy, and talking to the control station before the sun goes down. What follows is what that looked like from the ground.
Setup and Preparation
The bulk of the day is logistics. Every aircraft has to come out of its case, get placed on its exact launch position, get powered, and get confirmed as connected. With a hundred of them, small inefficiencies multiply fast, and the margin you build in the afternoon is the margin you spend later when something goes sideways.
Watching the crew stand up the software and hardware side was the part I enjoyed most. I come from a software and hardware background, so seeing the pieces fit together — PoE, UPS, Wi-Fi, and the rest of the acronyms — was genuinely interesting. A show system is a network deployment as much as it is an aviation operation, and it fails in both ways.
The Storm Rolls In
Around 5 p.m. a thunderstorm rolled through. We had enough warning to stow every aircraft before it hit, and nothing in the fleet was damaged. The wind was strong enough to flip two of our canopies and destroy them outright, which tells you what it would have done to a hundred drones sitting on the field.
The storm did not just cost us canopies — it cost us the test flight. The rehearsal window disappeared into the weather, and we launched the show without ever having had the full fleet in the air that day. Weather contingency planning for a show is not only about protecting the aircraft; it is about protecting the schedule that lets you find failures before an audience is watching.
The storm passed, the sky cleared, and the rest of the evening was calm. From that point it was smooth — right up until launch.
The Show
At 10:40 p.m. the fleet went up, and it was worth the day. The drones drew flags, words, and shifting formations across the night sky, and the crowd reacted the way crowds do when they have not seen something like it before.
Two aircraft did not finish the show. One dropped on lift-off and one came down mid-performance. Neither took the show with it — the formations held and the audience was none the wiser — but from the crew position, watching an aircraft hit the ground while ninety-eight others are still flying raises an immediate question you do not want to be answering for the first time in the moment.
As the crowd left, we heard a steady stream of appreciative comments. Despite the weather, it was a remarkable thing to have been part of.
What a 100-Drone Show Requires on Paper
A show like this is not something you can walk onto a field and fly on a pilot certificate alone. The authorization work happens weeks ahead of the crew call, and it is the reason the operation is legal at all.
Coastal Drone note: Two separate rules put a show like this into Special Flight Operations Certificate territory. Under CARs 901.40, a pilot may operate at most five remotely piloted aircraft at a time from a single control station without an SFOC — beyond five, an SFOC is required. Separately, flying at an outdoor event advertised to the general public requires an SFOC for an advertised event, and since April 1, 2025 that applies to microdrones under 250 g as well. Confirm current application requirements and fees on Transport Canada’s site before you plan an event operation.
Lessons Learned
As with any flight operation, the value is in what you take from the problems so they do not repeat.
The test flight is not optional. Losing it to weather meant we had no opportunity to surface the two failures before showtime. A rehearsal flight is the last chance to find a bad aircraft on your own terms, and a schedule that treats it as nice-to-have will eventually put an undiagnosed problem in front of an audience.
The crew needs a written failure protocol. When the first aircraft hit the ground, I found myself wondering whether unplugging the battery would disrupt the rest of the fleet. That is not a question to be working out live. A one-page procedure would have answered it: do not attempt to catch or intercept a descending aircraft, disconnect the battery on a downed aircraft immediately, and in a fire — there were none, but the protocol needs to exist anyway — clear bystanders from the area and know which extinguishing method applies to the battery chemistry you are flying. Every crew member should be able to recite it before the first aircraft leaves the ground.
Neither of these is exotic. They are the same discipline any operation builds when it takes its procedures seriously — written down in advance, briefed to everyone, and rehearsed. A hundred aircraft simply makes the cost of skipping it more visible.
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This blog was written by our guest Kiera Howe. Kiera is a software founder and multi-product operator based in Ontario, Canada, and the owner of Wiley Solutions. She builds and operates software and hardware products across varying frameworks and platforms, and is a Level 1 Complex certified drone pilot.