Texas-based Sky Elements claims on its website to be the ”largest drone show provider in the United States.”  With so much marketing hype and fierce competition in the drone industry these days, many companies make claims of this sort that are impossible to verify.  Sky Elements is surely in the running but so are several other fledgling companies, including Open Sky and Verge Aero.   And that’s just in the United States. China and India, the two largest drone markets in Asia, also feature burgeoning light show markets.  Globally, the market is growing by leaps and bounds.  Current estimates place it at roughly $2.5 billion, but it could easily reach five times that size by 2030.  That makes it one of the fastest growing sectors in the entire drone industry–with a robust CAGR of roughly 21%.

Drone light shows – and the companies provide them – seem to have popped up virtually overnight.  Sky Elements was founded less than three years ago.  Within a year, it was staging the first-ever Major League Baseball light show for the Oakland Athletics,  Gigs with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates  soon followed.  And it wasn’t long before NFL and MLS teams and major corporate brands like Paramount came knocking.  The company has a special fondness for clients in the Dallas-FortWorth area, its home base.  Two weeks ago, on Independence Day, it staged one of the largest drone light shows anywhere in the world (apparently) commemorating our nation’s founding.  Just to prove it, a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records showed up to award the company’s management team an official certificate.

From a business perspective, drone light shows are proving to be quite lucrative.  Especially out West, where seasonal wildfires rage, many cities are looking for cleaner, safer, more sustainable and less noisy alternatives to fireworks displays.  Sky Elements claims to have put on nearly fifty July 4th shows recently.  But the shows are expensive for the end users, one reason many smaller towns are sticking to fireworks, which some citizens actually prefer, because of their more booming visceral effects.  Companies like Sky Elements might charge $500 a drone, and with 500 drones w/LED lights needed to make a dazzling visual display, costs quickly mount.  And that’s just the hardware.  The real genius lies in the creative design, in the choice of themes matched to particular events, and in the computer programming needed to choreograph and synchronize drone movements to produce the desired effect, without crashes and collisions. A single designer can perform that task and indeed a single remote operator can ruin  the entire show, but it may only last 20 minutes, because drone battery power is limited, another reason some users still prefer fireworks displays.

Unquestionably, drone light shows are techie and a bit gimmicky, but the novelty has yet to wear off.  Far from it.  Fireworks displays are loud and dazzling in their own right, of course, but drone shows have enormous flexibility when it comes to their visual effect. When Sky Elements designed that first show for the Oakland A’s, its designers cleverly merged a Star War motif with baseball imagery.  A shimmering light saber suddenly “dissolved” into a swinging baseball bat,  and a death star morphed into a baseball.  It was impressive and audiences, adults and kids alike, were clearly fascinated with what the technology could do.

Drone light shows are only just beginning to realize their story-telling potential.  But it doesn’t take a lot for a business to get up and running and to design and manage them,  Amazing, Sky Elements has a team of just four, three of them young guys starting out their careers and two of them FAA certified drone pilots, plus Rick Boss, an old technology pro who sensed a promising new opportunity back in 2020, and ran to fill the void.  The company is still running to catch up with the racing consumer demand – everything from major holiday spectaculars to local business promotions, and even weddings – with apparently no end in sight.  So are some long-established drone companies, who have suddenly added a dazzling new service line to their portfolios.