The Fireworks Are Going Quiet. Town Councils Are Buying

At 11 pm on 30 June, a town in British Columbia held a show that promised to light up the night sky. Fort St. John was to celebrate Canada Day in style. But this time, there were no mortars and no pyrotechnic fallout zone to clear. The city's event listing told its 21,000 residents to bring lawn chairs and promised that, rather than fireworks, drones would populate the airspace. The reason was simple.

"There is a firework ban on," recreation programmer Marissa Jordan said the day before, citing ongoing wildfire concerns around the forest. Canada Day fireworks in town had been cancelled in recent years for the same reason.

Eighteen months earlier, about 4,400 kilometres southeast, another city's holiday show had gone wrong.  On 21 December 2024, drones in a 500-aircraft show launched from a small peninsula on Orlando's Lake Eola collided during the initial climb, and several entered the audience. A child was struck in the face and chest and seriously injured, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) final report. DroneXL reported that the boy was seven and needed emergency surgery.

Investigators traced the crash to how the show had been configured. A drone show is a networked outdoor display, synchronized by software, positioned by satellite, and made of hundreds of small aircraft, and it is increasingly bought by parks and recreation departments that have spent decades buying fireworks. As councils set 2027 event budgets, the NTSB report offers an unusually detailed account of how these systems can fail, and of the operational gaps that allow failures.

Fort St. John's council approved a drone trial in January when a staff report cited wildfire season, burn bans, and drought, and said drones "eliminate the need for large fallout zones, complex fire-safety protocols and extensive cleanup." 

Staff estimated savings of up to C$5,000 in holiday service fees. Councillor Tony Zabinsky pointed to pets that suffer through loud noise.

In Utah, the pressure was sharper. Gov. Spencer Cox declared a state of emergency on 25 June 2026 that placed a temporary prohibition on fireworks across the state, though municipalities could still approve certain areas. By 1 July, wildfires had burned almost 312,000 acres in Utah that year, across 390 fires. Skyworx Drone Shows, which has replaced Park City's Fourth of July fireworks for the last few years, had 14 shows booked for the holiday.

"I've never seen a higher demand for drones, and drone shows like I've seen this year," Scott Linzer, Head of Business Development at Skyworx, said.

But not every council that switches stays switched. Kamloops, B.C., replaced its Canada Day fireworks with an 18-minute, 200-drone show in July 2024. That October, council voted 8-1 to bring fireworks back. The drone show cost C$42,000, against C$20,000 for the 2023 fireworks and an estimated C$25,000 for 2025. People in Riverside Park had a good view, but the display sat low in the sky and was harder to see from elsewhere in town. Fireworks, it was decided, were a better bang for buck.

A drone show starts as an animation. Designers build the choreography in 3D software, which converts it into a flight path for each aircraft. Before launch, those files are uploaded from the operator's laptops to every drone on the field.

The aircraft themselves are precise. The Orlando show used UVify's IFO quadcopters. UVify's current specifications list a takeoff weight of about 990 grams, three RGB LED units, and hovering accuracy of 0.1 metres using RTK GNSS, a technique that corrects satellite positioning with data from a ground reference station. Advertised flight time is up to 25 minutes.

Safety comes from layered boundaries. Verge Aero, another show-drone maker, describes in its safety guide a "dynamic bubble" soft geofence that travels with each drone's planned path and triggers a controlled landing if breached. Around the whole show sits a hard geofence that cuts the motors, though the guide notes that momentum can carry a falling drone beyond it.

Each drone's flight path is a set of positions relative to a show centre and a heading. Get either wrong and hundreds of accurate aircraft will precisely fly the wrong show.

That is what the NTSB found in Orlando. Its final report gives the probable cause as "the remote pilot-in-command's (RPIC's) failure to locate the drone show center position over the physical location" of the drones, which led to collisions "during the initial lift and subsequent loss of control."

The errors stacked up. The uploaded show centre was off by about 5 metres, which caused the software to assign drones to the wrong flight paths. The show heading was rotated by about 7 degrees, moving the show roughly 18 metres closer to the audience. When the centre position was updated, only 498 of the 500 drones were selected, leaving two working from different data. The file containing the final flight paths had not been sent. And 12 days earlier, the company had tightened the margin between its soft and hard geofences from 5 metres to 1 metre, but the command laptops were still set to 5.

Setup ran close to showtime. About five aircraft initially would not accept launch data, and the crew soft-rebooted the fleet about five minutes before the scheduled start. At liftoff, the drone "layers" did not rise uniformly. As they lit up and moved to the first frame of animation, they collided. Video showed numerous aircraft falling, and one "streaking towards the audience." The accident drone was travelling at 29.9 metres per second, about 108 kmh, when it crossed the hard geofence, the report says.

Post-accident testing of the command laptops, wireless access points, and RTK system "revealed no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation." 

The NTSB listed the wrong heading and the non-standard geofence as contributing factors, along with the operator's "lack of show oversight." 

At the time, Sky Elements had no procedure requiring management or a second pilot to verify the show parameters set by the remote pilot, a single operator with about 300 previous shows.

According to the report, Sky Elements has since required at least two Part 107 certificate holders for every show, a designated pilot and co-pilot, and a paper checklist signed by both. A "15-minute show-ready" rule delays the show if procedures are not complete. 

Show computers were recalled to verify their settings, and the company set a minimum 155-foot buffer between the geofence boundary and spectators.

The software changed too. Pilots can no longer modify critical flight parameters, show coordinates are embedded in the show file with restricted access, and the company added a third, path-based geofence and an Extended Kalman Filter failsafe that automatically disarms a drone when triggered.

Sky Elements is flying again. The FAA issued the company a new certificate of waiver, effective 16 June 2026 to 30 June 2028, covering up to 1,000 drones. It requires a supervising remote pilot plus a second certificated pilot, one visual observer per 500 drones, an on-site wind check within 10 minutes of launch, and a restricted area that spectators are not allowed to enter.

In the U.S., the authority to fly sits with the operator. Part 107 normally limits a remote pilot to one drone at a time, so shows require a waiver of 14 CFR 107.35, issued to a named company and a responsible person. In Canada, the Canadian Aviation Regulations cap one pilot at five aircraft within visual line of sight without a special flight operations certificate, and Transport Canada requires an SFOC for drone shows.

Municipal procurement documents show how much of the remaining responsibility can sit with the vendor. A 2026 request for proposals from Mobile, Alabama, for a November tree-lighting show asks the vendor to obtain all FAA authorizations, define the launch area, performance area, and safety buffer zones, set crowd exclusion zones and wind and weather operating thresholds, and carry general liability coverage of USD 1 million per occurrence, with the city named as additional insured. A 2023 RFP from Lacey, Washington, set general liability at USD 3 million and assigned crowd control to the city.

That split is where the systems lesson lands. The city controls the event and the crowd. The operator controls the aircraft and the configuration that tells them where to fly. In Orlando, the failure lived in that configuration: a show centre, a heading, a parameter file, a geofence setting, and no second person checking them.

For a municipal buyer, the useful questions follow from the report. Who verifies the show centre and heading, and how? Is there a second pilot? What is the distance between the hard geofence and the nearest spectator, and who measured it? What happens if the setup is still running five minutes before showtime?

Canadian operators have been in this market for years. 

Northstar Firework and Drone Shows in Waterloo, Ont., added drones to a fireworks business. After an early show over Kitchener, company president Jeff Clarmo told CTV News Kitchener that "we bought 200 drones, and we're now touring." 

Companies that once loaded mortars now load flight files.

More councils are lining up. Creston, B.C., stopped providing Canada Day fireworks in February 2026, citing summer fire bans, stricter storage rules, and a shrinking pool of qualified staff. In June, council voted to explore funding for a drone show in 2027. A 20-minute show would cost about C$27,000 to C$35,000, according to the Creston Valley Advance. 

Mayor Arnold DeBoon said bookings need to be made well in advance because of demand.

Fort St. John has made its choice. On 28 September, council approved a staff recommendation to replace Canada Day fireworks with a drone show permanently, held each year on 30 June.

The staff report said Centennial Park gave clear sightlines, nearby parking, and a comfortable place to gather, and that the 2027 show fits within the proposed operating budget, with about C$4,700 saved in staffing and up to C$5,000 in lower provider fees. 

Heidi Avanthay, the city's Program and Services Manager, said the drone companies the city looked at "all have a contingency clause" for weather.

Next summer, residents will bring their lawn chairs back to the same park. The risks they used to worry about, sparks landing in dry grass and debris falling on the crowd, are gone. What replaces them is less visible: a show centre, a heading, a flight file that has to reach every aircraft. In Orlando, nobody checked those settings a second time. Any council buying a show should know who is responsible for the final check.