We’ve seen tons of drone light shows over time. But we have never – ever – seen something like this: A failure that sent multiple drones plunging out of the sky, with spectators on boats below.
Drone light shows have become immensely popular, particularly in China. There’s almost a competitive aspect to the shows there, with each subsequent display trying to get more drones into the sky to create more elaborate imagery. But this one?
Well, let’s just say things didn’t go as planned.
Kanzhaji
That’s the name of the person who brought this to our attention. We follow @Kanzhaji on Twitter, but this post comes courtesy of his website. It’s a video, apparently from Chinese social media, showing a drone light show that went disastrously wrong earlier in June.
The display was taking place in Shanghai, over the Bund, June 14. And we’ve been able to parse some of the details directly from this post on Kanzhaji’s website. The show seemed to be going along just fine, until multiple drones just started falling from the sky. We tried to embed directly from Kanzhaji’s site, but had no luck.
Here’s the vid:
Wow
Thankfully, you don’t see that every day. What went wrong? We have no idea, but according to Kanzhaji’s post there were some injuries (maybe). It’s a bit confusing, using Google Translate to understand precisely what happened and which companies were involved. One company issued a news release stating it had zero involvement with the display. Other bits and pieces in the article appear to be pointing the finger at other operators or product manufacturers. But without further information, we’ll just leave that alone.
It’s easy to forget, watching the amazing drone light shows we’ve become accustomed to, that drones can and do occasionally fail. It’s rare, but it happens.
This incident is a wakeup call… and we one hope is never repeated.
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