Meet Flying Sun: The drone that turns night into day

If you’ve ever worked through the night at a construction site, on an emergency response team, or just tried to light up a massive outdoor area, you know how clunky and frustrating traditional lighting towers can be. Bulky, noisy, and slow to set up — they’ve been the only option. Until now.

Enter the Flying Sun 1000, a revolutionary drone-based lighting system that’s built to light up the night — literally. Engineered by Freefly Systems, a Washington-based company known for its Alta X heavy-lift quadcopter, this industrial-grade drone delivers 300,000 lumens of focused LED illumination from above. That’s about as bright as stadium floodlights. But instead of needing a crane or tower, all it takes is one operator and a few minutes to get the Flying Sun into the air.

Traditional light towers can be a hassle, especially in unpredictable environments like construction zones or disaster areas. The Flying Sun 1000 does away with all that. Tether it to a 5kW generator, an electric vehicle, or a standard power outlet, and this drone can hover silently (at just 56 decibels) for days — no refueling, no repositioning, no fuss.

Flying at around 100 feet, it can light up roughly 14,000 square feet at 10 foot-candles, providing the kind of illumination you’d expect in a well-lit mall parking lot. Push it higher, and the drone covers over 130,000 square feet — about the size of two football fields. And yes, it’s still usable light.

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One of the drone’s cleverest features is how it keeps cool. With 288 ultra-bright LEDs cranking out massive amounts of light, heat could be a problem. But the Flying Sun uses its own rotor wash — the downward airflow generated by its propellers — to cool the lights. This smart design not only keeps temperatures in check but ensures the drone can run for thousands of hours without requiring service.

The whole setup is small enough to fit in the back of an emergency vehicle. Whether you’re a firefighter, an engineer, or shooting a movie on location, you can launch it on the fly and light up the scene in minutes. There’s even a battery-powered option if you need to explore without being tethered to a power source — perfect for search and rescue operations.

At $60,000 per unit, the Flying Sun 1000 isn’t cheap. But when you compare it to the cost of installing multiple poles, running cables, hiring a setup crew, and doing maintenance, this drone starts looking like a smart long-term investment — especially for large-scale, mobile, or high-risk operations. It’s safer too, avoiding the trip hazards and flood risks of ground-based setups.

Freefly also sees potential for the Flying Sun in the film industry. Lighting a nighttime scene usually requires massive rigs, lots of gear, and tons of prep time. The Flying Sun can replace all that with one drone and a controller. Instant light. Minimal shadows. No blind spots.

Freefly says it is limiting production to just 10 units a month, with the first shipments going out in June 2025. So if you’re in construction, public safety, energy, disaster relief — or filmmaking — and you want to get in on the future of night work, now’s your chance.

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