Who we are
Your Drone Show started as a shared folder of teardown notes between two operators who kept relearning the same lessons. One crew, thirty drones, a wedding in the Cape Winelands, and a sequence that only held together because someone had written down what went wrong the time before. That folder became this site.
We write for the people doing the unglamorous work: choreographing in Skybrush and Blender, arguing with geofences, filing CAA Part 101 paperwork, scanning 2.4 GHz in a crowded city square, and rotating batteries so nobody grounds a fleet at minute four of a six-minute show.
The tone here is deliberately plain. No launch-day theatre, no inflated claims. If a firmware quirk cost us a rehearsal, it goes in the post. If a client clause should never have been signed, we say so. The point is that the next operator does not have to find out the hard way.
Everything we publish comes from gigs we flew ourselves, from a two-person wedding setup to formations past the hundred-aircraft mark over stadium precincts and harbour fronts.
Skybrush timelines, Blender blockouts, RF channel scans, battery rotation schedules. We write about the settings and the paperwork, not the marketing version of either.
Drone display against fireworks, corporate activation against festival slot, what a coastal wind window actually does to a schedule. We would rather be useful than flattering.
People behind the fleet
Your Drone Show is written by operators who spend their weekends on launch fields, not in a marketing office. Between us we have run a thirty-drone wedding display in the Cape Winelands, coordinated a three-hundred-aircraft formation over a stadium precinct, and rebuilt a sequence at 22:00 because the wind window moved. The notes on this site come from those nights.
Choreography and flight
Builds the Skybrush timelines and the Blender blockouts that feed them. Has re-timed more transitions than she cares to count, usually because drones were reaching waypoints a second early. Handles the on-site ground station and the backup laptop nobody talks about until it matters.
Compliance and site
Owns the CAA Part 101 submissions, the geofence drawings and the conversations with venue safety officers. Has learned the hard way that an enclosed stadium and a harbour front where the public walks underneath need two different sets of documents.
Fleet and power
Runs the battery rotation schedule, the charge logs and the pre-flight checklist series you will find across the blog. Keeps a spectrum scan habit from a city-centre activation where the 06:00 rehearsal was clean and the 20:00 show was not.
Our story
Nobody sat down and drafted a rulebook. The way we plan, brief and fly displays came out of jobs that went sideways: a wedding in the Cape Winelands where the launch corridor was narrower than the client's marquee, a stadium night where the venue's safety officer asked for paperwork we had never seen, a city activation where two aircraft drifted a quarter second behind the rest once the crowd switched their phones on.
Each of those nights left a note behind. Those notes became the checklists, the pre-flight sequence and the way we talk to clients about what a display can and cannot do.
Stage 01
The first paid work was small: a six-minute vineyard display, one ground station, a backup laptop that ended up mattering. We learned to build the sequence in Blender before touching Skybrush, and to rehearse the transitions at the actual time of night rather than in daylight.
Stage 02
Scaling past a hundred aircraft meant CAA Part 101 submissions, geofencing that held up on site, and a document order that survived three stadium gigs. We stopped treating compliance as an afterthought and started building the flight plan around it.
Stage 03
RF planning, battery rotation and mid-show recovery procedures now sit in every brief. A rehearsal that runs clean at 06:00 tells you very little about 20:00, so we scan the spectrum, choose channels deliberately and keep the ground station where the crowd cannot sit on top of it.
Three stadium precincts, a harbour front where the public walked underneath the display volume, and a run of smaller weddings and brand activations across the Western Cape. The fleet grew, the paperwork grew with it, and the checklist series on this site is the version we actually use on site.
If you are prepping a first paid show or pushing a fleet past a hundred units, the pre-flight series is the honest starting point, mistakes included.
Timeline
Nothing on this page came from a planning meeting. Each rule below was added after a show went sideways, a client asked for something we could not legally fly, or a crew member found a cheaper way to do the same job without cutting corners.
2019
Cape Winelands
A wedding on a working vineyard, six minutes of sequence, one launch corridor between the marquee and the dam wall. The rule that came out of it: no show ships without a second ground station laptop, charged and logged in.
2020
Compliance baseline
We stopped treating the CAA submission as paperwork and started treating it as the show plan. Airspace classification, geofence geometry and the public exclusion radius now get drafted before the first Blender blockout, not after.
2021
Harbour front
A coastal night with prop wash off the water and a crowd that would not clear the display volume. We flew a rotation sheet by hand and nearly grounded half the fleet. Since then every show carries a printed charge and cool-down schedule taped to the case lid.
2022
Stadium precinct
Venue safety officer, municipality, insurer and broadcast crew, each with their own document list. We now publish our submission order internally so nobody is waiting on a signature the week of the show.
2023
City centre
A clean 06:00 rehearsal and a messy 20:00 show taught us that crowd density changes the RF picture. Channel selection and ground station placement are now decided on site, after the scan, not at the desk.
Ongoing
Editorial rule
Firmware quirks, re-timed transitions, the client request we should have declined. If a post cannot name the venue type, the fleet size and what actually failed, it does not go up.