Sky Elements Soars to New Heights with Record-Breaking Drone Fireworks Show

Texas-Based Company Sets Guinness World Record with 1,164 Pyrotechnic Drones, Blending Fireworks and Cutting-Edge Technology

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

A drone show company that scored high in the competition held on America’s Got Talent, recently flew to new heights, by earning the Guinness World Record for the highest number of remote-operated multirotor drones launching fireworks simultaneously.

In a colorful drone display over the city of Mansfield, Texas, Sky Elements Drone Shows successfully operated 1,164 pyrotechnic-launching UAVs to the delight of observers on the ground. The drone show broke the previous record of 1,068 of fireworks-launching drones, held by Pablo Air, a South Korean drone show exhibitor.

An official adjudicator from Guinness World Records was on hand to verify the record-breaking achievement.

Tyler Kubicz, Sky Elements production manager, said the company had launched 1,200 of its proprietary Phoenix pyrotechnic drones. Although 36 of the UAVs failed to function properly, the number of drones that did shoot off their firework was enough to beat the old record by almost 100 drones.

Launched in 2020 as the successor to an old-style pyrotechnics company, Sky Elements in May received the first-ever waiver from the FAA for launching pyrotechnics off of drones

Since then, the company has staged dozens of shows at Major League baseball games and other sporting venues as well as music festivals and private events.

“We service around 60 percent of all drone shows in the U.S.,” Kubicz said. Recently, the Sky Elements team came in third in the finals of NBC’s talent competition show America’s Got Talent.

A typical Sky Elements show combines the choreographed beauty of preprogrammed lighted drone shows with the excitement and warm nostalgic feeling of watching a traditional fireworks display.

The record-breaking Mansfield show was set to music broadcast over FM radio. Unlike traditional fireworks displays, with their loud booms and high-pitched sounds, the drone show itself produced minimal noise — primarily a light buzzing sound. This added to the show’s enjoyment by pets and noise-averse humans, the company said.

The Mansfield show marks just the latest in a string of Guinness World Records for Sky Elements. In July at the San Diego Comic-Con the company set and broke its own record in the same show promoting the Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine. It first set the world record for the “largest aerial display of a fictional character formed by multirotors/drones,” with a formation featured Deadpool, consisting of 1,599 drones. Then it immediately broke the same record with a formation depicting Wolverine, using 1,607 drones.

The company had previously performed the same two-record trick when it snagged two Guinness World Records for a Nutcracker-themed display in North Richland Hills, Texas last December. An image of the Nutcracker captured the record for “largest fictional character made with multi-rotors or drones” while a depiction of a giant Christmas tree earned the record for “Largest aerial image made with multi-rotors or drones.”

In July 2023, Sky Elements won the Guinness World Records title for the largest aerial sentence formed by multi-rotors or drones. In celebration of Independence Day, Sky Elements flew 1,002 drones armed with bright LEDs in a show paying tribute to the history of the United States.

Kubicz said he sees drone-launched pyrotechnic shows as a complement to, and not a replacement of, traditional firework displays.

“With the Fourth of July we got plenty of questions that were always, ‘Are drone shows going to replace fireworks?’ By no means have we ever felt like we would replace fireworks. They are their own thing and provide their own sort of aerial entertainment that drone shows just do differently,” he said.

Combining the two forms of aerial display simply enhances the overall experience for the audience, he added.

Fresh off its latest world record win, Sky Elements is poised to garner new accolades in the fields of pyrotechnics and drone showmanship, Kubicz said. The company recently was set to compete in Sky Wars, the U.S. Invitational Fireworks Championship, which had been scheduled to take place on Saturday, September 28, in St. Louis. However, that event was canceled due to inclement weather.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get to that,” he said. However, given the company’s roots in the pyrotechnics business, Sky Elements sees competing at events such as Sky Wars as a way of maintaining a foothold in the traditional fireworks business, Kubicz said.

“We don’t see fireworks going anywhere,” he said.

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.