The anticipation is building for Waynesboro’s GloW event and drone show on Saturday night in Constitution Park.
Jason Johnson, the founder of Airloom, the only drone show company in Virginia, is doing the final preparation for the 200 drones that will dance in the sky.
“I don’t breathe until the 200th drone is landed,” Johnson told AFP. “I’ll hear the audience react they way that I want them to react to a formation being unveiled, and those are wonderful moments. I try to capture those somewhere in the midst of the chaos and the supervision of these systems, but for the most part, when the show is in the air, I am 100 percent focused on the safety and the performance of the drones in the sky.”
After the show closes, the Crozet business owner is usually relieved and can breathe again.
“I get a rush of excitement right after the show closes,” Johnson said. “It’s a sigh of relief and accomplishment at the end of the show.”
GloW drone show to replace annual fireworks
The GloW show, if it’s anything like the city’s fireworks show previously, should draw hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators, to take in the performance.
The drone show will replace fireworks at Waynesboro’s annual midsummer community celebration which takes place on the second weekend of July each year.
For four decades, Waynesboro hosted Extravaganza in Ridgeview Park, and the event concluded with an impressive fireworks show set off across the river. In 2020, Waynesboro City Council cancelled Extravaganza to offset lost revenue due to the stay-at-home COVID lockdown.
In 2022, the city announced that Extravaganza would not return, but it would bring back fireworks, setting them off at Sunset Park, in what became known as the Sunset Spectacular.
Three years later, the city is changing things up again with GloW, short for Glo Waynesboro, and moving the venue to Constitution Park, with the drone show taking place above the open meadows of the South River Preserve.
The GloW event will begin at 6 p.m. with food trucks including Sooner BBQ, Daddy Mack’s Grub Shack, Holy Smokes BBQ, Lucky Duck Kettle Corn, Kona Ice and Happy Sips Tea and Lemonade.
The Skillbillys will perform from 7-9:30 p.m., and the finale will be a drone show in the skies above the park.
City: Shift to drones due to environmental regulations
The City of Waynesboro said the shift to drones is due to environmental regulations at the former city landfill where Sunset Park now sits.
Falling embers from previous shows burned the grass, putting the city at risk of permit violations and steep fines. The city explored other launch sites for fireworks, but none met the required “clear fall zone” safety standard.
In an effort to keep the celebration alive, Waynesboro Parks and Recreation staff began exploring an alternative, a drone show.
Outside of using drones for events, which is a relatively new practice, drones are used for law enforcement in the search for missing people, like those in Texas, or sometimes to hunt down a suspect. They also assist firefighters and have been used in targeted military strikes.
Last year, the public was in a frenzy over mysterious drones that were reported to be the size of SUVs, allegedly flying in multiple states, including Virginia. The public hysteria eventually died down as experts seemed to agree it was much ado about nothing, and likely airplanes in the sky.
Drones create a ‘storytelling experience’ for spectators
In Waynesboro, the shift in format for the July event has some residents skeptical that drones can deliver an experience comparable to the annual fireworks show.
“A community like Waynesboro, fireworks have been a part of their celebration for so long, and fireworks, I think they hold a special part in a lot of Americans’ hearts,” Johnson said. “I think there’s a good portion of people that go into an experience like this, they’re sort of expecting disappointment.
“It’s our job to show them just how interesting it can be,” he said. “You can see the show for miles,” he said. “The lights on them are incredibly bright, so you could be on top of the mountain and see this show very clearly.”
While you can see the show from other parts of the city, Johnson recommends that spectators find a spot in Constitution Park this year so they can enjoy the full experience which includes music synchronized to the drones.
“There’s a framing aspect to it, so the best angle is going to be sort of pointed at the park, at that main audience. We do have some more three-dimensional designs that are a little bit more abstract that are enjoyable from any angle, but a lot of them, especially the text-based ones, it’s best to view them straight on.
“We’re trying to push the envelope in creative ways and have it be more of a storytelling experience than just showing picture after picture. Music is a big part of that.”
Drone shows are a completely different experience than fireworks, Johnson said, and it can be better suited for some children without the loud booms of traditional fireworks.
It is also safer for local wildlife and domesticated pets and doesn’t have the fire danger of fireworks.
“I think that drones are a more sustainable pathway to public celebrations. I think there are a lot of communities around the country who are looking at droughts, fire, danger, wildfires, and then also these sensitivities and saying, we got to find something else,” Johnson said. “Drone shows are a completely different product in a lot of ways. Our ability to tell a story with drones is something you can’t really replicate with fireworks.”
Designing a drone show takes time, and a lot of testing
Johnson is excited to share the drone experience with a new audience in Waynesboro. He still remembers the first time he saw a drone show in person in 2017
After being fascinated by it, something inside of him told him that one day he’d end up in the drone business in some capacity.
He started doing serious research approximately three years later, and he established Airloom Drone Shows in early 2024.
Airloom puts on approximately 50 shows a year with clients including Boar’s Head Resort, Primland Resort and the Innsbrook After Hours concert series.
Shows typically include anywhere from 100 to 600 drones, and the cost can range from $120 to $400 per drone in the sky. The cost is primarily driven by the amount of customization involved in each show.
The time-intensive and most creative elements of the show are done on the computer in advance –designing the full show in modeling software – creating different shapes and movements and factoring in things like acceleration and velocity limits and each of the drones proximity to another in the sky.
The software will translate his programming into movement, and then the drones are loaded with flight paths that determine where each drone will fly, at what speed and what color to flash creating the pictures that viewers see in the sky.
Beyond the computer, the behind-the-scenes work involves a lot of moving parts even before the team arrives at the launch site.
“We do a lot of testing,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for things to not go perfectly, but we do everything we can prior to the show to make sure all of those edges are ironed out, and it moves smoothly.”
The final countdown: Putting on a drone show
On Monday night, Johnson and his team did a “test flight” to go through some of the new formations designed exclusively for the Waynesboro show.
“We tried to add in a couple different formations that are very specific to Waynesboro and the population, and we’re excited to unveil that. I don’t want to give away anything. That’s a surprise.”
The night before the show, the team is busy prepping for the show, charging batteries and running through a final series of tests.
On the ground at the launch site, Johnson said he usually has four people with him running through pre-flight checklists and making sure they fly in accordance with FAA regulations.
When the Airloom team arrives, usually six hours before a show, they generally connect with the client and work to set up a safety perimeter.
“That gives us enough time to lay out the grid of drones on the ground and really start going through the fleet and testing out each drone individually, hovering them above the ground, making sure that the props are functioning correctly, making sure that the system is communicating over the network, and that we don’t have any interference at play.
“We run through quite a few tests in those six hours leading up to the showtime. We’re fully prepped, and we’re just testing as a contingency, so we’re so we’re super confident that everything is going to go as planned.
“It’s a lot of bending over and picking up drones and putting in batteries and troubleshooting and testing and changing props and all that sort of stuff,” he said.
They also coordinate with the sound booth to really start dialing in the start time and double-checking, even triple-checking how the music will synchronize with the drones.
Johnson hopes that spectators in Waynesboro walk away with the same incredible feeling he did eight years ago.
“It’s like nothing they’ve [spectators] seen before. It’s hard to explain. You just can’t capture it until you’ve seen one in person,” Johnson said. “I think that’s one of my favorite parts of the job is that we get to show people this awe-inspiring thing for the first time.”
Video: See Airloom Drone Shows in action
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Crystal Graham
