Updated ,first published
The much-anticipated return of the dazzling Vivid drone show above Sydney has hit turbulence after dozens plunged into Darling Harbour, placing the festival calendar in doubt.
Hours before the Star-Bound drone show on Monday night, Vivid organisers warned the event was “weather dependent” and conditions were being closely monitored to determine whether it could proceed.
But the 7.30pm event showed it wasn’t just rain falling from the sky they needed to worry about. After hanging limp in the air, the drones began to descend before 89 dropped into the water.
The incident forced the cancellation of the 9.30pm show and those scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.
Adam Love was in the crowd below and told the Herald he recognised the drones entering a “test pattern”, rapidly flashing different colours to test their LEDs.
“They paused in formation for ages. It seems that behind the scenes they were madly scrambling to get them to reconnect,” Love said. “Many fell into the water.”
Vivid has planned its largest ever drone series this year after the shows were cancelled in 2025 on the advice of police and transport authorities, in response to a potential crowd crush around Circular Quay in 2024.
The drone extravaganza at Darling Harbour was scheduled to take place twice nightly between Sunday and Wednesday with a total of 22 shows over 11 nights during the weeks-long festival. The displays feature up to 1000 drones swarming over the harbour for eight to 12 minutes.
UK company Sky Magic, responsible for the shows, said the drones landed in the water around Cockle Bay.
“Some vehicles during the emergency landing phase encountered the geofence boundary and shut down to preserve the safety zone, resulting in them falling into the water,” the company said in a statement.
The issue was caused by an unforeseen change in the “radio frequency environment”, which the company described as an “anomaly” and said had not been encountered during previous site visits and rehearsals.
Premier Chris Minns acknowledged this week’s cancellations were disappointing, “but you know, safety’s got to come first”.
A worker at Darling Harbour told ABC Local Radio there was a “cascading failure of the drones”.
“Everything seemed normal and then very shortly after that first image was displayed, on the southern side of Cockle Bay you started seeing drones dropping in the water,” he said.
The director of UNSW’s drone program, Graham Doig, told this masthead several factors could be to blame.
“You’re in an urban environment where signals are bouncing off buildings, there’s Wi-Fi interference, there’s all kinds of things,” he said.
“People might be worried about ‘jamming’ … some bad actor trying to disrupt the show.”
But Doig reckons it was the weather. Humidity, rain and cloud are all capable of creating interference.
“The conditions were pretty horrible in Sydney last night, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the main factor,” he said.
Doig said interference does not mean much for individual drone operators: “But when you have thousands of drones that all need to talk to each other precisely, and some of them are losing signal and threatening to crash into each other, they’ll have a procedure in place that says … we just have to land now and that will be an automated process.”
University of Sydney drone communications expert Athman Bouguettaya said signals were encrypted to prevent intentional interference, but drone swarms need systems in place for unforeseen failures.
“What you want in these types of large-scale deployments is resilience,” Professor Bouguettaya said.
“This may include having duplicate base stations to communicate.”
Drone shows have risen in popularity globally as the technology has developed over the past decade, and the large number required means the devices are typically quite simple.
“They’re relatively straightforward, relatively small drones that are probably going to be less than two kilos each,” Doig said.
But the displays have not always run flawlessly. Cascading errors, wind and connectivity issues led to 427 drones being lost during a drone show over Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour in July 2023, many of the drones plunging into the water below. About 50 drones ended up in Perth’s Swan River in November 2022.
While Vivid’s drone shows have been cancelled for at least two nights, dozens of other scheduled events will continue.
Showers are expected on Tuesday, and will ease on Wednesday, followed by heavy rain through the rest of the week.
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