ATSB report released after 400+ drones crash during light show

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has released its final report on a drone light show gone wrong, where 427 of the 500 drones plummeted into Victoria Harbor, Australia, in July 2023.

The show was held in support of the Matildas, Australia’s national women’s soccer team, ahead of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Drone swarm fails in less than 30 seconds

The show started at 6:30pm on July 14th, 2023 and within 30 seconds, the ground control station (GCS) began to display errors as a few drones began to drift out of formation.

As wind speeds continued to increase, at some points doubling the 8 m/s limit of the drones, more drones lost control, with some colliding mid-air and many eventually falling from the sky.

In response, the pilot in command placed the drones in a hold while trying to the return the worst affected drones back to the take-off point.

However, during the hold, connection was lost to the majority of the drones still in the air, resulting in them dropping into the harbor below. Luckily no one was injured.

Critical wind speed warnings went unnoticed

The GCS software did include a wind speed indicator, but it had been added in a recent update, and was still new to the flight team.

To make matters worse, the indicator didn’t feature any visual or audio warnings when the wind exceeded safe levels, resulting in it going unnoticed. Even when it reached 18 m/s at points throughout the show.

Each drone did display errors on the GCS during the show, but due to the poor design of the software, it wasn’t always obvious what the error was for, especially when managing 500 drones at the same time.

The team weren’t looking out for wind speed warnings as the wind speed on the ground in the afternoon never exceeded the limit of the drones. The wind speed at altitude was also never checked.

ATSB recommendations

Following the drone show fail, the flight team introduced a number of corrective actions, which included:

• Conducting pre-launch wind tests with single drones at altitude
• Reducing pilot workload by updating crewing roles
• Providing better training on the ground control station’s software features

The ATSB additionally recommended that the ground control software’s manufacture update the program with visual and audio alerts for non-standard conditions.

The full report on the “Control issues and ditching involving RPA swarm of 500 Damoda Newton 2.2 RPA, Victoria Harbour, Docklands, Victoria, on 14 July 2023” is accessible on the ATSB’s website.