Surf Life Saving NSW drones recorded 750 shark sighting events and more than 200 interventions between July 1 and August 30, the first two months of a A$34 million expansion that now puts 73 aircraft over 97 New South Wales beaches. On September 1 the state stretched flight hours to 6:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. for spring. The same day, crews began installing 51 shark nets between Newcastle and Wollongong.
That pairing is the story. New South Wales has built the largest aerial shark-surveillance operation anywhere, funded to more than A$120 million over two years, staffed by pilots who clear a beach in two to three minutes after a sighting, and backed by a coastal network of acoustic listening stations tracking 3,010 tagged sharks. It is also keeping the meshing program that marine scientists have spent a decade calling ineffective, and the minister in charge says so out loud.
For American readers the reference point is New York, where the NYPD and state parks now fly drones over Rockaway and Long Island beaches every summer. NSW is running that model at roughly ten times the scale, year round, with a budget line attached.
Surf Life Saving NSW Runs the Largest Aerial Shark Watch on Earth
The A$34 million package, announced June 28 and live since July 1, expanded year-round dawn-to-dusk drone coverage from 26 to all 38 of Sydney’s ocean beaches, Palm Beach to Cronulla, and to around 70 beaches statewide, with at least one in every coastal council area.
It sits inside a A$120 million two-year Shark Management Program. The June ministerial release, from Premier Chris Minns and Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty, called it the largest expansion of aerial shark surveillance in the world. The August 30 follow-up put numbers on it: 73 drones across 97 beaches once school-holiday sites join on September 26, and more than 300,000 scheduled surveillance hours this year, which the release calls a 1,200 percent increase.
Regional beaches get flights every weekend of the year for the first time, plus daily flights from December 1 to April 30 and extended hours to cover dawn to dusk. Coverage is not limited to patrolled beaches. Surf Life Saving NSW CEO Steve Pearce said in the organization’s own announcement that it had already flown more than 100,000 shark surveillance flights this year and prevented more than 2,000 shark interactions with swimmers and surfers before the expansion started. It is now recruiting pilots to staff the new schedule.
DroneXL covered the program’s earlier form in Surf Life Saving NSW’s DJI-based shark patrols in March 2024, when it still ran mostly through school holidays and summer weekends. The state’s own December 2025 top-up funded 50 beaches through the end of March. Nine months later the number is 97, all year.
One Coogee Pilot Shows What a Shark Drone Shift Actually Looks Like
The Guardian’s Penry Buckley spent a winter morning at Coogee with Taha Kafil-Hussain, a 22-year-old Surf Life Saving NSW pilot, and produced the best public account of the job so far. Each flight runs about 20 minutes at 197 feet (60 meters), raking the bay in overlapping legs.
The pattern leaves a checkerboard on his control screen.
He told the Guardian he is looking for “anything moving against the flow of water, anything that looks a little bit long.” Most zooms end in seaweed or a turtle. When one does not, and he is alone at dawn, he makes the call to clear the water himself; later in the day he passes the sighting to lifeguards, who decide. Either way the beach is empty within two to three minutes. The aircraft carry speakers, so the pilot can talk directly to surfers on the outside break.
Coogee is the beach that changed the program’s politics. Until June, drones were not permitted there at all because it sits under the approach to Sydney Airport’s east-west runway. That ended after the June 13 attack on Sydney teacher Leah Stewart, who lost her left arm to a white shark the Guardian reports at roughly 13 feet (4 meters) while swimming between the flags. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted Surf Life Saving NSW an emergency exemption within days, and as DroneXL reported at the time, the state committed to pushing the regulator for permanent approval. Kafil-Hussain now starts each Coogee shift by checking the radio for which way the airliners are landing.
Drone Coverage Still Misses Small Sharks on Windy Days
Everyone involved, the funding government included, says drones are not a complete answer. The June release lists weather, visibility and battery life as limits. University of Sydney shark researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff told the Guardian that on a windy day, or with a small shark, an operator will not see it.
Pepin-Neff called drones the best technology available and, in the same breath, warned that more surveillance means more sightings, and more sightings without a public education campaign will frighten people. “Drones are a great tool but they’re not a perfect solution,” they said. The 750 sightings in eight weeks work out to roughly 12 a day across the network, and 200 of them ended in an intervention.
The state’s answer to the human-eyes problem is automation. The June package funds trials of at least two AI detection systems over the coming summer, with the stated ambition of making them standard, and a joint push with Surf Life Saving NSW and CASA for approvals to run more autonomous flights, eventually from surf club rooftops. Surf Life Saving NSW says the money also expands its drone-in-a-box and BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) capability, which is the hardware side of the same ambition. Kafil-Hussain told the Guardian he has raised the alarm most often for bull and tiger sharks, and once for a bronze whaler he initially took for a target species. That misread is exactly what the AI trial is meant to catch.
Shark Nets Went Back in the Water the Day Drone Hours Grew
On September 1, the day drone hours extended to 6:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., crews began setting 51 shark nets at beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong. They join 305 SMART drumlines from Tweed Heads to Bega and two new tagged-shark listening stations in Sydney Harbour.
The harbour stations sit at Balmoral in Middle Harbour and Lady Bay in the east.
They are the newer, less controversial addition, identical to the 37 already along the coast, which together track 1,698 white sharks, 938 tiger sharks and 374 bull sharks, the three species most often involved in serious bites. When a tagged shark passes within about 1,640 feet (500 meters) of a station, the SharkSmart app pushes an alert.
The nets are the part the science does not support. Pepin-Neff’s verdict to the Guardian on nets and culling was that they do not work. DroneXL made the same case last November in Nets vs. DJI drones for Australian shark spotting. Moriarty did not pretend otherwise. “I acknowledge there are some mixed views on shark nets,” she said in the August 30 release, before confirming they would go in anyway because the government intends to use every tool available. That is a political sentence, not a technical one, and it is at least honest about which kind it is.
DroneXL’s Take
New South Wales did what no US coastal state has matched: it made drone surveillance the primary shark-mitigation tool, funded as a budget line, not a pilot, with full-time staff. When we covered the drone hunt after the fatal Long Reef attack a year ago, drones were the emergency response.
Now they are the baseline, and the emergency response is what happens when they see something.
The American comparison is not flattering. New York’s program, which DroneXL covered when NYPD drones tracked seven sharks at Rockaway in July, is seasonal, city-by-city, and still treated as a novelty in local coverage. Dutch beach rescue brigades adopted DJI drones for this summer citing the Australian model. Nobody in the US is citing it.
The nets are a fair place to push back on NSW, and Pepin-Neff is right that a drone cannot find a small shark in a chop. That is a real limit, and it is the reason the AI detection trial matters more than the drone count. But the nets stay in for the same reason a lot of bad policy stays in: removing them the summer after a woman lost her arm at Coogee is a headline no minister wants. Moriarty at least said the quiet part.
Here is what I will be watching. The two AI systems go live over the southern summer, and CASA is being asked at the same time for approvals that would let Surf Life Saving NSW fly autonomous patrols from fixed sites. Whether either clears before daily regional flights end on April 30 tells you if this becomes a robotic program or stays a very large human one. My read is that CASA, having already carved out Coogee under an airliner approach in a weekend, has shown it can move when a state government leans on it. The question is whether it will do it again for flights with nobody on the sticks.
Sources: NSW Government ministerial release, August 30, 2026, NSW Government ministerial release, June 28, 2026, The Guardian, Surf Life Saving NSW, ABC News
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
