Super Bowl Halftime Drone Swarm Was Pretaped to Shield Crowd

The synchronized swarm of 300 drones lit up the night sky behind Lady Gaga, morphing into an American flag as she recited the Pledge of Allegiance, according to Bloomberg. Super Bowl halftime light show, prerecorded to comply with prohibitions on flying drones over people, was choreographed by Intel. It provided a dramatic backdrop for the performance and also illustrated the ways large companies are embracing unmanned aircraft in sometimes unexpected ways.

The registration of drones used for business has gone from a trickle to a flood. Only a handful were listed in the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s aircraft registration database a few years ago. That number swelled to 6,683 as of the end of 2016, according to agency records analyzed by Bloomberg. The list of companies reads like a who’s who of top U.S. corporations, along with startups seeking to catch the wave of unmanned commerce. It comprises old-guard railroads like Berkshire Hathaway’s BNSF, utilities including Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric Co., and technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon and a company that has supplied drones to Alphabet’s Project Wing. In December alone, Disney Co.’s TV network, ABC Inc., registered 29 drones, bringing its total to 51.

“It does show that there is a lot of interest, and this industry is, pardon the pun, really ready to take off,“ Tom McMahon, a spokesman for the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a Virginia-based trade group, said in an interview. The companies listed in the FAA’s database are the ones the public knows about. Most unmanned aircraft now are being registered in a new, separate online system that the agency has ruled isn’t public information. It has a total of more than 37,000 additional commercial drones registered since the agency created it a year ago.

Intel, for example, had registered 112 drones in the public database, giving it the second-largest total. Those were for an earlier light show. The hundreds it has used for the Super Bowl and other recent events are registered separately in the nonpublic system, spokeswoman Krystal Temple said in an e-mail. She declined to say how many unmanned craft the company has in the U.S.

“Lady Gaga and the Super Bowl creative team wanted to pull off something that had never been done before,“ Josh Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Technology Group, said in a statement. Because the light show was taped in advance due to restrictions on the use of drones over people, fans in the stadium could only see it on the video boards, Temple said.

The use of drones for business has benefited from regulatory changes. The FAA put rules in place last year allowing more routine commercial drone flights during the day, at low altitudes and within sight of an operator. It also set up a waiver process to allow night operations or other expanded missions if an applicant proves they are safe. While automated drone deliveries and other far-flung uses won’t be permitted initially, the agency is laying the foundation for expansion. It is crafting a proposal to allow some drone flights over people, for example.

Gaga’s roof-top opening portion of the Super Bowl show, with drones forming a star-like backdrop, also was pretaped prior to the game and fed into the broadcast, Temple said. Fans in the stadium could only see it on the video boards.