Chinese Drone Businesses Are Sabotaging Each Other At Live Events, Causing Panic

Isaac Taylor

Business can be a cutthroat endeavour, especially if you happen to be in the drone business. Over the weekend, a mall in Henan’s Zhengzhou city in China put on a huge light display featuring hundreds of drones celebrating the opening of a new mall. After forming the name of the mall, drones begun to go dark, slowly powering down and hovering back down to earth, to the dismay of everyone below.

Video from the incident show people running away and drones hitting parked cars and landing in crowds. Honestly it’s one of the most sci-fi entertainment disasters I’ve ever seen.

Over 200 drones were used in the display and local drone outlet Kanzhaji has said that the police are now investigating whether foul play is at work.

In May 2020, four people were arrested after using jammers on drones at a similar light show in Yibin City. It turns out that they were competitors that had lost the contract to the company they were now jamming. Their efforts dropped 17 drones out of the sky causing NZ$41,680 in damages. Amusingly police didn’t need to do too much hunting. In the area there was only one competitor not involved in the show “Sichuan XX Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd.”, and security footage outside their business caught them carrying out jamming equipment earlier in the day.

Interviews with the police resulted in an admission, and the mastermind behind the plan was found to have been upset that his contract offer had been undercut by a competitor with a lower price.

In January of this year a “mainframe failure” was blamed for a similar display going awry sending drones flying into a building in Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, and in June yet another display in Shanghai ended with drones falling in huge groups into boats on the river.

Drone advertising is a growing market for offline advertising, and prices can range to up to $1,000 a minute to put on a show. While we don’t have exact numbers of how many drone displays are put on each year to find out exactly how rampant these disasters occur, consumer drone sales in China have a compound annual growth rate of 31.3%, and is expected to be worth 6.4 million this year. Drone displays are only becoming more prominent, meaning that more rules may have to be put in place to avoid unintentional audience participation.