250 drones will join fireworks above the city

A look at how the holiday display came together

Phil Keller, left, senior technical director with Image Engineering, inspects some of the 250 drones to be used during Baltimore’s Fourth of July fireworks and drone show. Jerry Jackson/Staff

Spectators in downtown Baltimore on Thursday evening will get to see the skies light up from a fleet of 250 battery-powered drones.

Make no mistake, there will still be fireworks crackling above Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for Thursday’s Independence Day display. The drone display serves as a way to “use the sky differently,” said Michaela O’Gallagher, manager of creative services for Image Engineering.

The Curtis Bay-based company arranging Baltimore’s July Fourth drone display started by doing laser shows, lighting and pyrotechnics — it’s the same group of entertainment pros who built the Ravens’ explosive player introduction displays. Over the past three years, they’ve built out their drone display operations as well. Their first drone show over the Baltimore harbor was during the city’s New Year’s fireworks display that kicked off 2024. Since then, they’ve been planning Thursday’s show.

While fireworks are “a little bit unpredictable,” the drone displays can create more detailed imagery, using LED lights from each device as pixels to build “as precise a picture as we can,” O’Gallagher said.

Thursday’s fireworks and the drone display, which will be accompanied by a patriotic live set from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has mostly been arranged over the past three or four months, she said. The company worked with the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts as well as the BSO to set the “story in the sky,” she said.

Choreographing the drone displays is mostly a feat of software. Directions for the imagery, movement and lighting are all “packed into a show file” that tells the drones what to do, O’Gallagher said. The flying devices are able to measure their location relative to one another, allowing for them to fly around in unison. Once the instructions are put together, the software allows for a pre-visualization of the show in a virtual Inner Harbor.

But there is still plenty of work to do Thursday, when crews will arrive downtown at midday to unpack the fleet of drones and get them set up for the night’s show.

The roughly eight-hour day consists of “a lot of checks,” including making sure all batteries are charged and that the weather won’t throw off any drones, O’Gallagher said.

Thursday’s main show will begin around 8:30 p.m. with the BSO’s performance from Rash Field, followed by the 15-minute fireworks and drone show around 9:30 p.m.