Attention to detail: Verge Aero to curate 500 drones for early morning and night shows at Fiesta

Synchronized by software, Verge Aero has its drone shows down to a science.

The Austin, Texas-based company is responsible for putting on the popular drone show at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

This year, the company is upping the ante with 500 drones. Last year’s Balloon Fiesta show featured 300 drones.

“We have designed a software application that allows us to create images in the sky without having to worry about the drones colliding, which is obviously an important aspect of a successful production,” said Nils Thorjussen, CEO of Verge Aero. “We have a designer and they create the shows based on input we’ve received. (The client works) with the designer, who then turns it into the flight path for the individual drones.”

The Verge Aero team spends long hours going over a large amount of details to successfully execute a show.

“Anybody who hires us, they hopefully trust us,” Thorjussen said. “But that being said, we will give them a full previsualization video that’s quite photorealism. They can see everything that they’re going to get and say, ‘Oh, this looks great,’ or ‘maybe not,’ or ‘let’s tweak this’ or whatever.”

Earlier this summer, Verge Aero began work on this year’s Balloon Fiesta drone show.

“We worked with the (Balloon Fiesta) team in Albuquerque and (they shared) some thoughts on things they’d like to see,” Thorjussen said. “They gave us a long list of ideas and (we) kind of canoodled on some of those ideas and started brainstorming and working with them. There’s a series of meetings where we show them some output, ‘Do you like this? Do you like that?’ And then we evolve the show to the final product.”

This year’s drone shows will once again contain concepts that are relevant to New Mexico. Nine drone shows will be part of Balloon Fiesta. Shows take place at 5:45 a.m. and 7:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7; 5:45 a.m. and 7:45 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 8; 7:45 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 12; 7:45 p.m. Friday, Oct. 13; 5:45 a.m. and 7:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14; and 5:45 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 15.

Verge Aero works on the Balloon Fiesta drone show up until the week prior to the event. It allows for last-minute tweaks based on input it received from the Balloon Fiesta team. Tweaks can be done without much problem, according to Thorjussen.

“The perspective of our company, what we’re trying to do is develop the tools to make throwing the shows something widespread,” Thorjussen said. “We think it’s a really cool technology. The key to long-term success of this basic technology is making sure that people have the right tools to see shows and that the drones are like any other element in a production, so that if you need to make changes that can be done so in an efficient manner.”

Verge Aero generally sends two people, usually a pilot and a technician, to run its shows. However, more of its team members tend to come for Balloon Fiesta.

“Just because the Balloon Fiesta is so fun, maybe we’ll send a few extra people,” Thorjussen said. “I’ll certainly open up myself for a few of the shows. Normally, we don’t actually need a big team to run our end of things. We’ll usually supplement the crew with some extra hands to help move things around. We’re really fortunate this year, much like last year, we have some volunteers who are helping us move drones in and out of storage every time we fly and charging batteries. All that fun stuff.”

Verge Aero’s software is so accurate that it generally eliminates the need to do a test run. More on how its system works and how drone shows are created can be found by visiting verge.aero.

“It’s actually rare,” Thorjussen said of test runs. “As an example, we flew a show for (President Joe) Biden, when he claimed victory in the presidential election, and they wanted to keep it secret. The Secret Service wouldn’t let us fly in advance, so we flew this super high-profile show, without a single drone having gone up in advance to test anything. And everything was perfect.”