How much light do you need? Try 300,000 lumens by drone

Illuminate a 10,000 sqft area to 17 foot candles or a 137,000 sqft area to 1 foot candle with FreeFly Systems appropriately named Flying Sun.

You want overhead light? FreeFly Systems has you covered, quite literally, with its new Flying Sun 1000. Effectively it's a system that couples the company's heavy lift Alta X quadcopter, which can hoist up to 5.06 kg / 33.20 lb into the air, with four extremely bright LED panels to give you a fairly extreme amount of light.

It's 'good' light too. Flying Sun provides overhead diffused lighting which is also less blinding and results in reduced shadows. It can light 137,000 sqft / 12,728 sqm to 1 foot candle, an area larger than a soccer pitch. Bring it closer to the ground and it will give you a whopping 17 foot candles over 10,000 sqft; that's 929 sqm and roughly the size of 3.5 tennis courts.

It's a lot of light which you would automatically assume isn't going to be available for very long. Indeed, an Alta X will only give you 50 minutes on batteries without any payload, never mind when kicking out all those lumens. But though the company is keen to point out that it will run off batteries for short periods for search and rescue purposes, where it comes into its own for production is when it's tethered.

Flying Sun can effectively be deployed anywhere in the world using a 5kW+ 240v generator and a tether. What's more the drone is rated to fly for 7 days straight before a 15min inspection, then it can go right back to work. Pair it with an electric vehicle and you have virtually silent and effectively unlimited uptime. Flying Sun at 100 feet is only  56 db (and it is up at 316 feet to cover 137,000 sqft to 1 foot candle).

How come it doesn't melt with all those lights? Well, it's been designed to use the rotor wash from the drone to cool the LED lights. This allows it to run very high power while keeping the lights cool, which the company says results in thousands of hours between light service.

Pricing and availability 

None of this comes cheap and is going to be very much the province of specialists. They're not going to flood the market either, FreeFly Systems saying they will only build 10 Flying Sun 1000 systems per month, with the first orders shipping in June 2025. The price? Flying Sun 1000 costs $60,000, with a less powerful model, Flying Sun 500, coming in at $50,000.

h/t to Peta Pixel.