We started this because we kept looking up
Gabriel Rapacz and Thomas Leroux started DroneBusters after years of working festivals together. Gabriel joined Bluesfest as a volunteer in 2016 and moved onto the contractor team the following year. Tom was already there. Between us we've spent two decades working festivals - Bluesfest, CityFolk, immersive art shows - and another two decades in IT, with Gabriel at nine years and Tom at eleven. Network design, implementation, security camera systems. The infrastructure that holds an event together.
Festival work has a rhythm to it. You rush to get everything in place before gates open, and then you shift into firefighter mode - standing by, waiting for something to break. It was during those idle stretches that we started looking at the sky.
There were drones over the crowd, and not just occasionally.
So we started going after the operators ourselves. Following a drone until it landed to see where it came down. Scanning the crowd for the one person standing still, staring down at a controller. Over the years, we caught six to eight of them that way.
It worked, but it never worked fast enough. Every time, the drone had already finished its pass over the audience before we got anywhere near the pilot. We were reacting to danger that had already happened.
Last summer, a headliner's manager came to us mid-set, furious about two drones flying over the crowd. We found one of them. That was the night we stopped trying to get better at chasing and started looking for technology that could put us next to the operator immediately - fast enough for security or police to reach them while the drone was still in the air.
We knew this was coming
We'd seen the risk clearly since 2017.
Our background is technology, so we understood how these aircraft actually work, and what a festival site does to them. The RF load from a live event is nothing like the open field a hobbyist is used to flying in. Add temporary structures that go up for one weekend, stages and delay towers reaching into airspace a pilot isn't expecting, and you have a set of conditions built to bring a drone down.
We figured it was a matter of time before one came down on somebody.
What we bring to your event
We know how festivals are put together. We know the communication pathways, who talks to whom, and what it takes to get a decision made at eleven at night with forty thousand people on site. We've spent those years inside the production structure rather than selling into it from outside.
During an event, we monitor the system live and relay the location of any drone inside your perimeter to the people who need it. That's the whole job - accurate information, communicated clearly, at the moment it matters.
We're problem solvers first. We like technical challenges, in festivals and outside them. What we've built here comes from sitting at an unusual intersection: enough time inside the industry to know what actually happens on site, and enough distance from the security world to approach the problem fresh.
DroneBusters is a member of the Event Safety Alliance Canada.
