Drone Technician and General Outdoor Entertainment Electrician
Dollywood
A clip of a particular drone show with nearby storms. This video is courtesy of a park guest who attended.
Job Description
Dollywood Amusement Park in Pigeon Forge Tennessee is a year-round attraction for millions of families. The Sweet Summer Nights celebration of 2023 held a nightly drone and firework show which featured a ten minute visual display of five hundred light drones. As a drone technician, I worked to set out and assist checking all drones before flight. Over the course of the summer I learned basic drone maintenance and would repair drones that crashed in flight.
Outside of the hours spent on the drone field, I worked as a lighting technician around the park. With a team of around five people, we worked to troubleshoot issues and wire additional light features to be hung around the park.
DISCLAIMER: This video was recorded during a summer season that I was not involved in. I have not worked with Intel drone systems. The intention of linking this video is to give a sense of what the field looked like and what previous summers have been like.
This Instagram video highlights some information regarding the drone show.
Due to employee rules, I cannot show images from the drone field beyond what the Dollywood Company has posted publicly, as it is considered back-stage information.
Job Stories:
Through the summer season at Dollywood I worked as a certified Visual Operator (VO) for the drone show. Meaning I acted as eyes over the drones and called out any risks and alerts needed over a radio. As a team we set out the five hundred drones on a marked area. As we put them out we made sure to add a battery pack and then inspect the drone to make sure it won’t have any issues.
Over the first couple of weeks I developed an interest in the maintenance of the drones and the repairing of those that crash. I became one of the primary drone repairmen on the team and learned how troubleshoot and fix most of the issues that would arise.
One of my favorite side projects when we had downtime (besides doing homework for voluntary summer classes and going through drone pilot training modules) was to fix a drone from the ground up. Over the course of the summer we had a trash bucket for any parts that were deemed unusable or broken. I realized that I had almost all of the necessary parts for an entirely trash drone. I started assembling and troubleshooting my franken-drone and by the end of the summer I slapped a battery in and it lit up and connected to the Wi-Fi and GPS system in the area. The motors all spun and from all appearances it was a successful drone made entirely out of scraps.