Twelve minutes.

That’s how how long Paul Souza’s team has, in front of thousands this Friday night, to mark a big change in Rose Bowl stadium tradition: Switching from decades of fireworks to a new era of drones.

While the stadium has hosted drone shows before, the Rose Bowl’s Fourth of July drone show will be a first in the stadium’s history, a change spurred by environmental concerns. And its a new moment in a gradual shift from fireworks to drones in some Southern California cities, with company’s such as Souza’s Rialto-based Pyro Spectaculars undergoing their own shift in the marketplace.

“We’re a full-service production company for fireworks and special effects, and adding drones to that portfolio was kind of like a parallel market,” Souza said. “It kind of just made sense.”

But if the prospect of drone shows all over the place has you wondering about some pending demise of fireworks shows, that may be far off.

The technology of traditional fireworks shows is literally thousands of years old, Souza said.

Pyro Spectatulars has been in the drone market for about the last half decade, but Souza said fireworks still dominate the space based on the ubiquity of the art form in human history.

“Drones are really an immature market, they’re like in their infancy,” Souza said.

Still, this week, rather than gearing up for the fireworks, Souza’s team was gearing up for drones at the Rose Bowl.

On Tuesday, 750 Pyro Spectacular drones covered the Rose Bowl’s field for a test run ahead of Friday’s show – the first-ever such spectacle to lift off from the playing surface in the stadium’s rich history.

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The show will include drones hovering 400 feet about the ground celebrating American independence, the city of Pasadena and its 104-year-old stadium’s importance to the city.

In March, organizers of the Fourth of July event announced the switch from the traditional fireworks show to a drone show as part of a weekend-long celebration in partnership with FoodieLand.

Rose Bowl Stadium CEO Jens Weiden said at the time that the switch to drones came down to an opportunity to use the technology for a unique display as well as taking into account the environmental impact of a fireworks show on the community surrounding the Rose Bowl.

Lights, crackle, action

Programming a drone show takes about a month of work, compared to the 20 to 40 hours that go into prepping a traditional fireworks show, Souza said.

However, the timeline for planning a fireworks show is about a year in advance. That’s because it can take up to nine months to order the fireworks, which are mostly handmade.

His company is also putting on fireworks shows for the cities of San Marino and South Pasadena. Other nearby cities putting on fireworks shows this year include Alhambra and Monrovia while Sierra Madre will put on a bubble fireworks display.

Souza said the Rialto office will be putting on around 180 fireworks programs from June 28 through July 5 around Southern California.

He said the only other drone show the company putting on locally will be in Pacific Palisades at Paul Revere Charter Middle School.

Setting up the Rose Bowl fireworks show would be a two-day process compared to a single day for this year’s drone show. Souza said while there have been previous drone shows at the Rose Bowl, this will be the first on the Fourth of July and first launched from the playing surface inside the stadium.

He said a combination of ethernet and radio signal is used to keep the drones in position during a show.

“Our test on the first is to make sure that those signals are strong and that there’s no, like, kinks or bugs that need to be worked out before we show up on July 4th and learn that,” Souza said.

He said while drones are replacing some firework shows for different reasons, fireworks remain the dominant, more well-established market.

Therefore, Souza said, the inventory nationwide for all the companies that do drone shows is limited.

“Drone shows are, I’d say, considerably more expensive, and they’ll probably retain that until the market is more mature.”

Industry expanding

In March, the city of Arcadia said it would not be permitting any firework shows in the city this year.

Last week, the Downtown Arcadia Improvement Association held its annual Patriotic Festival and for the first time hosted a drone show. Open Sky Productions, a Utah-based company put on the show which included 200 drones.

Erik Merkow, vice president of sales and marketing, said the company has seen growth in its drone show market over the last two years and that the January wildfires have contributed to the shift.

“I think it’s just made everybody really think a lot harder about it, maybe not that hard, maybe it’s just kind of pushed them over the top to say ‘yeah, I think we want to do drones this year,’” Merkow said.

Merkow said each drone is the equivalent of a pixel in the picture on a high-definition T.V. The more pixels or drones in a show the more detail there will be. He sees the industry continuing to expand into the future but where it goes depends on how the drone technology evolves over time.

A unique aspect of a drone show is the ability to put company logos into a show, which Merkow said can help cities and other clients offset the increased cost of opting for a drone show.

“The clients are paying anywhere from, I don’t know, $1,000 to $2,500 to put a logo in a show, so the ability to offset that show is very real, and it doesn’t exist in fireworks at all,” Merkow said.

About two months out from a show, Open Sky meets with the client and comes up with a storyboard with visualizations about what the show will look like.

Downtown Arcadia Improvement Association Executive Director Donna Choi said the collaboration and feedback the association and community was able to incorporate in the show was a much different and welcome change from the fireworks process.

The association asked for the community to submit what they’d like to see in the drone show and Choi said the response was overwhelming.

“You order fireworks and they give you a show. Here it is, wrapped in a nice bow and it’s always wonderful but it’s not as collaborative and this is really putting our stamp on our beautiful downtown Arcadia,” Choi said.

Choi acknowledged that her organization heard from a few traditionalists who did not want to see fireworks replaced, but Choi said Saturday’s free event was better attended than last year’s fireworks show.

Tickets for all three days of the Rose Bowl celebration, including Friday’s drone show are still available.

Weiden said comparing ticket sales this year compared to the last few years would not be “apples to apples” because there has been a Major League Soccer game followed by the fireworks show.

FoodieLand will bring 200 vendors over the weekend, including 60 that are local to the Pasadena or greater Los Angeles area.

To drone or not to drone?

Other cities have been grappling whether to switch or not to switch from fireworks to drones. In Long Beach, a longtime fireworks show will go forward this year but has been close to being canceled due to environmental concerns.

Rick Flagan, Caltech professor of chemical engineering and environmental science and engineering, said there’s a clear spike in air monitoring data associated with Fourth of July fireworks.

Concentrations of potassium, chlorine, sulfur, aluminum and copper in the air increase around the holiday thanks to public and private firework displays.

Redondo Beach made the switch in 2023 to drones but reverted back to fireworks the next year after officials felt the drone show was a let down.

Environmental concerns have put a Fourth of July fireworks show in Big Bear Lake under scrutiny due to the impact on a family of bald eagles.

The fireworks show that explodes over the lake every Independence Day is expected to run for 30 minutes starting at 8:45 p.m. According to Friends of Big Bear Valley, the eagle family it monitors via two web cams remains in the area, with eaglets Sunny and Gizmo spotted circling over the lake on Friday. Their nest is not far from the lake.

But there’s concern that the show could force the nesting pair to leaves their roost, tree or nest as soon as the fireworks start. And in past years, they usually don’t return for a few days. And for the eaglets, they would lose their parents at a critical time, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Weiden did not give a definitive answer when asked earlier this year if the Rose Bowl’s switch would be a one year change of a permanent one.

Pasadena Councilmember and longtime Pasadena resident Rick Cole said that as someone who grew up in the city he understands the feeling of people, including some of his constituents, who are unhappy with the switch away from fireworks.

However, he said the move away from fireworks seems to be as inevitable as shifts away from rotary phones and typewriters, as concerns about fire danger and pollution rise.

“I miss the fireworks but I understand why people are skittish about continuing that tradition,” Cole said.