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The Grey Cup Festival is 0-for-2 through the air.
Early Friday afternoon, the Festival announced the second NexGen Energy Drone Show had been cancelled due to high winds and what it called “unfavourable weather conditions.”
The same fate befell the show that was planned for Thursday.
The show Friday was to start at 9 p.m., on the REAL District campus. Weather permitting, two shows are planned for Saturday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
After Thursday’s show was cancelled, Jeff Clarmo — the president of North Star Entertainment, which is putting on the shows — said the drones can’t operate well in colder temperatures.
“It’s all about the battery life,” he said. “The batteries don’t like cold and they don’t like fighting the wind.
“The more they fight the wind, the more batteries we use, and if we use too much battery power in a show, then the drones start to come down and that’s not what we want to happen — and we won’t let that happen.”
Clarmo said his company was taking steps to keep the drones plugged in and warm in hopes of getting the shows off the ground.
“I think we’ve got the cold licked,” he said. “The cold is a problem, but I think we’ve come up with a strategy … We’ve done so many shows between here and the States that we were able to think outside the box to come up with a plan to beat the cold, but it’s the darn wind that’s our problem.”
He said the coldest temperature ever endured during a drone show was -8 C a few years ago in St. Moritz, Switzerland. As Clarmo put it, the company is in a “record-breaking area” with Regina enduring chilly temperatures and stiff breezes.
“We talked to the (Grey Cup Festival) organizers months ago and we felt that we would be between zero and five degrees Celsius, and obviously we’re at -20,” Clarmo said. “We are beyond our threshold in a normal situation for both wind and cold.”
