As NFL Super Bowl nears, Dedrone reveals scope of drone threats to stadium airspaces

Counter-UAV detection and mitigation specialist Dedrone offers a pretty compelling argument for why the National Football League (NFL) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have created a week-long no-flight zone ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas: Over 4,000 illegal drone flights around stadiums were registered in 2023, an increase of 20% over the previous year before.

As DroneDJ reported Monday, the the FAA announced a week-long no-flight drone prohibition around Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. That gradually widens in scope and restrictions through Sunday’s NFL Super Bowl match-up between the San Francisco 49ers and reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs. The ban comes amid a rising number of illegal UAV incursions of football stadiums, including one during the first quarter of the recent playoff game between the visiting Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens.

That flight simply added to the figures that have been rising around football and other sports facilities in recent year as aerial infractions increase.

NFL chief security officer Cathy Lanier stated last October that drone violations of banned airspaces around games nearly doubled from 1,300 to 2,500 over the 2021-22 and 2022-23 regular seasons.

Though 121,000 requests were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations to deploy counter-UAV specialists to mitigate those invading aircraft, only 6% were satisfied, due to the legal and administrative complexities of current US laws.

With some of those drones flying or even hovering directly above crowds, players, and officials, the potential for dangerous activity by criminal or terrorist operators is obvious. That threat is magnified even more across the nearly 60 stadiums using Dedrone counter-UAV techworldwide, where fully 4,046 craft were detected violating airspace bans in 2023. 

The Virginia-based startup also provides Las Vegas with its DedroneCityWide detection, identification, and potential mitigation assets – one of several U.S. municipalities using that wide-area monitoring system. Those will be part of the counter-UAV tech fabric the city and NFL will rely on to monitor the FAA’s multi-day flight ban.

“The federal government clearly understands the threat posed by drones, or the FAA wouldn’t have put these (flight bans) in place ahead of the game,” said Dedrone chief revenue officer Ben Wenger, noting the company’s experience using its counter-UAV tech to identify and mitigate the rising illegal activity. “Although not every drone flight we recorded was nefarious in origin, some of them were — and those are the kinds of flights that can stop games or ruin concerts and other events being held at stadiums. These rising statistics make it obvious that counter-drone technology is no longer nice to have. It is now essential.”