Downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in 'jellyfish' formation(cnn.com)
cnn.com
Downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in 'jellyfish' formation
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/politics/iran-drones-f-15-pilot-intelligence
8 comments
That effect and formation isn’t hard to achieve, I did it before. It boils down to having a “leader” drone and the others are some sort of followers, while taking into account the speed/location/etc. I have even added few other features like when the leader goes down, another drone gets automatically “promoted” to be one and carry on the mission. The critical thing in it is the network connectivity, either centralized or not, so most of the work is about how that formation works in terms of network bring up and rerouting automatically.
I learned how to model swarm behavior using this one weird trick! https://arxiv.org/html/2505.05246v1
Is moving many drones in a formation so truly difficult? I’ve seen drones in formation all the time for drones show and fireworks. Hundreds and even thousands of them, and most likely they are not remote controlled but programmed to do so.
Why was the account painted as something extraordinary?
Why was the account painted as something extraordinary?
It’s not extraordinary from a technological standpoint, it’s extraordinary as a military tactic. This has historically not been how drones are used in wartime.
I think the takeaway is that swarming behavior is not difficult. It's relatively simple, it's cheap, and it's going to grow in effectiveness and smaller actors are going to gain access to it. That's going to be a problem for war-makers who don't take it into account. I think the pilot expressed awe at it because it was part of what beat him.
Beyond the shape they produce, I assume that drones for entertainment are not the same as military ones.
While this seems like a novel secretive technology at first glance it could easily have been a drone swarm similar to those you would see at a firework show.
Stick one of those in a planes flight path and it would cause alot of trouble.