Sky is the limit

More than a billion people watched live on television June 11 as a drone shot zoomed in on Mexico City’s historic Estadio Azteca, which was hosting the opening spectacle and first game of soccer’s 2026 World Cup.

Moments before, Tiara Brown ’13 was on the ground, watching the drone pilot’s shot and resurrecting her half-forgotten Spanish the best she could to talk with a Mexican general, asking him to stop shooting lasers at and jamming the GPS systems of the broadcast drone she was responsible for.

“There was a huge disconnect between the generals I would talk to and the captains on the ground,” she said. But just as the shot went live, the general’s orders reached the junior officers, and the world saw the shot as it had been intended.

It was one of the closer calls Brown experienced in her role as the head of air security for this summer’s FIFA World Cup, laying the groundwork for the air security of 16 stadiums and 13 Fan Festivals in three countries.

This unique job, which she says she “made up herself,” draws on skills she’s nurtured since her time as a sport and recreation management major at Pitt-Bradford: an interest in athletics, a military aviation background, a law degree and a steely sense of self-determination.

Mexico wasn’t the first time Brown had done battle. The first Pitt-Bradford Commander of the Seneca Battalion ROTC, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army after graduating and attended flight school. As one of the top graduates in her class, she had the opportunity to choose her aircraft – Apache helicopters that launch precision-strike Hellfire missiles, provide close air support for ground troops and perform deep tactical strikes.

How she ended up in ROTC was purely a practical matter. Brown’s mother had escaped an abusive marriage with Brown’s father and moved herself and Brown’s siblings into a single room in her own mother’s house.

“She formed a whole life for us,” Brown said. “We lived in one bedroom with a bunk bed for four years until my mom could go back to school and buy a house. I was always trying to take the burden away from her.”

That included paying for her own college.

After graduating from an engineering high school in Pittsburgh, she received an academic scholarship to the University of Colorado and planned to study architecture. Her mother took out loans to cover what the scholarship didn’t.

But Brown was miserable. She knew she loved sports (she had run Junior Olympic track during middle and high school) but did not want to be an athlete. She thought back to her home in Pittsburgh and discovered a Pitt campus with a program in sport and recreation management: Pitt-Bradford. She took a chance and made the move, which would become a recurring theme in her life.

At Pitt-Bradford, she worked a full-time overnight shift at McDonald’s and then sliced meat in a grocery deli to cover tuition — until a recruiter explained ROTC and she landed a scholarship. “It let me quit those jobs,” she said.

With her top physical fitness scores, she had access to myriad summer trainings.

“I went to all the schools,” she said. “I did all the stuff.” Including traveling to Spain to jump out of airplanes. That’s when she picked up some Spanish.

During her 10 years’ flying, rappelling from helicopters and parachuting from airplanes in the Army, she began working with drones. It was a decision that – true to form – was against the advice of those who worried that it would negatively affect her career as a pilot.

But it was drones that were headed to Iraq, and Brown was anxious to serve her country in a more tangible way.

“I felt like it was important to take a chance,” she said. “Every time I’ve taken a chance on myself, it’s paid off.”

Her first deployment in 2016 would be using drones to fight in Iraq. In 2018, she deployed to Syria as a helicopter pilot.

Eventually, injuries took their toll, and she took a medical retirement. Her pain led her to investigate medical marijuana, which she credits with reducing the number of prescription medications she takes. As she thought about what she wanted to do next, she was drawn to advocacy and entrepreneurship.

She decided to pursue joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration degrees from Northwestern University’s prestigious Kellogg School of Management and Pritzker School of Law.

But after graduating in 2024, Brown knew she was not a law firm kind of lawyer. In 2025, she saw a posting for a three-month legal internship with FIFA in Miami and, trusting herself to make it again, signed a year-long lease.

She wasn’t far into her internship when teams began asking about drone policies. She’d hit it off with World Cup Chief of Security G.B. Jones – a fellow former military helicopter pilot who had experience running airspace for the NFL – who asked her what she knew about drone regulations.

“Hey, let me look into it,” she said, and was soon talking with the Federal Aviation Administration and FBI. She discovered federal agencies often didn’t coordinate with state or municipal police or stadium security. And that was just in the United States.

If the president or prime minister of any of the three World Cup host countries – the United States, Mexico and Canada – showed up, air space would be shut down. In the United States, the Secret Service would get involved.

It was clear the World Cup would need someone to coordinate airspace, and Brown was the obvious choice. Jones handed the project to her, though his NFL airspace experience remained a resource she could draw on. FIFA then hired a recently retired FAA employee to work alongside her, and together the two of them managed airspace for 600 World Cup sites.

Her chief tool was communication.

“Each department had their own plan,” she said. “The state police. The local police. I would get them together and say, ‘We’re going to have to work together here.’” She gave law enforcement an unprecedented amount of access to information, and in return was able to give FIFA broadcasters an unprecedented amount of access of their own.

“They were extremely grateful for all of the transparency,” she said.

Coordination solved one problem. A bigger one was still airborne: the threat of an actual attack. At one point, she called the FAA to say she was worried about the Fan Fests, where tens of thousands of people would be gathered, with safety as the last thing on their minds.

She worked to educate the public that they would not be able to use their own private drones for a cool shot of stages or crowds.

“People think it’s no big deal,” she said. “We call them the careless and clueless. But we have caught a few with nefarious purposes.”

The crowds themselves, she understood, made everything else more dangerous. A drone scattering baby powder could cause a stampede.

“It was cool to be in that position, but it also felt like a big responsibility. This was my first civilian job,” she said. Well, after McDonald’s.

With the contacts she made throughout her experience, her plan is to stay in aviation law and keep working with drones and technology.

For Brown, literally the sky’s the limit.

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