Blackbird Builder Benjamin Biggs Opens Up About the 690 km/h Drone, John Wick, and the Sound Barrier Wall

There is a specific sound a drone makes at 690 km/h. It is not the low hum you hear at a park. It is a high-pitched scream — brief, startling, and then gone. Most people watching laugh. They cannot process what just happened. Benjamin Biggs, the Melbourne aerospace engineer behind the Blackbird speed drone, has heard that sound more than most. He was wearing FPV goggles at the time, watching the You Yangs range stream past at more than half the speed of sound.

In a new interview with The Australian (paywalled, February 28, 2026, by Ross Bilton), Biggs talks about the Blackbird build, the physics ceiling he is chasing, and how drone cinematography on John Wick 4 connects to all of it.

• The drone: Blackbird is a 40 cm, 2 kg gyro-stabilised quadcopter that flies on its side like a missile, built from 3D-printed plastic, carbon fibre, and off-the-shelf components. It cost $3,000 AUD and took 18 months to build.
• The run: Biggs hit 690 km/h over January 2026, with an estimated 100-meter average of approximately 661 km/h based on his own post-run calculations — faster than Luke Maximo Bell’s Guinness-verified 657.59 km/h, though the January attempt remains unofficial due to missing professional witnesses.
• The ceiling: Biggs told the newspaper that the physical speed limit for a propeller-driven multirotor sits between 800 km/h and 900 km/h, defined by the point at which propeller tips go supersonic and efficiency collapses.

Biggs’ Day Job: Drone Cinematography and Keanu Reeves

Benjamin Biggs works at XM2, a Melbourne company specialising in drone cinematography. The studio builds heavy-lift drones for film cameras and does live aerial shooting for productions. Biggs piloted drones for the car chase sequences in John Wick 4, flying at high speed between and over vehicles during production in Jordan and Germany. Keanu Reeves did his own driving stunts throughout. Biggs describes him as “super chilled, super funny.” Low-altitude, high-speed flying in tight proximity to moving objects is useful training for reading what a drone can take at the edge of its operational envelope — a point worth keeping in mind when assessing how Biggs approaches the speed record problem.

The Blackbird Build: What Goes Into a 690 km/h Airframe

Blackbird takes its name from the Lockheed SR-71, the Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft. The parallel fits: a machine built around one metric, with everything else subordinate to it. The airframe is 40 cm long and weighs 2 kg. Every external surface is shaped as a smooth aerofoil. It flies oriented on its side so the frame presents the smallest possible cross-section in the direction of travel. Per The Australian, the design work happened in Biggs’ bedroom in St Kilda and the physical build in his workshop.

Packing four motors, dual batteries, a gyroscope, GPS, a video transmitter, a flight controller, and a receiver into that airframe without adding drag is the core engineering challenge. At 34,000 RPM, the propeller tips approach the speed of sound. At those rotation speeds, heat becomes the enemy. Biggs runs AAX 2826 Competition motors custom-wound to higher KV for more raw RPM, accepting additional heat as the trade-off. During the 690 km/h pass, motor temperatures peaked at 76°C. Warm, not destroyed. The batteries, overcharged to 4.35V per cell across a 14S dual-pack configuration, still had 8% capacity remaining at the end of the run.

We covered the full technical breakdown of that January run when it happened — the motor choice, the orientation flip, and the battery telemetry are all detailed in our earlier report on Biggs’ 690 km/h unofficial attempt.

The Australia-South Africa Rivalry Driving the Records Forward

The speed record timeline reads like a compressed sprint. In April 2024, Luke Bell and his father Mike set the Guinness record at 480 km/h with their Peregreen 2. Biggs watched that run, figured he could go faster, and entered the competition. Since then, the record has changed hands five times. Biggs took it in December 2025 at 626 km/h. Bell reclaimed it three days later with the Peregreen V4 at 657.59 km/h, the current official Guinness record. Biggs then hit 690 km/h unofficially in January 2026.

Biggs describes it as a good-natured rivalry. The Bell team was reportedly pleased for him when he set the December 2025 record. They are already working on their response. Meanwhile, Luke Maximo Bell has been keeping himself busy — he recently completed a 3-hour, 31-minute endurance flight on a single charge, demonstrating the range of engineering problems this community tackles beyond raw speed.

The pace of progress is worth noting. Drone Pro Hub’s 603 km/h run in November 2025 felt like a breakthrough at the time. The 690 km/h pass came just two months later. The Peregreen 2 record from 2024 is already ancient history by this community’s standards.

The Physical Speed Ceiling for Propeller Drones

Biggs gave a clear answer on how fast a multirotor can ultimately go: somewhere between 800 km/h and 900 km/h. The limiting factor is propeller tip velocity. At some RPM, the tips break the sound barrier. When that happens, a shock wave forms at the blade tip and propulsive efficiency drops sharply. The drone stops accelerating and starts wasting energy on compressibility effects. At 34,000 RPM and 690 km/h, Blackbird’s tips were already close to this threshold — Biggs noted in our February report that the tips were “likely going supersonic” during peak runs.

The next step, he said, is custom carbon fibre propellers optimised for high-speed operation. He is currently running off-the-shelf props. With purpose-built blades, he believes 700 km/h is achievable with the existing motors and batteries. That is not a stretch target. It is 10 km/h from where he already was.

DroneXL’s Take

What this interview adds to the story is context most outlets miss. Biggs is not a speed record specialist who does nothing else. He is a working aerial cinematographer who flies fast and close for a living, on actual film sets. I’d argue that background matters. The instinct for managing a high-speed drone near moving objects in tight spaces — even on a heavy-lift cinema rig — shapes how you think about control margins. It shows in how Biggs approaches the Blackbird problem: not just “how do I go faster” but “how do I manage what the machine is doing at these speeds.”

The 700 km/h barrier will fall. His own numbers say the headroom is there. Custom props will unlock it. Back in February I wrote that an official Guinness attempt from one or both teams was likely within three months. That window is closing. My expectation is that we see a Biggs official attempt — with proper witnesses this time — before June 2026. If Bell’s team responds first, the record goes to whichever builder gets to 670+ km/h on an official day with calm conditions. Either way, 700 km/h gets broken this year.

The broader point Biggs makes about personal air transport is worth taking seriously too. He is right that the technology largely exists. The regulatory framework is the problem — and it is a solvable one, if regulators treat it as an engineering challenge rather than a liability exercise. Someone who has flown FPV drones at 690 km/h has a useful perspective on what autonomous aerial systems can handle. Regulators should probably listen.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.