Benjamin Biggs’ Blackbird Drone Tops 730 km/h, But The 685 km/h Average Won’t Count

Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs pushed his Blackbird speed drone to 730 km/h (454 mph) on a downwind run and 640 km/h (398 mph) flying back into the wind, for a two-direction average of 685 km/h (426 mph). The average clears the 657.59 km/h (408.6 mph) figure that holds the official Guinness World Record for fastest battery-powered RC quadcopter. It still will not enter the record book.

The runs were flown in gusting wind of 35 to 60 km/h with no accredited observers on site. That is the same gap that left Biggs’ January pass unofficial, when the Blackbird peaked at 690 km/h. DroneXL has followed this drone through every version since its 603 km/h run last November. The speed keeps climbing. The asterisk has not moved.

The footage and telemetry come from the Drone Pro Hub YouTube channel, which has become the main public record of these attempts. Biggs and his team lost one of two Blackbirds during testing before posting the 730 km/h number with the surviving aircraft.

The Blackbird hit 730 km/h on a single downwind pass

The fastest leg of the attempt was a downwind run that the team’s telemetry logged at 730 km/h, about 454 mph. That single pass beats the speed at the heart of the current official record outright. The problem for record purposes is that one direction never counts on its own.

The numbers around that pass show how close to the edge the hardware was running. By the team’s account the drone pulled 400 amps for roughly ten seconds, and the batteries hit 80°C, hot enough to melt the heat shrink on the packs. The pilot described glancing at his speed readout at 550 km/h, looking away, and looking back to find the drone already past 700. On the upwind return in heavy wind, the batteries dropped to about 3.65 volts per cell and the run topped out at 640 km/h.

Custom sawtooth propellers replaced the off-the-shelf blades

The hardware change driving this attempt was a set of hand-made carbon fibre propellers with a sawtooth leading edge, built to replace the off-the-shelf APC 7×15 blades the Blackbird flew on earlier records. Biggs had named custom props as the next unlock when DroneXL covered his interview with The Australian in March. These are the props he was waiting on.

The new blades carry more pitch than the old APC props, with an exact pitch number the team declined to share. The sawtooth edge is meant to keep airflow moving straight across the blade rather than spilling sideways and bleeding off efficiency. Biggs said on camera he was skeptical the aerofoil would hold its shape at every point along the blade.

His doubt looked justified on day one. With the new props fitted, the team’s first day of testing topped out near 630 km/h, slower than the 690 km/h the older props managed back in January’s unofficial run. The higher-pitch blades demanded more power, and the motors could not spin them fast enough to show a clear gain. The faster numbers only arrived on day two, in stronger wind, with the last drone they had. The carbon fibre frame and PETG parts came from sponsor PCBWay; the props were made by hand by friends of the team.

Biggs lost a Blackbird at 630 km/h when the video feed cut out

One of the two Blackbirds built for the attempt was lost on day one after the first-person-view feed dropped out mid-run at roughly 630 km/h, leaving the pilot flying blind. The drone never came back, and the team called it the worst day of testing they had had, the first loss after something like 50 runs across this version of the airframe.

The team’s working explanation is the Doppler effect acting on the digital video link. As the drone screams toward the pilot, the radio frequency carrying the feed compresses, then stretches as it passes, faster than the goggles’ receiver can track. They laid out three theories stacking together: antenna geometry that leaves both antennas sharing a blind spot, the Doppler shift flipping the frequency in under a tenth of a second, and signal overload as the drone passes close at speed. Biggs was careful to frame all of it as unproven. “We’re not 100% sure why this happens at all,” he says in the team’s video, noting that other high-speed pilots have hit the same wall. The lost drone was written off over a wide search area. The landowner from the test site found what was left of it that night and called to say so.

The 685 km/h average sits outside Guinness rules

Guinness recognition requires two runs in opposite directions, averaged over a fixed measurement zone, with accredited witnesses and certified timing. This attempt had none of that. The 685 km/h figure is the team’s own average of its two top speeds, 730 and 640 divided by two, rather than a certified average across the 100-meter zone Guinness uses.

The team expects the run to be dismissed on a second count: the surviving drone landed on a near-empty battery rather than gliding in clean, and Biggs acknowledged critics would call that disqualifying, while arguing the aircraft came down in one piece. The 700 km/h target the team set for itself fell short on the average. By their own math, clearing 700 would have needed about 670 km/h on the upwind leg, and the wind held that run to 640. For now the official record stays with the Peregreen V4 built by Luke Maximo Bell and his father Mike, set in Cape Town in December 2025.

DroneXL’s Take

The custom carbon fibre props Biggs talked about in our March interview just showed up, and the peak speed jumped from 690 to 730 km/h. That part tracks. The unlock he named is real, and the airframe took it.

What hasn’t changed is the witness problem. In March I wrote that I expected an official Biggs attempt, with accredited observers, before June 2026. It is late May. This run, like the January one, went up without them. The speed question is effectively settled: Biggs has now cleared the official record number twice on his own telemetry. The thing standing between the Blackbird and the record book is logistics, getting certified observers and timing gear out to a remote Australian paddock on a calm day. That is a scheduling problem, not an engineering one.

The 700 km/h barrier on a single pass is gone. He hit 730 downwind. A 700 km/h two-direction average is a different bar, and by the team’s own arithmetic it needed roughly 670 on the upwind leg that the wind capped at 640. Calmer air and a drone that survives the run would likely close that gap. Whether Biggs lines up both, plus accredited witnesses standing in the field, is the open question worth watching. Whether the drone can do it is not.

One detail I would flag for anyone treating this as a done deal: the team lost a drone to a video dropout they admit they cannot fully explain, and they ran the record pass on their last remaining airframe. At 400 amps and 80°C battery temperatures, there is almost no margin left. The Blackbird is fast enough. It is not yet repeatable enough to walk into a witnessed attempt with spares in the case. That is the next problem to solve, and it matters more than the next 15 km/h.

Source: Drone Pro Hub (YouTube).

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.