EHang Flies 22,580 Drones, Breaks Guinness Record

EHang shattered the Guinness World Record for drone light shows on February 3, 2026, flying 22,580 drones simultaneously from a single computer over Hefei’s Luogang Park. Of the swarm loaded for launch, only about 25 drones failed to lift off.

The performance aired during China Media Group’s Spring Festival Gala on February 16, beaming the achievement into roughly a billion living rooms across China. It’s the most ambitious drone choreography ever staged from a single controller.

The Hefei Show

Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. ran the show at Luogang Park in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province.

Guinness World Records states the achievement cleanly: “The record for the most multirotors/drones airborne simultaneously from a single computer (outdoors) is 22,580, achieved by Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. in Hefei, Anhui, China, on 3 February 2026.” That single-computer constraint is the heart of the record, and it separates this category from the larger total drone counts being set elsewhere in China.

The previous holder was a show in Liuyang, where 15,947 drones flew on October 17, 2025. Before Liuyang, Shenzhen DAMODA Intelligent Control Technology held the record at 10,197 drones in September 2024. EHang added 6,633 drones to the ceiling in roughly four months, a jump of about 42 percent over Liuyang’s mark.

Alongside the main swarm, 15 EH216-S pilotless eVTOL aircraft flew an “Eye of Anhui” formation, a glowing circle visible against the broader display.

The EH216-S is the same airframe that holds China’s first type, production, and standard airworthiness certificates for a pilotless eVTOL carrying passengers, and it now operates commercially under China’s first Air Operator Certificates for human-carrying eVTOL services.

Tucking that aircraft into the choreography turned the show into a soft demonstration of EHang’s full product line.

The Ghostdrone 4.0 Behind the Record

As BGR reported, EHang built every drone in the swarm in-house. The model is the Ghostdrone 4.0, also called GD4.0. Each unit can stay aloft for up to 45 minutes, holds centimeter-level positioning accuracy, and supports box-launch deployment for fast setup at outdoor venues.

The single-computer detail is what separates this record from the bigger swarm numbers showing up in Chinese headlines this year. Most large drone shows use distributed control systems, where several computers coordinate sub-flocks across the sky.

EHang ran the entire 22,580-drone choreography from one machine. Can you imagine what would happened if during the mission this computer decided to update Windows?

That specific setup requires its own fleet management software, navigation stack, and inter-drone communication layer, all developed internally by EHang. The company says the precision and coordination at this scale were not possible with older swarm software, and the engineering team is already targeting larger productions.

Bigger Swarms in Different Categories

Other Chinese operators are pushing total drone counts much higher, but in different Guinness categories. In Dujiangyan, Sichuan, tech firm Yufengzhe Technology flew 33,615 drones in a single show, setting three separate records: highest drone count in a single performance, most drones used to form a single image, and largest mid-air LED mesh screen at 148,561 square meters (about 36.7 acres).

Those Dujiangyan records used distributed control, not a single computer. That’s why EHang’s record stands intact. Guinness keeps the categories separated for exactly this reason: total drone count and single-controller scale are different engineering problems, and the gap between them is real.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant about this record. It’s not the headline number. China can stack drones almost arbitrarily high if the only constraint is total count across multiple controllers. What EHang did is harder than that.

Coordinating 22,580 airframes from one computer means the bottleneck is now software architecture, not airframe count. Every drone has to receive position updates fast enough to hold formation, the network has to scale without packet loss, and the central controller has to model the full swarm in real time. The complexity climbs exponentially with drone count, not linearly.

EHang founder Huazhi Hu said over 20,000 drones is not the upper limit and that even larger shows are coming. I believe him, and that’s the part worth tracking. The dual-use implications of single-computer swarms above 30,000 units are real, and EHang is the company closest to that ceiling right now.

The light show is the consumer-facing demo. The underlying control stack is the actual product.

Photo credit: Guinness World Records