Luke Maximo Bell Beats SiFly’s Guinness Drone Endurance Record By An Hour

Luke Maximo Bell flew a rebuilt quadcopter for 4 hours, 21 minutes and 39 seconds on a single battery charge, breaking the Guinness World Record for longest flight of a small electric multirotor drone. Independent witnesses observed the attempt on a farm outside Cape Town, South Africa. The result beat the previous certified mark of 3 hours and 11 minutes, set by SiFly‘s Q12 in July 2025, by more than an hour.

DroneXL first covered Bell’s endurance project in February 2026, when an earlier version of the same drone flew 3 hours, 31 minutes and 6 seconds without Guinness witnesses present. Bell spent the months between that flight and this one rebuilding the motor mounts, landing legs and flight controller, then running efficiency tests to find the drone’s most economical cruising speed before scheduling the certified attempt.

Bell is better known for the opposite end of the sport. His Peregreen series holds the Guinness record for fastest battery-powered quadcopter at 657.59 km/h (408 mph), set in January 2026. The endurance drone trades top speed for hours in the air, and it needed almost none of the same engineering.

Bell walks through the entire rebuild in a video posted to his YouTube channel, including the failed test flights, a mid-project flight controller swap, and the power logging that shaped his final flight plan.

Bell’s Redesigned Motor Mounts And Landing Gear Fix Version One’s Failures

Version one of Bell’s endurance drone suffered from two recurring mechanical failures: two-piece clamp-style motor mounts that added unnecessary weight, and 3D-printed landing legs that snapped on hard landings, both problems Bell set out to solve before returning to the record attempt.

The new motor mounts are single-piece, C-style clamps that squeeze directly onto the carbon fiber arm and bolt shut from below, replacing the split two-bolt design from version one. Bell said the redesign, suggested by viewers of his earlier video, cut roughly 6.5 grams per mount and about 26 grams total across the airframe. He also switched to continuous 1.8-meter carbon tube arms instead of joining two shorter sections at the midpoint, removing a structural weak point from the previous build.

For the landing legs, Bell used the dual-nozzle setup on his Bambu Lab H2C to interlock nylon and TPU filament into a single continuous print, embedding a flexible TPU joint into the middle of each leg. The joint lets the legs flex on a hard landing instead of shearing off. The rest of the airframe was split across the H2C and a second Bambu Lab H2D printer, with four AMS HT filament dryers, up from a single AMS 2 Pro, keeping each spool of nylon, PET and PA6-CF at its own drying temperature before printing. Bambu Lab sponsors Bell’s builds.

Cube Orange Plus Flight Controller Solves Bell’s Vibration Problem

A mid-project flight controller swap became the fix that made reliable autonomous flight possible, after Bell’s original flight controller proved unable to handle vibration generated by the drone’s 40-inch propellers during early GPS-hold testing.

Bell first suspected off-center propellers were the cause and 3D-printed nylon prop locators to correct any misalignment. Flight logs afterward showed the vibration, and the resulting IMU clipping, hadn’t gone away. Cube Pilot and Cape Town reseller Flying Robot supplied Bell with a Cube Orange Plus flight controller, which isolates its IMU in a dampened housing built to filter out exactly this kind of mechanical noise. Bell printed TPU mounts for the new unit and added a front spar to stiffen the arms. On the next test flight, the vibration and clipping issues disappeared, and GPS lock came in at 31 satellites almost immediately.

The drone runs ArduPilot, and Bell said adjusting a single notch filter value was enough to take it from unstable to flyable during pre-record tuning, a change he made mid-flight after connecting his laptop to the drone over his RadioMaster TX16S Mark III transmitter’s Wi-Fi link. It was his first flight on that radio.

Efficiency Tests Reveal A Slower-Than-Expected Cruising Speed

Power logging from a series of autonomous test loops showed the drone’s most efficient cruising speed sits around 5.5 meters per second, or about 12 mph (19 km/h), well below the pace Bell expected before he started measuring watts per loop.

He found the number by flying a programmed loop and changing the target speed on each pass, then comparing power draw per loop in the flight logs. The same data turned up a counter-intuitive pattern: the drone pulled more power on straight sections, averaging around 500 watts, than through the turns, which averaged closer to 450 watts. Bell hadn’t expected that, and he shortened his test loop mid-session to add more turns rather than fly a long racetrack shape.

For the record attempt, Bell added an external static RTK base station feeding a laptop for centimeter-level positioning, a setup he was using for the first time on this drone. He kept the same propulsion hardware from version one: T-Motor G40 propellers, 101 cm (40 inches) in diameter, paired with T-Motor MN105 motors at 90 KV.

Record Flight Clears The Guinness Mark By More Than An Hour

Flying a fresh battery in calm, windless conditions, Bell’s drone passed the previous Guinness mark of 3 hours and 11 minutes with independent witnesses on site, then kept flying for another hour and ten minutes before landing.

The power came from a newer battery pack Bell described as a semi-solid-state NMC design rated around 380 Wh/kg, up from the roughly 320 Wh/kg cells he flew on the previous attempt. Each pack holds about 87 Ah and weighs close to 5 kg, and Bell flew with a single pack rather than the two he ran in parallel on the earlier build. At the four-hour mark the drone still had 8% battery remaining. Bell said he pulled slightly over 100% of the pack’s rated capacity, which he attributed to an unusually low discharge rate of roughly 0.2C.

Bell called the drone’s GPS-hold position “almost on DJI level,” a comparison that lands differently given how much of the current U.S. endurance-drone conversation centers on non-Chinese platforms trying to compete with DJI on capability rather than compliance alone.

DroneXL’s Take

A hobbyist working alone on a farm just beat a Pentagon-vetted startup at its own record, using a laptop, an open-source flight stack, and off-the-shelf T-Motor hardware. That gap is the real story here, not the stopwatch number.

SiFly’s Q12 carries real institutional weight behind it. It’s one of only four non-Chinese drones cleared under the Department of War review process, and it holds an FCC Covered List exemption that took actual regulatory work to secure, the same pathway that keeps DJI and Autel locked out entirely. I’ve tracked how narrow that exemption pathway has been since DroneXL first reported on it in March, and it’s still just four drones, none of them Chinese, none of them cheap.

We’ve argued before that the DJI ban is bad for American drone operators, not because DJI is above criticism, but because a policy built around a company’s nationality instead of its demonstrated capability rewards paperwork over performance. Bell’s flight makes that case without mentioning DJI once. He built a drone in a home workshop that beats a Pentagon-cleared platform’s own endurance number, using parts anyone can order from T-Motor.

SiFly told press in August 2025 it was targeting four hours of flight time within a year of its own record. That anniversary is close. If a solo builder working off a farm in South Africa already cleared 4 hours and 21 minutes, SiFly’s excuse for not being there yet on its own certified hardware gets thinner. Watch whether the Q12 itself closes that gap before the one-year mark passes, or whether “four hours” quietly becomes a claim reserved for some future variant instead of the drone agencies are actually buying today.

For long time drone enthusiasts, remember the entirely different approach to achieve maximum drone flight time by Impossible US-1, that was essentially a flying battery pack?

Source: Luke Maximo Bell (YouTube).

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