DARPA Pays Half As A Conventional Helicopter Wins The Lift Challenge At 3.84:1 — DroneXL Skip to content<br>DEALS

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Technology DARPA Pays Half As A Conventional Helicopter Wins The Lift Challenge At 3.84:1<br>Haye Kesteloo · Editor-in-Chief August 10, 2026 · 13:05 ET 6 min read<br>DroneXL may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Team AVIDrone won the DARPA Lift Challenge with the Katana helicopter drone. Photo credit: DefPost / X

Avidrone Inc. won the DARPA Lift Challenge on Sunday with the Katana, a conventional single-main-rotor helicopter that weighed 13.3 kg (29.3 pounds) and hauled 51 kg (112.4 pounds) of cast iron around the course at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. That is a 3.84:1 payload-to-weight ratio, the best completed run of the week and a number no shipping heavy-lift drone gets anywhere near. It is also short of 4:1, which means the prize rule DroneXL flagged before the first weigh-in did exactly what it said it would: every podium check got cut in half.

Avidrone collected $1.25 million instead of the advertised $2.5 million. MTech Operations LLC took second at 3.64:1 for $750,000, and Xtreme Aerial Concepts finished third at 3.45:1 for $500,000. Nobody reached the 4:1 target DARPA set when it launched the $6.5 million competition last November, and DARPA’s recap counted 61 teams flying across seven days, out of the 124 it invited.

Avidrone Wins With The Most Conventional Layout In Rotorcraft

The winning aircraft was the least exotic machine in Dayton: a slender single-main-rotor helicopter with a tail boom, the configuration that has defined production helicopters since the 1940s, and it outscored a field of multirotors and experimental layouts designed specifically for the payload-to-weight metric. DARPA’s field roster lists the team as an academia entry out of Columbia, Maryland, and the Katana finished its winning run in 19 minutes and 17 seconds against the 30-minute limit, per figures from the live broadcast.

A component list published by DefPost points at battery-electric propulsion: battery modules from Titan Batteries and motors with speed controllers from Scorpion Power System, alongside carbon fiber rotor blades from Falcon Propeller and GNSS antennas from Calian, all bolted to a platform the team developed in-house.

The podium photos carry the architecture story further. First and third place both flew single-rotor helicopters, with MTech’s multirotor between them.

The physics is unglamorous. When payload fraction is the only number on the scoreboard, a big rotor disk at low disc loading wastes less power per pound of lift than a cluster of small props, and the leaderboard rewarded exactly that.

DARPA framed the result as history. “7 days. 61 teams. Thousands of test flights. One new world record,” the agency wrote on X after Sunday’s awards ceremony, pointing readers to the official results. One number needs a footnote. Program manager Phillip “Donna” Smith described the best run as a 3.86 ratio in a post-event interview, while DARPA’s podium graphic certifies 3.84. The arithmetic explains the gap: round the weights to whole pounds and 112 over 29 gives you 3.86, while the decimal weights land at 3.84. The certified figure is 3.84:1.

For scale, today’s production platforms sit at or below 1:1, and DroneXL’s look at the DJI FlyCart 100 put that aircraft at roughly 0.53:1. A 24.9 kg (55 pound) competition machine carrying nearly four times its weight is a different universe of performance, even if it only has to survive 9.3 km (5 nautical miles) at a time.

The 4:1 Wall Held And Every Podium Check Got Cut In Half

DARPA’s published prize rules pay full awards only above a 4:1 payload-to-weight ratio, and since the best completed run finished at 3.84:1, first place paid $1.25 million instead of $2.5 million, second paid $750,000 instead of $1.5 million, and third paid $500,000 instead of $1 million. DroneXL reported that clause before the flying started, when almost nobody else had, and called it the most honest sentence in the rulebook.

The target was never soft. When DARPA announced the competition in November, 4:1 meant a 24.9 kg (55 pound) aircraft lifting 99.8 kg (220 pounds), an eightfold jump over the best hardware anyone ships. Teams had to move at least 49.9 kg (110 pounds) of DARPA-supplied barbell plates through a 9.3 km (5 nautical mile) circuit, dropping the iron after the first 7.4 km (4 nautical miles), all inside a 30-minute limit.

The teams that chased the full target found the ceiling. Four of them started runs configured at a 4.1:1 ratio or higher, Smith told Dayton 24/7 Now, and none of those runs finished. One aircraft made it three miles into the course before its batteries died. The awards broadcast described another team loading plates for a 6.11:1 attempt on the final day and wrecking its remaining aircraft chasing...