Western Cape father-son duo Mike and Luke Bell are reaching new heights, literally.
The pair recently officially broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest drone.
The drone they built clocked a speed of 480.23 km/h.
“[This was] the most frustrating and difficult project that I have ever worked on,” says Luke.
It took the pair months to turn the concept into a prototype and, finally, to test it out.
The first few high-speed runs were touch and go.
“While we didn’t get any failures mid-air, the drone was not as fast as we’d hoped in these runs. It only reached about 400km/h, which is fast but not good enough.”
It was back to the drawing board for the pair to make aerodynamic improvements.
For their official world record attempt, they did two 100m speed runs in opposite directions to negate the wind.
“Three months of hard work, failure, and engineering would ultimately come down to a few seconds of high-speed flying,” says Luke.
Their effort was worth it as they officially broke the record for the fastest ground speed by a battery-powered remote-controlled (RC) quadcopter.
Luke documented the full process on his YouTube channel, watch it below:
