An FPV-drone YouTuber who entered as a team and filmed the whole build. The most-watched account of the challenge by anyone, DARPA included, and the only one that also walks the hangars on site.

About the team

• Fairfax, Virginia
• FOUNDED BY AN FPV DRONE YOUTUBER
• BUILDS, TESTS, AND REVIEWS EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT
• Its info panel on air — Tue Aug 4, 11:49 AM ET
• Hoarder SamYouTube

• I'm building a drone for the DARPA lift challengeJuly 2026The build, start to finish. 444k views.
• I'm still building a drone for the DARPA Lift Challenge28 July 2026177k views.
• An inside look at the DARPA Lift Challenge5 August 2026Inside the hangars at Dayton, past other teams' aircraft.
• Drone crash at the DARPA Lift Challenge5 August 2026
• Drone on fire at the DARPA Lift Challenge5 August 2026

A solo entry by an Army veteran and graduate student who published the build as a five-part series, from first sketch to prototype flights.

About the team

• DigiFred LabsYouTube

• Meet Vitruvius, a DARPA Lift Challenge contenderFebruary 2026The reveal.
• I'm Building a Heavy-Lift Drone for the DARPA Lift Challenge… from ScratchMarch 2026
• Building Vitruvius: Engineering | PCB Fabrication Pro TipsMarch 2026
• Building Vitruvius: Prototype Test FlightsMarch 2026
• DARPA Lift Challenge: One Month Until FlightJuly 2026

Entered twice, as Alpha and Omega. Posting from Dayton as it happened — including a fall from 100 feet and a small fire, then flying again the next day.

About the team

• Burl AerospaceYouTube

• The Coolest Drones I've seen at the DARPA Lift Challenge — at 0:00Sam Wechsler  ·  August 2026  ·  a walk round the pitsA team member walks Sam through the crash that killed their carbon-fibre aircraft — a pod died, the power board shorted, it fell about 100 feet and burned — and how they rebuilt it with simpler directly-wired pods and flew a faster yaw run the next day.
• Birra1A: Free Flight Yaw Test #26 August 2026Flying again the day after the fall and the fire.
• Birra1: Free Flight Slow Yaw Test5 August 2026The 8-metre-span aircraft on site.
• Ultra Heavy Lift Animation5 August 2026

The solo entry of a freelance aerospace engineer whose earlier work includes Maryland's human-powered helicopter and Makani's airborne wind turbine.

About the team

• Menlo Park, Calif
• Its lower-third on air — Mon Aug 3, 12:08 PM ETup 2× over the week
• SkyweaverYouTube

• Skyweaver: DARPA Lift Challenge4 August 2026The only video on the channel.

A family business building rotor systems for extreme weights on electric propulsion.

About the team

• San Bernardino, Calif
• Its lower-third on air — Tue Aug 4, 11:18 AM ETup 2× over the week
• Sherman AeronauticsYouTube

• RotorWings Do a Lap (DARPA Lift Challenge)2 August 2026Their aircraft carrying 55 lb round a lap.

A one-person composites shop run by an engineer who has built structures for space vehicles.

About the team

• Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
• ONE-PERSON CARBON-FIBER ENGINEERING COMPANY
• OWNER HAS WORKED ON MULTIPLE SPACE PROGRAMS
• Its info panel on air — Tue Aug 4, 11:53 AM ET
• ProtoCarbonYouTube

• The Coolest Drones I've seen at the DARPA Lift Challenge — at 4:52Sam Wechsler  ·  August 2026  ·  a walk round the pitsA one-man composites shop shows an all-carbon helicopter with VR-12 blades on a teetering head, 500-series helicopter blades on the tail rotor, a carbon tail driveshaft and a two-stage Gates belt reduction with 3D-printed pulleys.
• ProtoCarbon Vehicle Tethered Test For DARPA Lift ChallengeJuly 2026

A hybrid parafoil-prop aircraft from a nonprofit that delivers cargo to remote solar minigrids in Africa.

About the team

• Matthew OroszYouTube

• SAMARA Update — DARPA Lift CompetitionJune 2026

Eight researchers at Florida Atlantic's Center for Connected Autonomy and AI, building an autonomous tilt-rotor.

About the team

• Boca Raton, Fla
• Its lower-third on air — Mon Aug 3, 11:04 AM ETup 5× over the week
• FAU EngineeringYouTube

• FAU CA-AI DARPA Lift ChallengeJuly 2026

Led by Sam Wechsler, flying a coaxial helicopter drone with carbon-fibre-over-wood rotors. He also walked the pits with a camera on the closing days, which is the only footage that shows most of these aircraft up close.

About the team

• Delmar, New York
• COAXIAL HELICOPTER DRONE WITH CUSTOM ROTORS
• LONG-TERM GOAL: DRONE MEDEVAC
• Its info panel on air — Tue Aug 4, 11:45 AM ET
• Sam WechslerYouTube

• The Coolest Drones I've seen at the DARPA Lift ChallengeAugust 2026Aircraft by aircraft round the pits, interviewing the teams beside them. Transcribed here, so each team's visit is linked from its own row.

  Stop by stop — 12 aircraft, 10 of them named

  • 0:00Burl AerospaceA team member walks Sam through the crash that killed their carbon-fibre aircraft — a pod died, the power board shorted, it fell about 100 feet and burned — and how they rebuilt it with simpler directly-wired pods and flew a faster yaw run the next day.
  • 2:43team not identifiedA builder named Tristan shows a rotorcraft made of two tethered airplanes that circle a common centre like a giant helicopter rotor, steered by a software swashplate he wrote on top of PX4.
  • 4:52ProtoCarbonA one-man composites shop shows an all-carbon helicopter with VR-12 blades on a teetering head, 500-series helicopter blades on the tail rotor, a carbon tail driveshaft and a two-stage Gates belt reduction with 3D-printed pulleys.
  • 7:08Red Snowname on screen at 7:06Sam films, without an interview, a tilt-wing aircraft whose whole inner wing section and its four powerplants pivot for vertical takeoff; the team is from Washington state and is sitting this window out because the plastic wing covering warped.
  • 7:51Stanford OHS UAVsHigh-school students explain their quadrotor's multi-element slotted airfoils — each slat a different section at a different angle, after Handley Page — which they say keeps the stack from stalling at high angle of attack; they have a 2 p.m. flight window.
  • 9:35APTOS AEROA single builder shows a very slow-turning rotorcraft (60-100 rpm light, up to 300 loaded) built from a carbon tube spine with stacked one-inch foam sections under heat-shrink, custom pulleys, and control surfaces driven electrically with no swashplate, hinges or tail rotor.
  • 11:18team not identifiedA team shows a half-scale test article next to their full-size aircraft and explains that control, not structure, has been their problem: they balance on two tilting/twisting units, and their one flight ended when a belt slipped and burned through a gear.
  • 12:46HappyHellfire Engineeringname on screen at 12:45Builders explain their quadcopter with a hang-glider wing slung in the middle: it takes off as a quad and tilts to 50-60 degrees so the wing carries the load, cutting draw from about 250 amps to under 50, at the cost of being hard to control in wind.
  • 15:10Driftless Roboticsname on screen at 15:27A brief stop at a very large aircraft built by former teammates from a robotics team — no interview and no name spoken, but the pit banner behind it reads DRIFTLESS ROBOTICS.
  • 15:35Snyder LaPennaname on screen at 15:36Composite builders show a crashed tip-jet rotorcraft whose turbine exhaust is split by a 3D-printed stainless manifold, ceramic-insulated and ducted out through the blades to nozzles at the tips.
  • 17:04Cactus Labsname on screen at 17:03Another turbine rotorcraft team shows blades controlled by servo flaps through a swashplate and a servo-driven tail rotor for downwash vectoring; they have not flown yet because the frame goes into resonance as the rotor spools up.
  • 19:25Mammoth DronesSam closes on his own aircraft, says he has not got it off the ground yet, credits the difficulty to everyone who has done this before, and invites teams he missed to drop links in the comments.

These say on camera that they are competing, but the name they use does not appear on DARPA's roster, so they cannot be tied to an entry with any confidence.

• Building THE Drone for the DARPA Heavy Lift ChallengeCharles Yang  ·  4 August 2026A 55 lb tilt-rotor called BUS, lifting 135 lb.
• DARPA Lift Challenge 2026. SHRIKE Heavy Lift Drone.Drone Power Concepts  ·  July 2026Carbon fibre and 3D print, signing off “see you in Dayton”.
• I too am building a drone for the #darpaliftchallengePeter Sripol  ·  2 August 2026A large RC channel based in Dayton. The roster has a team called APRAD described as “a bunch of YouTubers and engineers” in Dayton, which fits, but nothing confirms it.

• DARPA offers $6.5MM for "impossible" heavy-lift challengeJoshua Bardwell  ·  July 2026Made with DARPA, on the biggest FPV channel there is.
• Why is DARPA Opening This $6.5M Drone Challenge to the Public?Civil Defense Engineer  ·  December 2025The largest outside analysis of why the rules are set the way they are.