In China's southwestern Yunnan province, six heavy-lift cargo drones flew in tight formation this month to hoist a 780‑kilogram power‑transmission tower section across a mountain gorge and set it down on the next tower site — a 760‑meter hop completed in roughly three minutes. The operation, carried out in early August at the Heping 500 kV substation and transmission project in Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, was reported by the industry outlet Nengyuanjie, citing Yunnan Power Grid, a subsidiary of state‑owned China Southern Power Grid.
The six drones, flown as a single coordinated swarm by a proprietary intelligent control center, lifted the component near Tower No. 137, ferried it over a ridge and gorge, and lowered it onto Tower No. 136 with centimeter‑level precision. A custom suspension rig distributed the load across the six airframes while real‑time positioning and multi‑drone coordination algorithms kept the payload steady despite mountain turbulence.
The flight marks the first operational use of “six‑drone joint lifting” in China’s power‑grid sector. The previous benchmark — a four‑drone formation tested on the China–Laos transmission corridor in Yunnan — handled components of 200‑600 kg. But the real breakthrough, engineers say, is logistical: more than 70 % of Yunnan’s high‑voltage corridors thread through steep slopes, gorges and dense forest where building access roads, deploying pack animals or stringing temporary cableways has long been the only way to move heavy steel.
By moving that logistics into the air, Yunnan Power Transmission & Transformation Engineering — the state‑grid contractor leading the project — says it has moved more than 15,000 tonnes of material by drone at grid‑construction sites since January 2026, the first time a single Chinese builder has topped 10,000 tonnes of drone‑lifted cargo in a year. The company says drone haulage boosts material‑delivery efficiency more than fivefold, cuts forest‑floor disturbance by over 90 % and eliminates the need for separate forest‑clearance permits.
Chinese engineers have effectively turned a swarm of heavy‑lift drones into a “flying crane” capable of ferrying nearly a tonne of steel to sites no wheeled crane can reach. Yunnan power engineers plan to scale the model further: in 2026 the province launched the country’s first dedicated drone‑application task force for grid construction, armed with centimeter‑grade 3D modeling, multi‑drone joint‑lift algorithms and intelligent aerial dispatch. The team already holds ten invention patents, three science‑progress awards and has co‑authored industry standards.
