Meituan M-Drone 4L Winch

Announced on 21 May 2026, the M-Drone 4L Winch is the long-range, cable-lowering member of Meituan's fourth-generation fleet, and it exists to solve an infrastructure problem rather than an aviation one. Meituan's earlier machines fly fixed corridors that must end at a prepared pick-up cabinet; every new destination therefore means negotiating floor space, power and permission on the ground. This aircraft hovers instead, pays out a cable and puts the package down at the target point, so a delivery address no longer has to be built. That change also raises the ceiling on what the drone is worth carrying. Payload rises to 4.5 kg — nearly double the standard M-Drone 4 — and range to 20 km fully loaded, enough to cover city blocks and the near suburbs from one base rather than a 5 km circle. Meituan also states that flight noise has been reduced specifically to make night deliveries usable, which is the practical limit on scaling a service that flies over housing. Meituan quotes a wide environmental envelope: heavy rain, moderate snow, Beaufort-6 wind and temperatures from -20 °C to 50 °C, which the company translates into coverage of more than 97% of Chinese urban scenarios. Safety is layered rather than single-point: redundant systems in normal running, a controlled emergency landing, and a parachute as the last resort. The aircraft was announced together with the rest of the system it needs — the M-Port 3 transfer station, a 1.4 m2 cabinet about the size of a phone box with a robotic arm that loads cargo without staff, and the M-DaaS 3 control system, which Meituan says classifies an anomaly within 100 milliseconds and schedules beyond visual line of sight across mixed aircraft types at high density. By the launch date the wider Meituan drone fleet had completed more than 900,000 real customer orders.

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