Current Formula 1 cars go the fastest in Mexico City, which is the track at the highest elevation on the current calendar at 2200m[1]. The engine lacks power due to the thinner air, but the reduced drag more than makes up for it.

So the thrust produced by the propellers on the drone should be considerably lower at the same RPM, but they might spin a fair bit faster if the engine can handle it, which would compensate. I too would be interested to know how it works out in practice.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut%C3%B3dromo_Hermanos_Rodr%C...

That same trade off exists in an extreme form with the copter that flew on Mars!

Same volume of air pushed through the props, much lower density, and as you say, much higher RPM.

Quite a bit. It directly affects the amount of lift the props are able to produce. I would imagine they probably used props with more aggressive pitch than the stock ones.

The latter needs to be done for all drone builds. Its quite simple: turn on manual mode, turn on blackbox recording, record hover throttle setting; enter this value in the firmware via the Mavic/CLI interface. Pretty simple. Surprised they didn't use ArduPilot or PX4 (or even iNav) all three of which are just as good as DJI, completely open source and wildly easy to configure.

> Surprised they didn't use ArduPilot or PX4 (or even iNav) all three of which are just as good as DJI, completely open source and wildly easy to configure.

Smaller sponsoring budgets. Tweaking the drone a little is not the hard part, the hard part is walking up there and funding everything required to do so.

Quite a bit. The lift produced by an airfoil is proportional to air density. You can compensate by turning the rotors faster, increasing the size of the rotors, and/or increasing the angle of attack. None of these options are free and all of them have limits.