Aerial robots like quadcopters, and their ability to move freely indoors and in confined spaces, gives them an advantage over other ground robots. Collaborating quadcopters form an aerial swarm, enabling various real-world industrial applications. One such application is the transport of payloads using a rope hanging from the quadcopters in the swarm. The current literature is mostly focused on the manipulation of flexible objects and the transport of a payload by two or more quadcopters, while the autonomous grasp of the payload is not fully addressed. Therefore, a path planning algorithm is introduced that is responsible to carry out the whole process of approaching, grasping, lifting and transporting the load by a swarm of two quadcopters. Its inputs are the initial positions of the quadcopters and the load, while utilizing the results from the rope modelling. This outputs the flight sequence for the swarm from takeoff to landing. The experiments are carried out by two rope-tethered Crazyflie 2.1 nano quadcopters and their control by a cascaded PID controller structure. The experimental results prove the system’s viability and set the foundations for further use in industrial and other applications with larger swarms.