{"id":13872,"date":"2026-07-20T12:12:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/anduril-pitches-a-robot-wingman-for-us-army-helicopters\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T12:12:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:12:44","slug":"anduril-pitches-a-robot-wingman-for-us-army-helicopters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/anduril-pitches-a-robot-wingman-for-us-army-helicopters\/","title":{"rendered":"Anduril pitches a robot wingman for US Army helicopters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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LONDON\u2014One month after winning the U.S. Air Force\u2019s drone wingman contract, Anduril announced plans to make an autonomous attack tiltrotor that the company hopes\u00a0 the U.S. Army will pair with its helicopters for future missions.<\/p>\n

Nicknamed Thunder, the vertical-takeoff-and-landing rotorcraft is to be autonomous, heavily armed, hybrid-electric powered, and roughly group five-sized. It\u2019s being designed to \u201cbe packed into a standard shipping container\u201d for easy transport, Anduril said in a press release. It is being developed with Archer Aviation, another California-based firm, with first flight envisioned for next year.<\/p>\n

Company officials say multiple uncrewed tiltrotors could accompany each crewed helicopter on a mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy teaming three Thunder aircraft with each Apache, for example, a Combat Aviation Brigade will achieve a three times increase in available munitions without placing additional pilots in harm\u2019s way, all at a fraction of the cost of a similarly-sized formation of exclusively crewed aircraft,\u201d Anduril said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In June, the Air Force announced that it would take the California-based firm’s drone wingman prototype into production. The new tiltrotor concept is following some of those same principles, such as having a commercial product that can be affordably and efficiently produced, company officials told reporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s going to be an absolute, you know, a fraction of the cost of something like a Cheyenne or something like an Apache,\u201d said Chris Brose, Anduril\u2019s president and chief strategy officer. \u201cIt is going to be a system that you obviously want to get back when you launch it, but you can afford to lose it if you have to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Pentagon, and the Army in particular, have never been more open to these kinds of new ideas and sort of collaborations than ever before,\u201d Brose said.<\/p>\n

Chris Arnott, the company\u2019s senior vice president of maneuver dominance, told reporters Thunder is being designed to hold a wide range of armament: up to ten air-to-ground missiles, such as Hellfires; 16 launched effects;\u2019 or 76 70mm rockets, plus 12 counter-UAS effectors in the nose of the rotorcraft, Anduril\u2019s press release said.<\/p>\n

Arnott said they\u2019ve been working on Thunder for around two to three years. He said that if it sells, Anduril could start building it by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepending on kind of how quick the demand kind of goes from there, is then when we hit production, etc., but we’re talking about being at rate production in the 2030-29 timeframe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While the company officials repeatedly mentioned the Army during a roundtable with reporters, the decision to announce and debut a model at Farnborough means they want the attention of international customers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a global air show. You know, we’ll have the eyes of pretty much everybody that we’re interested in discussing this system with,\u201d Brose said. \u201cI think we look forward to discussing it, obviously in the U.K. with the U,K., but then obviously also with the many European partners that are going to show up to Farmborough and, obviously, the US Army as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other companies have similar ideas.<\/p>\n

Last year, at the Association of the U.S. Army\u2019s conference in Washington, D.C., Boeing officials unveiled their own tiltrotor drone wingman concept to support the service\u2019s helicopter fleet. The company used lessons from its MQ-28 Ghost Bat aircraft to design the concept.\n\n<\/svg><\/p>\n<\/div>\n