Anduril unveils armed drone gunship to fly with Apaches

Anduril has unveiled Thunder, a Group 5 autonomous attack rotorcraft designed to fly alongside crewed attack helicopters and multiply their combat power, with the tiltrotor able to carry ten Hellfire-class missiles or seventy-six 70mm rockets and a first flight planned for 2027, the company announced today.

The aircraft is Anduril’s answer to what it describes as a near-surface domain rendered one of the most lethal places on the battlefield, where attack helicopters and their crews are increasingly held at risk by loitering munitions, cheap air defences and persistent surveillance, conditions the company argues have brought manoeuvre to a stalemate and point to a future for attack aviation driven by autonomy.

Thunder is designed to multiply the combat power and increase the survivability of current and next-generation crewed attack and assault aircraft, according to the company, teaming with piloted platforms rather than replacing them.

Thunder is the defence-specific variant of a dual-use platform co-developed with Archer Aviation, the electric air taxi firm, bringing the commercial VTOL sector’s work on electric propulsion and rotor design into defence. A series hybrid-electric powertrain and tiltrotor configuration combine vertical take-off and landing with efficient wingborne cruise, while variable-speed rotors reduce power demand and fuel burn in cruise and minimise acoustic signature during low-altitude ingress, according to the company. Anduril says the combination gives Thunder the range for global self-deployment, or alternatively the aircraft can be packed into a standard shipping container for movement by air, road, rail or sea.

The payload arrangements are set out in unusual detail for a product launch. Modular internal bays in the main body and nose can host precision munitions, air-launched effects, rockets, electronic warfare payloads, counter-drone effectors and cargo, with the main module configurable with ten air-to-ground missiles such as Hellfire, JAGM or Anduril’s own Barracuda-100M, sixteen launched effects such as the Altius-600, or seventy-six 70mm rockets, plus a further twelve counter-UAS effectors in the nose. Teaming is where the company pitches the step-change, with three Thunders paired with each Apache giving a Combat Aviation Brigade a threefold increase in available munitions without placing additional pilots in harm’s way, at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent crewed formation, according to Anduril.

The aircraft runs the company’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy software, which handles formation behaviours, separation management and flight logic so that pilots direct the aircraft through intent rather than managing it with a stick and rudder, and an onboard perception stack combining passive and selective active sensors with computer vision, map data and edge computing is intended to keep Thunder navigating and tracking threats when GPS, visibility and communications are degraded or denied. The company says the software fuses sensor and mission data across a formation into a common tactical picture, so the aircraft enhances the platforms around it rather than merely flying its own mission.

Anduril says multiple test flights with full-scale surrogate aircraft have already been completed, with Thunder’s first flight planned for 2027, and the dual-use baseline shared with Archer’s commercial work is presented as the route to the economies of scale and supply chains needed for affordable, large-scale production.

The launch comes weeks after the company won the production contract for the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme with its FQ-44, extending the autonomous teaming concept from the fighter force to attack aviation, and comes as armies including Britain’s absorb the lessons of a battlefield in Ukraine where the space just above the ground has proven as dangerous as Anduril’s pitch describes.