Anduril pitches a robot wingman for US Army helicopters

LONDON—One month after winning the U.S. Air Force’s drone wingman contract, Anduril announced plans to make an autonomous attack tiltrotor that the company hopes  the U.S. Army will pair with its helicopters for future missions.

Nicknamed Thunder, the vertical-takeoff-and-landing rotorcraft is to be autonomous, heavily armed, hybrid-electric powered, and roughly group five-sized. It’s being designed to “be packed into a standard shipping container” 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.

Company officials say multiple uncrewed tiltrotors could accompany each crewed helicopter on a mission.

“By 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’s way, all at a fraction of the cost of a similarly-sized formation of exclusively crewed aircraft,” Anduril said in a statement. 

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.

“It's going to be an absolute, you know, a fraction of the cost of something like a Cheyenne or something like an Apache,” said Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer. “It 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.”

“I 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,” Brose said.

Chris Arnott, the company’s 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;’ or 76 70mm rockets, plus 12 counter-UAS effectors in the nose of the rotorcraft, Anduril’s press release said.

Arnott said they’ve 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.

“Depending 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,” he said.

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.

“It'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,” Brose said. “I 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.”

Other companies have similar ideas.

Last year, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference in Washington, D.C., Boeing officials unveiled their own tiltrotor drone wingman concept to support the service’s helicopter fleet. The company used lessons from its MQ-28 Ghost Bat aircraft to design the concept.