Anduril Unveils Thunder, an Autonomous Tiltrotor Built to Fly Wing for the Apache
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The attack tiltrotor Anduril unveiled at the Farnborough International Airshow on July 20 carries no pilot and, so far, no publicly identified U.S. Army award. Thunder is a Group 5 autonomous rotorcraft pitched as an armed wingman for two-ship formations of AH-64 Apaches or other armed-reconnaissance aircraft, as well as the MV-75, the Army's future FLRAA tiltrotor. In the company's concept, each two-ship formation could command three to six Thunders from displays already in the cockpit. The airframe on the show floor is a full-scale mockup. It has not flown. Anduril claims Thunder will match the MV-75 for speed and range while carrying an Apache-class weapons load, low and fast, nap-of-the-earth. Shane Arnott, the Anduril senior vice president who presented the aircraft, kept the mission statement short: "Thunder is very much an attack aircraft, so it is designed for very high performance, [and] low-level [flight]." Every performance figure attached to Thunder is the manufacturer's claim about an aircraft that does not exist yet. No independent flight-performance data is yet available because Thunder has not flown. Chris Brose, Anduril's president and chief strategy officer, tied the design to the war every rotary-wing planner is reading: "Many of the things that we've designed and engineered into Thunder are really based on the lessons that the United States and our...
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