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FARNBOROUGH — A year and a half after Anduril Industries and Archer Aviation announced they were teaming up to develop a next-generation hybrid-electric aircraft for defense applications, they revealed that aircraft at the 2026 Farnborough International Airshow as “Thunder,” an autonomous tiltrotor designed to work collaboratively with crewed attack and assault aircraft.
Thunder combines Anduril’s mission systems and autonomy with a hybrid-electric powertrain developed by Archer. It also features Optimum Speed Tiltrotor (OSTR) technology from Karem Aircraft and its failed commercial air taxi spin-off, Overair, whose patent portfolio Archer acquired last year.
Although the companies have not yet shared detailed specifications for the aircraft, a full-scale model on private display at Farnborough indicates that it will be comparable in size to Archer’s fully electric Midnight electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, albeit with a very different configuration aimed at maximizing hover performance and range.
“The parameters broadly that we shaped this thing around is to have similar payload to the Apache, but to have the legs and the speed of a Cheyenne II,” Anduril senior vice president of programs and engineering Shane Arnott told reporters at Farnborough, referring to the Bell MV-75 tiltrotor that was chosen as the U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft.
Anduril was down-selected earlier this year for the British Army’s Project NYX — which seeks to develop loyal wingman drones for Apache helicopters — and Thunder is a direct response to the evolving threat landscape that derailed the U.S. Army’s Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program in early 2024. It also confirms Archer’s shift in strategy away from being a pure-play air taxi developer, with the company also planning to develop a commercial variant of the aircraft, called Halo.
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