Omen

“So this has been one of Palmer’s personal projects that we’ve been working on for quite a while, which is why we’ve stayed on it,” Dr. Shane Arnott, a Senior Vice President at Anduril who is currently the lead for what the company calls Manuever Dominance, told TWZ and other outlets during a press briefing yesterday. “So having the support of the founder goes a long way.”

In terms of its core design, Omen is a twin-rotor aircraft that takes off from and lands in a tail-sitting position, where it stands about 10 feet tall. It features relatively long and slender main wings, mounted toward the rear of the fuselage, together with canard foreplanes on either side of the nose. It also has a twin-boom tail configuration extending from the rear of the nacelles on each wing.

Beyond it being hybrid-electric in nature, Anduril has disclosed few details so far about Omen’s propulsion system.

“Candidly, we hit a wall when it came to propulsion technologies,” Arnott noted when talking about prior flight testing of subscale demonstrators. “So we’ve been working very diligently over the last five years, looking at new technologies, and in particular series hybrid tech, and working with the likes of Archer.”

Archer Aviation is an independent company focused, at least publicly, on the development of crewed hybrid-electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Anduril and Archater announced a partnership in December 2024 to work on a design aimed primarily at meeting the requirements of an unspecified U.S. military program. Arnott said Omen is separate from this effort, but some of the technology is being leveraged, especially when it comes to motors. He also described the core elements of the hybrid-electric technologies used in Omen as “internal Anduril magic.”

“We’ve now flown a propulsion demonstrator, which we’re now going to evolve into a new product with EDGE,” he added.

Anduril has yet to provide any hard dimensional or weight specifications for Omen, but says it is in the Group 3 category. The U.S. military defines Group 3 drones as ones that weigh between 55 and 1,320 pounds, can fly up to altitudes between 3,500 and 18,000 feet, and have top speeds of between 100 and 250 knots.

“It is a heavy Group 3, so we are at the upper end of Group 3,” Arnott said. “As many of you would know, Group 3 tends to be dominated by folks who are at the lower weight category … and it’s been a bit of a race to the bottom, to be honest, in that space.”

Arnott further described Omen’s payload capacity as being “three to five times” what most Group 3 drones currently on the market can carry, which he also said was generally in the 25-to-50-pound range.

Omen’s exact range and other performance characteristics are also unknown. Arnott said range-wise, the drone would be able to fly three to four times as far as typical Group 3 designs on the market now.

“What I will say is it is Indo-Pacific relevant ranges,” he added. “We are specifically designing for that particular customer in mind, … where there’s a lot of water, not too much land, [the] need the ability to self-deploy, etc.”

As is typically the case with members of Anduril’s uncrewed systems portfolios, Omen will make use of the company’s Lattice proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package. With Lattice, “multiple [Omen] aircraft will coordinate flight paths, share sensor data, and adapt behavior in real time, enabling new missions that bring the capabilities of much larger systems to smaller, more expeditionary units,” according to the company’s press release.

“One of the reasons why people keep chasing this particular capability is there’s the promise of being truly runway independent and expeditionary in your capability,” Arnott explained. “So, as we know, in the future fight, and also in disaster response, there’s not going to be a lot of runways available. So, being able to take off and recover anywhere, but still have the performance of an aircraft, is very desirable.”

Arnott said that Omen is also designed to have a “low logistics” footprint to further enable its use during expeditionary and distributed operations from far-flung operating locations. “Its lightweight, foldable frame will allow a two-person team to transport, assemble, and
launch the aircraft in minutes without specialized infrastructure,” Anduril’s press release adds.

Arnott made clear that Anduril sees Omen’s particular combination of features and capabilities, together with its underlying highly modular open-architecture design, as giving it outsized potential compared to even significantly larger crewed aircraft.

“So we can start doing things that would normally take a Group 5 [drone] or potentially a small business jet, because we can carry multiple sensors, be it SAR [synthetic aperture radar], EO [electro-optical, various electronic sensors,” he said. “So we can go after missions like maritime patrol, etc.”

Group 5 is the highest tier the U.S. military has for drones, covering designs with maximum takeoff weights over 1,320 pounds and typical operating altitudes above 18,000 feet, and that can fly at any speed. The parameters for Group 4 are identical, except when it comes to operating altitude, which is set at no more than 18,000 feet.

Multi-payload capability, which is not found on drones at the lower end of the Group 3 category, “makes for a very interesting set of missions,” according to Arnott. “When you’ve got multi-sensors to do correlation, etc, using technologies like Lattice. We can then specifically get into things that would normally be small business jets, be it special mission aircraft, be it maritime patrol. So we’re really looking after, going after that particular space.

Beyond various types of sensors, potential payloads might also include munitions. Anduril’s press release mentions other military mission sets ranging from “logistics resupply to air defense sensing and communications relay,” as well as non-military ones, particularly in the context of a disaster relief scenario.

“So, similar to the problem that we see in the future fight, where runways are likely to be cut or denied, similar kind of problems exist when you have a disaster, whether it’s a tsunami, or a cyclone, or wildfire, or anything like that,” Arnott explained. “Your normal infrastructure tends to be lost as a result of this.”

Omen could help with search and rescue or the delivery of aid, as well act “as a cell phone tower that can fly. So Omen, being a series hybrid, actually has a lot of excess power, so it’s kind of a technical item that can support electronic payloads that need a lot of power to drive them,” he continued. “You can get that in the air, and people’s mobile phones can still work, communications can be restored, and therefore, response can be coordinated. So we are actually very optimistic for capabilities like that for this system.”

It is worth noting here that this vignette speaks to the potential value of Omen as a signal relay node in a military context, as well.

“The vehicle system itself is a dual-use system, so there’s nothing inherently military about it,” Arnott added, highlighting how that will help with sales to non-military customers. It is “the missionization of it will be subject to the standard export controls of the United States government and also the UAE.”

Omen design is also intended to allow military or non-military personnel to readily “snap in, snap off various payloads,” even under field conditions, according to Arnott.

More broadly speaking, “we have very specifically gone at the upper edge of Group 3 … where we believe that there’s a bit of a blank spot in the market,” he said. At the same time, “we believe we’re onto something, and we believe this is less about disrupting Group 3. This is more about disrupting current maritime patrol, special mission aircraft, much bigger systems. That’s what we’re going after here.”

On top of that, “there’s a lot of wreckage on the road to the creation of tail sitters,” Arnott asserted. “A lot of people have had a shot at doing that. Not a ton of people have succeeded in doing it.”

There is at least one successful tail-sitting vertical takeoff and landing drone on the market now, Shield AI’s V-BAT. The V-BAT, which is now combat-proven thanks to its service in Ukraine, is also a Group 3 design.

What sets Omen apart is “really the propulsion tech. So, being able to get it off the ground and then still be able to get into a regime that is efficient for forward flight has been the problem,” according to Arnott. “Typically, you’ll have to pick where your engine is happy from an energy output standpoint. So, helicopters optimize for that vertical flight, which is kind of why they’re horrible at forward flight or very limited in their capability.”

“So having that magical kind of in between [capability], and the hybrid-electric kind of helps there,” he continued. “So you’ve got the ability of having the traditional power plant, as well as then the electric, the battery system, to deal with the lift part of it, and to then get you into cruise.”

“You are seeing others get into this space and start working it. You know, one way to solve it is kind of like what the Shield [AI] guys have done with X-BAT, or they’re planning to do with it, which is a ridiculous amount of thrust, we’ll see there, with the F-15/F-16 engines,” he also noted. “In the Group 3 category, it’s much more tricky [sic] to kind of get that balance right, which is kind of why we’ve been chasing this for better part of five, five to six years.”

X-BAT, which is a much larger design overall and intended for very different mission sets, is not without risks. Shield AI has significant hurdles to clear to make that drone a reality, something it has itself acknowledged. At the same time, Anduril has also laid out extremely ambitious goals for Omen and the market space that it expects the drone to be a contender in.

Sikorsky also recently unveiled a new family of tail-sitting twin-rotor vertical takeoff and landing drones called Nomad, the smallest of which is also in the Group 3 category, as seen in the composite rendering below. The tactical vertical takeoff and landing drone space is heating up, in general, with a growing number of tilt-rotors and other types of designs, as well.

“This is an architecture that we’ve been we’ve been working on for some time. I won’t say that we’re announcing a family, but it’s certainly a it is a scalable architecture,” Arnott said in response to a direct question from this author about whether there might be plans already for further scaled-up derivatives of Omen. “Today we’re we’re announcing this one configuration.”

In Anduril’s case, Arnott pointed to the order from the UAE-based customer as evidence that Omen “isn’t just another prototype, as the vast majority of the industry has done in this particular class. We will actually create a full production system, we will actually take this into service, and we’ll be fully missionized.”

That being said, Anduril has not disclosed a firm timeline for the first flight of a production representative Omen or a projected unit price. The company has described the current joint development effort with EDGE as being on a three-year timeline that extends into 2028, after which series production of fully missionized examples is expected to begin.

“When it’s ready, it’ll be ready,” according to Arnott.

Anduril’s press notes that the company has already invested $850 million in relevant “mission autonomy technology and Group 3 VTOL development,” and that EDGE is now providing another $200 million to continue work on the drone. EDGE has already been investing heavily in its own expanding portfolio of uncrewed aircraft designs. The company is also involved in the development and production of a wide range of other weapon systems, as well as other defense and security products.

The EDGE-Anduril Production Alliance is also expected to extend well beyond Omen to cooperation on other systems. The joint venture also notably represents Anduril’s first true joint venture outside of the United States. The company has a presence in the United Kingdom and Australia, but those are wholly-owned subsidiaries. Anduril is separately building a 50,000-square-foot engineering center in the UAE that it will manage by itself.

Beyond the order from the customer in the UAE, “there has [sic] been U.S. government customers tracking [Omen] … certainly there have been a number of close customers that we’ve kept in the loop,” Arnott noted. “We tend to keep it reasonably tight when we’re doing development, and then go more broadly once we’re confident and have conviction that we have [the] line of sight to a product that we do now.”

Anduril has already promised more information about Omen to come at the Dubai Airshow next week, and we will follow up when we learn more.

Contact the author: [email protected]