Sikorsky’s strange Nomad drone takes off on its tail and grew out of an unfinished X-plane

A drone that stands on its tail, spins up two rotors and then tips over into level flight looks like an idea from the 1950s. Sikorsky’s Nomad is doing it in 2026, and its design descends from a larger Sikorsky aircraft that was never finished.

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Nomad is one of four prototypes flying in a DARPA effort with a reported budget of $47 million, and the company is already pitching it to the military services, the Department of Homeland Security and forestry agencies.

A flying wing blown by its rotors

Aerospace America describes Nomad as a tail-sitting, rotor-blown flying wing. Airflow from two rotors adds lift over the wing, and the articulated rotors tilt for control in hover and change pitch in level flight. Power is hybrid: a piston engine, with an electric motor helping in hover, and in cruise the piston engine recharges the batteries. The article does not give dimensions, weight, top speed or measured endurance, and Sikorsky has not released them.

Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky’s parent, announced at Farnborough on July 22 that the aircraft, branded Nomad 100, had completed its initial ground and flight testing. Rich Benton, Sikorsky’s vice president and general manager, said Nomad would serve as part of a crewed-uncrewed team. A longer campaign at a government test site was to follow.

The unfinished X-plane behind it

The design traces back about 12 years to a tail-sitting flying wing that Sikorsky developed with Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works for DARPA’s VTOL X-plane program. That aircraft weighed 4,500 kilograms and used turbine-driven rotors. It was never completed after Sikorsky and DARPA funding ran out, so the lessons stayed on paper until EVADE gave the concept a smaller second life.

Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky’s VTOL technologies group, said the company reused that work because it already knew what the aircraft needed to look like and had done a lot of aerodynamics work. The hard moment is the transition from hover to forward flight, and he said the control system does a lot of work to keep the aircraft from simply falling out of the sky.

Moble Benedict, an aerospace engineering professor at Texas A&M University who is not affiliated with Sikorsky, explained to Aerospace America how rotor downwash helps with lift and control in hover and transition. That is the physical reason a wing sitting in the rotors’ wash can hold a vertical attitude at all.

EVADE and its fly-fix-fly rules

DARPA’s Early VTOL Aircraft Demonstration program, known as EVADE, was announced in June 2025 to show what vertical-takeoff drones under 330 pounds can do and to speed up flight testing. The program announcement named five performers: AeroVironment, Griffon Aerospace, Karem Aircraft, Method Aeronautics and Sikorsky. Four are flying prototypes now, and a fifth finished its flight tests in August, though the article does not say which company.

The targets are demanding for the size class. Aircraft up to 150 kilograms are meant to fly 12 hours over 23 kilometers while carrying a 27-kilogram payload. DARPA set no end date, so each design keeps flying until it meets the milestones, in a cycle the program calls fly, fix, fly. Flights happen at company sites, with demonstrations at the Naval Air Systems Command headquarters in Patuxent River, Maryland. DARPA also dropped a requirement to land on a ship in rough seas, and the teams showed that capability only in simulation.

Lt. Col. Phillip Smith, the EVADE program manager and a former Marine Corps Harrier pilot, described the testing cadence as a concept of flying as soon as a design is ready. The trade he keeps returning to is the difficulty of getting fixed-wing endurance and VTOL robustness in the same airframe, which he called the difficulty. He called the baseline design a pickup-truck version that customers can modify later, and in the 2025 announcement he called the aircraft flying trucks. The payoff for the services is payload. Army Capt. Christopher Chelson, an officer at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, who has no tie to DARPA or Sikorsky, told the magazine the immediate gain from combining the two flight modes is simply how much a drone can carry.

Software, payloads and what is still unproven

Trade coverage adds mission detail. Military and Aerospace Electronics reported that Nomad 100 is meant to fly from austere forward bases, ship decks and unimproved landing zones, carrying logistics loads, communications relays, synthetic aperture radar, intelligence sensors or weapons. Its mission software comes from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, and its open architecture works with the Army’s Universal UAS Controller and the Marine Corps’ MANGL controller. Interesting Engineering notes that Sikorsky pairs rotorcraft know-how with electric propulsion and advanced manufacturing to hold operating costs down, and that MATRIX has logged more than 1,000 flight hours across 500-plus tests.

Public flight data on Nomad is thin. The endurance and payload targets belong to the program, not to a published Nomad result, and DARPA’s autonomy choice, Sikorsky’s MATRIX software for all five platforms, means the contest is partly about the aircraft and partly about who writes the flight code. Whether Nomad survives as a product depends on a customer stepping forward. Sikorsky is pitching it widely, and DARPA is already steering EVADE toward starting airworthiness certification while the prototypes are still being built.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.