AeroVironment P550

The AeroVironment P550 is a runway-independent, battery-electric eVTOL reconnaissance drone built for the US Army's Long-Range Reconnaissance program, giving battalion commanders up to five hours of modular ISR, relay, electronic-warfare and strike capability.

Overview

The P550 is an American battery-electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) unmanned aircraft system built by AeroVironment, the company behind the Switchblade loitering munitions used in Ukraine and the Raven and Puma scouts carried by US infantry. It sits at the top of the Pentagon's Group 2 small-UAS category and was designed from the outset for the US Army's Long-Range Reconnaissance (LRR) requirement: an aircraft that battalion commanders own and task directly, rather than requesting reconnaissance support from brigade aviation. The design pairs a roughly five-hour battery endurance with a 6.8 kg (15 lb) modular payload bay and onboard AI for target recognition and GPS-denied navigation, according to AeroVironment.

The system's significance is procurement as much as engineering. In 2026 the Army placed a $117.3 million firm-fixed-price order for 82 P550 systems — the type's first major production purchase — with delivery compressed into weeks rather than years, part of a deliberate push to raise drone density across US combat formations in light of operational observations from Ukraine, as Army Recognition reported.

Development

AeroVironment unveiled the P550 at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting in October 2024, presenting it as a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) airframe with an all-electric powertrain, tool-free assembly and hot-swappable payloads, per the company's launch release. The Army moved unusually fast. In August 2025 it selected two systems for the initial LRR capability — the P550 and Edge Autonomy's Stalker Block 35X — a dual-vendor structure meant to preserve competition while units evaluated both aircraft, according to the US Army. AeroVironment delivered the first P550 systems that same month to support training and operations in the Army's Transformation in Contact brigades, followed in December 2025 by a three-year, $13.2 million agreement covering testing, integration and training.

The production breakthrough came in 2026. The Army's Uncrewed Aircraft Systems Project Office announced a production contract on March 20, 2026, procured through the UAS Marketplace Basic Ordering Agreement — a mechanism the program office says cuts procurement timelines "to a few days." The award appears twice in the Pentagon's public contract digests: a March 20 notice announcing the $117,306,232 firm-fixed-price contract, and a June 3, 2026 digest entry restating the same value and specifying 82 aircraft, with an estimated completion date of July 23, 2026. Ten bids were received before AeroVironment was selected, per ClearanceJobs. The LRR effort directly supports the Pentagon's July 2025 "Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance" directive on accelerated acquisition of small uncrewed systems.

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