Overview
- Sikorsky said it completed initial ground and flight testing of the Nomad 100 on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, under DARPA’s Early VTOL Aircraft Demonstration (EVADE) effort.
- The Nomad 100 uses a rotor-blown wing design with twin prop-rotors that allow vertical takeoff and landing, hovering, and transition to wing-borne cruise for greater speed, range, and endurance.
- DARPA selected Sikorsky’s MATRIX autonomy stack as the common flight system for EVADE participants, and Sikorsky says MATRIX has logged more than 1,000 flight hours across over 500 tests and trained more than 100 operators.
- Sikorsky will move Nomad into an intensive, government-led flight-test campaign at an unnamed test facility to exercise real-world mission scenarios for brigade-level reconnaissance, logistics, and shipboard use.
- Nomad is sized as a Group 3 drone and is being pitched as a candidate to replace the RQ-7 Shadow and to expand crewed-uncrewed teaming, but key details such as range, payload, test location, and timeline to service adoption remain unreported.